The God of No Explanation

My mom used to say she believed in God because of the miracle of how the seasons dependably follow each other, the tides come in and out ... in other words, the natural order. One time I finally replied to her that if I were to believe in God it would be because there is no explanation for the mutations that caused evolution ... nor for an incredibly dense basketball containing all the matter in the universe -- the strength of the gravity pulling all that matter towards the core simply beyond imagination -- to have suddenly exploded in a cosmic orgasm. No explanation for the accidents, the monkey wrenches from outer space, the heartbreaks and the moments of utter joy. If there is a God, I told her, it would be the God of unpredictability and creative chaos, a God of the things for which we have no explanation, not a God of the things we have measured and weighed and documented.

Usually when she and I debated she would eventually throw up her hands and say "You should be a lawyer!" This time she said, "You should be a rabbi!" LOL. Love ya mom, hope you're enjoying the trip out there.

The Witch's House

[This is a story I will rework one day. As it stands now it was written to satisfy the guidelines of a short story contest. the opening sentence and closing sentence were given as part of the contest rules, as well as the length.]

Some people swore that the house was haunted. Almost all the kids in the dodge-ball circle agreed. "They say a witch lived there," whispered Darla's big sister. "My friend saw a ghost inside." Maybe her sister was just teasing, or making it up.

Darla walked across the street and climbed onto the old bike her father had bought for her, its fragile "German racer" frame as spindly as her own little limbs. She pedaled down the street past the homes and obedient shrubbery of the suburban development. The houses were reassuringly uniform, placed at even intervals along the green stretch of front lawns. At the corner the street post marked the intersection of Trafalgar and Cypress Drives. Familiar names. She had been turning left here on her way to school every day for the past three years.

But today Darla turned right, and then a few blocks later turned left, leaving behind the young housing development built on a former potato field. She coasted down Pine Avenue towards the witch's house. Here the houses were older, each one different under a tangled canopy of unmanicured woods. The street was pitted. Gravel and dirt blurred the line between roadway and yards. An old boat dropped peeling paint on an unkempt lawn. Scraggly grass, neglected under the trees, did its best to survive.

There it was. That had to be the witch's house. The air was suddenly cooler. Darla got off her bike and buttoned up her cardigan.

The cracked stucco cottage barely held up its sagging roof. Vines pushed their way off the crowded lattice and spilled across the walls. Even the "Condemned" sign was in tatters on the torn screen door above the rotted stoop. But the late-summer flowers bloomed and thrived among the weeds in what used to be the garden.

Darla did not have the nerve to walk up close and look in the dirty old windows. She stood still for a long while and watched the honey bees at work in the liberated yard. And then she began to see. She began to see the image of an old lady -- watering her garden, making tea on the stove, talking to her cats and her flowers, clocking the changing seasons. She saw a lonely old woman. No. Not lonely. Alone. A woman who nobody understood. Who had no one to tell the things she saw and the things she knew.

The sun was getting low in the sky. Darla was pretty sure the streetlights would be on back in her neighborhood, and the rule was: Come home when the streelights go on. She mounted her bike and rode back.

Ciprion Court? That was a strange street name. Was she going in the wrong direction? The next street post said Lloyd Lane. What? Was everything replaced while she was on Pine Avenue? Was this actually a dream? The ground tilted. The green lawns might open up and swallow her.

Ahh. OK. Trafalgar Drive. She turned into her street and then into the driveway. She was home. But now the houses looked dangerous. The obedient shrubs did not understand her. She felt out of place, and the uniform homes laughed their ridicule from behind neat curtains.

She could not tell anyone the things she saw and the things she knew. Nothing was ever the same again after that.

(c) ilyse na'omi kazar, 2011

the musician

(after i drew this someone pointed out that this musician has no ears,
but he is an ear)

The Journal of Fox and Ilyse (excerpt)

[Written while pet-sitting my friend Lisa's dog Fox  when I was a 20-something in 1985. All my friends were out of town that summer. It was just Fox and Ilyse. Although the whole story was just a exercise inspired by boredom for me, Fox proved to be a great story teller and a deep philosopher.]

Henry called ... from Artist Utopia in Massachusetts. Among other little anecdotes, he described the three-legged dog that chases people through the graveyard, persisting until he's been outrun. Ilyse thought this story would amuse Fox.

"Oh, among us dogs that's a very old tale. My Great Aunt Fido told it to me as a bedtime story when I was a puppy."

Ilyse raised an eyebrow. "Come off it, Fox -- Great Aunt Fido? Isn't that a boy dog's name?"

"Just keep in mind that it wasn't a dog who named her. There's no accounting for human folly," said Fox, who despite her lack of training, was not as dumb as she looked. "And Henry doesn't know the whole story. Let me tell you what Aunt Fido told me."

...

The three-legged dog gave vicious chase to every passerby. He could not be won over. One had no choice but to outrun his snarling, limping attack.

He liked no human save one, his master. The dog, however, disdained living in the house, staying outdoors instead to stand guard over their terrain.

His master, on the other hand, was warm, witty and generous. The neighbors paid him frequent visits, willing to race the dog to his door in order to enjoy his company. One had no choice but to like the man.

Of course, were it not for the dog, there's no telling about the man.

...

"That's the whole story?" Ilyse felt there should be more to it. "What kind of ending is that?"

"I'm glad Aunt Fido isn't around to hear you say that," Fox reprimanded. "A story never ends, you know, you just leave off telling it at some point. A dog would never ask such a question."

