 
THE HOLLY KING

or, Why Do You Hate Christmas?

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# Chris Martin

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### Smashwords Edition

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Published by chrismatic | book at Smashwords

The Holly King;

or, Why Do You Hate Christmas?

Copyright © 2012 Chris Martin

All rights reserved for material original to the author

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Thank you for downloading this free eBook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form, with the exception of quotes used in reviews. Your support and respect for the original intellectual property of this author is appreciated.

Contrary to the meta-pleasures intended, this is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, time and space are imagined and in some cases co-opted by the author for fictitious purposes. Resemblances to real persons, alive or dead, exist in some cases in this work but  
are coincidental and not intended to represent, document or portray their  
lives or beliefs in any meaningful way.

Artists, musicians and the copyright holders of the art referenced here have no association to this work or this author at all. Nor should they be considered as having given their permission to be associated with this work. The author of this ebook does not hold the copyright or title to that referenced work and provides links to them only as a courtesy to ebook readers.

This is Adult Reading Material, intended

for reading about adults and their material.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part One: A Christmas Office Party

Part Two: Carson's Movie Begins

Part Three: The Animation Sequence (about Christmas)

Part Four: Christmas in Hosanna Hills, CA

Part Five: Christmas with Tillie Harm

Part Six: Christmas in a Monastery

Part Seven: Christmas in a Monastery Continues

Part Eight: Christmas Ends

ALSO:

Contact

Biography

Additional Art

Additional Work

Breakfast First, Then Alpha Centauri

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The holly bears a blossom

as white as lily flower,

And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ

to be our sweet saviour

The holly bears a berry

as red as any blood,

And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ

to do poor sinners good.

The holly bears a prickle

as sharp as any thorn,

And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ

on Christmas Day in the morn.

The holly bears a bark as

bitter as any gall,

And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ

for to redeem us all.

The holly and the ivy,

now both are full well grown,

Of all the trees that are in the wood,

the holly bears the crown.

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# Part One

In which I meet Carson Hancock at a Christmas party, and he gives me a

copy of his DVD, "Why Do You Hate Christmas?"

Deep into the Christmas season last year, I was at an office party munching a samosa festively speckled red and green, watching animated elves top-rocking and Indian stepping across a cheaply animated winter wonderland. Lolling on their simply drawn, zigzagging tunic shoulders, under simply drawn elves' hats, were the real-life faces of startled employees, who clearly weren't told their photo would wind up towering and unavoidably beamed on the front wall of their year end party. Surprise.

My girlfriend had slipped away to the martini fountain so I was alone, leaning cowboy style against one of the bar tables. We were in a time out. A tense fight over Christmas cards was still lingering.

Two guys I didn't know planted themselves on two thirds of this little table and started laughing at each other. They were irritating and I thought about moving but a hand grabbed at my shoulder. This was going to be someone I didn't want to see. I turned around but no one was there, so I twisted even more. Almost directly behind me, having made no effort to come around and face me, was slight, seasonally scarfed, Keaton-faced Carson Hancock. The flickering light of the dancing elves was all over his hair. He nodded sharply: Hello. A black-shirted waiter dodged him at the last second, hoisting empty glasses. Carson chooses the worst places to stand.

He is a friend of a friend, a semi-mysterious traveller along the periphery of some social and professional groups I'm in. I produce corporate videos and, occasionally, cheap independent features and reality show pilots. You haven't heard of any of them.

Like a lot of people in this business, I try to believe that when I work on the visual equivalent of memos from upper management ("Sexual Harassment is _Not_ an Option"), or desperate reality shows ( _Interstate Rest Stop Ghosts_ ), it is to pay for the time I keep my heart open for more meaningful projects. I work hard at sustaining this belief, even, or despite, teaching at a local film school. This is why I look forward to seeing Carson. He manages to be a filmmaker without having to make money at it. He knows film, not the business.

Otherwise, he is just quiet and droll. And also edgily, socially alert. His eyes shift to an offhand gesture you make, or he stops in mid-sentence and waits impassively for a shift in your posture to settle. It's a habit that makes you feel either important or a fake. Needless to say, uncomfortable lulls always come up with Carson and almost none of them are your fault. He's never this awkward in his movie, though. On the contrary.

I'm just a little older than Carson and the people he went to school with, by only a few years. I lucked into some paying gigs quickly after graduation, starting as an executive's assistant. That turned into a few coordinators jobs on movies people still remember and because of that some think I am successful. In fact, I am a non-starter on my own projects. I can't shake that crisis of belief I fall into, either over my own ideas or the reasons people should have to fund them.

But whenever I spend time with Carson I have a feeling he's taking in every word I've said and, after careful internal debate, will decisively dismiss them as industry crap. Something To Avoid. I think this encourages him to keep asking my opinions on every kind of movie. I know I like it when talented people ask my opinion, but I also know, to him, I am a negative pole against which all other virtuous cinematic ideas are measured because, when in doubt, I am snarky, cynical and aggressively dubious in just the ways the industry prefers. And I work on shows like _My Mom's a Gangland Stripper!_

It used to be a favorite social tick of his to quote movies verbatim, explosively and ad hoc. So when he said at this Christmas party, "I thought you'd be here. I have something I want you to see," I racked my brain: I thought you'd be here, I thought you'd be here... Jules Dassin? _Thieves' Highway_? But he quickly produced a DVD and offered it to me. It was titled: _Why Do You Hate Christmas?_

Oh.

I looked at him. The quirky, disjointed Carson Hancock I knew before had given way to a man of purpose and ambition. This was his movie.

"It's too big to post on line," he said. I knew it was a feature, but I wondered if he meant in some self-marketing momentousness. I turned it around in my hands and said I liked the cover: an upside down Christmas tree hanging from telephone wires, like a pair of sneakers.

"And I don't really like the title," he said while I was examining the cover. "But tell me what you think."

At the same time he spoke, I was saying, "Right – I've heard about this," and looked up but Carson was already headed away. I watched him exit with a nimble sidestep around a dancing couple leading with their butts in a party-sloppy Chubby Checker twist. I didn't see him for the rest of the night.

But yeah: one of the reasons I was familiar with his movie was the title. I never liked it, but everyone else in our little film community latched onto it right away. They liked to talk to him about it in excited, future tense, like an inside joke about to strike. Then the project somehow got bigger and then Carson disappeared, apparently working on it with windowless, hermetic filmmaker devotion.

They liked the title, I guess, because it harkens to that viral video a few years ago of Pootie's mother yelling "WHY DO YOU HATE CHRISTMAS?!?" over and over and over. Over and over so much it became a rolling snowball of derision across the schoolyard internet, a snowball sent down the mountainside towards sleepy, innocent Whoville, collecting spinoffs, parodies, auto-tune tributes, photo memes and lame late night tributes.

Just in time for Christmas.

What? Not familiar? Dare to know more? "Why Do You Hate Christmas?!?" comes from A Very Pootie Christmas. Starring the very same Pootie of Beach House fame, the reality show set down the Jersey Shore, who, yes, was such a hot item that the network gave her her own show, Ventnor. As in Ventnor City, the southern capital of the Jersey Shore. Ventnor went nowhere, thank god, though they obviously wanted it to thrive in A Very Pootie Christmas. No doubt an idea that sounded good in the writer's room soon after Ventnor was greenlit. Only, presto!, it fell into TV infamy.

It goes like this: Pootie's mother comes to visit the day before Christmas, arms full of groceries and presents to make up with her daughter after some past act of petulance. Her daughter – Pootie – has been making this big point of saying how much she hates Christmas because "everyone is all like freakin' happy." When Mama arrives she finds Pootie all depressed, something about a fight Pootie's had with her boyfriend because, well, the boyfriend says he likes Christmas because of the rockin' Christmas sex and Pootie is feeling, like, all betrayed. He should totally know she hates Christmas.

The rest of the show, surprise, is "A Christmas Carol" updated for the badda-bing generation. But before all the ghosts, there's this one epic moment of brutacious line delivery, Mama chastises Pootie for her unChristmas-like behavior. They launch into a shouting match over the meaning of Christmas (Mama pro, Pootie con), and Mama, riding the Valkyrian crest of Christmas joy yells, "Why do you hate Christmas!?!" with such unnerving incandescence it takes a while for your senses to settle down. It's truly unbelievable. Pootie slams the door in her ma's face and then goes all freakin' crazy with the triad visitation of ghosts played by the non-actors of Beach House. It never aired. But thanks to pirated copies like mine, everyone who wants it can be touched by Pootie's Christmas fable for all ages.

I can only guess that Carson glommed onto the WDYHC!?! culture-gag early on, thinking maybe of adding a layer of his own to the pixel-crusted snowball. Maybe he set out with only a three minute poke at _A Very Pootie Christmas_ in mind and in the end felt committed to the title. I don't know. Because his movie quickly tosses aside the hipster Xmas parodies and defamations and, instead, seems to take the WDYHC?!? question more and more seriously. As if he went climbing to the roof to show off and make some holiday mischief, capered and tap danced up there for a while until, embarrassed by himself and his behavior, made his way down the chimney and into the memory hole of his family's home where he rediscovered the shag-carpeted, liquor-drenched living room he left them in with its listing, ignored Christmas tree and the family long gone, even disbanded. _Why Do You Hate Christmas?_ is Carson's motion picture memoir.

Before watching it, I only knew a little of Hancock lore. The father lived and worked high in the invisible strata of insurance executives, while the mother was a self-made caterer to the stars. Their two eldest children, Humphrey and Shannon (who used to go by the nom de celeb Tillie Harm; remember her?) flung off whatever legacy their parents meant to bequeath them and hit the road upon graduation, one after the other. Certainly not together. They were – are, still – dueling spirits. Their rivalry during adolescence would only truce up when joining forces against Mommy and Daddy. Carson is the youngest by about 11 years. I'm not surprised to learn he grew up in the peace and quiet behind a closed door.

Even though I promised Carson at the party I'd get to it right away, or at least promised him to myself, entire months passed by. A fruitless trip to Sundance, the Super Bowl, the Oscars, President's Day weekend, St. Patrick's Day, Easter, Opening Day, my first swim at the local pool, my annual Earth Day whitewater rafting and cookout trip, an ugly, forgettable Cinco de Mayo, the weekend I dragged tables and chairs up to the roof for summer-nighttime lounging and the spontaneous party that ensued, our local Cherry Blossom and taiko drumming festival, a friend's wedding in Cabo San Lucas, the breakup with my girlfriend immediately afterwards, Mother's Day, a Memorial Day pigfest with fireworks, Father's Day, a Juneteenth street party in my neighborhood – they all passed by before I watched his movie.

On a rainy day soaking the earth with uncomfortably tropical temperatures, I decided to stay in, watch some videos. At the bottom of a stack of black, pirated DVD cases, I found Carson's movie. It was a rediscovery: the dyspeptic title, the homemade cover of a lit Christmas tree hanging upside down under a gray winter sky seemed both nostalgic and crotchety. Why not? I thought. Christmas in June sounds fun.

I hope, but doubt, you'll ever get a chance to see the movie yourself. After a brief, fitful campaign to get it into festivals, on public television, cable, the internet, Carson said he's through with it and onto something else. But people fall in love with things, like Pelican Bay lifers and priests and other doomed enterprises, and sometimes their messy devotion spreads and teaches others to open to their own devotions. First it was Carson and his and then it became mine, mine with the four days I spent but will never get back, personally transcribing his movie with one hand on the remote frame by frame, ignoring calls, eating impatiently. I wanted to do it. So here, without the directors permission, is my account of Carson Hancock's Why Do You Hate Christmas? I just wish you could see it.

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# Part Two

In which Christmas greetings are explored and the awkward Christmas

home movies of the Hancocks are enjoyed

There are no credits, just Carson's made up, non-existent production company, Self-Divulgent Pictures. The movie begins as a handheld camera lifts its gaze from the sidewalk. It's a busy sidewalk, noisy with traffic and hubbub, outside a mall downtown. A Salvation Army bell-ringer stands near a store window with a puffy-quilted down jacket and Santa hat. The camera moves right up to her.

"Why do you hate Christmas?"

Carson's voice.

The Salvation Army foot soldier blinks her eyes and stops ringing her bell. "Say what?" she asks. She's defensive. Carson asks again, a little less in her face. Her expression changes and she gives him a look, hard: Oh, that's what I thought you said. Also, and for good measure, Why would I be standing out here ringing my bell if I hated Christmas, stupid kid?

Carson doesn't really have the stomach to be a jack-ass. He retreats slightly, able to stand his ground only by shaping the prank into an anthropological study.

"Seriously," he tries again. "Do you hate Christmas?"

She rolls her eyes. "I'll tell you what I do hate. What I hate is having to stand here in the cold hoping someone is going to notice me and my bell and my little red pot here while dealing with somebody thinking he can be cute with me." She rings the bell once and then someone apparently does notice her. A hand drops some change, clattering inside the pot, and they speed off. "Merry Christmas – " she says to the donor. A gust wipes the puffy exhale from her mouth.

She's done with Carson. "Go ask him your question," she says, meaning it. "Go on."

Carson does. We cut to the man, eyeing the sound man to his left and the camera on his right and the goofy kid asking him why he hates Christmas.

"I don't know," he says. He is also defensive but nimbly turns the tables. "Why do you?"

"You ask that like we're sharing a secret," Carson answers.

The man blinks, recalibrating. He leans in a little to the camera. "Then we should develop a secret handshake and pretend we never met."

Cut to a parade of responses from similarly startled, or vaguely annoyed, or secularly amused, or icily insulted, or spiritually accommodating or urbane and haughty people, not to forget a middle-aged woman who was just plain tickled to be in front of any camera. People are asked inside a deafening mall, subway cars, a gala hotel lobby, at Pershing Square and, oddly, from the back of a college sociology classroom, topic: Theories of Deviance and Emotional Variance in Seasonal Cycles. Most of the students wind up defending the holiday and try, it seems, to lift Carson's spirits with holiday cheer.

At the holiday outdoor skating rink in Pershing Square though, where the counter-clocking throng on skates all have excellent, sculpted bare arms, Carson finds his plain-speaking, confessor-muse. He lingers on her, a pretty Irish au pair with three of her charges hanging off her. She has opinions. She takes her time answering Carson's questions and offers some of her own as if trying to get to the heart of exactly why this person is asking her such interesting, personal questions. Her initial belief, like so many others', is that one shouldn't hate Christmas because, after all, it is for the children.

But eventually she admits, "I suppose, if you do dig down deeply, you know, for most people who don't have kids, it really might be a mystery why you should go through all this, the spending and the hassles of being places and the shopping and the general awfulness of everything, you know, you wind up asking yourself, what's the point? Where's the fun?"

"Right," Carson answers, off-camera.

"Though parties are another thing to my mind. If you're young, the parties are riotous. That's why the season exists. But for those with kids, you have to think that all the parent gets out of the holiday is indoctrinating their child on what a fun holiday it is, and that's it."

"There's sacred reasons, too," Carson says. "For a lot of people."

She considers this, without looking away. "Sacred and not so sacred. The Church wants you to think it's their holiday, but it's not. Never has been, do you know? I remember hating with a passion supreme going to those services at the heels of my parents, begging for the punishment of time spent in the attic instead.

"Until one day at the door of the church my muther says, she pulls me violently around and says: 'is it so much to ask that you go and watch the priests, who spend the entire year helping the poor and hearing confessions, watch them enjoy themselves a little?' At the time, you know – I think it was during the days of Oxfam, with [singing] 'We are the World,' remember that? Oh yes you do...."

[Carson singing stiffly, badly] "We are the children ...."

"Oh! Very good!" She claps her hands three times. "Any way," she continues, "I was devoted as much as a child could be to helping the poor – not that I ever could, you know, actually help them? I mean, what I had in my pocket came from my parents. But it was a good means to rebel, to say, I won't tie my shoes because there are children without shoes. But outside that church, with my coat arm in my muther's grasp, just like that, she made a little sense. I could squeeze open a little vestibule in my heart for Father Corrigan who, if truth be told, was in fact a patient, boring, kind, puttering little man. And she made me realize I could make him happy just watching him perform his eucharist."

"You made it your own act of charity."

She smiles. "It was. My own act of Christian charity. From my pagan little heart."

A mosaic of holiday greeting cards stands before Carson's camera. He meticulously closes in on a card: a Sunday school painting of delighted, handsome Jesus counseling some cute kids and the punchline reads: "Happy Birthday to me!" He says it as if he's the last one to join in.

"In case you're wondering," Carson admits, "I don't really hate Christmas. That much. I like the parties and the shared ambience that we are all in a holiday season.

"What I am is curious: Why is there Christmas?"

Down the long aisle of cards, an old woman, in a gray flannel overcoat picks through the cards with a deft intolerance. She is oblivious to us, until a quick cut has her standing in front of the camera, grinning bashfully, holding up her card for us to see. It's a purple and silver duotone photo of frosty Christmas ornaments hanging in a blurry space. Across the photo reads Season's Greetings."

"This one is for my nephew and his children," she explains.

Carson's voice over continues. "It's definitely not an empty holiday. People generally agree it's a time to be nice to each other. Devoting a time of the year celebrating kindness is more than just filled with good intentions. It's slightly radical. At least in intention."

The old woman's card flips open. Inside, with gold cursive lettering the card majestically reiterates its cover invitation: Season's Greetings. To You and Yours.

"Though, to be honest, kindness invites a lot of platitudes."

They roll up down across the screen:

Peace. Peace on Earth. Peace to All. Goodwill. Goodwill to all Mankind.

Celebrate! Ring in the Season! God Loves Us Everyone. Merry Christmas. Happy Holidays.

Time of Year. Cheer. Joy. Bright. Blessing. Peace. Season. Happy. Sparkle.

He finds these and more on bus stop posters, sprayed on store windows, dangling in office breakrooms and medical waiting areas, and on countless commercials and advertisements. A nerdy, goateed store clerk in the unqueasy adult goods store Sexy Time holds up a candy-striped dildo that waggles limply in his hand.

"Even the word 'celebrate' can't live up to these expectations."

Over a continuing pastiche of images of Christmas in the here and now, collected from clip store and image banks, or those he shot himself, Carson proceeds:

"Thousands of years of accumulated traditions roll through our lives every year. Some of it sticks...."

~ a huge lighted display outside a suburban home with luminous nodding reindeer, an inflatable Santa on a motorcycle, and bushes, trees and gutters outlined with flickering redgreenblue and snowy white bulbs ~

"Some of it rolls past with incomprehension...."

~ several people in a summertime Brazilian plaza stare back in wonder at an enormous wire sculpture of a goat with a scarf and ski cap. It looks forty feet tall ~

"Some of it perpetuated just because it's so old and arcane you think it's source material for the true Christmas...."

~ a video of a Yule log burning in the fireplace. Which leads to a recording studio in Asia where, off camera, a Taiwanese record producer instructs his smart vocal ensemble to sing 'I saw three ships come sailing in' by punctuating their beats with their fists. 'Like with a beer glass,' he suggests effervescently, in subtitles ~

"But really, it's a mystery. Literally. A liturgical mystery event."

~ "It's a Wonderful Life:" " 'Zuzu's petals!' " ~

"Without noticing it, we play with a trunk of mysterious emblems, icons, devices, memories and tributes not only in store windows and commercials, but in Christmas movies, books, plays, music. In the dreamlife of our society, our culture, the best way to celebrate Christmas is by examining the lives of those who won't or can't celebrate it. Our culture is almost obsessive about Christmas nihilism, without really defining the terms more than either having the Christmas spirit or not and wanting 'the true meaning of Christmas'.

~ Maureen O'Hara, coldly and unconvincingly modern, atheistic really, in "Miracle on 34th Street:" "I think we should be realistic and completely truthful with our children. Not let them grow up believing in a lot of myths and legends. Like Santa Claus, for example." She's quickly tag-teamed by Alistair Sim practically spitting 'Humbug!' ~

"What amazes me every year," Carson explains over, I suppose obligatory, images of domestic, Eisenhowerian Christmas perfection, i.e, skirted mothers baking, flannel-robed fathers piping, elated children grinning, "is the effort.

"Even though it's a complete mystery – an ancient deity's birthday – we work to get it right. Every year we re-receive that mystery in our hands and hold on to it for dear life.

"My own family wasn't immune to this."

~ Eisenhower polish gives way to the green yellow orange white flares of Super 8 film which float and coalesce into the delicious largess of a living room, circa 1976, with a fat, silver-twined Christmas tree potted with heaps of presents ~

"Christmas for us was a colossal event at the end of every year. Lots of planning, expectation and disappointment went into it, the way it is with other families. But layers upon layers of mysterious tradition, added to family obligation, is very combustible."

The sound and image of a needle dropping onto an LP, the hypnotic 33-1/3 spin of the gently wobbling record and through the crackles and analog ether the tremulous introduction to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir's rendition of "O Holy Night," and thus to the Hancock family's own trunk of mysterious Christmas memories.

A series of home movies spanning maybe twenty years begins with that musical drop, its beehived sopranos importuning:

O holy night!

The stars are brightly shining

It is the night of our dear Saviour's birth

Same living room and decorated tree, probably the same 1976 Christmas. A youngish, square-jawed blond man holding a baby that has stray tinsel hanging from its light blue Dr. Dentons and a big red bow on its head. The young father bounces and coos at his baby. You can't help thinking: It's a boy! Cigars for everyone!

It's a cozy room and several people mingle in the background, cocktails in hand. A tree glows in the corner, some empty boxes litter the floor and a modish, attractive woman in a short green skirt pushes up a wrapping-festooned stroller to her husband holding the baby. She confronts without saying anything. He knows and shrugs. She leans close to him and makes a point or two emphasized with wide open hands. It's the simple predawn of unrecorded audio, the silent era of home-movies, though the camera, stationed on a tripod, busily records everything else. To help, Carson supplies us with subtitles.

She: Why – did they give us – ?

He (looking over his shoulder): I don't –

She: – they think we can't afford one ourselves – ?

He (shrugging again, then making a face, i.e.,: we'll talk about this later): Go put it –

He points awkwardly past the camera, still holding the bouncing child. The child's bow slips to the side, then falls. The child watches it lay on floor off camera: Buh-bye.

Long lay the world in sin and error pining.

Till He appeared and the Spirit felt its worth.

Put off, mother wheels the stroller past the camera, nicking the tripod a bit, jolting us slightly to the left. The young father, panicking over the precarious camera, lurches forward to catch it as if the camera were a long promised Christmas gift to himself and about to be taken away, and splaying the child tightly against his cardigan. Fortunately, the camera only turns to the left with a jostle, staying grounded.

Previously off frame but now revealed, a slim well-dressed and coiffed blue-haired grandame, whose hands at the end of her birdlike arms possesses the hell out of the armchair she presides from. She stares bullets into the back of the departed young mother.

An older man – Grandpa, I guess – approaches in red cardigan, armed with highball, gitchy-goos the child. He speaks sotto voce: Where's she going to? He glares past the camera. The child starts to cry. Young man fobs off child to Grandpa, walks to camera, click.

Another year, another Hancock home movie, and onward the Tabernacle Choir:

A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices,

For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn

A baby girl, maybe two years old, dressed like a pink elf, sitting on the floor like all babies do with their self-regulating sack-of-potatoes balance. Pale womanly arms with fine black hair enter, placing toys all around her: brand new yellow rattle; a wind up long-legged bird; teething rings – red, purple, blue, green, yellow, white – stacked like a cone; then, blocks and fuzzy stuffed animals (mother turns and grins; her favorite gift?); a Look-Around Crissy doll with enormous Stygian eyes and long long long red hair; a box of SuperElasticBubblePlastic; a big primary-colored frog with top hat, and more, much more. It's a parental Hancock in-joke, heap-ing all the world's toys around their littlest, oblivious baby girl.

