The Language of Belief

1. Sober, Ordinary, Honest Men 

“On the sixth day of April, 1830, 161 years ago today, in Seneca County, NY, six sober, ordinary, honest men, acting in obedience to a commandment of God, assembled to found a church. What they did that day ranks among the most important events to have transpired since the death of Jesus and his Apostles in the meridian of time.” 

Here spaketh President Howard W. Hunter, President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, on April 6, 1991, at the (now annual) conference of the (now worldwide) Church of the Latter Day Saints: “the organized and established kingdom of God on Earth.”

I write not to mock but marvel. How I love how it rings, and sings, the language of impassioned belief. Yet sober, and ordinary, and honest! 

It was the language of my father’s father, the principal, a hundred years ago, a hundred years later, of a mission school, in Grassy Park, South Africa, and co-founder there of a church where he ministered—oh, just an ordinary local branch, for the ordinary Coloured people, his and I guess my people—but how his out-of-the-ordinary voice would rise into its oratories, how in its fervors it would ring unwavering. And if my father’s own faith died, the day his father died, on dad’s fifteenth birthday, it died emphatically, devoutly, with no less fervor. 

For how my father loathed the Church. How orotundly he declared that truth, loving the ring of language. (He taught. Afrikaans, then English. Instead of sermons, he intoned, all his life, their poetries.) Marry in a church, he told his children, and you’ll be marrying without me. 

Mine’s more the language of incertitude. It intones, then stutters; very well, it contradicts itself. 

2. Thought-flash 

Thought-flash. I’m 17, smitten by the loveliness and silliness of the world—by night rain and streetlamps and kazoos—a seethe and a jostle I am, of ecstasies and angsts and the half-caged howl of hormones—and rocked by identity crises racial and spiritual—and seeing no point to it all, and expecting to be dead soon, once I contrive the just right, not too flashy self-sacrifice: an act futilely heroic; a cause modestly worth the martyrdom. 17 will tear me every which way the hardest, but from desolation to delight, from revolt to revelation, for three, four years the tremors of it still persist… Until, one fever-break dawn, I’m 20 or so, I wake into a Road to Damascus dream—of a god-sky of selves—edgeless with light. Look, words can’t tell it. But as a blaze of grace, a dunk in the ineffable, no common sense to be made of it, it settles me and it begins to turn me. Back to the path of a sober, ordinary life; in acceptance of such a thing; remade. 

Amen.

Yet did that earlier, rawer time, with its gouts of seeing and not seeing, of my honestly, tenderly lostness, entirely pass from me? I was offered the steerage of it is all; I took the deal. 

So that even now, this now, of my body’s sag, of the mirror’s scoff, braving the long look back, my life a slow-peeling, gloss patina, am I, in a thought-flash, not still that boy? In a heart-sear, I am! As he is us; this old man I am, 17 again. 

There’s a piece I wrote decades ago, maybe at 30 or so—I look for clues in the beliefs I espouse, and can’t be sure—in which I declare myself quite orotundly: “Notes Towards a Creed.” I meant it as something, I think, both to stand by and, in the ripening of time, adjust. I’ll place it next: to let who we were when we wrote it have their/my/both our say. Am I him still too, standing skeptically to the side of it, seeking us? In a thought-flash: yes, also. 

3. Notes Towards a Creed 

I believe in the great spirit from which we came, and to which we will return. I believe that however and however much we touch here, there we will commingle, like water. I believe neither in individual salvation nor in individual perdition, nor yet in individual survival; only that when death takes us, as a collective mist—as souls, if you wish—we must confront all three potentialities, salvation, survival, perdition. Even as in life we have, as a collective mass, of body, flesh, blood, and bone, made into breath, and being. 

I believe that everything that lives on this earth, animal, vegetable, or mineral, is in a small or a smaller way part of that collective mist. Therefore I believe that to reach out and give succor to everything that lives is divine. 

I believe that to seek scrupulously to understand is divine, that to love honestly is divine, that to learn fiercely is divine, that to sing passionately is divine, that to dance, plant, build, play, write, paint, and in all ways to create and recreate, are essential styles of praise, and that to praise and mean it, aspiring to do so in full-hearted fidelity to our unique and temporal selves, is divine. 

I believe in the conscience, which I take to be a heightened form of consciousness. I believe that every offense against it is a small self-death; that every act in support of it is a breath of life; and that caring, committed, honorably informed people may with integrity disagree about which, for them, is which. For knowing, loving, living are not stasis but process, which depends for its health on diverse ways of seeing and feeling; on the holy and perishable individual. 

I believe in openness to that diversity. That the naïve person is lither and more muscular than the cynic, more posed to enrich the process. I suggest that while hatred of others because of their simple otherness is blatantly pernicious, there exist subtler defeats of the spirit, which ultimately are no less noxious. For each movement of the soul breeds in our neighbor a small, mirroring movement; and simple mistrust, for example, even where it is apparently, from our innocent perspective, surely warranted, may not be; and mirroring mistrust can kill us as virulently as misplaced confidence. It is right and proper to protect the unique and perishable self from premature engulfment in the whole; but the price is not one we should consider pragmatic or pleasurable to pay. 

I believe that all religious worship that reaches up and out is holy, unless it be a reaching up with knives, guns, bombs, framing God for our own murderousness, or a reaching out with violence of spirit, with the venomous tongue, carving out the holy ground in our own name. For sectarians are spirit profiteers, and to consider ourselves elect, or more chosen than thou, is in fact to cast ourselves out of the collective spirit. 

I believe that personally, individually, we have nothing to gain from our good acts, other than for their own sake, other than in obeisance to our conscience. I believe that there is no manner in which we can ensure our personal survival after death, neither at the expense of nor with the cooperation of others; and that this is the deepest freedom that we have. For finally I believe that while it is from the great spirit that we came, and while it is there that we will return, and commingle, it is only here, now, that we may make a difference. 

4. The Girl with a Message for Me from the Post Office 

The girl in my room today, in Lille, in France, on the campus of the Lycée Faidherbe, where I live and teach, has come all the way from somewhere in America, a vast, faraway country whose geography I am woefully fuzzy about, to preach (though she knows no French to speak of) the gospel of the Mormon Church, which I am very happily fuzzy about; and since she knows no French to speak of, and we have chatted once before, in line at the post office, she has fixed on me to preach it to. 

Our conversation, what there is of it, is stuttering and dull. I have offered her a digestive biscuit, which she nibbles as if unfamiliar with digestive biscuits, and hot tea with milk, which she sips as if confounded by such a beverage—stirring the cup more than she sips from it, clinking the teaspoon clean against the rim. I nudge her along with small talk, lightly, politely. She has come to convert me, and poor her, I must let her try. 

There’s a whole hapless house or something of her ilk somewhere. They post signs on the University English Department walls, advertising free conversation classes which no one takes them up on. 

I am 23, and she is younger, with bad skin, and a mission she is dutifully earnest about, and a belief in it which seems rote and unexamined, or which she merely can’t articulate. 

I sit wondering, if she could, would I fall under its spell? If she were lovely, and knew how to flirt (I sense that she wishes to), would I be beguiled enough to ask for a pamphlet or two, and someday, one day, wind up, with her and maybe a few other wives, in wherever the heck is Utah? 

But she knows, and I know, that I would not. We sit, and we listen a little, looking each other over. My slouch-jeaned and hippie Afro slovenliness; her grey sweater and mid-calf skirt, her stiffly impeccable posture. We politely play it out. My stereo sings its freak folk love songs. It is without invitation. The pages of her peculiar Bible fall open in her lap. Her skirted knees flash their elaborately gilt answer. It is without flinch or fear. This is our declaration, merely, of an opposite faith. We sit confirming it to ourselves; affirming to ourselves who we are.  

5. The Girl with the Gypsy Heidi Klum Vibe 

The girl in my room today, in Lille, in France, on the campus of the Lycée Faidherbe, where I live and teach conversational English, has come at the behest of my suite-mate, Karl, who teaches conversational German, and who two generations ago would have been a Hitler youth. (He has more or less admitted this. The Third Reich, he assures me, achieved many fine things.) 

Tonight, he has invited her over for drinks, her and a second strikingly beautiful German girl, teachers of conversational German somewhere else in town. And apparently, she, the blond one, the one with (my present self would say) the gypsy Heidi Klum vibe, is for me. 

My German is decent, their French is better, so we’re speaking French, mostly; but when they’re not, I can follow the negotiation of arrangements. I know what will be expected of me. And am aware that they would startle at such a phrasing—as if for any healthy heterosexual boy my age, for any kid of my sexually dauntless hippie generation, the prospect of a night with this lovely stranger, might be, what am I saying, some kind of a burden to me? 

And I fumble and wonder at this also—fearing what to believe about myself; whether I am somehow unnatural, or emotionally too scrupulous, or simply gutless. 

So the night darkens, and the drink brings us to the brink of things, to the clarities of slurred tongue and lolling body language, before I have the straightening backbone to signal no. 

They slip through the adjoining door, all three, somehow (I have seen its size, and they are all three broad-bodied and tall) to share Karl’s bed. 

I pick up after them. I feel, I am relieved to discover, no regret; only relief. 

In the morning, I am gone before they rise. “I was astonished,” Karl will say, in his precise, clipped French, when next I see him. And with that, after that, he will give up on me. And I will feel, I discover, relief. 

How I fumbled my way towards myself, back then, through that trial and error dark. Bump, into the furniture of false expectation, bang, into some wall that moved, and even when through unscathed, I’d doubt, and check for bruises; and finding none, feel more bafflement than belief.

6. In Family Tribute, part one 

Among the papers left by my father, Mr. Raymond Frederick Kannemeyer, I find a curious article, headlined “Thousands At City Funeral,” clipped from a Cape Town newspaper. 

“The death took place on Friday of Mr. Raymond Herbert Kannemeyer, the principal of the All Saints’ Mission School at Grassy Park and one of the best-loved men among the coloured community in that area. A tribute to his memory was the fact that all day Saturday coloured people combed the district to buy up all the white flowers that could be found. 

The funeral at Plumstead Cemetery yesterday saw several thousand people present, perhaps the biggest crowd there ever seen. Mr. Kannemeyer, who died at the early age of 41, taught for many years at Grassy Park. He also took a great interest in religious work. Among Europeans as well as among his own people he was held in wide respect.” 

Dated within days of my father’s 15th birthday, it remains in remarkable shape for an artifact from 1935: robust to the touch, and barely yellowed—as if, in the world since, little time has passed. 

My father Mr. Raymond Frederick Kannemeyer’s death took place in 2014, in London, England, where he lived for seventy years, and was a school principal. 

At the funeral, his children and his grandchildren sang and recited poems. The flowers, like the celebrants, were of all colors. 

Among his fellow Europeans he was held in wide respect. 

7. All Nose

“Je est un autre.”—Arthur Rimbaud 

We are someone else. It’s the one constant. We spend our lives becoming them. We forget ourselves and remember ourselves, when we were someone else, and (if we are like me) we turn the memory over to wonder at the trick of it; of how we did it; if in fact it was I who chose it, or only the world’s wash and backwash oceaning over me; and if—not if this is who I am, now, at last—but if the defined “I” is possible, us being so large, containing so many multitudes. Sometimes this someone else we have become feels the slam of that constant becoming: that what I am is what shifts; neither what was, or what is, or what will be; only this always other. 

If there was one lesson above all else which my father wished to drum into me, it was to refuse labels. Let no one tell you who you are. I have a sonnet about this in a poetry collection, in which a “good witch” advises her charge not to fixate upon his alleged flaws, nor to allow others to do so: to let no wielder of a magnifying glass “persuade you you are all nose.” Its protagonists aren’t quite my father and I, but that’s the taleteller’s way of things: I’ll ventriloquize us all, myself and the rest of you alike, into the throat noise my tale prefers. When I was six, and we were about to flee apartheid-era South Africa for post-war, not yet multicultural England, dad sat me down to deliver this talk. People in England, he told me, would not know what to make of me. It was the opposite problem we faced in South Africa: here, we had our label, Cape Coloured, and people knew exactly what to make of us. Don’t let them decide for you. And the kicker: try not to decide too hard yourself. The hard label, my father taught me, is a trap. 

