Going to Laos: Storytelling and Ideology

This is not my story. 

I've tried to write this essay at least five times.  I felt it had to begin this way:  this is not my story. 

One time, I began it this way:

There's danger in telling other people's stories. Perhaps that's why I'm loathe to tell stories that are not in some way "my own," stories that I myself have not had a hand in. I had a professor who did his dissertation on Native America, but going into the project he vowed that he "would not write another book about Indians." Too many white people have been speaking for Native Americans for too long, is the idea, taking liberties they shouldn't take, speaking about them as if they were an exotic species.

Another time I began telling the story of a woman who only had to finish her medical degree when the Pathet Lao swept into power, but instead moved to Red Deer, Alberta, where she has been a CNA her whole life, about a man who took her story and fit it into his "You came to America for freedom" narrative, looking almost right past her.  Then I realized I had already used that story on this same blog.

Then, last night, I watched a documentary on PBS entitled A Harvest of Loneliness about the Bracero Program, how through the law of the land, US companies herded poor Mexican laborers into assorted concentration camps and worked them like slaves for almost no pay; how later NAFTA increased the pressure on poor campesinos and drove them north; how currently there's still a "temporary worker" law on the table to displace people in the name of cheap labor, leaving displaced laborers already within this country doubly displaced.  Another way to begin, I thought.

This story that is not my story goes like this:  farang khi nok intervene in Indochina; out of this comes a ruling elite that in turns becomes ripe for the drama of ideological conflict; world superpowers filter money and weapons to a place their leaders can't even pronounce; the resulting horrors and specters of horrors drive people out of the place, streaming to places where life is said to be better, where mountains of gold are said to exist; churches agree to provide shelter in cast off houses and apartments around town; the mountain of gold turns out to be clefts in rocks--CNA jobs, tailor jobs, meat packing jobs. 

The first time I wrote this essay, too, in order to move the essay along, I tried this gimmick:

I'm trying to write back to my first line, to revisit the fact that "this is not my story" and then, miraculously, to show that it is, that it's an American story, that it's a migration story, that all of us here on American soil, even Native Americans through the racial memory of the land bridge, came here to establish a new life, and that my wife's story is only a relatively recent chapter--certainly not the most recent--within that American story.

But it seems fake, seems forced, seems imperialist.  I can't get there except by telling you I was trying to predetermine the ending of this essay, and then couldn't do it.  This is not my story, not America's story.  But after reading about how the US planted bombs in Laos that continue to bear deadly fruit to this very day, it seems even more impossible to get out of America's imprint, out of reframing the story in a way that will make it more flat, pre-packaged, more objective.

After the Bracero movie last night, I've come back to this "move" again, because that movie reminds me of a book I read in college, Ronald Takaki's A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America.  This is my story because it is a race story, because America is a race story, because America is a war story, because America is an ideology, because America is a mouth.

And this is a success story: a family comes to a secure town, the mother works hard, the children get  educated, get integrated without cultural decimation, get baptized, get married, get good jobs, get to go "back."

But this is where the tension exists in this story:  it is a success story because it is an individual story, a story of individuals who worked within a larger narrative that was almost absolutely corrupt to bring about, through the yeast of God's grace, a story that ended in a specific place with specific outcomes measurable according to typically American standards:  cultural integration, economic independence, religious freedom.

This is a story of individuals, serendipity, and other receiving individuals, acting within a narrative that had overarching violence, distrust, and selfishness as its motives. 

In other words, this is a story of God's providence, but only, it seems to me, if the story resists the pull of these other stories at every step of the way. 

But I don't know that it can. 

This is not my story.  This is not America's story.  Does announcing that make it not so?

Farang Khi Nok

Call it a preemptive strike.  That may be harsh terminology for language acquisition, since we usually talk about such things with terms like "broadening horizons," or "becoming more cultured", more "well-traveled."  Then again, I don't know that I can call this "language acquisition"; it's more akin to grasping at straws, clinging to a life preserver on a choppy sea, covering oneself with a fig leaf.

