The Apocalypse Reader Read online

  Okay, so it was the first century after Christ's martyrdom at Calvary. His followers were suffering. They were spurned, they were flogged, they were flayed, crucified upside down, torn apart by horses, left out to be fed upon by vultures. You name it. Every conceivable torture was visited upon them. Meanwhile, in the midst of this persecution, St. John the Divine goes off to Patmos,' an island off the coast of Greece, and begins-in this intense rage-to write a screed on which his reputation rests among fundamentalists. It's about the future of the church, about the coming house-cleaning among the chosen. This is the screed called Revelation. It's his prophecy. A prophecy that contains things "which must shortly come to pass" (1:1). "He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly" (22:20).

  Here's what I imagine: John living a life of complete poverty, confined to a monastic cell with only charcoal and parchment to divert him, unfed, unattended, in a building as scorched as the sands of the Middle East. Or maybe he was even one of those cave-dwelling monks. Unwashed, solitary, in retirement from light. In constant fear of the authorities. Panicked at the thought of his own martyrdom. In cycles, John wept, shouted oaths, prayed joyously. He had visions. Because of migraines. I'd say John had a migrainous personality. That's my guess. Anyhow, in the midst of John's rage, in the midst of his abandonment, an angel came to him and said to take up his pen.

  MYSELF,

  Bob Paisner, in Chapin House

  JOHN SAW A future marked by persecutors, false gods, Antichrists, Gog and Magog, plagues, floods, earthquakes. He saw it this way because this was how he felt about the church in the first century. Saw it this way because this was the moral environment in which he lived. And of course he's not the only guy that ever had these feelings. Jerome probably felt this way in the wilderness. Nostradamus probably felt this way when he was predicting John F. Kennedy's assassination, the rise of Idi Amin, Ayatollah Khomeini, the invasion of Afghanistan, and the Third World War. Barry Goldwater may also have felt the bruising solitude of moral superiority and maybe he still does. Or take the case of James Earl Carter. And I feel that way too. I feel it now, here in Chapin House at Temple University, Phila., PA. I suffer with rectitude. I have tunnel vision sometimes. I get these compulsions to drop everything and run, to go in search of a girl with whom I worked bagging groceries in Nashua, N.H. Her hair fell in amber ringlets. She took me into her confidence.

  Therefore and thus, I am up at 3:00 A.M. on the night before this religious studies term paper is due. I have taken two Vivarin caffeine tablets. I'm seated inside a large spherical chair-early seventies-type design packed with cushions, which I, along with Anthony Edward Nicholas (hereafter, Tony) stole from the Graduate Housing Lounge. We had to roll it down College Street. There's no other furniture in my dorm room, now, except for a mattress and a portable cassette player. I'm wearing only worn boxer shorts. I have stockpiled Quaaludes and generic beer.

  I'll just briefly expatiate on how I ended up living alone. The room is a double. Tony moved in. It was a week after school began (Sept. 1980). His shit was everywhere. He had a plug-in pink flamingo. He had congas. Bowling shoes. Hawaiian shirts. He left his records on the floor, out of their sleeves. He didn't bathe. And then, just as suddenly as he moved in, he moved out. Maybe a month later.

  I thought we got along pretty well. He agreed to dine with me in the refectory each night. We chain-smoked. True: I gave him a number of polite but direct suggestions about that lingering hacking cough of his and about his frequent nosebleeds; I offered to separate the whites from the colored items that lay strewn all over our little room. Maybe I wasn't too politic sometimes-one time when he came back from a frat party with some floozy I barricaded the door. I couldn't stand to overhear that groping. One night-it's true-I even threw some of his shit out the window at him when I saw him passing below. These things come over you sometimes. I offered apologies. After Tony left, the housing office moved in a rugby player actually named Scooter. He didn't last long either.

  So here I am.

  This solitude I've described counts among the similarities between myself and St. John the Divine. There are additional concordances between my life and the prophecy written down in the book of Revelation, to which I would now like to draw your attention. My comments on them will form the major work of this paper. Blessed is he that readeth.