The showcase of gifts is interrupted when the boy, a year or two older now, races in and takes the SuperElasticBubblePlastic. Mother's arms reach to take hold of the box. He is indignant and keeping it his. She tries to reassure him it's just for a moment. He refuses. The father obviously speaks because the child looks up to the camera and fatally relaxes his grip for a moment. Mother pounces, grabbing SuperElasticBubblePlastic.

Fall ... on your knees!

Oh, hear the angel voices!

Duped and betrayed! Enraged explosion of tears! Indignation! Mother holds onto SEBP with one hand while the other hand holds up a rational finger: just wait one moment. The boy is led off by the hand of the father and trudges off camera, a redfaced, weepy retreat.

But we're still on the baby girl, eyes wide with confusion, not daring to move. Though look, carefully: her face betrays roiling dissatisfaction and impeding breakdown.

A wooden broom pushes a pile of other toys, matchbox cars, a GI Joe, Smash-Up Derby cars, a Slinky, a paint set, crayons and Major Matt Mason so that they pile up to and on top of the girl's lap. The camera jiggles – Daddy's laughing. He whips left to Mommy who's laughing too, drinking from her champagne glass and leaving red lipstick behind. Leaning against the broom, she blows a kiss.

O night divine, the night

when Christ was Born

But something disastrous happens that changes her mood as the choir rises higher with escalating chimes, trumpets and cymbals.

O night, O holy night, O night divine!

The camera whips down to the boy who is kicking through the toys and kicking the baby too.

Freeze: the child in mid-destruction. Revenge is his.

Carson speaks: "This may seem a little gratuitous, using the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to underscore my family's Christmas distress. But my mother always insisted we play it during presents. And in retrospect, it did add a luxurious counterpoint to our mess."

Slow resume, and the music drags itself up to speed. The child delivers a thunderous Dr. Dentoned kick as the baby girl releases her fear and confusion into hysteria. The mother grabs the boy and lifts him, his little hams in full, slow motion gyrations as we close out that year with a wipe to black and a pull of the plug on the Tabernacle Choir before the next chorus can begin.

Over the empty black, Carson finishes his thought. "I guess my point is that like a lot of families, the fighting between my brother and sister didn't really have a starting point or underlying cause. It just existed. At least that's what they've told me. I wasn't there yet."

The home movie parade cranks back up. A fine winter's day, a few years later. Older now, the boy and the girl, Humphrey and Shannon, play in snow. The camera seems to sit on something uneven, like a tree stump, its angle up and over the heads of the kids. Somebody just left it there. A Nerf football lands nearby. A guy runs over to pick it up and is mobbed by other guys, including Carson's dad. The camera, bumped, falls over so that the lens is on its side, flecked with snow. No one cares.

"Hostilities rose and fell without warning or motive. As if everything around them was so unbearable the only possible reaction was aiming a finger at the eye of the other one."

The pile of guys breaks up merrily, revealing, way off, the girl pushing the boy down and throwing snow on him. She kicks him, and Dad comes running over. A hand reaches for the camera.

"Exactly why things were so unbearable to two well off kids is another mystery to me. And even to them, to this day. Except that back then their reactions to Christmas bliss were real and uninhibited."

Living room, circa 1986 or so. Tape stocks change; it's now blanched and silvery Super-VHS. The Hancocks have moved into a different house, too. A Neutra home and the phosphorous winter sunlight of Los Angeles lands with blown highlights behind everything the camera sees, putting faces and the fronts of bodies into shadow. But there's sound now.

Competing with the Mormon choir as they glide morosely into "O Come O Come Emanuel," is a faint thrashing sound as if hushed by a closed door elsewhere in the house. Is that – is that "We Must Bleed?" The Germs?

Father's voice asks "Who's up? Who's turn is it?" The camera searches. "Dianne?" It lands on Mother. She's in her chair with a wine glass in one hand. Older. Skin enhanced. A pink streak in her hair, very New Wave Susan Sontag.

"You're being ridiculous," she says, but not to the camera. She's talking to someone off camera. "I never thought anyone could be so selfish."

It's Shannon, now teenaged, who answers: "Selfish?"

"What's going on?" Father asks. "Where's Hump?" The camera swirls again, passing young Carson sprawled perpendicularly in the lap of an armchair, reading and ignoring. It settles on Shannon, supremely vexed, in a black torn t-shirt and gray jean skirt, the widest gauge in fishnet stockings, which are torn anyway. Her hair is long in stiff girlrocker bangs and lots of cheap 80s jewelry. He asks: "Where's your brother?"

As if poked by a stick she says: "Can't you hear? Open your ears for Chrissakes."

"That's enough," Dianne says. "I told you weeks ago, no concert tickets." The camera pans away again, as if it's heard this a thousand times. It lights upon Carson.

"Where's your brother?"

Not looking up, a lanky arm points helpfully, if vaguely. The camera follows the oblique directions.

The mother and daughter battle recedes as we go looking for Hump. Sunlight gets clipped by the hallway, then peeks occasionally from reflections on the walls as we head deeper into the Hancock home. We stop at a closed bedroom door. The camera drops down; that is, Father lowers it, keeping it on, holding it, I imagine, like a picnic basket.

We stare at the closed door in the dark while Father knocks, asking for Hump. Darby Crash seeps through the moulding:

I'm not one I'm two I'm not one I'm two

"Humphrey?!"

We wait. Another knock. "Humphrey?"

"I'm done!" Hump yells from inside. "I made my appearance!" Suddenly the door flings open, revealing the clothes-strewn floor of his room and the unfiltered high volume of four-chord, descending scale guitar, drumming delirium and the mess of Darby Crash screaming I want out now I want out now I want out now.

Except it's Humphrey venting his anger in front. "I lived up to my end of the bargain. You do the same." Whoosh. Door closed.

A long failure-of-fatherhood pause. Resignation. The camera trudges back through the house, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir somehow sounding consoling and facetious at the same time. We bump with the camera as he walks.

Back in the living room, Mother – Dianne – is still neck and neck with daughter. "You couldn't find it in you to compromise and let your father chaperone you and your little friends ...."

But we're headed to Carson, still reclining across the armchair. Jolting to a desultory stop against his father's leg, the camera dangles downward, at Carson's eye level.

Carson glances at it. "You know it's still on?"

"I'm letting the tape roll out. Here. Take it. It's yours." Carson looks up at his dad, wide-eyed: Really?

His father drops the camera on Carson's lap and he trudges away. Meanwhile, in the background we hear:

"Let me tell you something about gifts, mother. When someone asks for something, and it's not given to them, that's a signal. And that signal is 'Go Fuck Yourself!"

The Mormon Tabernacle Choir is dutiful. It sings:

Disperse the gloomy clouds of night,

And death's dark shadows put to flight

Rejoice! Rejoice ...."

Fade to black.

"And yet," our present day narrator says. "I still like Christmas, I even like my family. It surprises me every year how much I look forward to Christmas with them. And yet when it arrives I see all these ways to make fun of it. As if undermining peace and hope and serenity is just as important.

* * * * *

# Part Three

The famous animated history segment, in which the history of Christmas is likened to

a carnival and a learned professor dispenses excellent historical bon-moterie.

First, the comings and goings outside a public library, and then we're inside: check-out counter, a librarian wheeling a cart people hunched in scholarship or just dozing, then a sneaky glide across books in the stacks. We see Carson through an aisle, sitting at the end of a long wooden table absorbed in one of several large books. A shot you see in BBC history shows a lot, with a rumpled, engrossed pedant ignoring the camera. Only here you wonder who's holding the camera.

Still – we move out of the stacks and join him tableside. He turns to the camera, trying to stay quiet: "It's not like I expect to find the, single, underlying, ur-meaning of Christmas. If there is one. And I really don't want to find subversive plots, or Free Masonry or Dan Brown conspiracies." Someone shushes him. "Though they're probably there."

He returns to his books, just as we cut to public domain video of the chilly holiday streets around Rockefeller Plaza: people shopping, walking, and otherwise interacting or not with the Christmas season in New York.

"Instead, Christmas seems to me tangled, lopsided and really confusing. When the season arrives, it comes to town and takes over like an ancient, unwieldy carnival with broken and amazing attractions. Arcane, pigheaded, banal, sentimental, exhaustively cloying, vividly religious, or charlatan attractions. And the townspeople are delighted, annoyed, suspicious, rambunctious or desperate to avoid it altogether.

"Assuming they even understand what they're looking at. And I don't think we the townspeople really do, because the attractions were made up, assembled, decreed, amalgamated from all over the place, in say 2000 BC Assyria, or 900 AD Saxony, or 218 BC Rome, or 300 AD Turkey or 1843 England, all light years away in culture and consciousness. Without any attic cleaning in 4000 years, the attractions are unpacked and set up with bewildering non-meaning every year, even in the 21st century. And they will be again, this year."

He gets up from the library table, walks behind a bookcase, and we track along the shelf with him. When Carson and camera emerge on the other end of the bookcase, we are suddenly not in the library any more but in a rotoscoped, animated world of the academy: with books, stained glass, an oak desk, and a rotoscoped, talking head professor: K.L. Wolfram of Parson's Christ College, East Anglia. Sleepy eyes, tall seacliff forehead, mismanaged hair and a pirate's beard. And, as we'll hear, sporting exceedingly elongated, excruciatingly precise Oxbridge sibilants.

This is Why Do You Hate Christmas' animated history segment.

"Religions love – even demand – holidays," Prof. Wolfram says. "Not just to celebrate. They punctuate important events and principles of their belief. Because beliefs are abstract. They need a signifier or a meaning to point to in the corporeal world. And usually this is something that doesn't change or is large in scope, like a mountain. Or, on an even larger scale, the seasons."

A time-lapsed but rotoscoped treatment of live action photography: budding fruit shouldering their way out of pods; wheat fields of green wiggling shoots that run tall into mature golden strands, before crumpling and collapsing into fallow gray; a river swelling, meandering messily over plains, then shrinking to a single cold blue artery; the skirt of sunlight drawing across the deserts, hills, plains and ocean of the tumbling earth.

"The seasons are the most profound force, other than death, that affects humans, and because they exist without any involvement from us, our helplessness and our gratitude become expressed as religion. Their aloofness mirrors our relationships with divinities. Because we construct religions, we understand these events better, even become mollified."

As the tumbling earth finishes its revolution we drift up into space and behold! our animated world turns truly animated, anthropomorphized in orbit, warming itself la-de-da in the sun. It spins, do-si-dos elliptically, leans axially forward and back, its face assuming different colors for the seasons: white, green, yellow, orange. Our spinning, gavotting earth beams like Leslie Caron.

"The earth spins in one direction. Tilts up part of the time, tilts down another part of the time. These are occurrences we can't do anything about it. But we can rely on them, when everything else is seemingly chaotic. Such dependability was, maybe still is, a great relief to humans. A cause for celebration."

We're back on Wolfram: "Thus, most religions find a way to relate their eternal beliefs to the eternal events of nature: See that tree blossoming again?" He reverently lifts his face to the sky and opens his hands solemnly. "It's like ... God."

A sun draped oak on a pastured hill. Clouds come and go.

"Over time, religions have grown more sophisticated than simply celebrating nature, not that nature is a simple thing. Our understanding was simple. But our religions turn conceptual. They ascend the heavens, designing wondrous moral abstractions, while our calendars... they stay firmly on the ground.

"What happens in the case of Christianity? At its earliest point, its big bang, you have a narrative religion, like Judaism. But more so. In this case there is a fixed starting and possible ending point in chronology, in visible, living history. It is a religion that commemorates and expands upon a single historical and, for that matter, political event. Christianity is powerful enough to overtake the forces of history, of time, but is it powerful enough to overtake nature? To do so, it has to become very creative to spread its roots into the eternally cyclical cosmos."

"Why?" asks a rotoscoped Carson.

"Because the cosmos, the life and death, ebb and flow of the universe appears to us, on the human level, to be eternal. It is the only phenomena with greater power than religion. Its facts can compete for attention against any religion because religion, fundamentally, is only a metaphor, a narrative laid over that reality.

"Remember: if one of the purposes of religion is to understand and transcend the reality all around you, pairing or assigning divine energy to the ways of nature is a good place to start. Nature is eternal and therefore so is the power of your divinity.

"But when your religion is Christianity, historical narrative comes first. Fixing of the life and death and resurrection of Jesus into reality, the historical record, was one of several radical revelations of the early Christians. God was here, at this time and place, and here's the proof. But to make the narrative, which is the religion, thrive and live in the hearts of its believers at all times, it must be correlated to the ever renewing present. It needs to account itself to the reality people are used to. It shouldn't be surprising this process took hundreds of years to work out.

"So what does it do?" Professor Wolfram holds up a finger. "First it has to acknowledge that events like solstices and equinoxes occur, even though they are outside of Christian influence. Then it has to accept that these natural events are, and have been, causes for celebration and reflection. And then, once you allow these events into your thinking, you still must apply your new religion's interpretation of them to the calendar. Give these dates a second reason for celebration. Or if you will, a doppelganger of doctrine.

"This way, the vernal equinox is no longer just an occasion signaling that spring is here. Which by itself should be enough for a happy occasion. The feast you hold should be reflective, perhaps on the deaths which may have recently occurred during the winter, hallowed with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. Such is Passover."

"And Passover is a story," Carson adds.

"It is, one of many. But Judaism isn't explained or demonstrated by it. In Christianity, all stories need to articulate the main narrative: that Jesus was born, walked the earth and died for us. When Christianity ascended, they applied a third layer of meaning to events like vernal equinox which already had a second layer, Passover, laid on top. Remember, Passover, commemorates the deaths of the first born in Egypt, but can be used for any deaths of the previous winter. So you have a celebration of life after death. That becomes Easter. Aka, the coming of the growing seasons."

"So with Christmas ....?"

Wolfram answers over an animated parade of Terry Gilliam-esque cut outs of paintings by Botticelli, El Greco, Titian, of annunciations, births, madonnas and child: the angels don't just hug the humans in the foreground of Botticelli's bucolic Mystical Nativity, they clasp desperately to their human brethren to keep from lifting away, their white rumps rising indecorously above their beating wings; the manger animals emit green drifting gasses disturbing all but the ethereally enamored Madonna; while the heavenly hosts above the nativity get carried away in their own loony joy as they start swinging and rocking gleefully, trying to spin the dome of heaven they're dangling from until they break free and whirl away like tassels on a lampshade. They spin loopily across the background interrupting Titian's Annunciation, where Gabriel's legs kick at the ground like he's underwater, tangling in his lineaments while Mary swats away the divine light poking at her eye. All of this while Wolfram gamely elucidates.

"In the case of Christmas, you have a celebration of the virgin birth. An event to celebrate if there ever was one. But it is an abstraction, a spiritual concept fundamental to your narrative of God becoming man and man approaching God, so locating a date on the calendar to commemorate or explain this is tricky.

"The day theoretically could be anything: May 11th or August 19th or February 2nd. And at first, the early church ignored the question of when exactly Christ was born. It took almost 300 years to consider it worthy of adding to the calendar. But when they did, the early theologians chose decisively. December 25 is marksman precise: exactly nine months from the day of conception, which they established to be March 25. That is the key date, as far as the early church was concerned. Less so those existing Roman holidays already assigned to December 25th."

Botticelli's freewheeling hosts whoop and laugh and trumpet past other Renaissance-whimsical, quasi-Italian countrysides until they pass outside the window of a dark ruminative garret. A withered hand closes the curtain and we see the monkishly hunched body of old Roman scholar as he shuffles from the window through his ancient library at night, frescoes illumined by candle along the way to his cabinet of scrolls. As Wolfram continues, our scholar grabs a spindle from its cradle in the cabinet and then shuffles to his tiny desk, around which the stone floor below is littered with tossed aside and partially unwound vellum of auxiliary scrolls. We are in the library, supposedly, of St. Hippolytus.

"So why March 25th [Wolfram continues]? In the early second century, St. Hippolytus, a believer, like the author of the Gospel of John, in the Logos or the transmission of divine God to mortal man, sought to define the chronology of these alternately divine and earthbound events and legitimize the date of the first Easter. The by product of that accomplishment was reinforcing the date of Christmas.

"According to his research, March 25 was the date of genesis, the creation of heaven and earth. In the Julian calendar he used, this was the vernal equinox. Today, according to our Gregorian calendar, that would have been March 21. But in either case, the vernal equinox is a suitable time for the genesis of anything, be it the world or its savior.

"Hippolytus then traced seventy-one generations or 5502 years since Adam to the date of Jesus' conception on March 25 and along the way establishing, retroactively, the inevitability of Christ. March 25 has additional relevancy for, according the depths of his research, it was March 25 in the year 29 AD that the Passover occurred in which Jesus was killed. This was his goal. To the religious mind, in search of harmony, divine wisdom, and a narrative to express his ecstasy, the death of the savior of the world could only happen on the anniversary of his conception which could only have occurred on the date of the birth of that world. And oh yes, secondly, it is followed nine months later by his eternal birth, December 25, in Bethlehem. On a Wednesday, in fact, in the years either 2, 3 or 4 BC. Hippolytus was less certain of his math at that point. Nonetheless, locating the conception, and the birthday, in reality-based chronology was a necessity for a religion forming itself around the concept of the divine presence in the reality of man.

"Correspondingly, according to Luke, the Virgin Mary was told of her conception, the Annunciation, exactly six months after St. John the Baptist was conceived, providing another fitting calendrical puzzle piece."

Gone is Hippolytus to his measurements and back on rotoscoped Carson. "Because John the Baptist has to be born first."

"Circular reasoning, indeed," Wolfram answers. "So note when these events occur."

"Conception of John the Baptist, September 25. Conception of Jesus, March 25. Nativity of John the Baptist, June 24. Birth of Jesus, December 25. Close, but not exactly the dates of equinoxes and solstices, are they?"

"No," Carson agrees. "And I'm compelled to ask why."

"Of course. And I shall try to answer. Though fair warning: here is where we encounter the folly of man when he tries to fit the precision of his religion to the indifferent movements of the cosmos.

"Noted," Carson replies.

We are back to the animated, sparkly lineaments of space. As the earth orbits the sun, a running chronometer trails behind. Moving in closer, the numbers turn into lines of 1s and 0s, which duplicating and squaring in size, overtake the width of the screen, finally morphing into the letters and symbols of computer code. Amid the expanding code, some lines turn red and die with little dead faces and x's over their eyes.

"When computer programers encounter leftover code buried among the new they call the obsolete code cruft. Cruft may be obsolete but at one point it was put there for a reason now unknown by unknown programmers. Perhaps for good reason, but no one knows why. The dates I mentioned are cultural cruft."

"Cruft?" Carson states, asks, dubiously.

"Yes! What is a calendar, but a system to help us plot the rise of the sun or the passage of the moon through its phases? To our great frustration, however, orbits of the earth and the moon follow their own paths, trailing fractions of time behind them. As we've gotten more precise with our calculations, we updated our calendars, inventing leap months, leap weeks, leap days, from Julius Caesar to Pope Gregory to make up for what seems to us the maddening imprecision of the universe."

Picking up from the Gilliam worldview of animation, the gently painted icons of the early saints, gilded with halos and adorned in lapis lazuli, break from their frames, scuttle two dimensionally into groups and start hurling insults and condemnations at each other.

"According to the Julian calendar, for instance, which plots a solar year, the vernal equinox is March 25, as best as they could determine. The early Christians lived in a Julian calendar. But many of them also lived according to the Jewish calendar, which is a lunar calendar. Thus, Passover occurs on 14 Nisan, also known as the full moon of the Jewish month of Nisan. So, even while Christians pulled away from Judaism, they were still tied to the crucifixion occurring on or around Passover. No less than the Gospel of John states that Jesus was crucified on 14 Nisan. Or maybe it was 15 Nisan. Then, no one could decide which. And that made for disturbing arguments among the faithful, which led to accusations of heresy and even more infighting."

"Because ...."

"Early Christian fathers did not relish the idea of plotting Easter on a lunar calendar because they believed Easter, as it perhaps did in 29 AD, should always occur on a Sunday. Thus the work of St. Hippolytus to scientifically verify this in real, chronological time. And provide evidence, however scant, in the disputes between those who believed in following the Jewish calendar for the celebration of Easter and those who decided that Easter should be the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox, better known as Passover.

Back to Wolfram. "Only to have the date of that fateful first Easter change again from March 25 to March 21 because of the updated reckoning of the Gregorian calendar. But by then Christmas, which was not as critical as Easter for locating the time and place where the divine met the earthly, had been placed at December 25. There was no ecclesiastical reason to change it."

* * *

Though the screen dips to black for a quick breather, when we return to the still rotoscoped Wolfram, he is already charging on.

"The point remains, though, that the Roman church identified these dates and assigned them a correlative Christian holiday, with the radically liturgical idea that they be integral to the still solidifying narrative of the birth and death of Christ. They are applied to these dates in order to be a seasonal metaphor, a yearly reminder. A post card, if you will, reminding you the believer which portion of the narrative you are rewitnessing as it unfolds.

"I should add, though it probably goes without saying, the clergy and other orthodox believers have never been comfortable with the placement of a holiday dedicated to reverence of and meditation on the arrival of the Christ child around the time of the winter solstice. Which historically has favored a great deal of happy celebrations with the likes of Saturnalia, festivals of the holly and the oak, Bruma and other celebrations of the coming light.

"But ironically," Wolfram adds, "nothing could be more Christian than Christmas. Not just because of the faith it celebrates, but because they are both a riot of ancient and contemporary symbolism, mixing superstition and belief and folklore. They also have a keen ability to survive by adaptation without giving away too much of their messages."

Two hands open a book and up pop concentric circles of carnival tents, with little banners fluttering, pitched on an anonymous golden field of yesteryear.

Declares Carson: "Or, like I said, Christmas is when the freaky circus comes to town."

We look over the settlement of tents as an eagle soars up to us and, over a long drumroll and a jumbling dixieland march brings us down into the grassy streets of the carnival. We dive in and out of the tents whose names you can almost completely miss. Things like: The Grinch; Christmas Decorations (an overly garnished suburban home, its electricity humming and fizzling); The North Pole, inside of which we find Rudolph and Mrs. Claus baking a cake – Santa assumedly having a compound all to himself. We fly past a tent with a bloviating politician proclaiming "Home Before Christmas!" and the silhouette of a soccer match on a blasted no man's land inside. Naturally, there's a sooty-cobblestoned, English fog laden tent reserved for A Christmas Carol, adorned with a John Leech inspired Tiny Tim feebly reclining on the front steps, waving his little hand and tossing us a cheery, Brit-urchin, " 'ello!"

But our flight isn't ended: there's Christmas Tree. Twelve Days of Christmas (with a hasty visit to Sir Toby Belch that knocks several flightless partridges out a pear tree). Yule (with logs and goats). Noel. Knecht Ruprecht (a hooded ringer for Rupert Murdoch, scaring the children). St. Nicholas (the Ottoman). Wassail (not just the drink, but the cider drinking razzle dazzle, all to the health of yonder apple trees).

Then finally the show stopping favorite, the tent called Holly Ivy Mistletoe. The flaps part and we enter, finding the peace of a winter forest, ripening with poisonous red berries. The quietude is suddenly torn by the violent dueling of two creatures – one a stout, golden tree-man, the other a frail green, holly-shrubbed knight. We join them underway in their bloody broadsword grudge match, heaving and swinging, slashing through tunics, buffeting against helmets. It ends, inevitably, in a grisly only-in-animation landscaping by the Oak Tree when he finally chainsaws and brush-clears the poor old Holly-knight, whose collapsed, mangled body is carried away by an entourage of Burgess Meredith-like wrens (complete with consoling mutterances, scarves and longshoreman's caps), leaving blood spattered berry imprints on the snow.