My particular fig leaf? I've purchased a set of three "Lao for Beginners" CD's and have been memorizing--er, learning Lao on the drive to and from Dordt. 

But it was on the internet that I came across the phrase farang khi nok, or--let the record here show my growing expertise--the more distinctly Lao pronunciation falang kee nok, a phrase which confirms my "preemptive strike" theory.

I've been adrift in other languages before.  In the Philippines we learned a song in Tagalog, had no idea what it meant but used it to some acclaim as we presented in churches and schools.  Most everyone we talked to in the Philippines spoke English to us.  In China, a set of translators did everything for us.  We "communicated" to the people in drama, but what we said was at least twice removed from us.  Our strength was in numbers, foreignness, and translators. 

Once, in Germany, I actually got into a telephone conversation with someone who didn't speak English.  It was the type of conversation that rudimentary German classes dream about, that high school textbooks prepare you for.  The situation was this:  we wanted to move up the Rhine to a new hostel since the one we were staying at was hosting a youth retreat that threatened to stampede us.  It was mid-winter so there were no other travelers about and, no doubt, no English speakers on hand to treat tourists. 

In absolutely measured, halting German, I dived into the conversation: 

Hallo (To make a good impression, always start with the language's corruption of "hello"). 

Sprechen sie Englisch. (The most important phrase to know is, "Will you speak English to me?  I'm an American."  This used to be my preemptive strike)

The answer came back, clear as an interlanguage bell:  Nein.  It might have been "nyet," "nej" (Danish), "bau" (Lao), or any other language.  The meaning was unmistakable.

I was not prepared for this; nor was I "ready" or any other synonym for "prepared."

Haben sie ein zimmer for heute? I managed to spit out, in pulses, certain that somewhere, my high school German teacher had a warm feeling in her heart right then.

Nein again--and then something unintelligible, fast, not like the school recordings of German at all.  Was this some other language entirely?  Was this an East German Commi on the other end, perhaps even a Russian? 

This was a crisis--we needed a place to stay and it was up to me to arrange it.  Then it came to me, from some remote, verbal part of my brain.  Idiot!  I had asked for a room for today! I fixed my request. 

Haben sie ein zimmer for morgen?  Dramatic pause, for effect.

Ja...then that unintelligible Russian-German again.  I was speechless.  He bailed me out:  Comst du morgen? (Will you come tomorrow?)

My relieved response:  Ja.  Auf Wiedersehen.

Worse than Germany was France, where I was told to expect stuck up people who--horror of all horrors--often wouldn't speak English to Americans even if they knew it!  The gall--or, "the Gaul," as the case may be.  On the train in the "chunnel" going into France, I had tremendous anxiety that I was going to hate France, hate the French and their language arrogance.  In actuality, however, being adrift in a new language for the first time was one of the most freeing experiences of my life.  Even the one occasion where a ticket agent made me struggle through asking for tickets, then commenced to lecture me--in English--on how I would expect someone in my country to speak my language so why shouldn't I speak hers? left me not frustrated but comfortably humbled, made to feel appropriately small and dependent upon the kindness of others in a large world.

Which returns us to farang khi nok.  Farang comes from "Frank," the French, those ancient meddlers in "Indochina," but the term has come to mean "westerner" in general.  Language has a way of doing this, of stamping unlike people alike, just consider the broad term "Hispanic" that roots Latin-American cultures in Spain and blankets a wide variety of peoples.

Khi nok, you ask? 

Bird shit.  Farang khi nok--western bird shit.

"Yes," my mother-in-law confirms, "you will be falang khi nok, and your kids, too, falang khi nok."

And so I've spent hours with my "Lao for Beginners" CD, but still can't get tonality right, still confuse words, still can only pick about 6.32% of words out of my mother-in-law's conversation.  Truly, my acquisition of Lao is a fig leaf.  A tiny, tiny fig leaf.

But scratch that "preemptive strike" bit.  No doubt that's the way falang khi nok would think.  Instead, I'm ready to embrace falang khi nok, ready to surrender myself as "western bird shit" to a culture that cares not for me and my arrogant western ways, ready to embrace my fig leaf of language acquisition. 

Or rather, I'm ready to pull away the fig leaf and to use it as an olive branch instead. 

Going to Laos: Expectations

It's a sort of "bucket lister" for me, monumental enough that, in reality, this might be the only time we go, despite my wife's protestations to the contrary.  But its monumentalness comes from how often we've thought of it, how often we've made rudimentary plans to go only to scrap them for superficial sorts of reasons: a bird flu outbreak when we thought our daughter was pneumonia prone; the war(s) in Iraq or Afghanistan (Which war was it?  Who can remember?) that led to an "amber alert" for Americans worldwide.  Really?  Did we really think the long arm of Al Queda--is it really long, or just in our imaginations?--would reach all the way to Laos?  The truth is we've never been truly in danger of actually buying airline tickets, of really going. 

Now we're going.  To Laos. 

Laos, that kid brother of Vietnam, a Vietnam wannabe.  Or, more realistically, the secret Vietnam, where the US was actively combatting communism, but privately, behind the scenes.  Laos, the whipping boy of US bombing raids, the most heavily bombed country in history, where more bombs were dropped than in WWII Europe.  Every year people still die in Laos from "UXO," "unexploded ordnance," whatever the hell that means.  No, the hell that that means is leftover bombs. 

Laos, that landlocked country of Indochina, tropical and other.  I expect a paradise of fruit, dirt roads, and rice paddies.  I expect heat and humidity and an almost overwhelming greenness.  I expect down pours of large drops of rain, falling straight down in glittering waterfall from the heavens cracking with sharp thunder.

I expect street vendors with haphazard carts serving noodles.  I expect exotic dishes served on a low table as we sit on the floor on a mat.  I expect dishes with vegetables that are shredded, dishes with whole peppers, dishes with black-green broth.  I expect flavors so strong I know they'll give me diarrhea.  I expect bathrooms to be very different.

I expect squatter settlements, low shanties of cast off wood and tin patched together into marginal dwellings on marginal hillsides.  I expect traffic that seems out of control and deadly, a cacophony of horns communicating in another language about who has right of way, who'd better watch out.  I expect to hear stray dogs barking in the night.

The last time I was in the developing world, I was part of a drama missions team.  We went to the Philippines, where American culture has made a lot of inroads, and we were associated with Christian groups that made us feel welcome, and plenty of people were interested in getting to know us because we were white Americans.

I draw many of my expectations from my Philippines experience--the traffic, the climate, the squatter settlements.  Others I draw from knowing Laotian culture somewhat from the inside--the food and what it does to my digestion.  Others from the internet--legaciesofwar.org--and a PBS documentary I once saw about a Laotian immigrant family dropped off--literally dropped off--in New York City. 

This time, I will be going to a country with significantly less American inroads, the inroads that do exist leading to stories of war and death.  Of course, even in the Philippines we were told never to beckon someone by pulling an index finger toward ourselves: that was the sign American GIs used to beckon prostitutes.  And so the story of American imperialism, even in the far corners of the globe, seems to be my forerunner, seems to have gone much farther than any long arm of Al Queda. 

Then, too, missions has made a lot less inroads into Laos, a country with a communist government that "shut down" a church in Savannakhet--my mother-in-law's home town--as recently as 2006. This time I go with a group of ex-pats, so to speak, and yet a group of insiders to food and culture.  I don't know if we should attempt to visit a church, nor how easy it will be to find Christians.

What I'm saying is that going to Laos tests my imagination.  I resort to my imagination to knit connections together in order to lessen the "culture shock," in order to prepare myself for a degree of "otherness" greater, perhaps, than anything I've ever experienced.  Of course, from other trips abroad I know that experiencing "otherness" can lead to a feeling of disjointedness, of disorientation.  Or it can lead to a feeling of freedom, escaping from constraints one has always known into a new experience of humanity.  Many times, these feelings happen together at the same time, paradoxically.

Yet, of course, imagination can only take me so far.  Already I'm overlaying the trip with my expectations, warping it with my preconceptions, determining what it is in relation to what I know.  It may be impossible not to.  And yet successful travel, it seems to me, must come down to humility, to suspending disbelief, to a small "I". 

And successful writing, it seems to me, must depend on the same things.  As must successful travel for Americans with a domineering narrative.  As must successful missions as Christians with a biblical vision for the kingdom that must respect divine diversity and human culture making as well as have an eye out for the antithesis. 

May God grant us all the humility to imagine well.

Passing the Test

"If you're going to eat that, you've got to eat it like a Lao person would," she says to me.  Then again, "If you're going to eat that, you've got to suck it, get all the meat off." 

Obviously, she was talking about a mango pit, so I wasn't worried.  I think I know how to eat a mango pit.  By now.

But the question is, have I learned to eat enough like a Lao person to go to Laos?  I've learned how to eat chicken wings-Lao (get all the meat and crunch every bit of cartilage), snails-Lao (pick them with toothpicks, eat the good parts, drink the shell juice), and perch (deep fried, you can eat fins and the cartilaginous parts of the heads, which become like potato chips). 

To say that I've experienced a food revolution in my marriage is an understatement.  I went from a cuisine with a range of two taste varieties--sweet and salty--to one with at least five:  sweet, salty, hot, sour, and bitter.  Admittedly, hot was the hardest.  It's something to get used to; I got used to it primarily by sweating, sucking air in through my mouth, and drinking that natural solvent of oily spice, milk.  Thank God I grew up on a Dutchman's dairy farm. 

I remember one food lesson, though, because of how it passed down the hierarchy to me, through the chain of command and across languages.  I don't remember what we were eating, but I know there was meat and rice; I also know that the meat must not have been too spicy or else I would've been saved from my gaffe--I would have needed to chow down on rice in an attempt to neutralize the spice.  However, whatever dish we were eating, it was tasty enough that I was, as they say, "going to town" on it. 

But then, two words from Grandma Mouth (pronounced something akin to "moot") changed my life for ever:  gin po.  She said it to my wife, since I hadn't a clue about Lao, what she was saying.  To this day, I'm not sure what the direct translation is, but it's something akin to "he's eating wastefully or selfishly."  My wife caught the spirit of what her grandma was saying and basically explained to me that, in Laotian food tradition, meat is a privilege, not a 64 oz. T-bone:  to eat the way I was eating was childish, inconsiderate, tending towards gluttonous. 

Behind this explanation is a reality my wife remembers from refugee camp: when you have a little bit of meat and plenty of rice, you make the meat go far, you stretch it, you let the rice lead and the meat accompany, you chew and chew on that meat because it's all you've got. 

The Meksavanh women are known for speaking their minds.  I certainly felt sheepish as the matriarch of the family noted my childish eating habits.  In the future, I promised myself, I would do better.  Thus the cartilage of chicken bones and the hoi kang (snails).  But the perch, those are the payoff, those are the blessing of blowing the door open:  we caught them through the ice during the day and savored the sweet-salty crunch of skin and fins combined with the tender white meat and fatty eggs in their bellies on the darkest night of the year one moonless January night. 

So I eat the mango like a Lao person would--or, more to the point, like a Lao person taught me to: bite down through the meat to the pit, pull and suck every piece of world's sweetest fruit into my mouth, the tough fibers around the edges sticking in my teeth, savoring every bit.

"Yes, that's right," she says.  "Get it all.  I can take you to Laos," she says. 

Reading or Drawing Class Lines

I'm trying to remember when I started reading class lines.  I don't have much to go on.  There was the time when, fishing at the Missouri River we took a sort of resort "dock hand" along because we couldn't catch a fish and he promised us he could.  The kid had stringy hair and two sets of teeth, literally one behind the other, which both gave him a buck-toothed appearance and affected the way he talked.  I didn't trust him, of course, felt threatened by him in some way.  He was socially awkward, always hanging around and trying to leech a trip with someone.  But dad was desperate to catch fish and so was I, and so the leech went along. 

By now, of course, reading class is what I've been trained to do.  Uh, that is, in theory I'm supposed to be cued into the inherent power systems and codes that enable class divides.  Poolside at our motel several weeks ago these class lines were bright as blood, and as I sat there and watched the kids swim I tried to read the text of the pool as neutrally as possible; the extent to which I failed or succeeded is debatable. 

Poolside family type A is the family that we were when we initially came to this hotel several years back.  At the time we didn't want to burden any of our friends or family with little children, and we wanted to take the family swimming.  An internet search yielded this hotel with two pools: one a wading pool with water jets, a baby slide, and other attractions; the other one four foot deep with basketball hoops and a waterslide.  Kid friendly.  When we found out that a continental breakfast was included in the deal all for under a hundred bucks, we were sure we'd found the most popular hotel in the tri-state area.  Family A, then, is white, middle class, has 1-3 children, and the father with newly sprouted black chest hair lifts his toddler daughter with adorable pink swim suit in and out of the water as mom watches in her matronly suit at the pool's edge with a camera, and sometimes a grandparent reclines in street clothes from a safer distance, smiling. 

Poolside family type B is seemingly seeking rougher attractions.  They may be white but not necessarily;  they typically have many older children whom they leave to the pool; these children dominate the slide, finding illegal ways to go down it, or, more to the point, to stop at the end of it or go backwards up it.  The parents, meanwhile, are not just parents but a party of adults, complete with alcohol, filtering in and out of rooms in questionable states of coherence.  Their swimsuits may not be swimsuits but cut off shorts and t-shirts or may be ill-fitting, typically in gross ways.  For several of these family-groups, I'm left wondering if a stay at this hotel, complete with ordering pizza and drinking beer, may be their vacation for the year.

Over, let's say a five-year period of 5 stays total, I've noticed a shift from more of the type A families to about a 50/50 split.  Actually, I may not have reflected on this "shift" at all except for the event (which, let the record show, I was not witness to and must go on the hearsay of others) that precipitated some reflection: friends of ours saw two girls and a guy kissing in the pool during non-peak hours.  The kissers in question were teens or young adults from type B. 

When I heard this, I began to wonder about my options.  At check out, I consider mentioning the behavior to the front desk, then consider what that might look like.  "Yes, excuse me, we're middle class, respectable white--er, well, my wife's Southeast Asian, but, trust me, she's lived in the middle class long enough to be one of us.  Where was I?  Oh, yes, we're from respectable middle class morality and we saw some uncouth behavior in the pool this week from people who, well, frankly I can't believe they can afford to stay here.  Is there anything you can do to eliminate those type of folks from here?  Can't they take their two-day vacation somewhere else--somewhere where I can't see them and their confused sexualities?  What's that?  Jack up the prices to eliminate them?  Hmm, well, yes, I suppose that would work?  Excuse me?!  Maybe this is a sign that we've climbed the social ladder and should look up the road for a fancier hotel?  Well, I never!  We're respectable Americans, the backbone of this country and..."

Yes, as I read the class lines it seems to tell me as much about me as about anyone else--tells me how small my world is, how little I know.

Our Missouri river boy took us across the river to a shale bed.  We dropped out our Lindy rigs with nightcrawlers and began trolling.  Not even fifty yards up the river, he shook his head.  "This will never do--we're going too fast," he said.  He had my dad cut the engine, then he grabbed the emergency oar and went and sat on the prow of the boat, dipping the oar in the water and pulling us slowly, awkwardly forward while holding his real between his knees.  In another fifty yards, he grabbed his pool with one hand.  "I've got one goin'," he declared.  My dad and I eyed each other knowingly.  We had "bites" of the same kind, setting the hook only to find ourselves hooked on rocks.  "Come on, take it," he said to the fish, feeding line.  When he did set the hook, it quickly became clear he did have a live one on the end.  He brought it up slowly, expertly, and my dad netted it, a four-pound walleye with the dark camouflage bars distinguished in the light like a row of pine trees against the clear sky. 

It was a beautiful fish, spectacularly beautiful, and I looked at the boy with two sets of teeth, this boy who already knew the craft of fishing like I never would, never being so conflicted as to what I envied and what I didn't.

John, Gaze, and Self-Referentiality

If Mark's gospel, with it's straightforward narrative drive and it's objective distance, is Hemingway, then John the beloved's gospel is Faulkner:  "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was with God in the beginning" (John1:1-2).  Circular.  Discursive.  Doubling back.  Right from the start.  It's a verse that still confuses the life out of Jehovah's Witnesses when I try to use it as proof that Jesus is not just a demi-god.  (Actually, their verses just drop the capital letters and they turn it back on me.  Amazing what a jot and a tittle can do.)

No, John the beloved sees things just a little bit differently, writes passionately, gives us inside stories, crafts prose that we must soak in before they reach our core.  John's way of writing, however, seems to be only part literary construct.  John certainly has a unique perspective, a heart brimming with love for the world and his Master, but he also seems to be reconstructing the way Christ himself uses language.  Listen to the way the Master himself talks:  "On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you" (John 14:20).  Honestly, at times when the disciples scratch their heads, I do too.  There's something bigger here than we're used to dealing with, something akin to the doubling back of "I am who I am."

But John's text never lets us forget that it's a text--yea, a text that's meant to pursuade, that's meant to initiate faith.  This happens in the fourth, post-resurrection appearance that John documents, the story of "doubting Thomas." 

Again, this is a story that Mark wouldn't tell.  He's not an insider first of all, like John, so he doesn't have the goods.  John's gospel at times feels like a tell-all.  We get up close and personal with the disciples in ways that are shockingly human.  And so we see Thomas' brash statement that he needs physical proof, said with such vigor that we hear echoes of Peter in him--Peter who will be reinstated with the mysterious "feed my sheep" in the next chapter.  We're dealing with epiphanies here in John, and to have epiphanies we need before and after.  Thomas' before is gruesome realism:  "Unless I feel those bloody wounds, y'all are cracked.  And he's dead.  Fini."  That's doubt.  Ugly, killing doubt.

And we know that Jesus makes him eat his words.  But maybe not.  Maybe it's encouragement, said with a laugh.  "Okay, smart boy.  I know what you said.  Up this sleeve?  Nothing.  Up this sleeve?  Nothing.  You want to put your fingers through the holes?  You want to see firsthand what a resurrection body is like?  Be the first to try it out!"  I'm not so sure there's not an "I'm willing to help you believe," here. 

But it's the next passage that jumps off the page at us.  In film study and the visual arts, they call it "gaze": when you the viewer, the watcher, realize your participation in the picture.  In visual art it's something that draws attention to the fact that you the viewer are needed to make the meaning of the picture.  It can be as easy as every person in the painting focusing on the critical point of the painting--excepts one person who looks directly at you.  In any case, you the watcher become aware of yourself as watcher. 

I suppose that's a little different than self-referentiality, when authors like Faulkner make us aware that they are constructing the text, that the text we are getting lost in is very much a construct.  But in the Thomas passage we have both.  After Thomas' confession, Jesus makes us aware that we have a stake in this game, that we don't just get to watch and be entertained, but that this scene involves us.  "Because you have seen me, you have believed," he says.  "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."  And the words jump off the page to me, the reader, a participant in this as surely as Thomas was.  I have the choice to demand physical proof, to give over to doubt; I have the choice to make this count in my life, to believe, to buy into a radically altered reality.  And Jesus knows the difficulty of the feat.  Just as surely as he encourages Thomas, offers himself and his humiliation-victory for evidence, he encourages the imagination and paradigm shift this will take for readers throughout the centuries.

And then in the next paragraph, John himself reminds us that this is not objective, that he too has a clear agenda in writing this, one similar to Jesus' words here.  "But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name."

Not very subtle, there; not very literary.  Actually, self-referential and blatant. 

And beautiful, wonderful, life-changing.  How could it be written any other way?  How can one call for the paradigm shift it takes to believe in the resurrection but by story; by first hand, dirty-little-doubting-secret evidence; by direct call to faith that will alter the planet's very course?

John Mark's Crucifixion

Mark's account of the crucifixion, I thought first after reading it to my children, reads like Hemingway:  acerbic, third person narration blocked heavily by periods, only made diachromatic by almost unexplained dialogue tossed as life buoys into the choppy seas of a fated world.  "It was the third hour when they crucified him.  The written notice aof the charge against him read: THE KING OF THE JEWS. They crucified two robbers with him, one on his right and one on his left" (Mark 15: 25-27). 

Then, too, it's an orchestration, a drama that's carefully constructed.  Everyone, as they say, has their part:  the soldiers play an especially brutal part, conducting a mock-drama within the drama, going so far as to dress Jesus up, role-playing in a way that belies their desire to rise up against those who "lord it over them" and to let loose violence on those beneath them.  Mark gets about as lyrical as ever does in this passage with the word "homage," connoting the complexity within the banality of the soldiers' actions.  Immediately, then, Simon of Cyrene makes his way across the stage, a shout-out to Mark's modern day audience, the narrative vaccilating from violence to compassion in three verses. 

There's setting as well, of course--setting plays a huge part though you don't have to notice it.  For most of the gospel writers "Golgotha" echoed through the dimensions.  "They brought Jesus to the place called Golgotha (which means The Place of the Skull)."  The narrative dips into darkness and terror here, something Hemingway would never do.  It's all deserts in Hemingway but this is horror.  However, Mark returns to understatement, it would seem, in noting, "At the sixth hour darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour."  "By the way, the whole cosmos was off for three hours while Jesus died," the author tosses in here.  "Make of it what you will." 

Once people start talking, however, they all have their part, all with the same tone, almost the same words, like a Greek chorus.  Yet the characters are not faceless and attempt to throw Jesus' words back in his face.  "So! You who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three deays, come down from the cross, and save yourself!" "He saved others...but he can't save himself."  With all this emphasis on individual salvation, this could 21st Century United States instead of ancient Palestine. 

When Jesus himself speaks the opening verse of Psalm 22, no one quite gets it.  But "one man" acts:  "One man ran, filled a sponge with wine vinegar, put it on a stick, and offered it to Jesus to drink," then pronounces "Now leave him alone.  Let's see if Elijah comes to take him down."

I want to know about "one man."  Who is this "one man"?  What is this action--this urgent action with deep ambivalence--all about?  Apparently, Jesus drinking wine vinegar is fulfilling prophecy, yet Mark's streamlined narrative is not Matthew, fulfilling prophecy for a Jewish audience.  Perhaps "one man" is every man, every reader sitting back and waiting to decide, waiting for proof, proving precisly faithless in the waiting.

But faith does have the last word of course.  Faith springs from the horror of Golgotha precisely where this narrative started, with the brutality of the soldiers.  Out of the stone hearts of military men comes the most profound statement of faith, as God brings forth the water of heaven from the rock of earth once again.  "And when the centurion, who stood there in front of Jesus, heard his cry and saw how he died, he said, 'Surely this man was the Son of God!'"  John Mark saves one of his most layered sentences for this soldier:  a title (centurion), a location ("he'd been standing right there, people, he had not only the closest view, but a brutal hand in this murder"), an interpretation (when he saw all these things, all these bizarre things--it all added up for him to a declaration), and an action, a step of faith. 

True to his juxtaposition throughout the passage, John Mark turns his camera from this hardened soldier to the women at a distance, and the drama is complete, all humanity present even more so than they are in the symbolic Pequod from Moby Dick, and certainly more present than in the semi-fascist Hemingway. 

It's tremendous writing, writing that stands back and sketches the scene powerfully, writing that draws us into the action in a way that forces us to confront our own belief or lack thereof:  are we standing back with the false action of "one man"?  Or are we more guilty--and more convicted--with the brutality and confession of the centurion?  In John Mark's account of the crucifixion, he calls us to declare our allegiance once and for all.