July 9: Otto Messmer, Lymphoma of the Brain, Matthea Harvey, "My Bird Family"

Sometimes he'd bring his son with him, the kid no more than three or four years old and delighted by the futuristic machinery in that room.  [Otto] Messmer [cartoonist and "father of Felix the Cat"], stoic, reading a newspaper, even as Ives, against a backdrop of flashes--the afterglow of two thousand flickering lightbulbs seeping in--moved toward the control board.  Fascinated, watching a gear or switch move, levers shifting, cylinders and piano rolls turning, and, at certain intervals, a whole new deluge of light:  the walls suddenly pinkish or azure or carnival yellow, those colors flashing across his face; Ives remaining still, but ever tempted to push a lever or button or two, as he thought God might with men.

I really love this passage.  It's another one of Ives' countless versions of God.  This one has a very 1950s science fiction feel.  God as the great control board operator, pushing buttons, pulling levers to make sunrises and sunsets, hurricanes and earthquakes.  Cross this wire, a baby is born.  Unscrew this fuse, a dog is hit by a car.  It's not a very comforting vision of the Divine, that's for sure.

I've been struggling a little bit with God recently.  So much of what's been happening in my life seems arbitrary, as if there's some kind of bug in the computer code of my life.  I mean, c'mon.  My kitchen ceiling collapses.  My roof needs to be replaced.  The steering column on my car decides to stop working.  And then there's my sister.  Honestly, God seems to have it in for me.

The latest text about my sister from the University of Michigan:

Dr. Fink and his team were in.  Sally has lymphoma of the brain.  It is treatable.  Mass in brain growing fast.  He said this will happen.  Grow then shrink on and off...

I'm not quite convinced.  The doctor is trying to get a stat brain biopsy arranged.  Until I have definitive, pathological proof of this diagnosis, I'm not believing it.  There's been way too many physicians providing way too many diagnoses in the past month.

I'm finding it really difficult to believe in a loving, caring God right now.  I grew up with the image of the Grandpa in the Sky.  White hair, white beard, white robes.  Smiling and benevolent.  At the moment, I'm leaning toward the Otto Messmer God, sitting in a big control room, reading a newspaper, the world on a kind of autopilot.  Every once in a while, when a warning light goes off, He gets up and pushes a button or flicks a bulb.

I want something good to happen.  Anything.  I want something to restore my faith in a loving Supreme Being.

In the meantime, Saint Marty feels like one of the birds in poet Matthea Harvey's bird family.  Trapped.  Waiting for God to open the cage door.

My Bird Family

by:  Matthea Harvey

was spooling out a mournful song.  A misbegotten
gulp in the gizzard, ice on the clenched claw after
a blizzard, when I swooped in with my solo:
a bird filled with lead is better off dead.
For a change, we weren't larking about
in our strap-on beaks.  I had been a finch filled
with certainty until the end of the talk
about the universe at which point I was just
a diminutive coo lost in the bamboo, an "or"
in a grove I thought was mine.  The others too.
We fell backward into dreaming.
Somewhere was a park bench covered in
down, or a complicated carousel of up,
hatching new angles of flight which would outnumber
every plane contrail, every kite hypotenuse,
every lip-licking catleap toward the birdhouse.
In the sandpit we collided with toddler-made
castles and were none the worse, though the sky
spun slightly.  The clouds turned back to meringue.
Sometimes we stretched out a courageous claw
and climbed back into our cages, just to see
the human look in at us with his giant eyes,
to let his booming whistle swish through out feathers.

I'm Felix the Cat, and God is Otto Messmer