The buff, victorious Oak Tree, arms raised like Ben Roethlisberger, turns to a shivering unimpressed maiden waiting nearby, her bored indifference suggesting she's seen it all before.

"Heh heh heh," he says.

The voice of Professor Wolfram returns. "When we celebrate Christmas or, if you like, Christianity itself, what we are celebrating is an accumulation of traditions sprung up throughout Semitic Asia and then Europe over the last 2,000 years.

"Keeping in mind: to the Romans and Jews at the time, Christianity was a modern and radical, even dangerous reinterpretation. A usurpation, to some, of thousands of years of belief, being reimagined and retold in an utterly different and somewhat antagonistic way. "

Our guide the eagle flies past a tent called Sol Invictus, and then Bruma, next door to Saturnalia, whose pageant the eagle grabs before entering the tent called Resurrecting Gods. Here, a smoky music hall with a dozen or so platforms and catwalks where demi-gods like Mithras, Osiris, Dionysus, Adonis, Tammuz and Odin live, die and are reborn in sideshows of Victorian melodrama.

"One example of this fluid correspondence between cultures is the Roman mystery cult of Mithras, which started in Persia, the other great power to the east. Conceived as a sun god at first as well as the keeper of contracts and truth, like Apollo, his mystery seeped west into Rome where it became distinctly, emphatically Roman."

The figure of Mithras gets up from his dais, dusts himself off, checks his watch and says good night to his fellow deities before exiting through the rear flap of the tent. He emerges in a forest and makes his way along a path that descends into a wide-mouthed, torchlit cave.

"It was a time not for one religion, but several, expressed as cults or secret societies, whose meanings an adherent would take on and cherish as part of their identity. The cult of Mithras found inspiration among the Roman military and ruling elites around the first century, coincidental to, but in another part of the world from, the first inspirations of Christianity. Barracked in Rome, as men of war and society will, the officers developed a series of ritual vows and ethical promises, each one bestowing greater and greater status, each culled from the story of Mithras' divinity. In the last stage the initiate is called Father and his designation is Saturn, the god of reaping, abundance and repose. The overseer of time, whose time of the year is December. The quotes between existing, traditional myth and the new revitalizing cult were taken for granted by the Romans."

Mithras enters the cave which blossoms in the torchlight into a surprisingly colorful, ornamented temple, with statues, columns, painted benches, and an icon-dusted mosaic floor. The god greets each member solemnly with what looks like a secret handshake – very Rotarian – and makes his way to the front altar where the figure of a bull waits for him, with blinking patient bull eyes. The god turns and bows one more time before his initiates, then mounts the bull from behind, pulls out a sword and plunges it into the seizing, aching bull.

"While part of the cult's mystery lies in the ritualistic adoration of the slaying of a bull, the tauroctony, another aspect was Mithras' virgin birth. The story being that every year, he is born from stone, in blazing triumph. Suffused with Roman ambition, he takes on the greatest power he could find: Sol, the Sun, whom he subjugates but does not kill, instead becoming the keeper or enforcer of the sun's return. Between the slaughter of a bull, a mainstay of neolithic religions, and the virgin birth of the sun's savior, you have the convergence of the old and the new world views."

Having killed the bull, our god reaches up through the cave to the sun whose angry face is drawn ready to rumble. And they do, around and around the cosmos, above the earth, apparently covering an earthly year. Tiring, but with one last yank, Mithras pulls the sun down into the cave where the two of them, now brothers in arms, feast on the bull, their mouths turning greasy and tomatoey like Sunday BBQers.

"The date celebrating Mithras' birthday of course," Wolfram continues, "was December 25. In the fourth century, when the steady rise of Christianity became unavoidably competitive with Roman cults like Mithras, the Roman elite brought Mithras out of their secret bunkers and anointed December 25 as Sol Invictus, the day of the Unconquerable Sun."

Mithras arm in arm with his buddy the Sun, the pretty-eyed bull at their side, standing before a jubilant crowd in front of the Pantheon. But hearing a sharp, hey-over-here! whistle, all heads turn to a poor, grubby, togaed barker who thumbs their attention to the Son of God/Son of Man, dying on a cross. The crowd oohs and ahhs, drifting away from bewildered,

superhero Mithras.

"There is much to be said about Mithraic rituals shared or absorbed by Christians. A not insignificant example being Mithras' aspect of the covenant, a fundamental metaphor of Christianity that establishes God's promise of everlasting life through the death of His only begotten Son."

We are momentarily back on the rotoscoped, redbearded visage of Prof. Wolfram. "When we talk about Christmas as a Christian holiday, we are talking about celebrating the birth of Jesus, the Son of God. This time, the god-child is not born from stone but in a manger. We are therefore celebrating the birth of God as a man. The god is now divine and carnal, living and dying as a man but living again, divinely in heaven. So when we talk about Christmas, we are celebrating one half of a year long resurrection story."

We come back to the eagle, who plants his Roman pageant at the top of the Resurrecting Gods tent and then flies off into the pink fields of early morning sunlight. In just a few wingthrusts, he's over a sunny-hued alluvial marsh, flapping leisurely past Sumerians collecting grasses from the muck... .

"Even before Mithras, resurrection was an idea with a great deal of currency among the people living along the Nile, the Tigris, the Euphrates, and the Jordan rivers. Where the actions of nature – the floods then the food and then the fallow, the giving and the taking – were one and the same. Equating these eternal events with an eternal god gives us a grateful sense of blessing. God, or even the son of a god, must die because we must eat him to live. So we celebrate his birth as much as we mourn his death."

... as the eagle agilely swerves from the lunging jaws of a crocodile. He climbs into the fat glow of Mesopotamian sunlight, before plunging toward a carnival tent on the riverbank with a sign outside that says: "Exit to Land of Ice and Snow," and in we go.

"Not surprisingly, Christ, as an agricultural flood and fallow deity seems less meaningful in the north than the waxing and waning of sunlight."

We reemerge in the somber half-light of snow heavy pine forests and a frigid gray-iced lake. A glimpse to the west: a limp, light-worn sun slipping into a crease of horizon, taking its light with it.

"Up here," the professor explains, "it makes sense to proclaim that Christ is the light of the world, born at the darkest time of the year, the same moment when the sun returns. Birth and resurrection remain the same idea. Only the causes are different."

The world is dark, windy, primitive outside a tent that turns out not to be a tent, but the stone entrance to an earthen mound, sunless and foreboding.

"Here," Prof. Wolfram cheerfully proclaims, "in the beginning was death."

We pan right to a raging storm lashing trees, howling over figures caped in deer and bearskin trudging through snow. One of these Germani men lifts his icicle-ringed eyes – the very drudgery of life – in time to behold the hallucinatory, screeching Wilde Jagd approaching. Soulless undead black riders atop empty-eyed black horses, joined by dogs seething with spittle, sweep overhead, their host always just emerging from the churning clouds of the nightstorm. They chase a hapless fat soul with wasted dangling breasts driven mad by its fear of death.

Seeing this, our Germani's eyes pop out of his skull with shards of ice flying. His eyes waggle with horror on their stiff optical nerves, just like his tongue. But too late. The host of the Wild Hunt grins with predatory recognition and then turns on us and our Germani. We run until we reach a huge stone bower – trapped! Terrified, our poor hunter literally melts in fear like buttered syrup down the mound wall though we escape inside at the last second. Only to encounter the cold stone tomb inside.

"The only salvation," the professor says, "and I chose this word pointedly, is the winter solstice. Whoever noticed this, that at some predictable time the days begin to be longer, the nights a little shorter, and then prove to others that this was so, every year at the same time, undoubtedly made everyone very happy. When that shortest day arrives, it's worth celebrating its end."

Inside this stone bower, the tip of early morning sunlight breaks over the horizon and reaches its fingers into and along the stone walls. We venture timidly outside and while the winter sunlight now makes the forest sweet and gentle, there stands our Germani man, in death shroud and sandals.

"When the church chose, or simply allowed, Christmas to be celebrated at the winter solstice, it also allowed all the prevailing symbols and legends of a post-Ice Age northern Europe in to the party."

Our Germani reaches for a chalice handed to him, and lo! his death shroud slips down to his hairy ankles. Horrified anew, he grabs the only living thing at hand to cover his undelineated privates. He watches the illustrator's hand scrawl "Holly," with a helpful pointing arrow, there's then a breathholding pause, and our benighted Germani shrieks in pain. A stage manager's arm reaches from frame left, swaps out the holly with a yellowish wad of mistletoe, shoves the holly on top of his head like a victorious wreath, picks him up by the scruff of his neck and tosses him onto an enormous stone ceremonial table filled with roasts, drinking vessels and a couple of mini-torches. Reclining like the Venus d'Urbino, he becomes the center of the pagan solstice celebration as cardinals and other birds land on him and peck at the mistletoe berries. He eats and drinks like a slob.

"And that's the end of the story?" Carson asks.

"Not entirely. You could make the case that the Reformation was the final heave ho by the north of the queasy Mediterranean gospel of eating the godflesh in the eucharist when it created its own version of Christianity. So when the center of power and influence drifted north and European culture spread around the globe, it introduced its own strange abstractions which you see in the tropics or when the southern hemisphere celebrates Christmas in summer. Spray painted trees in Florida and elves on the beaches of Copacabana."

Stage curtains close on our feasting Germani, the curtains turn into canvas flaps, and we retreat out of a tent festooned with candy canes, horns, angels, tinsel. Reindeer graze and goats prance outside. The Germani, in beach shorts and shades, emerges like a fat banker on holiday, sitting in a recliner as bikinied girls with Santa hats toss a beach ball under palm trees stringed with colored lights shaped like candle flames.

"On the one hand," Professor Wolfram concludes, "Christmas has proven remarkably resilient mingling traditions of faith and temporality, desert and forest, rain and snow, sunlight and darkness, birth and death.

"But on the other, one has to wonder. The impulse to make Christmas everything to everyone, as it did early on, to be an occasion to make merry while also being a religious observance, still churns uncomfortably on, in a mild confusion of intent, in every corner of the spinning, hemispherical globe. Leaving some of us every year to scratch our heads, bemused, and ask: what exactly are we celebrating again?"

Professor Wolfram, eyebrows arching over a happy-to-be-provocative twinkle in his eyes, disappears behind the closing black.

* * * * *

# Part Four

In which Carson visits his mother for Christmas in the planned evangelocal community,

Hosanna Hills; evangelocalism is explained and the Rev. Mike Battle hosts the

Hosanna Hills Christmas Eve talent show

Up through the black, replacing Prof. Wolfram, an insert card rises:

CHRISTMAS WITH MY MOTHER

When it fades, we are back to a non-rotoscoped reality.

A slow glide over several framed portraits set on bronze and glass end tables and a white plaster fireplace. They are photos of a large man, variously handsome and pensive and tired, who sometimes smiles, sometimes stares woodenly, but other times can't hide his inner bafflement.

"My father died in 1997," Carson narrates. "He had a heart attack leaving his office. Not a massive heart attack, his doctor said. He said more people survive this sized attack than die from it. But after a lingering, sad several days in the hospital, my father gave in. None of us were glad. But we weren't surprised either."

He continues over more home movies: his father stirring a martini shaker in their Neutra home, at the beach in a swimsuit hoisting the mailloted Dianne over his shoulder caveman style, sleeping on a lounger with a newspaper cathedraled on his chest, bloody mary within reach, waving from his post at the barbecue, sunglasses on, beer in hand.

"My father was not a religious person. Not that he said anything about it. He simply had what he needed, religion-wise. He was punctual and consistent about attending church, though didn't go for any religious experience. That would have been way too much for him. If he believed in anything, it was useful rules of thumb. Like play fair. Or be able to look a fellow in the eye.

"After the '92 Rodney King riots, for example, my father really took to Rodney King's admonition, 'Why can't we all just get along?' It was a question without any answer and my father liked it that way. Part plea, part accusation. He would say 'Why can't we all get along?' whenever something happened that he didn't like in the family. Or at work, or on the news. More than that and he was philosophically exhausted. Or forced to respond a second time: Why Can't We All Get Along?"

A black and white sitting portrait of youngish Bill Hancock, not quite smiling under black frame glasses, a face indistinguishable from the kind, placid photos of gray flannel strivers like him taken during the early '60's.

"I think the reason Why Can't We All Get Along? achieved relentless truthfulness for my dad was the way it was revealed to him. When he and everyone else watched Reginald Denny get beaten during the Rodney King riots, when complete strangers descended on someone who was a stranger to them, pulled him from his truck and beat on him for an abstract, impersonal reason, he was suddenly exposed to an unresolvable fear.

The photo of Bill Hancock withdraws to the archival footage, the infamous, helplessness-inducing aerial footage of Reginald Denny and the drawn out assault that leaves him on the ground, in a pool of his blood, having a cement block heaved onto him for good measure.

"It was a fear he probably didn't know he carried with him until then: that things happen to other people, and if you aren't careful, they could happen to you. And why that is, who knows? That was the worst part, not being told why random violence should be in the mix. He was a wealthy, successful man at the top of a wealthy successful culture that emphasized that anyone could become a wealthy, successful man if he was careful about it. And if you weren't you'd become like Reginald Denny. Therefore, Why Can't We All Get Along was not just a reminder or existential plea. It was also the first line of defense, intended to stop harm from coming by forcing the harmer to answer the question himself: Why Can't We All Just Get Along?"

We trail a woman making her way through her house, pulling on a shawl, talking on her cell-phone. The bronze and glass end tables and dining table, the relaxed whiteness of the walls, the framed photos. It's Dianne, years later.

"Yes, we're on our way. You'll be free? Great. My son promises it won't take up too much time. Yes, I think he is. Very smart and charming."

"My mother has had a different relationship with religion."

Slight but indomitably large-headed like Nancy Reagan, Dianne has brought prettiness with her into her advanced age (if you rewind far enough, you can see the resemblance to the grandame presiding in the Christmas armchair. Minus the steel gripped self-possession.) Dianne sets her enormously round sun glasses on top of her translucent, and thickly coiffed, hair. A flowery scarf loops loosely around her neck. She's looking at photos on a white piano.

"You were in the choir – " Carson proffers, off camera.

"Oh I loved it. I loved singing. I loved the robes. Rising from our pew behind the minister in unison, the rest of the church was so quiet. And then we'd sing our hearts out. Mother and poppums loved it, loved seeing me up there."

It's difficult to make out what Carson says, the camera has located a photo of teenaged, teenybopper Dianne with other girls in the choir, but her answer fills us in. "No, dear. No singing today."

Now she's perched on cream colored, Danish modern couch that doesn't really give beneath her.

"When your father and I got married, it was in a church of course. Methodist. I chose it because that's how I was raised. He didn't really care, so I chose. And then I had the kids. Your brother and sister. And of course you. But religion really wasn't a priority, back then. It wasn't. Back then, we were modern. It was good to be questioning. That's how everyone phrased it. We were questioning. And anyone who wasn't came off a little ... odd. Fruity, your father would say. Bible thumpers. And they were a little. Odd. Religious people then just were. Plain as day."

We're in a car, Dianne driving, winding through gently curving suburban streets with towering mini-mansions jammed into tiny hillside plots. There is no traffic here or pedestrians on sidewalks for that matter. Just tight green lawns among the desert succulents. It looks hot outside.

"After my father died," Carson narrates, "it didn't take long for my mother's great awakening to come on. She sold the house in Brentwood, sold her catering company, and bought a condominium here in Hosanna Hills Estates, near San Clemente."

"Tell me about Hosanna Hills," Carson says to his mother, driving. He's in the passenger seat. Someone else – we'll later learn it's Carson's girlfriend Sasha – is now shooting. Dianne answers with delicate diplomacy.

"Well, as you can see, it's a lovely place. With lovely people. We have all chosen to live here ..." she waves at a man watering an organ pipe cactus, "... because of the affinity and love we have for one another. And for the Lord."

Emerging from that minefield, she energetically changes topics. "That was Dan Morales. Our very own Congressman. He and I have great fun together. A very funny man. El es Latino."

Carson would rather stick to Hosanna Hills. Over other drive-by shots of a golf-course; a football field-sized, candy-colored playground; and a pedestrian plaza with fountain and music stand and mall, Carson says, "Hosanna Hills is what you might call an insta-town, founded and fully formed on 2600 acres in the Southern Californian desert hills. It's also what outside people call an evangelocal community. Evangelocal being the next step beyond mega-church evangelism. Because, why stop at just one church?

"There are nine schools here including two high schools, a hospital, a library, parks, PGA golf course, and a mall. And its own graveyard: a columbarium."

And there we go, to the bleached Mediterranean columbarium with its half-moon walls of little gold plates that look like mailboxes holding the ashes of the dead, and which cup an open, marble-floored atrium. An empty stone table in the middle seems like it's meant for something, though nothing's on it.

"This is my favorite place here in Hosanna Hills. Hundreds of people who lived elsewhere in their lives wind up here for all eternity after just a couple years spent in a low tax, high quality of life Hosanna Hills residence.

"It's a peculiar trait of evangelocalism."

The camera turns to the rosy, side-of-beef Tennessee marble walls and finds among the mailboxes the one foot by one foot square claimed by his mother.

Dianne Turley Hancock

1947 to ---

My Family Meant Everything To Me

"Look," Carson says off camera and Sasha turns toward him. "Reindeer." Sure enough, a small herd of wire reindeer, twined with unlit lights bowing to the green grass in the bright noonday desert sun.

"Why would they allow reindeer in a Christian evangelical community?" Sasha asks from behind the camera.

Carson shrugs. The camera lingers on the reindeer.

"Maybe they're here to scare off the condors," Sasha offers.

Carson smiles, then considers it. "I should ask."

Back in Dianne's car again, on the Hosanna Hills tour. She turns onto the long, rising driveway of the Hosanna Hills Promontory Ministry. It is huge, with spectacularly stained glass panes which alternate with translucent ones. Visible from the street are gold crystal chandeliers and oyster-white adobe plaster walls. As we drive up, the camera locates an enormous nativity scene on the lawn, populated with hundreds of plastic, internally bulbed statues.

Carson's shooting now. He says to Sasha, "That's the nativity scene I was telling you about."

"Wow...."

"It's the life of Christ, from manger to mission and miracles to bearing the cross through the streets of Jerusalem to Calvary."

"Pretty neat, huh?" Dianne asks.

Carson's camera finds Sasha in the back seat. "Pretty amazing," she nods, staring out the window. "Pretty amazing."

"You should see it at night," Dianne adds.

"I would. I'd like to." Carson catches Sasha with her is-this-for-real? glance.

The camera ambles along with Carson's handheld gait. Following a one-handed pull of the 10 foot glass door, we walk inside to the foyer of the Ministry. A gaping, out-of-scale narthex, bathed in the colors of the desert sunlight transformed by the intermittent stained and glare proofed glass. The camera grabs quick introductory views of the Ministry interior: carpet designs featuring posterized, Shepard Fairey-like faces of the apostles and Jesus; forty foot tapestries depicting a panoramic view of Golgotha; directional signs re-imagined with Christian humor, (to coat check: a robe with wings hanging from a wire hanger; to rest rooms, the international male and female figures have international halos above their heads); and in a distant corner, a lonely glass counter with t-shirts, bibles, DVDs and postcards. Glimpsed through open doors on the curved interior wall is the capacious, leather stadium-seated auditorium slash sanctuary.

A hefty energetic man, dressed in early '90s business chic with purple pinstripe shirt and white collar, strides across the apostle-faced carpeting of the narthex.

"This is Mike Battle, Reverend Mike Battle," Carson narrates. "Hosanna Hills is his creation and his mission." Big Mike Battle, large hands, thinning pate but a crust of red hair circling his lips. He is just old enough for his face to begin the slow rollout of a double chin but young enough that his grins are quick and wide.

"God be with you guys," he declares, a little out of breath. He lifts his eyebrows conspiratorially. "Some place, huh?"

Sweeping panorama of Hosanna Hills and its dense cluster of tricked out Mediterranean villas and neat green lawns, with Mike speaking over the view.

"Hosanna Hills wasn't this sudden bolt of Godly inspiration. I almost wish it came that way, fully realized in a single vision. I probably would have understood Paul better that way."

"Instead God saw fit to drop hints and suggestions, like bread crumbs over a number of years. Meet with this person, because they may be able to help you. Buy that parcel of land because you may be glad you did. God knows how you lead a horse to water: by not scaring him half to death the first time."

Mike Battle's executive-styled office. His broad desk is in the background, the room's power spot. We're in a casual meeting space with couches, chairs, coffee table. He sits comfortably, legs crossed.

"What my revelation was," he continues, "was that God wants Christians to live together. We are, in our hearts, taught to be gentle. We have gone into the villages and homes of the differently believing to preach, to spread the word of God from Day One. And in a world that continues to persecute Christians? That takes guts. You have to admit."

Images of Hosanna Hillers in cars, in stores, playing after-school sports, washing cars. Dressed in jeans, flip-flops, mu-mus, track suits, polo shirts. Young, old, gentle, conversational. Every walk of life.

"But now it is time for us, as Christians, to come home. Tend to our own flocks. To live as purely and traditionally as the ancient Hebrews and await the coming of the Lord. That is the mission of Hosanna Hills."

Over these images, Carson narrates, "Though Reverend Battle has substantial concerns about the world-wide persecution of Christians, there are other reasons people move here."

Dianne, perched on her sofa.

"When your father died, there was so much, too much ... stuff. That huge house, the organizations, the country club. And my company, too. It was more than I could handle suddenly. You were all gone and of course your father hated pets. Not even a goldfish to come home to."

"I never took you for an evangelical, is all," Carson says. She cocks her head with a frown.

"That's a silly way to put it. If I were, why do I care less what you three children are up to? An evangelical could hardly choose three riper candidates for preaching to, and yet my lips are sealed."

"You're talking about me, Shannon and Humphrey."

"Yes, that's who I mean," Dianne replies needling Carson and his interviewer's clarifcation. "The three of you could honestly do with some better guidance, but that's really not any of my concern now is it? I did as much as I could, when I could. Probably not so well, but that's it." As if feeling she's allowed too much, she laughs at her own mischief, trying on hipster attitude, interpersonal abdication. "Oh well! It's up to you now. Mama's done.

"Any way, to your father. When he died, it was so surprising, so dreadfully final, as you probably know. I remember contacting Reverend Becker. You remember him – "

"Not really."

"Well, he baptized you. A fact you should be aware of and can't change. I asked Reverend Becker to lead the funeral, even though your father wanted to go straight into a pine box. He told me once he'd rather be eaten by sharks when he was dead than be cremated. Not that he was ever on a boat. Any way, Reverend Becker did the whole thing, robes, hymns, eulogy. And, I have to tell you: that eulogy? It was awful. Just awful. All death, mourning, dust, tears, everyone dies, even the beasts and the trees, you can't avoid it, the dead are victorious, the world is awful, all is vanity. I remember that: all is vanity. I went up to him afterwards, really very disappointed. I mean very. But trying very hard not show how ticked off I was."

"What did you want?"

"In the eulogy? Well, my god: that my husband's spirit will live on. That he's sitting next to God or Jesus or golfing with the angels. I don't know. Heavens." She crooks a finger beneath her nose, stifling.

"You can see, I'm getting upset again. Any way, to finish. Just bear with me. I went up to him, thanked him, but asked, politely: Did he write the eulogy for Bill? Just for Bill? And he says, 'It's Ecclesiastes, with a touch of Revelations.' "

She gapes, all over again.

"I mean: Bill – your father – wasn't Revelations. He wasn't Ecclesiastes. He was ... I don't know. Dragnet. The History Channel. Mixing goddamned cocktails, I don't know. Just not what Reverend Becker did to him, for him. A whole life spent and at the end all you get is bible verses from someone who doesn't know you enough to give you, I don't know, a pretty Psalm, for godsakes? There's something plenty wrong with that."