  The Angel Appears to John

  "WHAT THOU SEEST, write in a book, and send it unto the seven churches," the angel commands John in the first chapter of the final book of the Bible (1:11), and later, "Write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter" (1:19). The appearance of the angel hearing the word of Christ is intended to foster in John the act of writing scripture.' But the way I see it, the testamentary approach, this emphasis on writing things down, is important not only to Revelation but to the Bible as a whole. The Bible is about writing, about persuasion and the dissemination of belief and practice, and its subject is praise, pure and simple, praise for God's stuff. The stuff he made.

  Moreover, the Holy Bible, of course, was the first book ever printed with a printing press-the Gutenberg Bible. The revolution of dissemination brought about by the printing press came first to sacred ground, get it? and that's not just coincidence. All books, as a result, refer back to the Bible and to the truth contained in it, just as all writing refers back to divine creation, and, by extension, all critical papers ought to be contained in this concordance too. Between all covers, joined by all bindings, sewn, glued, or Velo-bound, is the word of God, like the movement of radiation out from Ground Zero. And that, you see, is what John's writing is about in the Apocalypse. Christ is the "Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending" of all alphabets (and all words) and all books and all society and all of society's works.

  Now, let's examine me for a minute. Ever since I was a little boy, I have felt the significance of the printed word. I read a lot of science fiction. But as for writing, I avoided this shit like the plague. From the age of twelve, when I went away to boarding school, I was exposed to classes in rhetoric and composition. I didn't enjoy these classes. I think I might have a learning disability. Really. When I have to write something, I get really bored. I never wrote my parents or my uncle, and they never wrote me. (My father lived in a tent-heated, with electricity, outhouse in back at the furthermost corner of our property. Early mornings he would stride across fallow acreage with a shotgun and his dog, Claw. As the sun teased through the remote woods of New Hampshire, my father would fire off round after round at the crows on his property. He took shots he could never make. This was his kind of dissemination. The dissemination of buckshot. His oaths of rage crackled across the White Mountains.)

  In the weeks leading to the deadline for my religious studies term paper, I know I am compelled to write in order to proceed to my junior year or at least in order to pass this class, and yet I can't do it. I want to write, but I can't. I'll do anything to avoid it. I'm wandering around dangerous parts of South Philly in a torn overcoat throwing rocks at stray dogs. I'm sleeping in public places. And then-all at once-a paper on Revelation comes to me, all at once, in a convulsion of inspiration, in a revelation you might say, just as the angel comes to John. It's not that I set out to write down the story of my life this semester, I'm just trying to think up a good paper topic, like, say, Christ as literary character in the three Synoptic Gospels. But instead the words just tumble out, as if it's a fit or a seizure. As though I'm taking dictation. My dorm room is a grotto and I totter around in it like an autistic until that moment when suddenly I can't stop myself from writing.

  Without too much of a stretch, therefore, we can see that the angel's injunction to compose (in 1:1) can actually refer to this very religious studies paper, and to problems in its composition and in my life generally.

  The Letters to the Seven Churches

  THE SEVEN CHURCHES to which John is enjoined to write by the angel are in Asia.

  Here are their n
ames: Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamos, Thyatira, Sardis, Laodicea, and Philadelphia. The point here is pretty obvious, right? John's letters to these churches are intended to reward and punish the various successes and failures of these institutions. The language of each letter is dictated by the angel of 1:1.

  My paper-this very paper-is being written in the city of Philadelphia, Pa. Here's an excerpt from John's letter to the church of this very name (3:12): "Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out: and I will write upon him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, which is new Jerusalem" (italics in original). Therefore, all that I'm telling you is true, it fulfills prophecy, and plus, it all happened in the one-time capital of the United States of America.