Ilyse was properly contrite, and took Fox for a bonus walk to make up for her human ignorance.

(c) 2010, ilyse na'omi kazar

bus ride / the mother

wheels rolling forward, her mind rolls back
to a suburban foyer
the eyes of a skinny child commit to memory the floor tile pattern
while bent over with pants dropped down,
having learned to practice a strange silent stillness under the rubber hose.

she hears the musical pitch of the slicing of air.
the slicing of air.
the slicing of air.

behind them a screen door opens, shuts,
the voice of the father:
WHAT ARE YOU DOING?
turning up eyes to see
his hand grab the striking wrist.

the girl runs upstairs and
in the absence of inquiries
upholds the dutiful silence.

the raised highway licks a bruise on this landscape
like green welts on the back of a thigh.


(c) ilyse kazar, 2010

Wood Stone Water and Flesh

dreamt in early 1990 at age 32 ... reproduced here is the first half of the dream, because some friends who have asked for this publication will be mostly interested in the part about the church and Jesus. I still remember my surprise when I awoke, to think I had had such a Jesus-themed dream, having been raised a Jew, and then thinking about Jung's theory of the mass subconscious. I have maybe a hundred more dreams written down. A Jungian would have a field day.

I had agreed to apartment-sit for a woman named Sylvia. Sylvia was an aging, or late-middle-aged, successful attorney. She was very observant, the kind who could size a person up at a glance. Very serious, but not without a certain droll humor.

Sylvia was going on a trip. Her apartment was located uptown where my mother's is [my mother died in 2002], but the interior seemed more like a country cottage. Dark wood was the most persistent motif, covering even the walls. Mullioned windows let sun into the kitchen. The other rooms were dark, and the whole place spoke of an intellectual inhabitant, comfortable with herself and not afraid to combine the rustic with the urbanity of her life.

Like my mother, she kept houseplants which I was to water. However, they were rather unruly, of free foliage, spilling around the sunny kitchen windows, unlike my mother's plants carefully arranged in the living room under a Gro-lite.

So I packed some things for Claire [aged 2 when I had this dream] and myself and we took up a short residence in Sylvia's apartment.

I had to run downtown again every couple of days, maybe to feed my cats, or pick up more clothes for the baby. But I don't remember actually being in my apartment.


On one of these forays downtown, I was walking across 7th Street on my return trip to Sylvia's, and just in front of St. George's Ukrainian Catholic church I noticed a fragment of a wooden statue which had been put out on the curb, perhaps by a church janitor, as trash. I recognized it as something very old and important. I looked closer and saw that it was the severed lower legs of some medieval mythological figure, which perhaps had adorned the exterior of a building. The two thin, bird-like legs were fused, carved from one piece of wood with no space between them, and had formed the pedestal of the missing upper parts of the statue. I believe the legs were severed below the knee, yet somehow I knew the missing knees had been bony and protruding. The feet were splayed and duck-like, with four webbed toes on each, and formed what would have been the base of the statue.

[some day I'll scan in my little drawing here]

The wood may have been painted once, but no color remained. It was aged and cracked, centuries old.

A black limousine pulled up to the curb and two priests stepped out. One of them was trim, middle-aged, with black, slightly grizzled hair.

I turned to him and said, "You know, this is from a Gremlin."

"I know," he agreed.

"I'm on my way somewhere now, and I can't carry this with me. But I don't want to leave it as trash. Can I store it inside the church?"

He granted me permission to bring the wooden fragment inside.

I carried the piece of statue up the church steps, through a large door and into the shadows under a colonnade that bordered on a large, landscaped, sunlit church courtyard. The floor under this very tall colonnade was made of cobblestones. I heard water running somewhere nearby; perhaps there was a small stream or fountain in the yard.

I found a spot at the base of one of the columns where I thought the fragment of the Gremlin would be out of the way. I was trying to be considerate of the church and of those who worked or worshiped there. I leaned the fragment against the column, but when I looked up I saw Jesus hanging on a cross attached to the column above me.

This crucifix was supposedly only stone statuary belonging to the church, the priests walking by saw a statue of Jesus, but I could see that THIS WAS THE FLESH-AND-BLOOD JESUS HANGING ON THE CROSS. More priests walked by, oblivious! Jesus looked sad beyond words, because his real message was not being heard, and the man that he had been, the things he had said and done, were being so misquoted, misused and misunderstood. The very people who made him their religious figurehead could not see him at all.

These priests -- who pretend to be closer to God than mere worldly men, who pretend to intervene and speak to God on behalf of the followers of their "flock", who would have their followers believe that Jesus was the only living Son of God and that Jesus wanted to be worshiped as God rather than teach their congregants that Jesus realized his own Godhead and sought to help us realize the Godhead in each of us, these priests who act as though they own the copyright on Truth -- these priests did not even recognize the real Jesus right in front of them!

But I stayed mum. I didn't have much time, and I thought if these men could not see, then they are not supposed to see, and they are not able to see. Also, they were letting me retain custody (only because they failed to recognize its worth) of this important piece of wooden mythology, and, moreover, they had granted me permission to store it in their church until I could recover it later. So, out of a desire not to insult or anger them, and, more than this, out of respect for the living Jesus on the cross, I moved the Gremlin to a different spot, and continued on my way back uptown to Sylvia's apartment.

Who

Entitled "Who", linoleum cut. 1975