Dianne wants Carson to understand this, and he holds on her, close up, tenderly, giving her displeasure a chance to resolve before turning to more images of Hosanna Hills: the cross at the fifty yard line of the high school football field, the fully lit Life of Jesus diorama, people in prayer waiting for the GoMessenger shuttle bus.

"Hosanna Hills almost guarantees no bad eulogies," Carson says. "It's about likeminded Christian people living and working together in the kind of all-hands, all-sharing way you usually find, or used to, on communes. Only, as an evangelocal municipality, it costs a lot of money to live here. Behind a well-staffed 24-hour gate."

We're on a scrabbly, yellow dirt hilltop overlooking the tree and house, canyon stuffed community of Hosanna Hills. Carson, with jeans, a long sleeved shirt and sunglasses sits on a white rock that looks pretty uncomfortable, truth be told. He says, "You're probably asking yourself at this point what I mean by evangelocalism."

He turns to the development beyond him, as permanent looking as the barren desert hills surrounding it. "That is evangelocalism. A newfangled flavor of American evangelism. Evangelism 2.0, if you will.

"Though if you look hard enough, American history is full of places like this. Where likeminded people live together and preach to one another with safety and certainty. The Puritans. The Amish. Mormons. Waco."

Cut to Carson's apartment where he sits, later, before a coffee table with magazines, books, DVDs. The word evangelocal is on all of them. It's just him, one-on-one with us. The sound quality changes slightly, flatly.

"Until my mother moved there, I didn't know that evangelocalism has been sort of a hot topic, not only among evangelicals, but on the left, too, the secular left.

"Here's an article in Mother Jones by Carrie Midway called 'Jesus at the Gates,' in which she lives with her father in a community a lot like Hosanna Hills. There's Inside Crossroads, a documentary about life in Crossroads Estates in Florida which played at Sundance. And there's How Do You Want Your Jesus? a book by Daniel Fleischsinger, about the evangelocal movement in general.

"They all touch on a central point: evangelocalism appropriates progressive impulses to buy local, to trust your local crafts-folks and farmers, share in the costs of raising food, clothing and shelter using CSAs. There are other cost arrangements known elsewhere as dues or annual fees or taxes, but in evangelocal communities they are called commitments. To residents, evangelocalism provides that satisfying balance of commitment to yourself and others. To progressives, it's ballsy, galling

appropriation."

Carson's now walking down a sunny, Hosanna Hills sidewalk. It's narrow, the color of sand, alongside a white gutter running dry and the freshly black asphalt roadbed. He's like a foreign correspondent on cable. Richard Engels.

"I can't really argue with either insight much. People who can afford to live in, say, Hosanna Hills don't have to knit hats for a living, but they do it because they like to. When the mood strikes. And then they put them in a box and take them to an Hosanna Hills store or one of the supermarkets for sale. Sort of the Amana colonies meet Whole Foods."

Shots of aisles and hat racks in a supermarket and other stores with signs saying,

Pray and Buy Local!

and,

Local Handcrafts Spread

the Word of God, Too!

We discover little boxes of beads and bits of turquoise, scattered and left on a table somewhere in Dianne's home.

"Even my mom tries her hand at jewelry, but not all that much."

"Truth is," Carson continues on the sidewalk, "evangelocalism does pretty well. It succeeds because it gives evangelicals more than just a mega-church, even a franchised one. It gives them a town, the pride of community, a place where the rest of the secular world can't interfere with your personal ministry. You don't have to worry your florist is a closet pagan or homosexual or your kid's teacher is a closet humanist, relativist, or just a regular spirit-bumming sinner."

More Hosanna Hills: kids playing soccer, neighbors waving at the camera in the parking lot. Bake sales. Guards in proto-police uniforms at the community entrance also waving.

"Other benefits are that you don't have to worry that other evangelicals might mess with your ministry. Stir things up into heresies. Because evangelocalist developments, like other gated communities are ruled with by-laws. Everyone signs a contract that says Jesus is your personal savior, that you are not a Muslim or Jew, that you are not homosexual. Or have a lousy credit report. And, most importantly, that you believe He will find you in the tumult of the apocalypse. Falter on any of these and you're gone."

Carson sits on the hillside lawn of Promontory Ministry. "What people who live here like the best is that two thousand years of argumentative Christian canon has been pressure cooked into diamond-strength theology, a single branded message: Jesus is your savior. And that's it."

Behind him is the welcome sign for Promontory Ministry: "Jesus Saves You. Every day. Rock on."

"Everything else: work, money, success, grief, frustration, that's all gravy. Even his teachings. Not really necessary. The apocrypha, the crazy Jesus-purists like Mel Gibson and his difficult movies, debates over degrees of morality, abortion, even the Bible: all pesky intellectualism. Who needs that? They have bookstores here, but probably because that's where they sell coffee and wrapping paper.

"So the win for evangelocalism is its 'we all agree Jesus is tops so don't bother me' anti-academicism. 'We all get along, generally. The details are unimportant.' "

Still on the lawn, Carson adds dryly, "My mother disagrees with this assessment."

In Dianne's kitchen. She's dressed as if back from church, an apron tied around her long print blouse. She's making a salad. Carson sits at a kitchen bar watching her.

"Are you saying we're a bunch of dummies because no one's interested in holding bible readings?"

"No. I only asked if I could go to one. And you said –"

"Don't be smart. I know what you're getting at. I told you no one needs to go to a bible reading here and so there aren't any. And you're about to take that way out beyond what I mean. So don't be insulting."

"Ok."

With giant wooden spoons, Dianne energetically tosses the salad. "Truth is, if you ask anyone here, most likely they've already read it any way."

She sprinkles little brown bits over it. "If Jesus is in your heart, then reading about Him is – why would that be important? Rev. Mike has a saying: if He's already won the war, why start the fight again?"

She shoots a look at Sasha, behind the camera, alarmed. "I just forgot you don't eat bacon."

"That's ok," Sasha answers. "I've learned to pick around."

Carson, Sasha and Dianne eating outside in a robust garden patio. They aren't glum; just not talking.

Carson narrates: "I don't know why an incurious form of religion bothers me. Especially after thousands of years of

religious warfare and torture. In Hosanna Hills, pure faith is all anyone wants. A wish upon a star.

"Which leaves room for the one thing they love to do here: put on talent shows."

A young, sullenly longhaired band concentrating on their playing under a pulsing red and white lightshow. A large woman in blue floor-length dress singing. A skit of vaudeville tramps peeking into the Bethlehem manger. Five girls trampolining for Jesus. The Ministry is in full swing under Reverend Mike Battle and his Christmas Eve service. It looks, in fact, like a polished, well-produced variety show, the kind that used to be on television Sunday nights. Preacher-in-Chief Battle, the master of ceremonies, is always the first to applaud as he makes way across the stage to thank and interview the performers.

Carson narrates: "In a way I'm glad my mother found a place like Hosanna Hills, although it still take some recalibration to see her as a Christian. Before this, I mostly knew her as a modern upper-middle class mother, housewife and business owner. Like my father, interested in Hollywood gossip, going on expensive vacations, and drinking martinis.

"Now, she has a place to belong to and is, I think, happy. Which makes me happy. It even feels like I'm quibbling when I wonder how much money she spends just to ensure her eulogy won't be a downer."

The Rev. Dr. Mike Battle, in handsome Italian cut business suit and Christmas tie performing Christmas services at the Ministry. He preaches to his congregation while they recline and bob to the music in very comfortable looking stadium seats with cup holders. He prowls the proscenium, wireless mic in hand, mid-parable:

"Jesus, I told him – and remember, I'm in the DMV – a godless place if there ever was one [laughter] – I tell that young man behind the counter – Jesus never needed to take an eye test. He can see for miles and miles and miles and he sees you and me right now. He sees everything. [He looks up at the cross behind him] Don't you Lord? Yes, you do. And thank you. Thank you for helping me see those tiny little letters on the DMV eye test. I owe you one."

[turning back to tickled audience] "And you owe him one too, don't you? Who's going to deny that we all owe Jesus one? Maybe more than one? Maybe something for real? Like your heart. We've all been entertained this evening by our youngest apostles tonight. They've been so good, so gloriously good. And do you know what our young people call it when you applaud them like that? They call it giving 'props.' Am I right, guys? [a couple of young voices: 'Whooo!'] You've heard them use that word. Your sons and daughters and grandkids. 'Props.' Well, I give props to Jesus. Props to Jesus! [woot-woots and applause] That's right. Woo-hoo! Props to Jesus!"

[later] "So when I say, did you get the memo? Let me tell you what that memo says. [lifting a piece of paper, reading] 'The Christmas memo, dated December 25th, signed by Jesus Christ Our Lord and Savior.' Drafted in three parts. And it sounds a lot like what the angel said to the shepherds. A long long time ago.

" 'One – Celebration. There's an invasion underway. It is I and God and the heavenly host and I am coming down to earth and nothing will ever be the same again. There's nothing to be afraid of. 'I bring you great news of hope and joy.' You all have heard that, right? Well it's time to celebrate, before it comes. Because it's going to be too late to celebrate when it comes. You'll be too busy ascending.

" 'Two – Salvation. 'He whomsoever believeth in me will be my friend tonight and every night and will sitteth with me in heaven on the right handed side of God.' Need I say more? I didn't think so.

" 'Three – Community. 'Christmas is a time of coming together.' Just like we're doing now. All of us. Give yourselves a hand, for coming out on this night. Go on [lots of sustained applause]. There may be sadness and there may be heartache, out there and in here. We're only human. But today, none of that matters, because Jesus is here and so are you.

"So say hello to that person you're sitting behind. Go ahead, they won't bite. [squeaky sounds of people turning in their leather seats, getting up and saying hello]. You may not agree with them. You may not even like them. But Jesus wants you to love them. Goodwill towards men. And women. And children. And dogs and cats and birds and fish and hamsters. Merry Christmas, everyone! Merry Christmas!"

Mike Battle's comfy office discussion area.

"I've prayed long and hard on this, long before your visit. The what is Christmas question," Mike Battle says to the camera, to Carson. "In the best, general sense, Christmas is a time of encouragement. At the end of the year, you may have plenty to look back upon, and plenty to look forward to. That's an indispensable mission of Christmas.

"The reindeer – and you didn't mention the Santa parade, but you could have, I know – but all of those things, the trappings of Christmas, letting those things in here in Hosanna Hills took a lot of soul searching, for all of us. Other Christian communities, other leaders are very very stern and disapproving of these things and perhaps they have a small point. But God doesn't like small points.

"When these things were brought to the board here, there was no argument, no opposition on the board of governors. Just a lot of prayer. Is this what we really want here, this much of the outside, secular-evil world? When you're a shepherd, in a leadership position like mine, you have to be remarkably sensitive to the swells of emotion in your flock. In my case, 23,000 people.

"So we decided that reindeer and the parade and all that jazz are for the children. In all of us. You can't just say – and I know a lot of ministries that do – that reindeer and Santa are blasphemous. We prayed and realized by grace: that just doesn't fly. God understands that. And you have to think Jesus probably does too, He kinda likes those things. A little." Two fingers show just how little.

"Christmas is the day Jesus was born. You just have to celebrate that. It has to be the greatest day of the year and the greatest day of your life. You can't wish Him happy birthday enough, in thanks and praise. And if everyone celebrates that, then wonderful. That's better than I or any other poor wretch of a preacher could hope for. I think it's only a good thing that Jews, bless their souls, celebrate it. And Asians, and Indians, and Africans. The entire world celebrates the birth of Jesus, because Jesus loves the world, and the world loves him back. You know what I'm talking about. I don't even need to say any more than that, do I?"

Mike Battle, and his slow fade to black.

* * * * *

# Part Five

In which Carson visits his sister and the fans of Tillie Harm get a rare glimpse

of her new domestic life; plus, a tour of post-Iron Age, proto-medieval earth-sculptures

before a solstice party with fireworks, bonfires and the arrival of Beiwe

A black screen, another chapter begins:

CHRISTMAS WITH MY SISTER

We are in a car driving though foothills of pine heavy with snow. Music jangles quietly from the radio. Judging by the cracked beige interior and the dark smudges along the stitching of the seats, we're in a Volvo stationwagon on its 250,000 mile.

It looks cold outside, the gauzy silence of winter. We look straight down a two lane road glistening and black against the snow banks. You're left to guess where we are: Vermont? Michigan? Maine? There are no houses around.

Carson is driving. He drives like an old man, hands at 10 and 2. Sasha's voice pipes up, singing a jingle. "We're going to a party – "

She's behind the camera. Carson nods carefully. But she wants him to talk, to her and especially the camera. "Tell me about it?"

Prudently checking his rear view mirror, he says, "Well, they hold these things ever year. It's pagan. In tone."

"With bonfires."

Carson nods again.

"What's your sister like?" His hands grip the wheel, so he shrugs his elbows.

"I haven't seen her in years." With intense concentration, he carefully releases the wheel with his right hand and calmly fishes in his jacket for something. Out comes a sleek red smartphone. He points it to us like a badge.

You wonder if they had this planned, this little sequence, though it appears Carson's wondering if it was ever a good idea. He obviously doesn't like to drive, let alone shoot and drive. Still, we're looking at Sasha with her camera in the passenger seat.

Because Carson is focussed more on the road than his camera, his framing sloshes a bit. She has on a bright blue and white striped, hand-knit ski cap with Pippi Longstocking drawstrings dangling. They're filming each other.

"I hope I like her," she says from behind the eyepiece "I don't want to feel like I'm visiting the goddess Kali."

"She may want to bathe in your blood." Carson fumbles and his camera slips to the floormat, but Sasha keeps on rolling.

"I guess that's ok. I've never spent a Christmas vacation in constant fear or awe. You dropped your camera."

We like Sasha. We hope she sticks around.

The cars turns onto a cleared driveway. Sasha must have gotten out and to film their arrival: you can see her track marks in the snow. And then a quick wipe to a delighted sister, arms wide, walking out of the house. Two children peak out of the doorway. It's sort of a single story lodge that looks hand-built, not prefab. A large stone disk, a sundial, stands nearby, shadow-less under the overcast sky.

Shannon beams, all grown up and glad to see her younger brother on her doorstep. She glimpses first to Sasha and then moves toward Carson, just coming out of the car.

"I think it's been like seven years?" she asks. She has dark eyes and a model's wide, charismatic smile.

And Carson's a little shy. "Something like that."

They hug while Shannon, looking behind Carson, says to Sasha, "And hi to the camera."

A smudgy winter sundown over a frozen lake. Three trees sprout crookedly on an island in the middle of the white frozen lake-disk. The camera turns around: there's his sister's home in the gloaming, lit inside like an ember.

A quick collage of eating and talking and the crack clattering of silverware on ceramic. Little hands grappling with bread and butter and the complicated effort of a 5 year old eating for himself; a profile of Shannon leaning with her shoulders, making a flamboyant point, her hefty, wool-sweatered husband Ken guardedly raising his eyes from his plate; a shy glance from nervous Sasha; a toothy mashed food grin from the other boy directed at Uncle Carson and his camera.

Then dinner plates clear, led by Ken. Children are sent away. The table reveals itself now as an enormous slice of clear varnished oak with a black burl the shape of a galaxy spinning just off center. Shannon stays put, still wearing an apron over her white turtleneck. She stakes her territory over much of her side of the table. Carson sits perpendicular to her, arms on the table, the eager interviewer.

"So which is it? Shannon or Tillie?"

A brief annoyed eyeroll gives way to charity in Shannon: "Doesn't matter. I'll answer to Hey you."

"Shannon," adds Ken from the kitchen. The camera swings belatedly in his direction and rockily zooms in as he scrapes child-mashed potatoes and ketchup into a little bucket.

"I've only been Shannon with Ken," and to the kitchen, "haven't I?" Ken doesn't answer.

With help from inserts of photographs and clips, a scrapbook pulled out of a drawer, newspaper headlines and ambiguous reactions from Ken, Carson leads Shannon through a brief summation of her life so far. I'll summarize, too.

Leaving home for a small rural college, she renames herself Tillie Harm, a slammed together marriage between an ostentatious affinity for indie queen Jennifer Tilly, and a punk age warning to the quiet preciousness of a liberal arts campus. It doesn't take long for her to realize she was wasting her time petulantly yelling in the woods of academia. She quits school and with her newfound identity firmly intact she heads to Boston where she becomes the front woman of The Meesels [there's a clip of her striding across a stage a little ungainly in black high heel boots, black leotard and frilly pink bustier; the band: a derivative mashup of Hole, Bikini Kill, Veruca Salt]. The Meesels meet anyone's requirements of a successful indie band: local celebrity, tours, videos, two albums and disintegration after three years. "We all hated each other," Shannon explains. "It was a race to be the one who left first."

There's her first husband, Travis Rex, guitarist of Killholler, kissing her in a handheld wedding video. She leers drunkenly for the camera. They're on an ocean beach somewhere far from family. Images and references to Travis disappear soon after. "He was boring and a jerk and the band sucked. I almost want those years back."

Modeling, artistic and otherwise, turns from a lark into a career. We see books by photographers like Harris Gorden and his aesthetic of Vegas motel glamor; and Willa Schoendorf with her women as plastic architecture series. But mostly there is Danton Khoudry who in retrospect seems to have invented the sooty dawn-of-industry look absurdly popular back then with the sawdust pallor of his exposures, models with red eyes, spindles and needles in the mouth, ears and eyebrows, sweaty flat hair and torn cotton or canvas apparel. Tillie was the muse.

In fact, Shannon clarifies, she was the one fascinated with spindles, pinions and needles and what she calls "the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire" look, with burn marks in billowy sleeves, grubby fingers and tears running down black powder. "It meant to be political but wound up depressingly hot and sexy. Tragically," she says. "Really, our ability to sexualize anything is what separates us from other animals."

Any way, after the success of their book Mill/child Danton Khoudry takes over not so much as husband but as sunglassed game warden. They become fixtures in the rarified, cross pollinating worlds of the European art scene, international conceptual fashion, and the rise of pornography-gangsterism in Eastern Europe, circa 1996.

An image of Tillie straddling, barelegged, the smooth pate of a blank eyed runway model, her feet on the model's upper arms like a living Versailles bird's nest hat. Kissing Croatian president and demagogue Franjo Tudjman on the mouth for Rolling Stone. Lying seductive as a ripe-hipped Venus on a spring-punctured mattress tossed among Balkan rubble just as the plume of an explosion thrusts up in the background. Partying and shopping with Dita Von Teese. Partying with Brazilian soccer star Lucien. Red carpets. Lounging in the white shambles of a loft in perestroika-ed St. Petersburg where the only movement is the pluming smoke of her cigarette: the muse-star, pale enigma at rest.

If you look on-line, you'll know there was more to come. Cameos in risky independent movies, music videos, British lad and tattoo magazine covers, more modeling, appearances at awards shows on the arms of actors and musicians looking for an edgy bump to their image. Ken arrives right around this time, in a smeary chronology possibly overlapping her relationship with Danton Khoudry and possibly, platonically, not. At one point during the scrapbook review, Sasha innocently asks big sister/little brother when they came back together again. They're stopped in their tracks, looking to each other to provide the answer, suggesting it maybe hasn't quite happened yet, entirely.

After dinner, in the 40 watt, nighttime glow of their guest room, Carson sits on the edge of the bed with a white granny quilt and lace fringe pillows, idly holding a stuffed goose with a bonnet. You can see Sasha holding the camera in a mirror above the headboard. It's like we're coming in on the middle of a conversation.

Sasha says eventually, "Not everyone has a famous sister."

"It's not like she's really, as in for real, really famous," he answers.

"Well, maybe you just don't see it. I think she's cool."

He weighs his thoughts, doesn't answer. Just tosses the goose a bit. "If famous means being ripe for a cable show, a Where Are They Now? thing, then maybe you're right. I just – we don't really get along as good as my brother and I do. That's no one's fault. It's family."

"I think it's maybe a wee bit easy to intimidated by someone like her. But that doesn't mean you should be critical of her. She does her own thing."

This suddenly seems like a thorny issue, not just between sister and brother, but girlfriend and boyfriend. Carson raises his eyebrows, wobbles his head, spins the goose on his hand. He offers a concession: "I like the cheese."

Outside, the delicate seeping light of predawn. Shannon, in wool and wellies, makes her way around mud puddles into a small barn. An acre or two away we see Ken in a backhoe. We can barely make out the engine working, but a small work lamp bouncing on top of his rollcage breaks the dark with a wobbling yellow glow. A busy place so early in the morn.

Shannon is inside the barn, milking a goat with a trans-species murmur. Carson narrates: "It's a small farm my sister and Ken have – if that's what you want to call it. It's more like they maintain a small engine of sustenance. The grass feeds the goats and sheep, and the milk my sister draws from them either goes into the bowls of granola she makes for her kids or over the hill to a couple who make cheese out of it."

Row upon shadowy-shelved row of little tuffets of cheese. "It's some of the best cheese I've ever had. Actually, it's the only great cheese I've ever had. Shannon is not one to be outdone, though, and is trying her hand at making her own cheese. She welcomes the arrival of mold with motherly joy.

"That's why I ask my sister if she's becoming a survivalist."

Inside the root cellar with the green and white patties of cheese in the background, Shannon pauses, cut short by Carson's question. Not that she's angry. Just considering it for the first time. You'll notice how all along she scrutinizes her words before speaking them, a sober, irony-shy habit you might see in people uncomfortable with words or have had years of careful-what-you're-about- to-admit therapy. Or those just a little uncertain about the comedic motives of their kid brother and who want to maintain the surface respects of their relationship.

So she answers it at face value, a practiced interview subject. "That sounds different than what I'm doing here," she says. "What we're doing. I don't think of us as desperate, backs against the wall. I think it's more working inside life, keeping it going. There are definitely people around here, people we do business with, who are, you know, hunkered down inside four windowless walls. Mr. and Mrs. Ted Kaczynski types. I think Ken and I are definitely more in the 'isn't nature wonderful?' camp." Anything else? No?

A hand pulls open the heavy wooden door of a stone house. Black and ruddy clubs of meat dangle from rafters. "As if to demonstrate, we visit another building, Ken's smokehouse. This is the turbine of the family engine, capable of bringing in a steady source of income. Their mutual legend has this smokehouse being the reason my sister fell in love with Ken."

Outside, as a tweaky bluejay lands on the pointed roof of the smokehouse, Shannon, sitting on the flat wheel of a tree stump, picking at a stray wool pile on her sleeve, begins formally: "We met when I was in this very expensive, very trendy, very organic restaurant way after lunch, when the staff was between shifts, cleaning, getting ready for dinner. Clearly in the way, clearly being the guests who take advantage of being famous or rich. Or both. Famous-rich.

"Me and four other people I didn't really like, but I'd spent all night with them in this huge ... well I didn't know why I was with them. But any way, there I was still, feeling, empty, sad, withered. Down to the wick. And just to get away from them and their eighth espresso I totter into the kitchen in my crazy heels and tell the chef who I am. I don't really think he knows me, and doesn't really care because he's a working guy, but either he smells money or fame or it's his nature as a chef to be accommodating to crazy people, he starts to show me around the kitchen when this delivery comes in. And it's Ken. Bringing prosciutto. Swinging it over his shoulder like he just hunted it, bagged it, brought it home. And I thought, I want a home. I want someone like him to come home to me, with some kind of provision."

She hasn't really looked at the camera, pensively avoiding contact, until she arrives at that last line, delivered as if finding it within hand's reach in the dark. The memory gives her a crooked, silly smile. "I forgot the chef, forgot my friends and followed him out to his truck and sort of made him take me with him."

After a moment Carson tells her, "I never dreamed my sister would marry a farmer."

"Nothing's impossible. What about your mother as a born again? Or your brother as, whatever it is he's doing? Compared to them, marrying a farmer is pretty sedate."

And then she shifts position on the stump, sitting up girlishly. "Besides, I don't think Ken'd know the difference between a seed and a pod. You can't really call him a farmer."

"He was up on a tractor this morning."

A smile of warning from Shannon. "That man's up to other things."

Architectural drawings are spread across a wooden table under a beam of afterhours tungsten. "You're staying for the party, right?" Carson and Sasha are asked. Ken is big, with tiny green eyes and a well-kept red beard. He has a deceptively aquiline nose. Under all that, he's handsome. When Carson responds yes, Ken continues his tour.

The drawing is, maybe, for something key shaped. There are hundreds of surveyor's symbols, cross-sectional grade illustrations and other unreadable engineering subtleties along the key that perplex the design. It could be a spaceship. Ken knows it by heart.

"These woods here, I cut through a year ago. The cutting runs from here to here. Which is how I found the 3.3° grade from this area here all the way down there." His thick finger points to one end of the key to the far end. "It diverges maybe .2 -.3° the whole time. You'd never notice it. Unless you had the largest carpenter's leveler in the world." His mustache parts with a tiny grin. Ken's dry humor. "To the eye, it looks flat. To water, a straight smooth decline."

To illustrate: a series of images including a steady focal rack, helped by a remarkably stable long lens of this long cut line through the trees. It's a corridor of white snow through tall pine, but the treeline is not cut parallel; it's gradually V-shaped, with a thin black line running up the middle. Your eye, guided by the white of snow, the black line, and the forest boundary, enjoys a walled convergence at an ankh-shaped stanchion sticking out of the ground at the far end. This is the pole we saw earlier, planted on that little island with the three trees. It looks maybe half a mile away. Behind the island is an empty field tilted down to the island. It's a humpbacked rolling hill and beyond that, the gray ceiling of winter.

"Ken's project, I realized, is a kind of North American Stonehenge. He calls it a 'Solstice Alidade.' "

Back to the pine corridor. Little loafs of sandstone line its edges. But down the middle, more sandstone bricks create an un-swerving, heterologous sluice in the ground, three inches wide: the meltwater inside makes the black line. It is unnervingly straight, regardless of earth's bumps and twists. The sluice runs down Ken's invisible grade and then, coming closer, divides into two streams sending the water to encircle a densely covered bower supported by large stone slabs. A little tornado of smoke twists upwards from it.

After a few seconds, the precise placement of the two largest slabs, front and rear, suddenly reveals itself. They're like sentinels.

Inside the bower, also made of stone and entwining ivy, oak beams cross the top with a gnarly overgrowth of grape vines. A shallow but very wide iron bowl hangs from the center beam. The smoke has been rising from a tidy, vigilant fire inside. Hanging from the bowl like an ancient Japanese bell is an iron cylinder.

Beneath the cylinder and firebowl there's a labyrinth formed by little pebbles on the floor. Ken walks the tightening circle of the labyrinth until he can reach up and place two logs into the bowl, feeding the fire. He obediently follows the labyrinth out.

In the rear, cut into the stone is a perfectly smoothed hole. The camera, sensing a companion iris, peeks through.

"With Druidic precision," Carson explains, "the circular opening on top of the pole on the island lines up exactly with the circumference of the firebowl cylinder and this hole at the rear of his bower." The camera turns to a black-limbed, leafless apple tree behind the bower, waiting for spring.

Back in the bower, and excited himself, Carson describes what happens next. "The earliest sunbeam on the morning of the solstice will rise right over there, poking through the ankh, through this bower, through that hole and onto the apple tree. Ken says it should be ready by tomorrow, just in time for the sun's rebound, and the party." He then moves closer to the camera, confidentially. "Unfortunately the forecast doesn't look too good."

Another image of Ken dragging several logs by tractor. He hoists and leans them into a triangular pile. It looks like the preparation for a bonfire.

"This is amazing," Sasha says.

Over images of burly, Granger-coveralled Ken striding across his winter acreage, tinkering, riding his tractor, Carson says, "She's right. We're both awed by Ken's project, regardless of the weather. And so is my sister who, I realize, has fallen in love with someone who can match her grandiosity, but is patient enough to direct it into the world around him.

"His life before Shannon was doing odd jobs, drinking, hunting, fighting, fixing cars. Making prosciutto was a lark. The movements of the stars literally went over his head, indifferently.

"Somehow, just by having someone like Shannon in his life, Ken is now a post-medieval enviro-cosmic landscape sculptor."

We cut to a computer screen of Ken's website, BlackCauldron.com. "That's how his agent describes him in the artist profile on his website and artist catalog. He's already moving onto another Neo-Iron Age project. Its working title is 'Ecclesiastic Orrery.' It's not far from the Alidade."

In a nearby clearing, we see an enormous structure of several orbital iron cages mounted on rusting staffs. Large wicker wheels bound by leather straps lie on a sandstone mater etched exquisitely with the hours and degrees of position, dug snugly into the ground. In the center of the mater is a tall octagonal obelisk with what looks like a solar panel on top. A sundial garden, of various sizes, shapes and registers, rise from the snow like miscellaneous tombstones.

"The sundials will be added later. But idea is that the sun, hitting the panel, will drive the wheels and provide the motion not only of these planets [the iron cages] but also little comets and meteors in a way even Ken admits he hasn't figured out."

There are ground level shots of the now towering sundials, as well as discoveries of rods and the Cadillac fin-looking comets. Tilting up from a copper disk blooming with oxidation, we see Sasha in the sundial garden, posing with arms outstretched, an upward glance at the pallid winter sky.

Later, more hushed confidentiality in their bedroom at night. Carson speaks for both of them while Sasha pets a large heavily crashed Newfoundland in the middle of the bed.

"Having seen what we saw today, the proto-medieval cosmic sculptures, and the sundials everywhere, Sasha and I are wondering if the solstice party will even be a party. We're kind of thinking it will be .... "

He turns to Sasha. "How did you put it?"

She keeps her attention on the dog. "Sort of like a reverential observance. Something holy. In the holiday/holy day sort of way." Then lands a big playful whoompf on the dog. "Which could totally be cool."

Carson nods, kind of. Not too sure. "Yeah ... or totally pretentious."

Fade to black.

"Then the beer truck pulls up."

Out in the driveway, another hairy delivery man, this time in white coveralls and rainbow knit cap pulls a keg from his truck and stages it among eight or nine others as Ken hoists one onto his shoulders.

Shannon and Ken, with experienced help from their kids, prepare for the party: moving tables, signing for slabs of meat, chipping ice into buckets, placing candles just so, cooking sugar to pour into the candy cane molds, then trimming trees outside with popcorn, cranberries and the homemade canes. They roll logs into theatrical seating arrangement near the bower and dispense luminarias every three feet creating a path to the log seating.

Shannon answers a question from Carson: "We began having solstice parties like right away, maybe that first Christmas I moved in. And that was only because I wanted to have a big bad ass Christmas party in the country, make a lot of noise and ruckus. But no one up here really wants anything to do with something as bourgie or mainstream as Christmas, so we threw a solstice party. For whatever reason, people really liked it, really preferred the idea of a solstice party. So, ever since."

"What do you think about Christmas, generally?"

"Generally?" Shannon dwells heavily on the question. "It's – " she looks for her kids, deciding on secrecy. "Well, the way it is out there ... in mainstream AmericaLand, my first reaction is: are you kidding? I mean, from out here, off the grid, it seems loud, crass, annoying, stressful. And too bright. It's a mess, really. A complete mess. Something to be avoided at all costs. But my second reaction is, well, a lot kinder, especially now that I have kids of my own. Now I'd say it has its plusses and minuses."

Shannon continues while images of the solstice party crank up, first with people arriving, friends and neighbors hugging and laughing, potluck chefs unveiling dishes on the oak table, kids playing in the snow, Ken lighting the luminarias, kegs being tapped. Four or five people watch a huge pig, maybe it's a boar, roast slowly over a fire outside. A guy other than Ken is in charge of the roast.

"On the one hand," Shannon says, "people do find a way to be charitable and use the I guess you'd call spirit of the season for some good. For some mystery-of-the-universe reason, this time of year really ignites humans. We're engaged. With the world, the universe, each other. There really is such a thing as kindness. Or can be.

"But on the other hand, most of what we call Christmas, really isn't supportable. Not the money, not the insistence of gifts, gifts for gifts' sake and then tossing those on the pile, on the landfill. And the wretched traveling. It's all the capitalist mandate, on steroids."

The house quickly fills. Among the conventional minglers in puffy down quilted coats and wool caps with ear flaps, many are in costumes: 19th century Victorian carolers with bonnets and muttonchops; Renaissance Fair wenches and Henry VIIIs drinking from goblets; lots of Father Christmases; Wiccans in luxurious black velvet long coats with fox fur cuffs and collars with little wiccan tots dressed as ponies and wolves; a lordly but very anomalous Klingon male with his lion-maned Klingon female consort.

"And the overriding social message that's sent out," Shannon continues, "is: this is expected of you now. To participate in Christmas and contribute. Accept it or we die. The message is loud and clear and reiterated over and over: You should be out, spending money, buying, collecting, spending again. Because the kids, members of your family, friends, they will think better of you if you succeed at this. And on top of that, the economy needs you. People will loose everything in the spring if you don't buy a lot during Christmas If the cash registers are singing and the waste is mounting, then all is well with the world.

"That's a crazy message. No wonder the fundamentalists go haywire over it."

"The 'Where's Jesus in it?' crowd," Carson suggests.

She chortles. "Exactly. It's sort of a joke: isn't it funny how we're all crazy doing this? Getting on line for the toy of the season in a blizzard, just for that one morning of pleasure for your kid, and victory for you. Society expects you to absolutely burst at the seams with consumption and to spread it around and not really have a great time doing it. I mean it's like, Ha ha, it's ok, it's going to end soon. We know this time of year sucks. Just get through it. That's the answer you get: It'll all be over soon. Happy holidays!"

"I can see why you want to avoid that."

"Right? I mean, neither one of us is a model parent. We just want our kids to grow up smart, strong and caring, engaged with nature and the universe and not cowed by the expectations of others or become the cogs of someone else's wheel of greed and power. At least that's what we tell each other, as Mom and Dad. Like anyone else, we make things up as we go along. Which includes having a party at a time of year when the urge is really strong to throw a big party. When it's dark and cold out.

"The solstice party, I hope, is a little antidote to all that. I actually like to think of it as a kind of karmic corrective. A little creative craziness in the distant forest."

Four women in white gowns embroidered with moons and stars, powdered faces and the same long blood-red hair, stride in mysterious, four cornered unison; lots of teenagers wearing wool caps with little ears on them, sometimes cat or fox or donkey; a tall and courtly Papageno and Papagena who fit bottles of local brew into their beaks; otherwise ordinary-dressed folks, with Ken, shooting rifles in the air out beyond the Alidade; a snowman playing a pan flute; a little girl serenely nibbling a cookie whose crumbs flake down onto her penguin costume.

Not one but five bonfires are lit and burn in a large pentagonal area which melts the snow, summons the mud and compels the biggest bellied men to take off their shirts in the toasty middle and wrestle. Elsewhere: a bareback equestrian barrel race and a kind of nomadic capture-the-flag on horseback starring a fluttering red banner with a skull (human? real?) on top; a stilt-walker performance with fire (juggling, eating); a well-attended children's magic show; a huge snowball rolling race; and, somewhere in the distance, the ever-present drum circle.

We see Ken conferring with Shannon and a few others, notably a nimble, elderly woman in a green and black robe with a tall white collar. The Celebrant. They're looking at the sky, black with unseen, impenetrable cloud cover. Then at their watches.

"Well, it's almost ten thirty," the Celebrant says.

Ken inhales with a wet sniff. "We should just do this any way."

"The fireworks will help," someone says.

"The solstice will still happen," Shannon adds. "Whether we see it or not." The small group nods collaboratively.

Carson: "Ken's plan, from the very beginning was to start this year's party at midnight and go until dawn, having pointed his sculpture at the exact latitude the first rays of the new, solstitial sun will appear. Which were then trained on hundreds of little crystals hanging from the apple tree. He gave up on that, Shannon told me, for practical reasons. Such as, no one would come that late. Plan B was using a laser borrowed from the nearby university for the same affect, which Shannon also scuttled. Plan C became the way to go: a huge mercury-vapor lamp borrowed from a local timber camp. But his contact for that never arrived. This council is the result."

"Ok, let's go," Ken says, then turns to the Celebrant. "When is it, again?"

"Eleven thirty eight."

"Maybe I can aim some kind of beam ...."

Ken tugs at his lip thoughtfully, turns and is gone, leaving the others to fend for themselves. He appears inspired. The council looks at each other, at disappearing Ken, and then at each other: what's going on?

"I guess I'll get us started," the Celebrant decides.

"The ceremony they've planned," Carson explains, "is a series of rituals taken from ancient lore, mostly northern European. According to the program, it begins when Beiwe arrives."

That would be the lady, in a long white leather and fur coat, with a little girl in white leather and fur at her side, who is led around the grounds of the farm in what appears at first to be a wicker sleigh, lit by swinging lanterns. Though it's not wicker. The little girl tosses small evergreen tips behind them.

"That's Mary Anne Klieg, as Beiwe, and her daughter Dakota. They're local. She teaches chemistry at the university. In the neolithic past, I'm told, Beiwe's carriage was made out of reindeer bones. Her husband Bob is a hunter and he and their friends spent most of the year carefully building this out of deer and moose bones.

"A bit about Beiwe: Professor Wolfram told me that to the early Iron Age tribes of Finland, the arrival of Beiwe, and her daughter Beiwe-Nieida, means a return of green grass for the reindeer to eat. Not only is she a fertility goddess, then, but she is also, given the long winter nights, the bringer of sanity. That's her job, now and always: bringing sanity to the bleak mid-winter.

"After Beiwe, there are other performances and rituals," Carson says, over corresponding imagery. A Mayan fire dancing ritual. Shaker shape singing. And for reals now, the mock sword fight between the Oak King and the Holly King.

By the light of bonfires, two large men, Druids, wield large swords against one another, with great heaving clouds of exhale and body heat.

"The fight lasts until the Oak King, the bringer of the new year, light and red robins, vanquishes the Holly King, the lord of withdrawal, disintegration, repose, death. He will have his rematch in June. Rudy and Jake here own a bar nearby and hit the Renaissance fair circuit pretty hard each year."

Jake, the winning Oak King, then walks to a little boy in a red cape and gold crown and kneels offering his sword. The boy touches the Oak King's head and walks to the Celebrant standing in Ken's bower. He gives her an offering of little cakes. Pleased with himself, he runs over to his mother, Mrs. Papagena, who has taken off her bird head. Her son buries himself among her feathers.

Though the celebrant starts speaking at this point, I heard something on the soundtrack and played it over and over. It's hard to pick up the first time, but it's there: a diesel engine revving up, getting warm, then rumbling closer.

"All over the world," the Celebrant says, "we wait eagerly for the arrival of the sun, the long sun, the sun that brings light, warmth and life. Birth, life, decay and death proceed just as the sun makes its way across the universe, bringing birth life decay and death with it. As it goes, we go. So let us give time to our thoughts of loved ones past.

The party descends to a quiet reflection, though the sound of the tractor is unavoidable. Some in the crowd notice it. When Sasha's camera swings to the Celebrant, you can tell the Celebrant hears it too. But she marches on.

"The cycles of life are the only truth the universe provides. We find simplicity and truth in these cycles for they teach us love, compassion, courage. To honor the neverending circle and to welcome the return of the light, we light a candle –" as many in the audience do. The Celebrant dips her candle into the iron bowl in the center of the bower, and ignites the inside with a small exciting whoosh. "And we proclaim: Return sun! Welcome sun! Abide with us, sun!"

That appears to be it, but the Celebrant looks in a direction as if 'Abide with us' was a cue to something. Sasha's camera finds some commotion in the crowd. People stir, look behind them and with minor confusion and awkwardness, separate themselves down the middle of the audience. A few stranded stragglers leap across the empty middle that Shannon wants to maintain with a wave of her arms: one side or the other, please.

The Celebrant appears to get what's going on, so she says, loudly, over the approaching engine, "Ok – well, from the top! Again, we proclaim; Return sun, welcome sun, abide with us, sun!" Hundreds of heads, also sensing a cue, look to the side, up at the sky, all around. But nothing comes. A few get fidgety.

The Celebrant cocks a May West hip. "Don't you just hate when you ask for something ... " she says, but then it comes. Somehow, from a Ken-rigged contrivance with tractor, work lights, and metal sheeting, a fierce light is cast through the bower and poof! The fey little apple tree is lit with a narrow beam of light. It's actually pretty impressive. People hurrah and say "Welcome sun!"

Then come the fireworks overhead, from who knows where.

"The party lasted all night," Carson says. "And it ranks as one of the coolest, most fun nights I've ever had. Despite the obvious let down at dawn when there was no sun, just a white disk glowing behind the gray cloud cover, and the technical glitches of manufactured light."

More scenes of partying, late into the night. Music. Passed out little kids in animal costumes sleeping over their parent's shoulders. The roast pig is passed around, meat piled high on the platter. Lots of drinking.

"But I can't help feeling that their solstice party is not any closer to the primal truth of the holiday than my parents' choir albums, cocktails and aluminum tree. Many of the ancient rituals around the winter solstice in fact involved carnal sacrifice. Beiwe, for instance, was celebrated by killing and skinning little white animals. Human sacrifice was not a rarity at this time either and considering the plight of humans plunged in darkness amid a little understood universe, ritual killing makes sense.

You might be willing to appease anyone or anything, in every manner available just to bring the light, and warmth, and food, back. Compared to that, listening to "O Holy Night" in the warmth of your centrally heated home seems much better. And the pretend bloodsport of Beiwe, a little crazy and nostalgic."

Of course, Carson can say what he wants. It looks fun as hell. As the party winds down, people stagger home in the snow, arm in arm, carrying sleeping children, riding off in fishtailing snowmobiles. Come the morning, there are two holdouts, a bare chested guy and a girl wearing a pink hat with pointy cat ears trying to keep a smoldering bonfire going, one knee-snapped branch at a time.

* * * * *

# Part Six

In which Carson drives to the Mashipan monastery to visit and film his

brother Humphrey, who used to live in self-imposed seediness

The sound of the morning after bonfire crackles and breaks long after the solstice party recedes into the black, empty screen. For several moments it's just us, the snapping and feeding of twigs, leftover murmurs and observations of the kid fire tenders and the crepitating fire. Even as the black peels away and we're put on the roof of a car making its way up a mountain road, the bonfire seems to burn, however faintly. The glittering pitch asphalt, the yellow dashes, wind and rush beneath the hood, until all we hear is an old car running.

It's a little unsettling, this view. The sharp turns around shorn and pebbly rock faces, calamitous drops just beyond the aluminum bands of guardrail – this could be the Rockies or the Sierras, but might also be the Alps or the Andes or the Cascades for all I know. I don't really like winding roads let alone those You Are There shots you see on car ads, where spinning tire meets zipping road. But still, ok, it's pretty, the muscular peaks, the endless fir, the piles of snow roadside or weighing on trees or tucked into mountainside or crowning rocks in streams. Carson obviously has more money available to him than your average documentarian, but a comfortably swooping aerial view of the Volvo as it climbs through mountain landscapes is not in the picture.

Anyway, the title card rises as we swerve from every precipice:

CHRISTMAS WITH MY BROTHER

And Carson narrates, sometimes over himself while he concentrates on driving. Sasha, and the break she gives us from Hancockony, doesn't seem to be on this trip, either.

"Like my sister, my brother Humphrey left our family after high school and really never looked back. And like my sister, he went through a period of shaking off every last remaining pedigree of the family. We didn't hear from or see him for years.

"But for all of Shannon's excesses, Humphrey far exceed her. Addictions, even more questionable sex, a plethora of drugs, riding herd with anarchists."

A few photographs of grown up Humphrey: a lanky, blonde-haired boy, delicate, a little feminine with his arms crossed but on his face a cold loathing.

"He told me later he wasn't interested in what passed for a political structure, even among the anarchists. He made sure he was their untouchable Lord of Misrule, in charge of nothing, letting anyone screw him if they wanted but fighting with razor blades if prodded. Their wicker man. The most unhinged member in the group, willing to do anything if it meant cracking a bottle over his own head to prove it.

"I tracked him down because of a postcard he mailed, out of the blue, delivered to my dorm one year, for my birthday. It said, 'Education teaches the slaves how to make their own prisons.' It came from Seattle and wasn't signed. But I recognized my brother's handwriting and his drawing style."

The postcard has smudgy decaying edges, but features a smeary thickly pencil-leaded tableau, sketched with an adolescent's careful perversity. There's a hanged man dangling in rictus, a fierce dog baring its bloody teeth at him, someone in the background spewing a rain of vomit and a fourth man stabbing himself yelling HA HA HA HA HA HA. Heavy shading like Goya.

"I didn't tell my parents. I wanted to see him myself. I got in touch with the Seattle police and with city social workers. After a few months, they had a pretty good idea which squatter's camp he was in. So I went to visit."

The picture is blurry, but there's Humphrey: leaner, tatted and pierced, no hair, waving a bottle of something, the only person standing in a graffitied warren with clothes strewn on the floor indistinguishable from his fellow squatters. Humphrey's giving Carson the finger. He has a Rasputin/Manson-mad ferocity, with black little eyes and gaunt, torn t-shirted nihilism.

"You wouldn't know it but right after I took that photograph, he and I started to become friends. But that's another story."

Back to the rooftop of the copper Volvo, pulling into a gravel turnout of the winding road, carved into the side of a mountain. A man in a long brown coat, like a friar's habit, sits on a log, waiting. Carson emerges alone from the car and crosses the still-running camera on the roof. You can barely hear "No, not long," before the two of them hug.

Carson, now holding the camera, grabs a bag and up a path they go. A last camera glance to his Volvo almost looks like an advertisement for a slacker car brand: shot low, the wreck, condemned to afterthought, sits against sky and wind and other snowy peaks in the distance.

"Today, I'm visiting him in the mountaintop monastery he has lived in for twelve years called Mashipan. It's not the first time I've been here, just the second. There's no parking up there. They normally bring guests up by shuttle but the driver wasn't around so I drove up. We're up so high that when I make a final check on my car, it feels like saying goodbye to the world."

He swings the camera toward Humphrey. The poisoning cherubic blonde hair is gone; it's stiff, parted and short, canvas colored, on its way toward white. The pupil-less eyes are gone. He now has a weathered, handsome face with eye wrinkles expanding into a sympathetic sorrow. This gaze is what he was hiding in the other photos. It seems it's all he needs now, a scrutiny both pitiful and awake.

Humphrey shakes off his younger brother's camera and stops talking in mid-sentence. "Let's keep that to a minimum," Humphrey says, meaning, I assume, Carson's ever present filming. Chastened, Carson says: "Ok, I can turn it off" – and drops the camera down to dangle over their boots, still furtively recording. Over the crunch of gravel, we get pieces of their conversation:

" ... not going to be like some heartrending family confessional I hope."

"No, god no," Carson says. "At least I hope not."

Somehow he still grabs shots of the distant granite peaks and his brother's long-legged stride, sturdily accustomed to hikes up the mountain, even in a robe. But we're still dangling from Carson's hand, pretending not to film.

"My relationship with my brother, actually, is pretty good. Better than the one I have with my sister. But that doesn't mean he likes it when I photograph him. He's very suspicious of it.

"Still, Humphrey is determined to steer his involvement in this project himself. He will do anything to avoid being a part of memoirs, confessionals or autobiographies because, he says, they are inherently narcissistic. Diversionary, from the truth. I wouldn't call him an ascetic, though I know it sounds like he is.

"Even though he and I have talked this out beforehand, now that he sees my camera, he reiterates his position regarding my project on the hike up to the monastery. He wants to share his ideology, not his personality, he says. I tell him I know. I'll do my best. I also have to lie a little."

The climb takes them up a pebbly, wind-bald route up the side of the mountain, around ice- and snowdusted boulders. The path is often narrow, fitting around the edge of the mountain itself, and the way Carson keeps the camera by his leg, you expect any second a misstep, an out of balance scuffle and a drop over the edge. More vertigo.

Where they're going you're not too sure until Carson stops and raises the camera. He's panting heavily but knows he's got a great shot: "Wow." Out of nowhere is a white stone complex dug into the shoulder of the mountain. Frosty blue sky shines to heaven beyond.

"This is my brother's home, Mashipan. A community on a rock at the top of the world," he says, though on camera you can make out his prosaic, one-handed defense on the reemergence of the camera. "This is a nice shot," he tells Humphrey and the camera frame jiggles a bit, getting it just right.

"Fine, fine." Humphrey trudges on.

As his brother walks ahead, Carson pans slowly over the grounds: a three story main building with two wings backed into the mountain with a generous plateau spread in front sustaining a few smaller stone structures and a fenced area with uniformly snowed-over bumps: a sleeping garden. Black trellis archways, a snow cloaked statuary, and a shoveled walkway cuts across the grounds and heads to a boxwood-lined patio with cold stone benches placed at the edge of the plateau. They sit at the cusp of a slight decline to another flat terrace which yawns one last time before abruptly emptying over the edge of the mountain to the valley thousands of feet below. Before that happens, though, the terrace sprouts a huge gray obelisk mounted with a wooden cross. It is defiant against the gaping drop and the universe just beyond, though the entire thing is latticed with scaffolding.

Turning back to the snow-level grounds of the monastery, Humphrey greets a fellow Mashipanite with hands in prayer and a perfunctory bow. As Carson catches up, he passes faces: nodding, acknowledging, round and pink, long and withdrawn, white-haired or bald, smiling, indifferent, male and female.

"I've been here before. It's good to see people I know. Most of them here don't seem to mind a kid with a camera."

We cut to an echoing arcade, following behind Humphrey. He climbs up narrow wooden stairs and we follow. He swings open his door and we move past him into a small room with a bed, a table, a window. Carson carries us to the window, pushes it open with his hand, and there is the green and white mottling of pine forested mountains beyond. He tilts the camera down to where we just walked: the compound of Mashipan with its walkways, benches, robed devotees.

"I already accept there are times and places for my camera. They have rules here. The trick is working within them.

"To be honest, I wouldn't have been allowed to bring my camera without Abbot Keating, Abbess Lamarcke and the prior Father Wilhelm agreeing to it." The three of them stand together, decked in white cloth or in the case of the prior, in beige, as solemn and weighty in their silence as a Greek chorus. "I'm allowed here in return for shooting images of Mashipan. For their website.

"It's not a trivial arrangement. Though their archives abound with photos, they have never allowed a camera from outside up here. But the changes underway, they tell me, make having one visit worth the trouble, even for a few days."

Two workmen inch their way out of a side door of the main building carrying between them a wooden crate with "UGANDA" stenciled in red on one side. A third man squeezes past, balancing a rolled up carpet on his shoulder.

"Of course, I wouldn't even be here, or even heard about Mashipan if my older brother didn't live here."

Humphrey in his cell, pulling off the long friar's robe, hanging it up meticulously and pulling on a sooty wool sweater. It's a small room, big enough only for the bed, desk, a comfortable looking reading chair, a bookshelf, with a little white iPod resting on top.

On one wall, smears of color from drawings, I guess, by Humphrey's and Carson's nephews. On another wall, a small collection of medieval icons inlaid with gold.

"Like my agreement with the abbots, I defer to my brother's ground rules."

"Over there," Humphrey points, pointing his finger to an area the floor near the wall. With one hand, Carson dutifully unrolls his sleeping bag there. "And every morning, you can roll it up and keep it in the corner."

"For instance," Carson narrates, "I thought a cot was waiting for me, but Humphrey decided it would take up too much room."

Noticing his brother's reaction, Humphrey says, "You'll be all right. You'll see."

"Sure," Carson replies. "No problem." As if to get even, Carson swings the camera around aimed at Humphrey. His starchy authority and implacability seem unassailable. But facing his own implacable younger brother, Humphrey shrinks slightly, retreating into self-consciousness, maybe even fondness. "I have an extra pillow if you need it."

We cut to two chairs placed in the small room, facing each other interview style. They're getting right to business, it seems. Humphrey is busy off camera.

"Living arrangements aside," Carson narrates, "most of my brother's rules basically involve his speaking and my listening. His answers to my questions are often on other topics he has in mind. Many hours will be spent arguing about this. But he does help me set up and sometimes holds the camera himself."

The interview begins. Unlike the footage of his mother and sister, Carson goes for more formal shooting styles with his brother. He cuts between three set ups: a two shot, in profile, Frost-Nixon style, a second camera trained just on Humphrey, a third camera on him.

"I'd really like, Hump, to talk about – "

"Humphrey."

"Oh sure, sorry. So I think going back a little into your experience in Seattle might help give some context to all this, your life here in Mashipan, what you're doing." It sounds like a question.

Humphrey sits in his chair, sipping tea from a wide, glazed cup.

"This," Carson narrates, his taped self still watching his brother sip tea, "is a Humphrey-sized pause. They occur frequently, coinciding with his breath. He gives himself time, he says, to tend to his thoughts before dispensing them."

Humphrey, concluding his sip, nods reflectively.

"I sometimes find them unnerving," Carson says. "This is just an example."

Humphrey places his cup down on its saucer, on his lap.

"What I've learned here," Humphrey offers, looking around his room, "is more to the point of your documentary."

"Ok. Whatever you want to say," Carson says to his brother. "Where ever you want to go."

Another studious pause, over which Carson adds: "Like the abbots, Humphrey has an ulterior motive other than acquiescing to his little brother's documentary dreams. He has a formulated point of view and is deliberate about it. Fortunately for me, this point of view coincides with the points I want to make in my movie."

From his chair, Humphrey nods, this time consenting. Contrary to Carson's gentle insights about his brother's pauses, Humphrey seems very much like a serious man used to suffocating his impulses. Every moment a conquest.

Humphrey says, "Coming to Mashipan...."

He shifts in his chair slightly, redirecting himself in mid-sentence. "Ok, I see your point. I'll summarize, so we can move on. When I went to Seattle, I didn't know or care what I'd find there – "

"Can we go back a little further?"

Uncomfortable, agitated Humphrey. "We've talked about this." Short, alert sip of tea.

"I know." That's all Carson offers, acknowledgment. It's stubborn. He holds on Humphrey working through tight-lipped deliberation.

"You mean growing up," Humphrey answers, inhaling, preparing.

"You were very unhappy, as far as I remember."

Humphrey licks the tea from his lips, without exhaling. "And?"

Carson continues, sympathetically. "Were you suffering... mentally? An illness?"

Surprisingly, Humphrey exhales, considering this. "I keep forgetting this age difference. You were probably pretty young and want to make sense of the behavior at home. Ok...." Another chair shift. "Mental illness is probably a helpful conjecture. But let's move away from that. It's not ..." he stretches his neck, "accurate."

"But I thought ..."

Humphrey holds up his hand, wait for it.

"I was reacting to what I was perceiving and, especially, feeling. And I assume on that basis, I was taken through several rounds of psychiatry, psychoanalysis, what have you. Everything. Whatever was the new treatment of the season. Back then it was all new. And every time there were different opinions, diagnoses, cures. They just all cancelled each other out."

"I remember that. To me, and you're right, I didn't know better, it was like you were sick, with some incurable disease, like cancer or polio, with all the pills that came into the house, and mom and dad fretting. But you kept walking around looking healthy. Just really really pissed off. So I just stayed away."

"You might have learned something if you hadn't been afraid of me."

"I was eight years old. With glasses. And your door was always closed."

"Well, maybe that was smart on your part. I don't know. No one knows what to do with unruly boys. People either want to cure them or jail them.

"Any way, and I mean this as charitably as possible, there's nothing my mother or father, our parents, really could have done. Either as being a cause or to help. I don't blame them for anything other than being unlucky to have such a, for them, a difficult first child.

"I simply couldn't make sense of anything around me. There's no other explanation. All I felt was distress, disassociation. Aggravation against everything around me. Smells, colors, the way the world came at me. You mentioned sickness. I felt like I was the sickness, and everything around me were the antibodies, closing me in, trying to kill me. It was very instinctive, my reactions. Not rational. But right. Sane."

Images of a protest march, circa late '80s, early '90s. Anti-capitalism, pro-environment, anti-globalism. Suddenly the video turns shaky, tumbling, as the march becomes a riot in the few hands of anarchists who descend like monkeys. Bottle bombs are lit and thrown, glass windows broken. Black-hooded, Converse-wearing bodies jump up and down on cars. Newspaper boxes thrown into the street.

"Seattle seemed like the furthest place to go. And the people I wanted to find – did find – were people I thought were really brave. On their own, ready to dispense hate and violence. The hate always at their finger tips. I liked that. It was energizing to me. And something made me exploit these feelings further. To show off to them that I could hate more, hate purely."

It's stock footage, but in one shot, there's a zoom onto one of the monkey car jumpers throwing blocks of concrete, then kicking clumsily, prancingly, at someone trying to pull him down. The zoom freezes. The figure is half-shaped, grainy. Carson doesn't say it, but it looks like Humphrey.

"Hate was the clearest, purest expression I had available to me and when I discovered that I had that all along, when I met other boys like that, it was instant ignition. I could be alive. Alive with execration. It was breathtaking."

Images of cars burning, store front looting, battling police.

"I liked playing with it, that hate. It was electric and elastic. I wanted to remain in charge of my own destruction, like a god. Delivering my own destruction. It was a power I could deploy any time I liked.

"Which was often," Carson suggests.

"....Yes, as often as I liked." A pause. "You've got me talking about this after all."

"We can stop...."

With two fingers Humphrey swats the offer away. He sips his tea, then resumes. Turns out he's happy to talk about this.

"Of course I had nothing in common with them. Most of them were abused as kids and were now all grown up. Wild, untamed and pissed. Smatterings of education. The truth is they were just the poor. Poor, unwanted, expelled, flushed away."

Humphrey continues, over soundless images of industrial despair: a dead bird on the floor of a wide sad room with a broom dropped and abandoned nearby; shears of white plaster peeling from the brick wall of a hallway; gray-white matted pigeon poop on a railing; water lapping against a knuckled pier. The dead, empty spaces of abandoned buildings that look busier with destitution than when they were working and swept everyday.

"And I was bourgeois, through and through. I read. Some of them couldn't read. But still smarter than most people I'll ever meet. I wanted to undermine my privilege, myself, every chance I got, desperately. And they would be my audience."

A few more pictures of Humphrey and the squalor he lived in, assumedly taken by Carson after tracking him down. There's one of Humphrey barking at a chained pit bull, someone's unhinged pet. And a moment of repose: Humphrey carefully carving under his nipple with a pen knife.

"It sounds pitiful now that I hear myself. I was an adolescent. You're not very smart back then. But these boys were beautiful to me. They manifested everything I thought was beautiful.

"To fit in – and I had to do a lot to fit in – there had to be – and there are studies on this, it's not unique behavior – I was compelled to perform public excoriations. Standing up and cutting myself, or just walking over to a wall and with great intensity smashing my head against it. They laughed. I laughed at them laughing. And that would shut them up.

"If a person made eye contact, in went a fork into the palm of my hand. 'That's what I think of you establishing a connection with me, asshole.' "

Close up of Humphrey and his thin, tired, derisive face partly obscured by the menacing hand he uses to grab the camera. Getting friendly with him, as Carson said he did, must not have been easy.

"You did that," Carson asks, by way of confirming.

Humphrey nods, dispassionately. "The interesting outcome of this was realizing that doing this, reacting like this, I realized, wasn't very pure. It was effect, then affect. Like a tantrum. And that was a huge epiphany. What I had been doing was childish. It felt like the first lesson I learned by myself. Very very powerful. It was an education. I became addicted to education."

"You say childish," Carson says. "But they must have thought you were crazy. Dangerous crazy."

"Some were scared. A few wanted me to go away. Some thought I was just the evening's entertainment. But mostly they accepted what I was, just a fucked up creature who chose to be that way, but who didn't threaten anyone. I didn't steal or break any other social bond, so I was tolerated.

"But because of that epiphany, the hate I was reveling in suddenly seemed paltry. It didn't do it for me any more. It was very up and down. One minute I was screaming, the next, nothing. I exhausted the pattern, or it me. Or maybe I didn't have that much hate to begin with. But I still wanted to find that pure, constant level of expression. Vigilant contempt."

He forms his hand into a pointed wedge. "I wanted to find that narrow line between hate for society of any level, groups, people, and still maintain a stoic, passive, even peaceable, disconnection to those around you. Some of the older boys not just around me but in other groups, they maintained this poise between outside hate and inner regard which again I thought was beautiful. That was the new goal."

More industrial entropy and decay: hollow buildings empty of windows; stone facades draped with water stains.

"I found this alcove and made it mine. Just a closet really. And I would sit at the edge of this place, at the edge of my own murk and just watch."

~ trash strewn lunarscaped warehouses, factory floors, barren facilities ~

"The place was always in twilight, echoing."

~ walls flaring with graffiti; piles of tossed office furniture abandoned in the middle of vacated floors; faded directional signs in hallways ~

"People would leave, people would come. I became the one who was always there. And when they were there, I was in the back of their mind. Always there. Always a little on edge, always a little disconcerting. Condensing, focusing.

~ shafts of light from breaches in a ceiling; blue sky and trees visible through the ribs of beams; plaster peeling like small sails off walls; a patient drip from a pipe feeding an orange gown of mildew on the floor ~

"And even though I thought I was molding this personage that I would inhabit, I allowed myself .... I began wanting to feel what dead was like. To be dead. Not out of despair. Just out of curiosity. To put my mind to being dead. I'd exhausted hate and was on my way – superhumanly, I thought – to containing and nourishing it and so I wanted to take on what I thought was a logical next step: conceive and maybe exhaust death. Outlast it. Again, this is boy thinking. So I learned this trick, this mental trick. I could imagine death, summon it like a mental shroud. Pretend that I was gone, no longer alive, and see what the world, this space, would be without me."

~ dowels of weeds poke through cement; a hallway under siege by vines jamming through a partially closed door; wisteria easing itself down from high broken windows, scouting the way in for thicker branches to reclaim ~

"And finally this fragile, blank composure took over. It could go on for days. Even when I went to find something to eat. Outside, walking in the streets, I told myself I didn't exist and I was free to see people not notice me. I was a ghost drifting behind restaurants, sifting through their garbage. A hungry little angel of death no one ever saw pass by. It was pretty thrilling not existing but being alive to it.

"Finally, it came to this. There was this time, mid-summer, I think, when a few of the boys decided they wanted to make a bomb. They went to find and steal the ingredients. Some of the girls headed out on their own excursion, a concert in the desert or something. I stayed. No one asked me to come, which was fine, because I was deep into this experience any way. I would be the dead presence left behind in the warehouse, is how I thought of these moments alone.

"And soon, as if I called her or she just gravitated to me, there was this girl, a small girl, dirty, and probably not – really and truly – mentally sound, who came back to where we were after months of being away. She'd come and gone before. No one really cared, much less about her.

"Any way, it might have been raining out too. She shuffled in from the far end. She had climbed the stairs to our floor, crossed this enormous space we had taken over, as if she were moving only to keep from falling over. She seemed even more lost than before, in bad shape. Cuts on her forehead, bruises on her neck and jaw. And, I found later, her forearm was swollen, with a bit of bone poking through the skin, as if she tried to protect herself from something heavy. She made her way to this small filthy alcove where I was sitting. She didn't really acknowledge me, but I got the feeling she knew I was in there.

"I sat there the whole time, even when she laid down next to me. I sensed right away what was going on and it seemed perfectly reasonable to let her die like that. I even allowed myself to get up and pull over some cardboard or a crappy blanket no one was using to cover her up because – and I was very rational about it – she was using me as a vigil. To help her on her way out of here.

"And that's how that poor body died."

A palled silence. "What did you do?" Carson's voice.

Humphrey nods, possibly remembering. "I thought about burying her. I was willing to do it. This creature had come to a place to die, found me there already and just laid down, as though I was the one she'd been looking for to watch over her death. It wasn't a special event. In fact, it was just very very empty. And very eternal, sitting next to her.

"And I thought, out of the blue: Enough. I've had enough. I thought, if I was able to provide her with non-interference over her death, I could give her every deathly impulse I had and she would take it with her. I gave it to her with a kiss. I bent and covered her mouth with mine and blew. And then kissed her. It was a bleak, mutual compassion."

Fade up, the photograph of young Humphrey dispensing hate to Carson and his camera, being found.

* * * * *

# Part Seven

In which Humphrey explains his experiments in squalor, the priest who led him out of it, and

what their relationship led to; including Father Solano, the development of a devotional

art lend-lease program, and lots of questioning of faith in the monastery

The photograph of Humphrey gives way to another one, a picture of a man in jeans and black sweater among a sidewalk encampment of street kids.

"The death of the girl, this is how you found or met Peter?" Carson asks.

"I already knew who he was. But that's right."

Like a teacher consciously working with hipness, the man lays on the sidewalk, propped on an elbow, his back against a wall papered with torn bills, petting one of the kids' pit bulls. He is surrounded by filthy clothes, and a farrago of debris and personal items, camped in their camp. The only one standing, shielding a match from the wind, a little outside the camp, is pierced and filthy Humphrey.

Carson zooms patiently on the man visiting the street kids.

"He was just Father Peter, then, to you."

"Correct. He would come around, check on kids sleeping on the street, the runaways, the homeless, even us, the anarchist diehards, the trouble makers. Though not very often. We liked to chase him away. Or they did. It always surprised me how glad I was to see him.

"Even though, at the same time, I was – literally – aglow in this perfect little kiln I made for myself. I was still in love with hate. Pure hate and glad of it. But he didn't try to soften it or dilute it, never tried. I remember congratulating myself that this handsome, interesting man was actually impressed with this state I made for myself.

"It doesn't seem likely that a priest would be impressed by someone's hate," Carson adds.

"No, no it doesn't. But it felt like he did. That is – I thought he was giving that approval to me, even if he wasn't."

"Sounds like crush logic."

Carson catches Humphrey – it makes Humphrey chuckle and relaxes his austerity. "Well, priests, teachers, anyone with true authority, you know, is good at bringing that out. A well-meaning con, yes."

Still grinning, he dips his head and reels it all back in. It takes a few moments. When he returns, his eyes are slightly wider, softer. "But inch by inch he was leading me somewhere else, where ..." he pauses, easing the words out one by one, "....Where, rather than being this body on fire, a wild fire at that, without any kind of sentience, Peter taught me to grab a hold of that fire with both hands. Pat it down, like ...." his face loosens slightly, a self-conscious raise of the eyebrows, ".... in his words, Prometheus.

"And, I didn't completely realize it at the time, but that was my task in the alcove. Seeking that balance and control. And is probably why I went to him before anyone else, about the girl. I remember finding him, in his office, reading and with this terrific, upright detachment, I said, 'A girl's died. Next to me.' "

A remembering pause. "Leaving her was more difficult than I thought it would be. I was afraid for her, leaving her. Actually I was afraid of leaving what I'd made of her.

"Any way, I was there in his office and I wanted him to be impressed with my resilience, to have been next to someone and let them die and to speak of it naturally, candidly. I still don't know why he didn't assume I was the one who killed her."

A photograph, a newspaper photo, from outside an abandoned warehouse. The coroner's van is partially out of frame, cop cars nearby. A couple kids running away, more being herd-ed by cops, yelling at the cops. Peter, hands on hips, watching from the side.

"Did you ever learn who she was?"

"There was an investigation, of course. Peter and one of the detectives hunted for next of kin. I told them no one knew her and I didn't want to find out her name, though all along I kept expecting they would. So I kept waiting for that moment. But it never came. She was never found out.

"Except, the other thing that happened that – when I walked to tell Peter, I also reviewed in my mind how I was destroying the squat, that group. I full of purpose regarding that. As if I alone had decided that now was the time to destroy all that. That I would be persona non grata to the other kids. And I was."

"But you didn't immediately leave the streets."

"No, not right away. I think I found a couple places by myself, or lived behind a soup kitchen or something. But I kept going back, kept going back to see Peter. Then started to work around the church, help him on his rounds. And always talking. Talking, talking."

A short video image, slowed to a mesmerizing crawl, in the poor, orangey candle light of a sanctuary somewhere. Peter and Humphrey sitting side by side. Peter looking watchfully as Humphrey, short hair mushrooming from his head, leans forward, head down, arms triangulated on his knees. Peter runs his fingers over Humphrey's head in a single petting motion. The touch sends Humphrey out of his crouch, back against the pew they are sitting in, a smile opening on his face.

Carson narrates: "This is one of the few images he's shown me. My guess is he thinks it says what he wants said about their relationship. It goes without saying that Peter figures prominently, intimately, in my brother's life. Not the least being a guide wire to where he is right now.

"I don't know much else to describe Humphrey's relationship with Peter, Father Peter Giles. He declines over and over again to say more, and I'm often left to my imagination. But to me, I think they enjoyed one of those rare charismatic relationships you only hear about."

A found moment of monastical light in Humphrey's Mashipan cell. Then a slow move to four crosswise photographs hung on the wall next to his bunk: the top one, of Peter; the bottom, of Humphrey and Peter together. To the left and right, two portraits of men not Humphrey or Peter. But we home in on the broad kind smile of Peter.

"Despite my brother's circumspection, though, I should be more clear and concise. Especially since I met Peter and visited them occasionally.

"Peter was a Jesuit priest, with extended missions to Africa and South America. He grew up in Seattle and eventually returned there. Which is where he met this man, Father Max Lincoln."

Carson slides the camera down and left to the photo of Father Max: dark, sharp like Anthony Perkins. "Together, Max and Peter started the outreach that led them into the lives of Seattle runaways and squatters. That eventually led Peter to Humphrey. While Peter was working his way into Humphrey, a soul saving way, Humphrey was doing the same to Peter. And away from Max."

The bottom photo on Humphrey's wall is a photograph of Peter relaxing on a tidy mid-century mustard couch, his legs on a glass and brass coffee table, reading. Behind is a wall of books. Humphrey, his head on Peter's lap, sleeps with a book on his chest. We don't stay here; a dozen more photos of Humphrey and Peter flow on, as if wherever they went, another photographer discovered them together, in soup kitchens, libraries, hallways, at dining tables, in groups, alone. Reading, studying.

"As with any new relationship, Humphrey was dazzled by anything associated with Peter. Especially his faith. For a little while he enjoyed, even accepted I think, the pageantry of the liturgy. Peter had found work in a large, wealthy congregation and Humphrey never missed a mass Peter led. The depth of Catholic theology, its careful scholarship, amazed him. But just as quickly, he tossed the orthodoxy aside once he discovered the early Christian apocrypha, the Gnostic and other heretical writings, Byzantine mysticism, the early theological arguments. Anything which challenged, ran counter to or was banished from modern Roman Catholic doctrine was fascinating.

"Which might have been his way not to lose himself entirely in religion, faith being something my brother continues being suspicious of. But he was vigorously devoted to whatever ideas Peter had for aid or good works. Organic soup kitchens. Bedside readings in prison hospitals. Difficult return visits to the anarchists and street kids. Shelters for women and children.

"So while Peter pulled Humphrey toward social engagement, at a more gradual pace, I think Humphrey led Peter to renunciation."

Carson lingers on a photo of Humphrey and Peter sitting on a rock, shirts off, vividly talking. Humphrey picks up where he left off.

"One of our favorite pastimes was fine-tuning a plan, the ultimate mission. Waiting for a train, going up an elevator, one of us would say 'convert derelict buildings into free housing', or 'organic farms for shelters,' or 'teenage health care without parental involvement.' That sort of thing."

"Did anything come out of this?"

For the first time, Humphrey allows himself a little sentimentality. "One of us would get excited. And then usually it was me who'd look a little more closely into it. And inevitably I'd find that these were being done already, or someone tried it and it didn't work, or if it did, it wasn't always in the church.

"Which usually was Peter's directive. He wanted us to work them through the church. To bring meaningful, contemporary insights of charity and social justice into the church. And more and more, that was something I didn't want to do. To do these things on behalf of the church. Any church."

"Why?"

A Humphrey-sized pause. "The lazy answer is, oh, the bureaucracy. Monumental bureaucracy. Many well-intentioned religious people stop there. But I found, and became leery of and frustrated by, the inevitable co-optation of whatever effort someone makes by the church. Any church, any institution. If you want to feed the poor it has to be through this institution, with its bylaws and logos and doctrines. When it comes to a church, that is their core operation: to spread doctrine, like a brand, through the good efforts of others.

"Also, and not to be overlooked: Peter's Roman Catholic Church would never allow the kind of kind of partnership we had in mind, let alone what we enjoyed in our home. And converting to Catholicism for me was – is – unthinkable.

"He had gotten very good at accepting what he could from his church. And ignoring the rest. But to me, the Catholic church is – " he leans back into his chair. This is Humphrey's favorite act of mischief, unveiled: "I assigned my own anathema to the Catholic church."

Carson expects to hear more but that's it. "Based on ...?"

Humphrey answers as if this were obvious.

"That for whatever ideals it professes, the church is antithetical to them by its ... structure. Structure assumes institution, institution supplants the idea it embodies. Ideas are alive, proof of energy. But an idea no longer exists once it is institutionalized or made into doctrine. That Christianity should exist as the Catholic Church is eternally contrary to itself and thereby abominable.

"Two things happen when you provide charity or relief or aid or just a helping hand: one, is that another person is helped. And two, that transaction occurs between two humans, one to another. It is a benefit to both. That is the highest calling of any human life. But not so when one party is an agent of an institution. An institution contains an agenda that is separate from the act of charity.

"Performing any of these works and allowing the church – again, any church, any orthodoxy, any religion – to receive benefit, I wanted to avoid that more than anything."

Off camera Carson quips, "Peter could tolerate a lot."

And with all seriousness, Humphrey answers, "Yes. He could."

Turning back again to the four photos on Humphrey's wall and another slow push toward Peter's gentle handsomeness, Carson says "Whatever their plans were, they never had a chance to enact them. Peter died six years after my brother left the street, from cancer."

A photo, fluorescently green-tinged and uncertain, peeking from a distance in a hospital corridor at Humphrey stopped, grieving, a large bony hand covering his face, the other holding a paper bag, a lunch bag made silly under the circumstances, as if he'd gone to the deli only to come back too late. Someone unidentified is holding him, tentatively.

"Like my brother's reticence over their relationship, he keeps his thoughts about Peter's death to himself."

* * *

From Peter's photo on the wall, we slide down and across to the fourth photo, the right arm of Humphrey's four portrait cross. It is of an older, firmly unperturbed, shiny-headed man with thick eyelashes above bulging corrective lenses that reduce but do not hide the directness of his stare.

"It happened to be at Peter's funeral where Humphrey first met Father Archibald Solano, the force behind Mashipan. Father Archibald and Peter knew each other from Peter's work in South America, and Father Archibald had just assumed the role of abbot at what was then called the Mashipan Mountain Monastery of Saint Luke the Younger."

The grounds and details of Mashipan, its buildings, its stillness, its windy oblique stake on the mountain.

"It was a monastery for roughly a eighty years. Then the church gave up on it, leasing it as a sanitarium. By the 1950s, it was abandoned. Available to the first disenfranchised, heretical man of God who wanted it."

Video footage of Solano on a Swedish talk show in the still mod, but also slightly hungover, counterrevolutionary, early 1980s. Solano is stately, dressed in a white and gold clerical gown while the host, longhaired and bearded in a blue suit with wide lapels, is achingly serious.

"Mashipan," Solano tells his interviewer, "is not the first and it will not be the last instance of a community of human beings formed because its members share a supernaturally held belief. In this case, a belief that it is their own humanity which is responsible for the suffering of the world, but is, also, the relief of that suffering. Many souls, acting as one, to help many souls.

"Where we are different, at Mashipan, is our seeking for refuge. We are eager for the monasticism of the earliest apostles. But a monasticism which does not require any allegiance to or patronage from an organizing, authoritarian institution, the church. A church which is an example of the order of things that needs overthrowing."

The host can't help poking: "What is the difference then between your order and, for example, the Red Brigade?"

Solano is dignified. Pleased to answer. "Mashipan is devoted to two things: aiding and alleviating the poor and oppressed of their earthly burdens. And two, Christian-style fellowship. Fellowship under the name of Jesus Christ. Involving Christian faith, though not allied to a given church or essential belief. Other than its own fellowship under Christ."

Images and footage of sumptuous St. Peter's Basilica, Pope John XXIII, and the gathering of thousands of pounds of cotton and muslin robes, rochets, albs, mitres and zuchettos worn by dignified, deliberatively moving and mutually blessing bishops and Curia. Because some of them don the severe black frame glasses of mid-century company men, daddies and generals, this can only be Vatican II, 1963ish.

"Historically," Carson says, "Archibald Solano was in the right place at the right time to be a questioning, near heretical monk. The social justice wing of Catholicism was all the rage, especially in the poorest countries, where bishops and their priests took to heart the Church's renewed interest in helping the poor and afflicted, regardless even of their own religion.

A leather bound book, written in gold leaf: Gaudium et Spes. And the resurrected footage of a priest reading aloud, I assume, parts of it in English:

"The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ....

"Hence this Second Vatican Council ... now addresses itself without hesitation, not only to the sons of the Church and to all who invoke the name of Christ, but to the whole of humanity. For the council yearns to explain to everyone how it conceives of the presence and activity of the Church in the world of today...."

And here, as the priest continues, Carson throws in for good measure not only more photos of Father Solano – at work in the fields and huts of farmworkers, arrested by police in Mexico City during the student riots – but other liberation theologists: Rev. Gustavo Guttierez in a library, Daniel Berrigan led away at a Vietnam protest, the Maryknoll Sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clarke in Central America, Desmond Tutu – who I thought was Anglican, and so maybe added for ecumenicism's sake? – preaching at a Soweto rally. And Archbishop Oscar Romero, alive and slain in his church.

"Therefore, the council focuses its attention on the world of men, the whole human family along with the sum of those realities in the midst of which it lives; that world which is the theater of man's history, and the heir of his energies, his tragedies and his triumphs; that world which the Christian sees as created and sustained by its Maker's love ...."

Back to Swedish TV and Father Solano. The voluptuously haired, fat-tied host says, "I have an article here, written by one of your critics, allow me to read it. Which states 'contentious desires for progress, modernity, and clerical reform advanced by Father Solano and others cannot be achieved while simultaneously yearning for the decentralized splintering into factions and cells resorted to by the earliest Christian groups and today's Marxist revolutionaries.'

"Professor Ratzinger, goes on to add, 'The persecution and elimination of autonomous sects, made vulnerable by their contradictions and mortal idiosyncrasies, compelled the early church away from heterodoxy toward universality, so that it may secure and deliver Christ's message for the world. It thus rescued the holiness of God's word from untethered sects whose endless debating sent them further into hallucinations and heresy and away from Christ. This is not the direction Archibald Solano and his minion are determined to emulate.' "

Solano smiles. "We are today blessedly rich in the knowledge and awareness of the grace of Jesus Christ. There is no poverty in the world for that. That is not the poverty we wish to cure. It is up to us, men and women, not to spread the words of Christ again and again until they mean nothing. It is up to us to act with it in our hearts, as a sword and a plow in preference to the economically poor and afflicted. The church's hierarchy is simply too large to fit into the fields or the homes where the poor dwell."

"Still," Carson resumes, holding a while on Solano's tenderly direct and articulate televised likeness, "someone in the church hierarchy, under the freewheeling sway of Vatican II granted Solano permission to re-access Mashipan and steer it accordingly. It may have also been a way to grant him his own mountaintop banishment.

"Which after awhile attracted people like my brother."

Back to Humphrey, in his cell, speaking to Carson.

"Father Solano attended Peter's funeral and I had a chance to meet him. His presence there was striking. Gentle and cultivated. I'd heard about Mashipan from Peter. Some of the revolutionary priests, revolutionary at the time, we were friends with them and some had chosen to go there rather than continuing with direct action.

"I started correspondence with him. And at first all I could tell him was how empty I was. Bereft. And soon I began to push very hard on him to let me in. To Mashipan.

" 'What do you hope out of a monastic life?' he'd ask. Am I clear on the idea of it as a journey rather than an escape? As a service to others rather than a retreat from them? And I'd answer yes. Yes to all that. And he, Father Archibald, I won't say patiently – he doggedly – called me on every one of my answers: what are you agreeing to? Tell me what you are agreeing to.' "

Carson asks: "Did you know yourself?"

Humphrey equivocates. "Yes and no. Which later on was a problem. But after several rebuffs from Solano, getting him to allow me to join Mashipan took on the form of an intellectual test. A game. Originally I started asking him for permission to join because of my grief. For Peter, for my loneliness. But then I decided: if this man really wants to know why I want to join, why I, a willfully destitute, overly educated – " he twirls his fingers up past his head like smoke " – fucked in the head son of the upper class is bothering him, is alternately begging for and intellectually playing with the limits to his theology, I would lay it on him. If he chickens out, the whole thing was wrong to begin with."

"So," Carson narrates, "my brother wrote him another letter."

Cut to a series of shots of Humphrey wearing glasses and standing, with one foot forward reading his letter. He rocks on his heels as he reads, with more animation than he's shown sitting down. Here is the boy on the hood of the car throwing stones at the police.

"...Even the most ascetic hermit, the most naked, hungry, unwashed man in a crevice in the desert – in fact he especially! – has an ego bulging in proportion to the extent of his asceticism. In other words, the ego of the dirty naked little mute in the desert is greater than all others because he says 'I will make myself so worthless to prove my devotion. I will handicap myself, God, I will give up everything, even You, to prove my devotion.'

"What I propose are two things: one, my service and two, my eremition. For the first, I do not propose a blind following of clerical orders and papal utterances. My service is a devotion to synthesizing and then dispensing the quality of love and compassion that you say comes from God. But without diluting it one second with preludes that it comes from God.

"For the second, let my monasticism be responsible for stopping the legacy of my bloodline. Stop it dead. Stop it from infiltrating society, insinuating its vein of materialism and aggression and empty appetite into a world that is already choking on the same veins from millions of others. To do what I can to improve that world, little by little, by my absence. Exist fully as the unaccounted-for outlier. The random particle of chaos that does good. From a long, unstaining distance."

When he's finished reading he lowers the letter and looks through the camera to Carson, his chest rising, excitedly.

Carson, almost flippantly, adds, "What my brother wanted is, well, impossibly self-canceling. You can't separate yourself from something and still have an impact on it. If you press him, he'll eventually agree with that. But it's an interesting notion. An idea maybe worth pursuing even when it falls apart. He calls it 'engagement through atonement.' Someone else might call it being sorry about something and trying to make up for it somewhere else."

Close up on Humphrey, seated in the interview. As Carson speaks, his camera holds on his brother long enough for us to scrutinize Humphrey's face as he listens to his younger brother's strained, even discomfited question. For his part, Humphrey's expression droops slightly, momentarily, listening. An instant of aging.

"You told me once your intention was to cut off this limb, your limb, from our family tree and end the dysfunction there. Offering no children to pass it along. First of all, I don't think we're that bad. There're certainly worse families. And secondly, you realize there have been many many men and women like you, hermits and suicides, through the centuries, right? And yet humanity just continues on, same as it ever was."

Humphrey repositions himself in his chair. But he realizes. He's heard this before.

"Engaging with atonement of course isn't new. That's just my term. And maybe atonement is presumptuous. Maybe it's absurd. In my case, stopping the blood line, like suicide, is possibly even violent, because its pre-meditated. That was Solano's opinion. But it still needs to occur in every generation.

"The trick, Father Archibald eventually said, after months and months of not hearing from him, is not to make the atonement destructive. Or even deliberately constructive. Just neutral. So that the intention of atonement lifts and the act of atonement remains. This leapt off the page at me. It was everything I'd always wanted to say, even when I was squatting and hating."

Over images of Humphrey performing chores and the necessary small jobs required of life in a monastery, Carson says: "When my brother says he wrote the founder of Mashipan, Father Archibald, presumptive letters asking for acceptance into monastic life, he doesn't say that he knew in his heart he would be accepted. Which he was, eventually. It's that he presumed he could reach or interact with Father Archibald in ways that others couldn't. That he would have a distinct station at Mashipan.

"Which, incredibly, he did. On his end, Father Archibald, found something in Humphrey that fit his model at Mashipan."

Grainy, sometimes blurry black and white photos of Mashipan brethren, attending mass, doling soup to the hungry somewhere other than Mashipan, sewing little tuffets and pillows and delivering them to a hospital. On one of the photos Carson lingers, a photo of two brothers at mass, looking over their shoulders with grainy disbelief? disdain? dubiousness? at the thin figure of Humphrey who leans languidly in the rear of the church, hands in pockets, dressed in black jeans and his black, army pre-issued, punk-ordained, tooth-soled boots.

"When Humphrey arrived, the monastic order was still intact. With a daily schedule, a series of liturgical activities, maintenance and chores, and one or two programs of Christian charity mixed with ministry. A small sewing operation, in which the brothers sewed little pillows and then sold them was in sluggish operation. My brother refused to participate in any of them. Older brothers and men of God were astounded not just by his laziness or apostasy, but Father Archibald's willingness even to allow someone like him among the pious. Let alone without insisting on any other duties from him."

"Even to the men who followed a very liberal, revolutionary priest like Solano, I was a problem. We may have had a lot in common politically, morally, but their faith and my absence of that faith got in the way of any collegiality. They were still convinced, perhaps not so much of their doctrines, but at least of the emblems or icons of their religion. Which usually is enough for some. But these men came here to contemplate every facet of their faith, with permission to jettison whatever facet that didn't work for them. That's why they were here. They came for that and found me."

"You teased them," Carson says. "About their faith."

"No not teased. I'd goad them into arguments, like, why is loving kindness or forgiveness the only vehicle to an afterlife? And why is there a redundancy like afterlife at all? Or I'd inundate them with questions about the catechism or the variations of apocalypse or Origen's transmigration of souls, all of which was settled in the third century. I must have been very annoying. It was more childishness. Of another order. To some, I was simply precocious or an acceptable autodidact, but I wasn't on their footing. Which I enjoyed. Tweaking them from below.

"But the whole time, Solano said nothing. At one point, Prior Dursilla, who was constantly hearing from several of the men, announced that enough objections had been heard that I was now considered a closed topic."

"He was pretty sympathetic to them, though."

Humphrey grins. "He was. And following orders I think. But I enjoyed how it required a formal action to declare I wasn't worth the effort. So, even though I was officially a novice, Dursilla announced, 'The subject entirely of postulant Humphrey Hancock is ex nunc clausa.

"Hearing this, one of the brothers, Brother Wilhelm, an older, let's say less robust questioner of authority, thought then that I was a postulant, that is, not really part of the Church or the order of St. Luke the Younger, or for that matter the Mashipan monastery itself. He said, 'if this is true, we must be reminded: Extra ecclesiam nulla salus. The old Church dictum, there is no salvation outside of the Church. Which meant, why were they letting in the draught, so to speak? Was I uninvited and therefore possibly anathema? At that point Father Archibald rose and said, because all is possible in God's universe, so is its negation. Therefore it was incumbent, following God's direction, for me to be here. As a negating element. And that was all he said about it. But that meant apostasy, heresy, bad thinking, all of that was allowable here. Sort of stunning when you think about it."

"And that was Solano's preference: no authoritative interference. Several of the men were actually elated with this pronouncement. And others, much less so. Even when you throw open the doors, sometimes people won't go through them.

Carson suggests: "Father Archibald reminds me of Bergman's God of silence. It can drive some people mad."

Humphrey obviously doesn't share his brother's obsession for cinema. He shrugs.

"The only other time he referred to me was to say, jokingly, I was there to test his faith, not theirs, and not to mind the rest."

"What did you think about it?"

"I was a little embarrassed that someone had to defend me, I think. A small growing pain. And slowly I realized more about what that meant. Because he, fairly, did not speak much to me either. His silence, as you put it, more or less condemned me, again and again, towards that solitary nihilism I thought I escaped from with Peter.

"Even though that was something you asked him for: solitary reflection."

"Correct. I was given what I asked for. And didn't want it. I avoided being alone, and instead sought out the others, to question them, bug them, however you want to put it. So I was again on my way to living a dancing, foolish half life of only questioning, without mercy or leniency. Plunged into this all-consuming self-regard. While all the others believed he was testing them with his silence on the topic of Humphrey Hancock, I eventually realized that overcoming or controlling this flailing around was Solano's intended lesson for me. He was an exquisite teacher."

* * *

Clips of Humphrey tuning, plucking haltingly, and finally playing (I had to look it up) a theorbo in the refuge of his cell. It's a hefty, fourteen-stringed lute, and probably stands about five feet. It is by all appearances very loud.

"According to Humphrey," Carson's narration adds, "What Father Archibald was also doing was waiting for my brother to find a way to fit in."

"One of the first things that happened when I came here," Humphrey says, over footage of his theorboic tinkering, "was realizing that my desire for solitary atonement was already waning. Even though it was a primary condition of my coming here. It was as if stepping onto this mountain satisfied everything I'd asked from Solano. I knew enough that I had to keep to it, mainly because I was skeptical of this supposed satisfaction. I thought, maybe there was something that could still be gained from living in solitary, meditative isolation. But at the same time I didn't see how I could go through that again.

"And, I didn't want to be entirely avoided or anathema to the life of Mashipan. Finding a way, bridging that, was a tough lesson. Wanting to be integral to something for the first time. Because I admired the men for their contemplative, meditational rigor, I wanted to help them, in whatever direction it could take. I really dwelt on that. And I started to remember how I did that with Peter, forming a relationship."

"What Humphrey came up with," Carson continues, "was assigning himself what he called artistic curatorial duties. He had found a way to appreciate Peter's religion by studying it. And so, without anyone's permission, he began gathering, archiving, and exhibiting Christian art, and music, too. Art which in its ancient day was meant to be devotional, which used its beauty and coherence to represent the divine. But, whose sorrows and joys, Humphrey felt, could be experienced by anyone without needing any underlying Christian ideas. They could be enjoyed as worldly sorrow, or worldly joy. Paintings honoring the Virgin became paintings honoring the wonder of biological, carnal motherhood. Motets exulting the death of Jesus become fragile songs of mourning and pity."

Photos of Humphrey typing on a wooden desk in the faint light of his cell; sitting on a stool at a payphone somewhere busy and secular and linoleum floored, like a library. At work on his curatorial calling.

"You can say it got started by boredom, my boredom of being here," Humphrey says."But I was curious, with a lot of time on my hands. So I started phoning or writing other monasteries, churches, seminaries, Catholic universities, all around the world. I ordered textbooks on the history of art, looked them over, and find something that interested me. I would go down to the bottom to the photo credit, find the name of the collection and then contact them. I would ask if they wouldn't mind sending us such and such painting or illuminated manuscript or icon or what have you, for devotional study and contemplation. And usually, that was all I needed to say."

Humphrey smiles at his own naivete. "That was what I thought that art was specifically for: literally, like a guide or instructional manual for devotion."

"How did they react? The people you called."

"Uncertain. Skeptical. Bureaucratic. At first. But somehow they would grasp what I was asking for and go along."

Of the photos and images of Humphrey among crates and boxes and ledgers recording shipping details and insurance, a short video clip stands out: standing among yet another shipment, he pulls a framed work with both hands out of a crate, carefully. The look on his face is astonishment. Someone off camera says "Oh my god," and the camera shakes a bit from tittering. Humphrey turns it to the camera, an exquisite gold leaf and lapis lazuli Madonna and Child, from who knows where or by whom. But with the lovely flat absence of perspective, it couldn't be any more recent than the 12 or 13th century.

"This is incredible," Humphrey says, though you're not too sure if he means the painting or that he's sorry he's gotten away with something.

"Something would make sense to a librarian or archivist, as if no one had ever asked to do this before and yet made a world of sense, and they would agree. So long as the destination of the art would be another monastery, they were fine with it. Eventually, the thinking became why not have a moving collection of Christian art, rotating from monastery to seminary to church and back again to support veneration, devotion, adoration, by the clergy? And just the clergy. After awhile, this intricate lending system started to develop."

"It reminds me of corporations who buy or lease incredible works of art, original Warhols or Renoirs or Pollocks just for their foyers or employee cafeterias," Carson says.

"Interesting. I didn't know that. But I can see that – so long as the art is for people we accept or understand. At least, that's how I think they understood this.

"Like I said, I was coming from this notion that if someone was going to concentrate their life on contemplating this one thing, this religion, especially one fragment of this religion, at the expense of everything else in this world, then there should be some aesthetic reward or challenge or representation, or just pleasure, involved. And I would try to make that happen for them.

"And yourself."

"And me. Especially me. I wanted to surround myself with these beautiful, out of reach things."

"At the same time," Carson explains, "or maybe because of this, a small renaissance began taking place among the brothers of Mashipan. The tuffets they made as a devotional craft and sold to the public for a few cents, were never really big enough to be used outside of a doll house originally. But they began to grow bigger, more ambitious."

A photo of the sewing shop, populated by tables of sewing machines and happy monks showing off their tuffets gives way to another picture, of a tuffet held in someone's palm, depicting the Flight to Egypt. The sewing is not great; Mary and Joseph and the donkey look like 8-bit video game characters. It's the next photo, of something the size of a body pillow, that's really stunning: a body-length huggable pillow of Jesus on the cross at Calvary, with incredible stitching and detail.

"Brothers not inclined to sew took on carpentry. Tables, hutches, prayer benches, alter pieces. And famously, this enormous ministerial chair, made for Father Archibald Solano, illustrated with scenes of the Temptation of Christ. Mashipan brothers were not without irony."

And there is the photo, of Father Archibald given the chair and his first test drive seating. It's a sweet, lively moment.

On Carson, in his brother's spare apartment. "You told me once that you began to lose interest in what was becoming a lively business, importing and exporting works of Christian art, because somehow it worked only when the loans went from one religious place to another."

"That's what happened. They already knew they could make decent enough money with loans, permanent loans to museums, or selling these works of art to collectors. But because of that, there was this understanding that we or I could not involve the public. It was a conflict of interest. Meaning their interest. Not that they admonished me or threaten me about it. There was simply this understanding. Don't invite the public.

"Which I ignored, mostly. Though that was hard, getting these things to the public. Bringing people up here was impossible, mainly because the rules forbade it. But bringing the art down to the valley was also really hard, even though we tried it. Once or twice."

A couple of these events, reminiscent of a poorly attended episode of Antiques Roadshow: people milling around wooden icons on a card table; a small family, with kids standing in front of a painting propped on a chair in what looks like a high school gymnasium. Other pieces recline in the background on a bleacher while a small group of musicians play early instruments at half-court, with a mascot of a high velocity bearcat dribbling a basketball beneath them.