  I came to Temple in the fall of 1979 after being rejected at Brown, Yale, Hampshire, Haverford, Union, and U.N.H. My first year was uneventful, although I did meet a guy, Malcolm, who eventually became my pharmacist. In the spring of that year, I began the frequent use of Quaaludes. My first bona fide blackout-loss of memory from the combination of drugs and alcohol-followed not long after. I was getting ready to go to a bar at the Tyler School of Art (it's all the way across town). Then, however, a gap in the narrative of these events ensues until the moment when I found myself suddenly, inexplicably, in a men's lavatory wearing a gray suitcoat with both sleeves torn off. I was shirtless underneath this garment, and I was also--I noticed in the smudgy mirror before me-wearing lipstick and eyeliner. I reviewed the facts. I had been drinking on top of downs, I guessed, and was luckily at the very bar to which I had set out. To a guy urinating in the stall behind me I gleefully shouted the following:

  -I don't want to seem like I'm giving you a pop quiz or anything, friend, but do you happen to know anything about what time it is or what day it is or what presidential administration is currently tangling things up or whether there's selective service registration yet? Is there anything you might know about these things?

  I cackled good-naturedly, but my new acquaintance left me (in haste) to my confusion. I decided, because of my condition, to make my way back to my dorm, a journey of forty-five minutes, where, along with Shusaku Sunami (see note 6), I got into the systematic destruction of my college-issue furniture. The desk and desk chair, the chest of drawers, etc.'

  The Throne of God in Heaven

  WHAT CAN I tell you about the Tap Room, as Tyler's bar was called? When I was there, when I was immersed in its liquid dankness, its crimson lighting, its unlistenable music, I felt like I was breathing properly, I felt that people weren't whispering invidiously about my wardrobe and comportment. I loved and revered bars in freshman year and I still do. I seemed, in spite of my faith in the community and fellowship of Christ, in spite of my belief in an eternal life as promised by him, to need to degrade myself with drink (and compulsive masturbation). Again and again I found myself scamming, pretending to be a Tyler student in order to find a way into the Tap Room. It was a tiny, rundown space, with no more than six or seven booths, maybe twenty-four seats in all. (And twenty-four, just by coincidence, is my very age as I write this paper because I took two years off bagging groceries and receiving psychotherapy.) An enfeebled citronella candle dwindled on each table; a mild adhesive varnished all surfaces. You had to yell into the ear of the person next to you. The men sometimes wore skirts; everyone wore black.

  I fell on my knees in places like that. I succumbed to a joy in my heart. I heard God whisper the good news. Even if they could tell there that I was a liberal arts guy. We were interlopers, those of us from Temple and Penn, in tweed suits from the fifties and skinny ties and peg-legged pants. They could tell us apart.

  Compare this bar and its charms with the fourth chapter of the Apocalypse: "Round about the throne were four and twenty seats: and upon the seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting, clothed in white raiment" (4:4), and, later, "There were seven lamps burning before the throne, which are the Seven Spirits of God" (4:5).

  The Seven Ages of Church History

  SEVEN LAMPS, THE seven letters to the seven churches, the seven seals of the Great Book-there are even seven visions in the book of Revelation as a whole. With these sevens in mind, I will now briefly discuss the work of Petrus Olivi, the Franciscan biblical commentator.

  Olivi, before being condemned posthumously in the early fourteenth century, was notable for insisting on a sevenfold division in church history to accord with the system of sevens in Revelation. He also insisted on a threefold division-borrowed from a Franciscan predecessor-to go with the Holy Trinity. The three ages went roughly like this: God the father went with the age of the Old Testament, Christ went with the age of the New Testament up to about 1300 A.D. (the time at which Olivi composed his Lectura Supra Apocalypsim), and the age of the Holy Ghost was, according to Olivi, to last from the time of his composition (1300) for about 666 years-the number of the beast-until circa 1966 A.D. Or roughly ten years after my own difficult childbirth at Mass General in 1956. This third period would accord more or less with the sixth age of church history, in which, according to Olivi, we would find the war between the Holy Ghost and Antichrist.

  If we consider that Olivi's first defense of his views before the Franciscans occurred in about 1292, not 1300, we can see that the Apocalypse and with it the end of the reign of Antichrist may well occur on or close to the year of my own birth. All baby boomers, therefore, the countless offspring of the late sixth age-of that great period of darkness, the fifties-will be around to see the Apocalypse. In recognizing this concordance I'm also alluding to another trinitarian construct-the three writers and prophets: St. John the Divine, Pettus Olivi, and Bob Paisner.