At his 84th birthday party, very drunk, very insistent, he repeated this plea. Don’t let anyone tell you who you are. Let no one, only you, name you; let no one, not even you, limit you. 

A high schooler in my senior English class once turned in an essay where she averred, in all seriousness, that now that she was eighteen she was mostly through with her changes, and would henceforth be who she currently was. I must, belatedly, apologize to her; I laughed out loud. She utterly failed to understand—but then why should she, yet?—why this amused me. 

Oh, labels can be useful. Deciding who we are and what we stand for is surely necessary. But the fashionable weight of them disquiets me. You’re LBGTQ/gender-fluid/poly. I’m BIPOC and cisgender. All utterly fine, until said as if that defines us, not describes us. As if we are the label. When in fact, how this others us all! “I’m a Marxist-Trotskyist lesbian feminist myself,” I once heard said, by way of introduction, as if part of the speaker’s name. This was at a conference for socialist women, with over a thousand attendees; I guess such labels were a useful shorthand. My wife’s women’s group catered the event, and I was helping serve, one of about five males on the premises, until an atypically hostile pair of (white!) women rounded on me and asked me what I, a male, was doing there, and could I leave now. I felt diminished and magnified enough, into a label—to bear a human history of belittlements and repression—to cower and do so. 

I am BIPOC and he/him. And I am also (like you; like everyone you’ve ever met) human, and they/them. Both still and no longer quite the same he/him/they/them I used to be or will be. Still vowing to discover myself—both I and autre—again, and until I turn as dull as dirt, again. What I will not be, not for you or for anyone—not even, let me vow, for myself—is all nose. 

8. In Family Tribute, part two 

My mother had a dozen siblings. Some were light-skinned enough to move north and marry white; some weren’t. There was a dark woman, probably a relative, one didn’t ask, living in an outbuilding in their back yard. As to where her parents came from, their racial make-up and her own, mum knew almost nothing. One clung to clues to the whiteness—to faith in the Scottish names, in the legend of whoever it was born on the boat from Skye—but in South Africa, it was not done for a Coloured person to ask! But there was color, I might gently remind her. And she would shift unhappily. I don’t know! she said once. I think perhaps someone was Swiss. Someone may perhaps have been a gypsy. 

My father did ask, later. This is from a letter sent to him, a few years after we left South Africa for England:

Now for Pa. There is a Dutch woman. She was a teacher when young, and lived all over— beginning in Paarl. Pa was born there, and she maintains that she knew Pa’s father well, and told us he was a German. I am inclined to think that she mixed up things and that he was a Hollander. The Kannemeyers were two brothers who came out from Europe and were wagonmakers in Paarl. 

About Pa’s mother we know nothing. Most likely C. 

I knew two of Pa’s sisters: aunty Rachel and aunty Krissie. Only Rachel could go for a South African white. Now I think I have been very frank with you—take what I have told you and work out your own conclusions. I would suggest for your next holiday go to Holland and do some investigation and it’s most likely you will find that that is where you belong. How is your mother? Is she well again? Give her my love. Did Monica get her money from the Master in Cape Town? How do you like England? 

If I win the Rhodesian sweepstakes I’ll come and visit you. 

With love, Yours etc.— 

And here the correspondent signs a name, though not quite legibly: perhaps F. Kannemeyer? All we have of his letter is this page: page 3. 

There was, I believe, an uncle Fred, but who “pa” is—Fred’s grandfather? perhaps his father?—is not certain. C, of course, means Coloured. 

You can work out your own conclusions. I believe I have been very frank. 

9. IN LOVING MEMORY OF ERA KANNEM YE 

~ my grandmother Vera Kannemeyers gravestone, 1899-1966 

After we cremated my father, after the pub lunch and the slide show, we laid some of his flowers on the grave of my grandmother; dead 48 years by then. Two carloads of us came, chilly in the wind, but full of kinship-warmth and jollity. The site took a time to find, what with the droves of cemetery rows, all so alike, and none of us knowing which, dad having been the lone soul still visiting her. So weathered, all that half-legible stone, so fiddly, mostly, the flowers laid here and there to ornament it. And the dead with their empty heads aligned in their same low, obedient rows, like cots in wards. (Asleep, say the headstones, to pray it so.) 

But we did find her, and stood looking. At her headstone, its missing V. Her windy, untended grasses. 

Looked inward also, each of us with our film of her, flickering. Also of Aunt Mary, who was laid here near her; we flicked through her file too. 

So, the kids asked, had we liked them, what were they like, great-aunt Mary, great-grandmother? We roused a few dusts to words. We looked. 

In my flicker-film, she’s old. Old testament old. In one scene, she binds me in her arms to baptize me in a cold tap’s roar. She hoists me upside down over the sink and scrubs the snot from me. 

ERA, her headstone says. Bygone, the court guiltily, gratefully finds. 

10. Bad People 

Charlottesville, VA, circa 1978. I’m at a heckuva fun party, all our best friends are here, plus bunches of their friends—lively, smart people I’m finding it fun to meet. Many of them work at the University Hospital, where I worked myself for two years, as a nurse’s aide, and first met a few of these best friends. I’m dancing up a storm. Lindsay, who’s a nurse, and a best friend, has been telling a doctor she invited that she has to dance with me, we’re both such fabulous dancers—which I’m not, technically, but I do throw myself about with impressive abandon—and she and I have been accepting the challenge. I’m on a happily weary break from this when Lindsay surges back up with someone else she’s been wanting me to meet. She’s told us about each other! He’s a visiting doctor, also native South African, also called Derek, and he’s really cool! I hold my hand out to shake, ready to hug, if he’s up for it. He looks at me and he blanches. He turns on his heel, cutting me dead.

Lindsay follows him, perplexed, hurt for me. “Derek, what’s wrong?” 

“Lindsay,” Derek says, “you don’t know what these people are like.” 

* * * * 

Lille, France, circa 1973. I’m at a twenty-somethings international party—folks from four continents and a score of countries—some locals, but mostly expats for a year or two—college kids, exchange teachers, hippie drifters. I’m sprawled on the rug near an Irish boy who’s been struggling to explain the Troubles to a baffled Maghrebi. Protestants, Catholics, colonialism, independence, well, he gets some of that. But, really? If only people could just love each other! 

“So what about the Israelis?” I ask him, curious. 

“Mais ça c’est différent!” he protests. “The Jews are just bad people.” 

I spread my arms, in the gesture that means, “There. You see?” I’m dumb enough to laugh out loud, as if the point is obvious; as if, touché, now he gets it. 

He doesn’t get it. He may be a little baffled by why I don’t get it. He may be (but it’s a party, so he bites back on this) more than a little angry.

* * * * 

I’ve found myself nervously babbling more often lately. Reflecting on these two tales in the rise and the fall of the voices of this or that American party; laughing ever more uncertainly now. Some smiling back at me, some not, as a strain of silence broadens between us. Some among us, if only we could tell who, still—as at a glance we could, once, by the skin color, or the nose of you—just bad people. 

11. The Girl Who Won’t Marry Me: an Epithalamium 

The girl in my Lycée Faidherbe room today, in Lille, France, tells me, “I’ll live with you, but I won’t marry you.” Her parents divorced a few years ago; it would have been healthier had they done so way back. So no, she doesn’t believe in marriage. Marriages are a trap and a trainwreck. 

She has a lovely voice. She’s from Chicago, presently, but only since dropping out of college a few months back. She grew up in big city white collar suburbs, outside DC, outside NYC, outside Boston, before high school in Illinois, and her accent is gentle and melodic. I’ve known her twin sister for seven months. Now here she is, having flown over on a whim, calling from the airport to tell her boss, where she’d been file-clerking, that she’s just quit. 

Carly Simon is on the stereo. “You say we’ll soar like two birds through the clouds, but soon you’ll cage me on your shelf.” Cute. A few months later, her twin sister flies back home; this one lingers. There are visa issues, of course. So we marry. “You swore to me you’d never marry,” says a friend we run into on the street. She shrugs. “Divorce isn’t hard.” Such crazy dumb shit we said—swore we believed—were right, and were wrong, and were oh, what the heck about, back then! More than fifty years later, we wince sometimes, looking back at this crazy dumb bet we placed on ourselves—with such gung-ho, who-knows, let’s-just-go-for-it lack of faith! 

12. My Marriage Vows 

The Dog of the Future is running loose again. When the barking stops, where will I find to sit? It’s a breezy October, day after day of sun suddenly, and fall trees shaking the jitters from their fingers like flickers of kerosene. And leaf swirl unmatting from the gutters and the grass in bent scurries of half-color. The Dog of the Future has in his mouth something green: something in the shape of a tongue before the color turns; perhaps about to frame the teaser song of some newer, wilder Maybe. He spins in a circle. Really, what does a Dog have to do to get my attention? 

I’m sitting on a park bench, petting the Dog of the Past, wistfully fiddling with my marriage vows. I rewrite them, sometimes! How I loved you, Europe, I sigh, having exiled myself yet again, for the love of the Pretty Woman. Dog whimpers a little, but she gets it. She loves the Pretty Woman too. (Sister wives, Pretty Words and they!) So sweetly she lies with me, and wades with me in this river, scoops silvery flashes from the current to maul and to mull at, paw to maw. Other Dog, Dog of the Future, begone! I say, hurling his pretend ball as he comes pestering. And off he scampers, all big flappy tongue and wonky eyes, chasing the tail of his dozen horizons. 

…Until back he trots with this slobbery scenario, saying, Let’s yap. He’s the Dog of the Present now, and didn’t I see him coming? Which I don’t, often, being not fond of his If, Maybe puppy dog perfervidness. Or on a bad day, or even an okay day, of his typical flap and frisk, ever the worrier at things, until that Other Dog yelps up, convinced he’s already him. (Though somehow, sometimes, it’s an actual good dog day—even a whole slew of good dog days—or perhaps for no reason at all it just feels that way—and I tell them both, Life, World, Dogs, how I love you all! As if this will always be so, as if it’s a vow and a bond we’re sworn to. As the pair of them wheel and woof up their storm around me, leaping to the toss of my thoughts like crunchy treats.) 

Anyway, to get back to my tale, it’s December now, Christmas Eve, and the Dog of the Present is saying, Look at that sky, so heavy with the promise of snow. It’s an okay day, as most days tend to be; I’m drinking punch and I’ll roll with it. I sink into an armchair and lid my eyes, wondering aloud how much snow? The Pretty Woman tends to know the guess of it; the Dog of the Weather Future and she are buddies. Anywhere, she says, from ice to six inches. And look, thought-flash, here’s the Dog of the Past come to sit with me again. Our first Christmas Eve in Virginia! Do I remember? And I do! How not yet mending a quarrel we went walking on our backstreet of huge trees. It was midnight, the road as if hollowed out of forest, wind-sung with shadows and an ice storm’s spit. We walked, hunched in our coats, apart, yet close enough so one falling branch might strike us both. The only light hung fraying from the tentpoles of the streetlamps, or strung the glitter of them through necklaces of ice slung by the storm among the flung arms of the thrashing firs. Every thirty feet we’d step sheer into blackness, with branches crashing, and the thump of ice on our umbrellas, and of our hearts across the space between us. Remember? I bear that night walk in me always, seized and vowed to, in the love and the fear of it. With its Dog of our Future out kenneled in the dark; not howling, yet, but whimpering, Will we make it? 

When we woke, the trees were skeins of ice, of limbs unraveling from their spindles like white fire. You fetched debris to work the damp from and drape with tinsel. With oak logs in the grate. Mulled wine. And the radio music, the old notes rising from us in concord with it, their amazed, found grace. In the language of found belief, of belief carried away with itself, oh I remember it. 

Only last Sunday, wasn’t it, all day I raked the back yard free of fallen leaves; there was choral
music on my i-Pod; when I dropped the rake to wheeze or sing, our cat leapt at the pile. The
three Dogs tug their leash of me into the warm. My hands are chapped and red with cold, and
with the imprint of the rake handle. Here is the intricate fissuring and ordering of their lines,
head, heart, life, so inscrutably and so only mine. Here the chapbook of my palms, where I blow
to soothe them. Here I lower these fingers to a tongue, to two tongues, three, to lick.