“The desert and the parched land will be glad… the wilderness will rejoice and blossom.. Like the crocus, it will burst into blossom. Water will gush forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert.”
If you’ve read previous blogs on my reviews of Confessions of St. Augustine, it will come as no surprise Augie’s retreated, retrenched, or reprised? to his initial vision, pilgrimage, purpose? To find himself, God, the purpose of life? WHERE ALL THE PROPHETS WENT! To seek and to serve.
As seen in the drawing above, his art has been reduced to the essence. Like his life: from The Mendicant to The Militant to The Missionary, living with and serving as he puts it “the lepers” of society, the mentally handicapped and the Native Americans in some “God forsaken desert” as I put it in the last blog.
Now I’m not saying I’m buying into this, but it sure beats the hypocrisy of what I’m seeing today in these so called Christians who can somehow defend every wretched grift couched in Patriotism like 1776 big ones (that’s one billion, 776 million) of our tax payer’s dollars to financially reward the bad guys so he can look like the good guy by rewriting history, starting with the 2020 election.
So while I’m on the front lines battling the Devil, Augie’s probably doing likewise in a world that looks better and better every day by comparison.
Take the Hopi Indians (who probably aren’t too far from Augie). The only tribe who never bothered anybody and nobody bothered them. And why is that? Simple: no one wanted their land.
And Augie? WHO WOULD WANT TO LIVE LIKE THAT? Mother Teresa? St. Francis? Even the original St. Augustine didn’t live like that. Last I heard is he wasn’t even aware of the 2008 financial crash.
Why?
BECAUSE HE HAD NO MONEY! No possessions. Nada! Like “The Lillies of the Field,” the 1963 movie where Homer Smith or “Schmitt” as Mother Maria called him (played by Sydney Poitier) – Homer as in the writer of the Iliad and the Odyssey (as in Ulysses) and “Schmitt” as in our Augie – talk about coincidence, synchronicity, or how about that word “Providence?” as in the will of God or the gods – from A to Z – Apollo to Zeus!
Or to continue with the A to Z on the literary scene: Antonia from the novel My Antonia, Willa Cather’s ode to simplicity and service and I could go on to Ulysses and The Confessions of Zeno, but you get the point, I envy Augie. In fact even the illustrations in her novel (My Antonia), remind me of Augie in The Missionary.
All of which brings me back to that simple illustration of some little mission probably not far from the Hopi or the mission chapel the other “Schmitt” built: “I built me a shapull.” “NO!” said Mother Maria – “HE built a Chapel!”
So Trump be damned (and he probably will) unless he repents in which case he’ll spend the rest of his days in prison but better a life time in prison than an eternity in Hell but I’m not supposed to believe in all that stuff, but just saying…
And now with my recent conversion to Agnosticism I can at LEAST be more open minded about all this because although I find everything about these “Christians” today abhorrent, I must admit, I envy Augie. And if you read my fourth book, yet to come out, The Donnie Diaries Regurgitated, you’ll see my Joycean epiphany as in Ulysses as in Odysseus as in the Iliad as in Homer as in Homer Schmitt as in Augustine Schmitt, as in a step above my more nihilistic tone as in my publicist’s moniker: Lightfinder.
Whether or not I’ll ever find it is another story.
And with Trump and his ilk – all I see is the dark at the end of the tunnel and as far as which way America? With Trump? We’ll all be certain to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. And Trump? he’ll still claim victory!
And why not? He’ll have made his fortune off of whom else? The same people who will pay for his Ballroom, His slush fund for all his goons, his wars, and all the other crimes he’s committed, is committing and WILL continue to commit until you morons do something about it.
OR? you can do something about it! Remember Peter Finch in his Academy Award winning performance in the movie Network?
“I’M MAD AS HELL AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!”
Dr. Phineas T. Redwell