  And here's one last interesting equation! The first Olivians, the followers who made pilgrimages to his grave, were burned at the stake for heresy somewhere between 1314 and 1318. If we take these dates (instead of 1300) as indicative of the onset of the sixth age (the beginning of the reign of Antichrist before final judgment), and add to them the 666 years signifying the beast, then we can see, of course, that the Apocalypse arrives between 1980 and 1984.

  The Book, Its Seven Seals, and an Angel

  WHAT HAPPENS NEXT in Revelation is that John, in the throne room of heaven, is given a chance to view the great book of prophecy spread wide on an ample table there. "No man in heaven, nor in earth, neither under the earth, was able to open the book, neither to look thereon" (5:3).

  I've told you about my own reading habits-mostly s.f. and light psychology books, although I am also a big fan of the writings of Ayn Rand. And there is this little "book" I'm writing here, this book of my own life, which I hope will top out around the required twenty-five pages and be done about three hours from now. But none of these books seems to resonate with the book described above in Revelation.

  In fact, I would submit to you that a real book is not intended here. Sometimes you have to admit that Revelation has both a literal and symbolic level. The truth of Revelation floats between the two registers like a mostly submerged iceberg. In the case of the book referred to here, I think we can confidently speak of the symbolic. The book John intends to anoint as the highest book of prophecy and the book of Judgment is not a regular book, a product of the printing press. It's the ancient and all-powerful book of the affections. The book of life, as described in 20:12, is the book of love.

  I know a little bit about it, about love. For example, my roommate Tony Nicholas and I had had a few drinks one night. At the Tap Room. End of fall semester 1980. After Tony had moved out. And we had smoked some pot, which was always bad for me, since in its clutches I imagined not only that people but tables and chairs, all the objects in the cosmos, were secretly passing messages about my mood and complexion, my family, or my sickly childhood. That night I had smoked this marijuana and was suffering with the predictable referential mania. A malefic world spun out around me. I was powerless over it. I drank to cut the edge of this bad noise. Tony was telling me in some litanical and repetitive
way about a stylish mystery film he wanted to direct. The eternal globe-trotting semiotics of mystery. The hermeneutics of murder and power pop. It all sounded the same. I was drinking faster. I had aphasia. I was nuts.

  The music in the bar, some fusion of punk and funk that was going around then, obliterated all the ambient noise. I couldn't hear anything. I couldn't see anything. But I could tell, suddenly, that Tony wasn't talking to me anymore. It dawned on me. Through some sixth-sense heartache. He hated me. He was five or ten minutes into a conversation with a woman in the next booth. Five or ten minutes? Or longer? He had actually slid into the next booth and was chatting her up and I hadn't even noticed.

  That was Judith. That was the first time I laid eyes on Judith. What did she look like? In the dark? Greater forces than my brute desire directed me at the moment, so her beauty wasn't uppermost in my mind. I can't tell you what she looked like, therefore, and her face was mostly turned away. She was chatting amiably with my former roommate. Still, I knew her immediately for who she was.

  She was the angel of the seventh seal. She was Mary and Mary Magdalene, she was my mom before my mom got sick, but that's not all, she was like Christ, she was Francis or Gandhi or Thomas Merton, she was the grinch after his heart got bigger, she was Patti Smith after the broken neck, she was the transcendental signified, she was the thing that rid me of Tony Nicholas, she was the thing that was going to thaw my ache, and I knew. I'm aware that it sounds pretty sudden. But consider the evidence: "And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon upon her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars" (12:1). Judith's address at the time was 1212 Rodman St., Philadelphia.

  My head cleared when she turned-from where Tony was yelling something in her ear. They were in the next booth. Backs to me. And she turned. As if according to some higher purpose. She turned and looked at me. My head cleared. Something tricky was going on in my life. There was contempt in the air, Tony's contempt, but contempt couldn't last in that furnace. I felt the absolute and irrefutable faith in an instantaneous bond. Love at first sight. My feelings would be boundless and exact and I would grow fat and bald cherishing memories of Judith. I would comfort her even when she was really wrinkled. I knew all of this by the time she was leaning over the booth: