Courtesy/Strangezoo.com

NEW CD FEATURE:  Complete hot-button excerpt from G.M. Corrigan’s “religio-socio-econo-politico-philo-psycho-romantic (whew!) novel, "Chasing Chickens: A Love Story"

By G.M. Corrigan

Introduction to Excerpt #1—theme: human creativity, its source and the consequences of its containment. It’s the familiar nemesis of writers, but everybody, at one time or another, experiences creative paralysis—whether it be in what to say to one’s beloved, how to solve a parenting problem or in simply doing a crossword puzzle. We are creatures that share in the creative power of the Creator (however one conceives this Creator), and much of life’s satisfaction lies in using that power to understand and communicate truth, express a perception of beauty or make life better for others. It’s what we all strive for in our work, though modern, modularized work—and adversarial workplaces—often frustrates that desire. (The word “adversarial” here is significant, as adversarialism—as a design feature of our political, economic and, increasingly, social praxis is a major theme of Chasing Chickens.) In this opening segment, our protagonist Walter Cephalo, a lead writer at a major folio books publishing firm in 1980s Washington, D.C., has been given the daunting assignment of distilling the world’s religions into a book that will promote religious unity. But he is stuck. Has his vaunted abilities finally met their match, or is there something about Walter’s views and lifestyle, his failure to appreciate past emotional wounds or his typical “adaptation” to the larger culture that’s to blame. Walter doesn’t begin to gain insight into the cause of his condition until a series of mysterious encounters sets him on the path of chasing chickens—and falling for an unlikely and challenging love interest. (Hint: The “chasing chickens” term comes from a scene in a popular Disney cartoon, released in 1955.)

Comes now Walter Cephalo and his chosen world.

“For thou lovest all things that exist, and hast loathing for none of the things which thou hast made, for thou wouldst not have made anything if thou hadst hated it….For thy immortal spirit is in all things. Therefore thou dost correct little by little those who trespass, and dost remind and warn them of the things wherein they sin, that they may be freed from wickedness and put their trust in thee, O Lord.”  The Wisdom of Solomon 11:24, 12:1-2

“Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises; that by these ye may be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.” 2 Peter 1:4

“In the name of God, the compassionate, the most merciful.” – the Bismallah of the Koran

“All thinking men are atheists.” – Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

 Chasing Chickens: A Love Story

by G.M. Corrigan, Copyright, 2011

PART I

“They know not how to touch the heart, save by wounding it.” Anon.

CHAPTER 1

Cramped in body and blocked of mind, Walter Cephalo squirmed in his cubicle’s pricey, ergonomic swivel chair; peeled his Fendi, wire-rimmed glasses from their perch on his nose; and pinched that now-vacant perch to relieve the tension pooling in his dully throbbing head.

"Merde," he softly cursed, clenching his eyes as much from strain as in flight from the imagined taunts of his screen’s incessantly blinking cursor.

Somewhere in the distance "Silent Night" played, but the carol did nothing to revive Walter's slumping spirits.

The approaching Christmas holiday was to Walter just another quaint but questionable distraction from the struggle for insight and expression – and the reassuring routines that supported his solitary regimens.

 This time, however, neither routine nor regimen – nor the cherished chair in which he fidgeted high within his company’s Washington, D.C. Books Division building – had eased Walter’s torment.

Good and evil, wisdom and superstition, slaughter and sacrifice, fanaticism and fervor were all merging in his mind, adding to Walter's sense of futility and desolation.

For a panic-stricken moment the thirty-year-old writer succumbed both to the chaos of his topic and to his dullness of mind, and shuddered at the solipsistic mirror-maze within that rattled not only his concentration but his equanimity.

"Here we go again," he muttered, deflecting in quick succession a stray erotic thought and then the urge to get up and snack on something. "I just can't get it."

Replacing his glasses, Walter adjusted its snug-fitting temples into the crannies around his ears, feeling, if not inspired by his spectacles’ Joycean aspect, at least comforted by the deterrent effect their donnish looks might have on the backbiting ways of his now exiting office mates.

Throughout the bay the unmistakable sights and sounds of a workday's end—pocketbooks and briefcases being snapped shut, file drawers slammed, overhead lights extinguished, and that singularly unstinting brand of bonhomie that flourishes at close of business everywhere—erupted, deepening Walter’s despondency.

When the last overhead light went out, Walter floated in a cocoon of semi-darkness—shades of Inquisitional autos-da-fe, ceremonial human sacrifices, suicide "martyrdoms," and other wretched “religious" rituals dancing grotesquely in his mind.

Walter, too, wanted to leave but he suspected that much more than a job depended on his soon making sense—first to himself and then for readers—of the arcane strands of his assigned subject matter. He even had the strangest feeling that his exacting assignment actually had some bearing on his own strained existence.

He knew that his section of a book tentatively called Creeds That Conquered Civilizations was next out of the hopper, and that he had promised his editor and sometimes friend, Dave O'Cannon, that he'd have a draft introduction ready for review by week's end.

But here it was Wednesday, and Walter had little to show.

In characteristic bid for a breakthrough he had even stripped his workspace of all frivolous mementos, workplace art, pictures, and cynical “Post-It” commentary on current events that, like inner-city street graffiti, is a commonplace of workplace cubicles everywhere.

Consequently, he now found himself with neither comic distraction nor increased insight in a setting that he suspected looked alarmingly like a Psychology Today cover.

"Fear and Loathing in the Cubicle Nest," "The Homogenization of the Human Mind," and "From Creativity to Catatonia" came to mind as candidate cover stories.

Only the antic appearance of several, small go-cart-driving "Sesame Street" characters, obtained noontimes with fast-food purchases—his sole remaining concession to whimsy in the workplace—relieved the modular cubicle’s stark functionality.

"Damn," he grumped again in the gloaming. "Real presence, the primacy of Peter, faith and works, scripture and tradition, transubstantiation and more for Catholics alone. Then, for Protestants, there is salvation by faith alone, innate depravity, predestination, and the literal interpretation of the scriptures.”

"As for Judaism there are the Torah, dietary laws, the Kabbala, Talmudic teachings, and orthodox, conservative, and liberal takes on these and other points—while for Islam there is El Shahadah, the ‘five pillars,’ the meaning of jihad, Sunni and Shia, and, of course, the constancy of the Koran.”

And then there was the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, a Native American version of Christianity, and Baha’i, which claims a successor role to the world’s major religions, preaching a synthesis of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

A tall order at best, Walter realized, to find some introductory way to synopsize even billion-plus-member Christianity for the highly hyped folio book.

"And what about atheism,” he mumbled mordantly. “Shouldn't I be addressing that too? Isn't it a ‘secular religion,’ in that it holds a non-rational faith in science and government, for example, or the supposed innate goodness of humanity and an ‘ethical order’ based on mutual—if problematic—self-interest?”

Cynically, he wondered how such an ethic would stand up under the stress of, say, Third Reich conditions. 

But, no, he finally concluded. He couldn't get into atheism this time around—though it was a veritable majority “religion” among his coworkers.

Walter would—given its dominant, thirty percent share of the world’s population—focus on Christianity first.  And, given his ongoing aridity in the area, he had opted to prime his creative pump with theological tidbits from what he remembered of his own forsaken Christian affiliation.

"Just can't seem to penetrate even this scaled-back scope and work my special 'Cephalic magic'—what one coworker had called my ‘esemplastic’ touch—for pinning the essence of an issue," he murmured only half-facetiously, again scanning the meager product of a full day's work.

Although central to most Christian religions, the rite of communion, or the Lord’s Supper, is variously interpreted across denominational lines. Some branches of Christianity view communion or Eucharist—koinonia, meaning “thanksgiving,” in the Greek—in a purely symbolic sense in that the bread and wine merely betoken sacramentally the body and blood of the Messiah. Others, however, most notably Roman Catholics, regard communion as a real transformation—known in theological terms as transubstantiation—of wheat and vintage into the actual body and blood of the Christ under the “appearance” of bread and wine.

Quakers and the Salvation Army, however, are Christian sects that do not celebrate communion at all, as they have no provision for any sacramental rite in their worship service.

Regardless of denominational difference, however, the messiah’s sacrificial, bloody death on the cross is key in Christianity, because it testifies to the primacy of love in God’s nature—and, ideally then, in all human activity and organization—atoning throughout history for the sins of humankind and reconciling creatures with Creator. By partaking in communion believers fulfill the Biblical injunction to eat "the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood" to have life, thereby establishing real unity with each other through participation in the Godhead.

Although precursor beliefs to this partaking of flesh and blood are resisted by modern Christian theologians, primitive antecedents to such rites are numerous in antiquity.

"Damn," he cursed again, this time louder, confidently sensing from the slight echo that he was, once again, the last one in the bay and therefore free to indulge his frustration to the fullest.  "'Precursor beliefs,'" he muttered with disgust. "That's just a sensationalist cop-out, Cephalo." 

Walter was familiar with the provocative—some would say blasphemous—linking of Christian doctrines with pagan myths and practices in the works of Joseph Campbell and Sir James Frazer, and even in the Mitchner novel, The Source. He knew, however, that, though instructive of what might be a universal hunger for propitiation of and participation in the supernatural, the ancient pagan practices did not pretend to foster agape—or communal love—within a primitive people.

Christian Eucharist did—though Walter failed to see what practical benefit that afforded. Love, he mused, twigging to personal experience, more often than not was disappointing and a messy impediment to illumination, to clarity.

Walter understood that in the warped logic of pagan ritual sacrifice you took something of value to yourself—such as a captured warrior or a child—and offered it to the capricious gods for something in return, such as victory in battle or relief from a drought. Sometimes you even ate the victim’s heart to claim whatever courage he had exhibited.

"Take this person, not me" was the tacit signal sent in such sacrifice, he knew.

A crude precursor of the modern understanding of sacrifice as voluntary self-denial in one area for greater good elsewhere—a fundament of athletics, academia, wellness, all civilized striving—the pagan practice, Walter knew, was not necessarily self-inflicted, nor geared toward assiduous self-improvement.

And he also understood that, rather than discrediting Christian practice, as some detractors liked to argue, the pre-Christian superstitions may actually have heralded, and thus affirmed, Christianity’s more perfect understanding of propitiation.

This struck him as significant—but of what he was at a loss to say.

Thwarted, he picked up his favorite "Sesame Street" character—the loopy-large chicken, “Big Bird”—and squeezed its hard plastic in his hand.

As a lapsed Catholic himself, Walter knew that Christian Eucharist—and this was true across most denominations—was not about acquisition but about participation and group...well, communion.

But participation in what? he wondered. The abstract “love” of God—for which one had to give up everything one really enjoyed? How does that benefit anybody, practically speaking?

The payoff, if he remembered correctly, was that you received assurances of "grace” or "life" or "fellowship" in the general Christian sense, which, he noted wryly, often did not withstand the test of getting out of the church parking lot. Then, of course, there was “eternal life.”

Reluctantly Walter admitted to himself that pagan sacrifice, if not exactly agreeable to him, at least made more sense.

"Now if I could just sacrifice, say, some little, stray animal for a shot of inspiration with this assignment," he puckishly muttered, eyeing Big Bird. "Now that's something I can relate to."

Walter suspected that it was this very topic—Christian communion and its putative and possibly seminal antecedents—that was key to unraveling the farrago of bewildering faiths and practices he grappled with, and to finding a common thread in the crazy quilt of all the world's religions.

"Double damn," he snapped self-consciously, enjoying, as he spun “Big Bird's” wheels, a bit of wordplay with the echoing void.

Walter did not know why he felt as he did, but the zany toys always gave him a welcome, if transient, sense of relief in the midst of looming deadlines, office infighting and faction-forming, coworker pretensions, or when personal or creative doubts arose.

His office mates might have their snarky habits, home projection televisions and chic Brookstone executive toys but Walter had his freaky, fast-food friends—and he derived a defiant sort of satisfaction from their goofy company.

Cradling "Big Bird" in his hands, Walter lolled his head back onto his chair's headrest and drifted, agitated yet encouraged that he may have found a launching point  .  .  .  sinking  .  .  .  thinking  .  .  .  the power of myth  .  .  .  the golden bough  .  .  .  ritual killing or ritual sharing  .  .  .  life springing from death  .  .  .  Horus the Elder as messianic prototype  .   .    .  “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son"  .  .  .  the corn myth  .  .  .  "Unless you eat of the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you will not live"  .  .  .  “This is a hard saying. Who can listen to it?"  .  .  . 

Whreeeeeeeeennnnnn.

The shrill sound of a vacuum spooling up somewhere in the bay shattered Walter's reverie. It was a noise that for some reason he had detested from childhood, its labored, overbearing whine seeming to drown out all consideration but for itself.

He suspected his aversion had something to do with formative loneliness and his family's preoccupation with flippancy and kibbitzing over communication and companionship. But, here again, he wasn't sure.

Now the cranky wail, which in an instant had banished both the balm of stolen respite and a lucrative back-chaining of ideas, greatly vexed Walter and cast him into an even deeper funk over his assignment, his job, and his competence in general. 

Though he had in the past risen to similar research and exposition challenges time and again, each new assignment was for Walter a repeated leap of faith and one that he agonized over agnostically until the work was in the can.

He knew that there were all manner of snollygosters—subliminal and otherwise—lurking in the shadows to snatch that brilliant insight or artful expression, and foiling these forays through self-imposed regimens had increasingly become his fixation.

Resisting again the temptation to throw in the towel, Walter pressed his frame against his prize chair's tensioned backrest, held himself in the reclined position, and scanned the ceiling as if seeking aid from some higher, loftier plane—a plane that Walter no longer believed in.

In noting the irony of his plaintive posture, however, Walter allowed a half-hearted appeal to slip out.

What Walter did believe in was discipline, focus, clarity, and a lifestyle devoid of messy entanglements and troubling passions. This is what got his "flow" going, he told himself—that rare homeostasis where the subconscious mind opens and all manner of insight, contentment, and cosmic connectedness fleetingly emerge.

To glimpse one of these insights and then, through some distraction—or worse, some murky, tangential doubt—let it slip back into the inky pool of his own subconscious was for Walter a torment that would gnaw at him for days, even weeks, until he recovered what he had fumbled or until some mystery restoration finally allowed him to move on.

So Walter continually strove for the "flow" in everything he did because, in addition to making him provisionally happy, it seemed also to shelter him from those drifting vortices of dark speculation, jack-in-the-box depression, and Sisysphean self-analysis that sometimes engulfed and paralyzed him.

But it was a stark and solitary battle for which he had yet to find a substitute, though he had tried across an assortment of impetuous but ultimately failed romances.

In the end he always returned to what worked best for him.

(to be continued)