"But mainly, for a number of years, the art and ancient codices of music and manuscripts came and went mainly for us. And then more than not – just for me. A pageant of beautiful of pieces of art just ... for me."

The painting of Fra' Angelico's Saint Lawrence Receiving Treasures of the Church which, as the camera pulls back, is being held like a trophy fish by Humphrey in Mashipan. It is another astonishment, considering this is a nine by seven fresco held at the Vatican.

"You must have finally made a good impression on the brothers here," Carson asks.

Humphrey doesn't appear to take much from that. "I don't know if they were all that impressed. Some probably were. But at the same time, I was still a disruptive presence here. When certain works came in from the Vatican, because they came from the Vatican ... that started to be a problem."

"How?"

"Well, though many of these men were liberal, it's liberalism in the sphere of a conservative church. For others who were truly liberal, they were thoroughly liberal and suspicious of authority in a hierarchical institution. So when these things started coming from the Vatican, some of them began wondering what was going on. Nervously. What was I doing here? Who was this guy with a direct line to the Vatican? I was accused of trafficking, money laundering. I told them no one is more surprised here by my luck than I was. At the same time, the authorities in the Vatican, they also grew very suspicious."

"I think you told me they were alarmed."

"They were. Completely."

Back to the beautiful fresco of San Lorenzo as well as a short parade of other Vatican pieces: Humphrey with panels of Bernardo Daddi's Stories from the Life of St. Stephen at his feet; holding up a Faberge egg depicting Mary at the burial cave; cataloging at his desk with Carravaggio's Entombment leaning against a table leg; a few of the brethren holding and admiring a (13th c.?) processional cross.

"I began receiving anxious letters from my contact, Mr. Borragio, in the Vatican's General Services Administration, all of a sudden requesting copies of archdiocesan or pontifical permission. And when I replied I had none, Cardinal Costanza came onto the scene. He began contacting me and Solano, alternately threatening and pleading to stop what we were doing, though he wasn't entirely certain what it was."

Back to Humphrey who apparently is still amused. "It was a scandal, or it turned into one. Newspapers. Articles. Vatican tribunals. Everything, the art exchange program, then Solano's appointment and ultimately Mashipan's incorporation, it all started to unravel. At least as far as Rome's relationship to us.

"Which couldn't have been a surprise. Or really a big deal, right? You were all going in that direction any way."

"We were. For our part, we were already debating defection. Though that was coming internally, of our own doing. But certainly, because of the Vatican's near hysteria over the art, coupled with men's concerns here that someone here was in direct communication with the Vatican, there was ... much worry and suspicion. To put it mildly."

"All because of items like this," Carson says, over another of Angelico's St. Lawrence Vatican frescoes, the Arraignment Before Valerianus, in a photo, being admired by two or three brothers and Solano himself.

* * * * *

# Part Eight

In which Mashipan's slow defection from the Church commences, because of household

chores, and its new mission comes to pass; also, Carson's Christmas abruptly ends,

so does his movie (though much less abruptly), and also this story.

Images of monastic life at Mashipan: monks and novices dining, at prayer, in the kitchen, raking leaves, sewing; walking, reading, singing.

"To say a monastery is like a family, I think, trivializes the relationships and the idea it upholds," Humphrey says. "It is a unity under a single idea or mission, composed of members struggling to maintain that mission on their own. It can be political. It can be loving. Despite itself. It can be a laboratory of minds."

Back to Humphrey and Carson, in Humphrey's room. "Before we go further, can you talk a little about some of the brothers here? Many of them seemed very appealing."

"Many were."

"Like, I recall Father Simon. I remember he liked baseball and opera, which I couldn't make sense of."

"Well, really, he's an example of the dynamic here. As I said, some of the men enjoyed the freedom Solano gave them, being given permission to question any or all facets of their faith. And as that gathered steam, some had some trouble. It doomed many into a cycle of questioning everything and not just their faith: their outlook on life, their morals, their sexuality, their choice of coming to Mashipan. Which to several, like Simon, was a last, clerical resort. They were arriving at conclusions they didn't expect or want. Simon, Father Simon Huston, reached a point where the primacy of a Christ became an impossible idea. He left it all behind. He turned agnostic. He lost a lot of weight, he became a flight attendant, he went to see the world."

"Oh. Wow."

Over images of Mashipan and photos of its earliest members, Humphrey continues. Many of the faces and expressions evolve from sainted kindliness to a weary strain to coolness, even upset.

"Brothers left often. You might say even fled. At the same time word was getting around about what was going on here. Not just in the Catholic domain but the ecumenical. For those who left, there were others who replaced them."

"Women."

"Women. Solano made the decision to let in women after awhile and of course the entire dynamic changed. For the good, I think. Though it took a while. It was fairly disruptive. Such a complete change in ... the air. The structure. The order of things. In fact, despite all the heresies being entertained here on the mountain, and the scandals around my art exchange, the presence of women completely upset the archdiocese. And then of course Rome."

A photo of meeting in Solano's office, he in his ministerial chair, a few brothers and for the first time, two women, seated, discussing. Carson narrates: "Meanwhile, as if an unspoken spell or virus crept among the order, monks like my brother began one by one discussing and petitioning Father Archibald for the freedom of direction and action they knew was occurring off the mountain, among the nonreligious.

"One issue, really the first, that came up right away," Humphrey explains, "was introduced by Sister Helene Millay. She came from running Catholic Charities and within two or three days, she raised the issue of collective charity. What is Mashipan doing? Shouldn't we be doing this this and this? She was swift and precise and threw many of us for a loop. Even though you could argue that what she was asking about should have been at the very core of what Mashipan was about."

"What was the delay? Why weren't – "

"I can only say it had been pushed aside by the scholarship, the questioning, the intellectualism. That was making our doing anything more than giving away our pillows or working a soup kitchen just too daunting. It's hard to do both, think and act."

"Still, even before Helene came, we were hearing about NGOs and other secular groups doing essentially the church's work without need for approval or direction by any church at all, or even government. Groups of lay people, atheists included, devoted to alleviating the burdens of the poor without the underpinnings of spiritual doctrine. Quote unquote normal people were engaged in acts of charity, beneficence, assistance and building support structures like financial endowments to do just that. Fundamental human morality was all the inspiration needed. And that fed our intimidation. And a growing sense of futility."

Over the photo of what appears to be a very tense supper table, Carson says, "According to my brother, all of this came to a head around the time he was planning a performance of Bach's cantata, Ich Habe Genug."

Humphrey in his cell: "I – well, one day – we – found ourselves arguing whether it was better that the contemplation of life resulted in compassionate service to others or the creation of art. These were the kinds of things we would discuss. This time, the discussion started because I was trying to locate a day in the calendar to have period instruments arrive and a place to house the singers, coming in from St. Olaf's, who would perform a Bach concert for us.

"There wasn't a place to put the singers and the day I had in mind for the performance was supposed to be a day for sending blankets and food and the pillows, our famous handmade pillows, to Sri Lanka. An earthquake there killed, I recall, perhaps 3,500 people. A terrible destruction. On top of a civil war that already destroyed their civil society. Certainly a time for action, as Sister Helene saw it.

"And for some reason, over a dinner, which was no longer a silent meal, after years of sometimes agonizing arguments, arguments in which brothers would break down or leave or even renounce their faith, for some reason this one discussion over where the singers would stay cast a pall over us. Lasting for months."

A long pause. Humphrey waits for Carson to say something, until he adds, "And we didn't have the performance. We just couldn't. Art, of any kind, just seemed terribly trivial.

"In fact, it opened this enormous predicament for me, and for others. Which essentially was, what are we doing here?

"How did that argument go? What were the steps, the lines of inquiry?

"Well, for me, the first step I suppose was wondering, what was the point of all this art? It had been my way, my hold on adopting or adhering to a Christian life, studying the art, listening to the music, reading the theologies. My Christian life was not at all based on faith. The faith didn't mean anything to me.

"So, I asked myself: if the art is only a fragile take on this religion, that what was I doing with the religion.

"Clearly you weren't the only one who went through this. Others went through the same process.

"They did. And now it was my turn, I suppose. I was being confronted through the one thing that made me feel like a Christian. So I reminded myself: being a Christian was something I chose. I wasn't born into it. I didn't feel it, you know, viscerally. In fact, I have all these other religions, more or less alive in the world, to choose from. And, when I looked at that, I thought, well, in fact, they have tenets and insights not too divergent from Christianity: peace, forgiveness, justice, compassion, love. Even everlasting life. There are not many religions which say, ignore peace, who cares about compassion, and when you die that's it, good luck.

"Which reacquainted me with the role of death. In everything. All these virtues, love, peace, compassion, justice, they all eventually lead to the question, how do you want to understand death? Because how you want to understand death can help you chose your religion, if you want one.

"Except in my case, death is not a mystery. At least not one you should concern yourself with in this life, because you'll never be given a useful answer. It's almost pointless. I don't even feel the need to ask the question. Even if my answer is 'I'll be given a hundred virgins,' or 'I'll see my loved ones again,' or 'my body will be whole again' or 'I'll get to come back to this world as another creature,' it's just a guess. And depending on how creative and pleasing that guess is, you begin to verge on storytelling. On art.

Carson asks: "So choosing a religion is a matter of taste."

"That's right. How do you like the ceremonies, the clothes, the traditions? The art? Hinduism might just be for you.

"I fell in love with Christianity because of its history, its theologic constructs, and its art. Finding the divine in beauty and representation was my transit to peace, which would set me free to help others. That was the core of my belief, I got from Peter, reinforced by Father Archibald.

"But reducing that down it became: satisfy me first, then I can help others. And put like that, having this art around me, even sharing it with others, it was really, obviously secondary to coming to the assistance of others. Shamefully obvious.

"Any way, among the community here, this discussion of art over action reignited old questions, old inquiries. And I wasn't alone asking this, making this connection. Father Henry, who had been a priest leading large congregations, who had raised money for magnificent organs in desperately poor communities, and always said he felt ambivalent about the priorities that entailed, came to this question: If the art exists to aid or luxuriate in or even embodies your contemplation, what was the material of your contemplation?"

Here Carson slides in what you might consider found examples of the material of contemplation (a sequence reminiscent of the found materials of contemplation you see in a Terrence Malick film): shafts of light bounded by stone walls; wind playing through branches; a monk with eyes closed; the moon and its likeness on still water; a universe of dust motes; dawn over the murk of a swamp; a woman descended into prayer; receding mountains of clouds; the patient footsteps of a man walking a carpeted, candlelit labyrinth. Humphrey continues over this.

"Productive contemplation requires peace and separation. Solitude. Especially if you're contemplating life through the teachings and example of Jesus. That is such an exquisite filter to work through, you need peace and patience to approach any kind of understanding of the question. What did Jesus mean? What did he mean?

"But instead of ever truly dwelling on this – and I can't say I did – Jesus has always been a bystander in my Christianity, admittedly – I was starting to see that living by the teachings and example of Jesus, or anyone, or any idea, means deliberately adding a burden to everything you do, even contemplation. In contemplation, or call it prayer or meditation, nothing should be in the way. Some prefer to chant or recite or add something to concentrate on. But I never understood that. Isn't having something added to your prayer exactly what you're trying to overcome? Having something that stands in the way between you and perfect living silence? Because the perfect living silence could be, in fact, the manifest of the divine.

"God is silence."

"Yes. Well, sometimes. But that is certainly what the religious aspirant ultimately yearn for. The presence of the divine, the deity, with you, sharing time and space. Hopefully forever. Anything beyond that desire is just a rule. Or an artifact.

"So the question became, and Brother Anush broached this, why meditate on a search for the divine at all? If by some miracle the divine descends, what then? When no one answered, I thought of Sister Mallora, having come all the way from a church in Aleppo, Syria. And I asked this: isn't the purity of your prayer or contemplation at stake? Even if you rid yourself of society and responsibility and life's distracting pleasures and pains and come to pray in a precious environment like Mashipan, what does it mean if your contemplation isn't limitless? Meaning, why does your meditative prayer have to first include thoughts of Jesus and God and the Spirit or even the divine?"

"I don't understand. Are you saying Jesus was getting in the way of your own religion?"

Humphrey obviously gets uncomfortable with reductive thinking; it shows. But he finds a way to agree. "To a degree. I'll tell you how this got started."

Photographs of Archibald Solano in the pulpit. Reading and writing at his desk from his enormous ministerial chair. We also see more of the sacred spaces within Mashipan, tidy untouched sanctuaries, hushed rooms, naves and apses empty of whispers.

"To begin with, these were the very reasons Father Archibald called to us originally. To find Jesus in our hearts and then use that energy to go out and do His works. First, contemplate and find the divine, then go out. And like I said, that's what I believed in too. Not only did we have our rooms, our cells. We had small chambers, vestibules, with candles and kneeling benches. And we had the chapel and of course our basilica where we held mass. Every opportunity to sit quietly with God, was here.

"There was one particular vestibule on the far side of the basilica, the corner of the entire compound, which I discovered early on and would use as a retreat, to get away from the few remaining formalities of life in this monastery. When Sister Mallora found it, she liked it to. We devised a small a schedule for us to share it, but soon everyone else wanted their turn in the vestibule. It was very quiet and serene, with a tiny view of the mountains through a small window, but it became as famous as a single bathroom.

"One day, we met to discuss drawing up a formal schedule. Sister Mallora joined in, already made aware of the popularity of the vestibule because she noticed that the hinge and door jamb was broken. She is the soul of gentleness but is also very crafty and she asked, could we all avoid going in there please until the door is fixed, counting on the fact that it would take a few days to get around to it, a common result for chores like these. But for the first time in the life of this monastery, there was an upswell of interest to repair the door of the most favored vestibule. Nine or ten people came with tools, but it became obvious that the job only needed two or three people, and they drifted away.

"So there we were, myself and Brother Anush, Brother Ted and Brother Emile. At one point I stopped, with phillips screwdriver in one hand, screws clenched in my teeth, holding an enormous door, three inches of oak, while Brother Ted and Brother Emile, with his bad back, were on their knees moving it into position on the floor. And I could see suddenly what I was doing. The door was there to close in a room at the furthest corner of the monastery, to shut out – to shut out, of all things, a monastery which was already on top of a forbidding mountain, which had been founded on that spot to remove itself from the world. Brother Ted asked why I stopped, what was the matter, and I told him what I was thinking. The four of us stopped and sat down on the floor, backs to the walls, considering the absurdity of it all. And then left the door as it was.

"Why was retreating to silence the idea? To be with God, sure, but even that suddenly seemed greedy. Undignified. As selfish or distracting or trivial or grandiose as making art.

"If it was to find the right Christian or spiritual impulse well, didn't I already know what Jesus says? It's not a mystery. Love thy neighbor. Do unto others. The Lord's prayer. Physician, heal thyself. It is easier for camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man ascending to heaven. Beyond that, much of what he says concerns internal Judaic debate or are parables expressing political code words of the day, or descriptive visions of heaven popular at the time. It was his action, going to death for others, aiding the poor and sick, that was the point. We who study Christianity know this. So why was this retreat from action necessary?

"And suddenly, to me, with the candles and the cross and the velvet lined prayer bench in the vestibule and the stained glass, I wondered what exactly was Christianity for? That's quite a leap, I know, because of a little household chore. But outside of dedicating ourselves to the crucifixion as an example of selflessness, the rest that we were living by came from the ancient precepts of a church which was locked in nostalgia for a view of the universe 2000 years old. Whose religion – again, beyond the crucifixion – was conceived and refined over and over by arguments and politics and theologies of the day, winnowed and vetted by men no longer alive to further agendas already forgotten. And while the tenets of this religion remain valuable and nurturing, on the whole, this religion we inherited is being asked to solve problems created under conditions only relevant today.

"This was part of the problem, and something Solano had naturally investigated years before. And was fighting tooth and nail with the Vatican almost on a daily basis. When he wanted women to participate and lead with us, the Vatican said no. When he told them homosexuals were present in Mashipan, he was told to banish them. Banish. As if there were a desert here to send them out into. He was engaged with this thinking every day, just to keep his community going. I suddenly saw what he was seeing.

"This isn't that radical, asking this. Reformers ask this. Atheists forever ask this. It only seems revolutionary when you are supposed to be a devotee to a religion and you are at the same time talking yourself out of being devotional.

"I mentioned this revelation to others, expecting another round of acrimony. And instead there was, well, stunned agreement, from a few. Mallora, in her quiet way, I remember nodding, with relief. The few of us, we felt like we'd woken up. And when we realized this, we didn't think oh this is terrible! It seems to me we thought, what a relief! To identify one of the causes of sorrow in life – organized religion – and begin the work to circumvent it. Sitting next to Mallora was Helene Millay. Who, the next day, announced she had decided to take off the cross around her neck but still desire living and working here as a base for her work. Not as a bride to Jesus, but as a woman. That was the start."

We linger on Humphrey accumulating, perhaps reliving, the memory. Followed by a photo of the stout, enduring stone cross outside positioned to oversee the valley and the wide separation of mountainsides.

Carson: "After years of discontent and discouragement from the church, Father Archibald began to wrench his community from the see of the Church. Defection is a long, heretical and administrative process. The Church doesn't even allow such a thing any more. But the day eventually came."

There is one final photo of Solano into which we move, studiously, solemnly. With help from Humphrey and two other younger, stronger monks, he is heaving his ministerial chair into an enormous bonfire in the courtyard of Mashipan, surrounded by the applauding community he had gathered.

"My understanding is that the church all but retreated. Cut its losses," Carson says over the photo, to his brother.

Humphrey replies, "When that letter arrived, turning Mashipan over to him, to us, it was an overcast day, in summer. Father Archibald had us all together in the courtyard and he read it – he and we were not surprised it finally arrived – but after reading the indifferent, formal termination, he added in his next breath, 'And the earth said welcome.' That felt like freedom."

A fade to black.

But not for long. We come back to the photo of Father Archibald on Humphrey's wall. He is smiling and sweet, though the black eyes behind his thick glasses can consume your attention. The camera moves up to the handsome portrait photo of Peter and then back down to Father Max.

"After that, the passage of time muddles things a little bit."

Carson sitting on a chair, seemingly alone in Humphrey's room. The chairs they sat in are gone. A stolen, confidential moment just between him and us.

"Apparently, of all the men and women to come to Mashipan, Father Max Lincoln was one. A few years back, with Humphrey's urging. My brother says this is a platonic, working relationship, and I believe him. Not that it matters.

"But together, Humphrey and Max started Mashipan's juvenile mission. Which opened and expanded Mashipan for the first time down to the valley. After the earth said welcome, the valley was the first place they went to.

We see for ourselves a shot first of an unassuming sign on the road: New Mashipan. Then, the family of buildings and gently rolling grounds under snow. Many more people are down here, just not in robes. They are young, excited, gathered in small groups with backpacks and duffelbags on the ground near a line of buses, as if they'd just been dropped off. Some of them wear red Santa hats. Two girls walk past Carson. Both smile and wave.

"On a wide, easily accessible meadow they built a retreat and sanctuary which has since become Mashipan's face to the world. They also work in prisons, establish health and pregnancy clinics, work in city shelters and delinquency halls, among police gang units and provide pro bono legal help. Almost everything Peter and Humphrey once talked to each other about. And more. Training is underway to operate on the ground during disasters and conflicts. Not just administering to the lost, injured and displaced. But as apolitical peace negotiators, to step in when the U.N. or other nations intentions are compromised or ineffectual.

"It's sad, but also a little reassuring I think, when I consider that much of this sprouted from Peter's death. Which is why I asked my brother if I could meet Father Max."

We see Humphrey, in his room, on another day, listening to the request, demurring, nodding as if he should have known Carson would ask. "We'll see. He's not well."

And Carson says, "Ok, ok. I understand." And the camera turns off. That's that re: Father Max.

Cut to Carson's own footage of workers at Mashipan carrying crates and boxes, as well as sagging, heavy-looking rug rolls wrapped in paper, to a staging area near the edge of the mountain. Over the last few days, a transom has been rigged to hoist these items down to a loading area a thousand or more feet below.

"My brother tells me that even before Father Archibald took ill, the community was already carefully making its way into a future where no one religion was adequate. Where, in fact, religion itself was considered problematic."

From a balcony or loft, we look over the sanctuary of the basilica, toward its chancel and apse. Along its length, an abundance of heavy red, purple and yellow insulating drapery. Red carpet runs down the middle of what would be the nave, but the only pew left is being carried away by two of the workers.

"Today, the mission which New Mashipan has found for itself is beyond ecumenical. On the one hand, its creativity in working with youth, its anti-poverty programs, its social justice and peace attaining missions are its strongest expression. It is often on the short list of Nobel Peace Prize and Goldman Environmental prize nominees."

Roving, peaceful shots of old Mashipan, the mountain priory, under snow. A Mashipanite shovels a walk. A lingering shot of the complex from its nearby cemetery. All of the stones have crosses on them, some elaborate, some plain wood. Carson continues.

"On spiritual matters, things are more complex. More subtle. It is groping toward a reverence for the sacred that is not bound by anything other than itself. The Mashipan community works diligently to secure a space for sacredness in all of society and in all individuals. The way an eternal flame is perpetually stoked. Protecting and enhancing the sacred, while important, is its single allowance to the monastery's previous mission."

Etched into the marble floor of the New Mashipan sanctuary, around a bowl holding such a small flame are the words: "The presence of the sacred is what is eternal in life."

"But while the sacred moment, perhaps applied over a sacred place, is what Mashipan strives for, above everything else, there are issues over what exactly that means: a sacred moment versus sacred place, those old confounding problems of time and space, are still being worked out.

"Also, not to be ignored are some of the methods sacredness is being honored. One of the ways Mashipanites try to secure sacredness is eliminating traditional icons of the religious. Icons which, as the thinking goes, may trigger associations of the sacred but also may be encouraging a step away from the actual sacred moment and into the profanity of religion."

Humphrey walks through the snow, carrying a thermos to the men working near the obelisk. From a distance we see them put down their tools and meet him, taking cups and happily watching the coffee pour. Tilting up, we see the cross is carefully, oh so carefully, lifting off its mount by a swarm of ropes.

* * *

A patient, prolonged wide shot of a forest at snow-filled twilight. The bough of an evergreen bobs with snow and a spectral black takeoff of a bird. A ravine, overseen by hunched trees, seems even more still when you notice it's a frozen stream. The wind pulls powdery snow from tree tops across the haze of an overcast dimming sun.

"I always meant to visit my brother at Christmas. I thought I'd do my interview with him and then experience what I thought would be a quiet Christmas retreat at Mashipan. Except, when I got there I realized I couldn't even be sure whether they celebrated Christmas at all."

Shots of Humphrey's empty room and kept bed.

"The third day I was at Mashipan, it was Christmas Eve. My brother was gone when I woke up and gone for most of the day. I didn't know where he was, but we had covered most of what I wanted us to talk about, so I didn't think about it too much. I took walks with my camera."

Shots of the men and women of Mashipan working, walking, carrying loads. Another shot of the cemetery, cloistered among trees and overlooking a turgid gray snow cloud covering, and perhaps dropping snow on the valley below.

"I was looking forward to filming and maybe participating in the Christmas service."

Down in the New Mashipan church. People busily fit hundreds of little sconces and chandeliers and votives with candles, adjust electric lights in the rafters, and, shoelessly, vacuum the huge red carpeting that forms the sacred heart of the sanctuary.

"I was certain that the service would beautiful. Perhaps even attaining sacredness. And I was especially looking forward to shooting my brother in attendance. That was more or less the shot I wanted all along. My brother in his new surroundings.

"It seemed a little silly, but I still wanted to – had to – get him to talk about Christmas. That was why I was here, of course.

"And then this happened."

Humphrey leaning in his doorway, hands in pockets, seeming a little irritable, a little rushed, a little tired. Carson's voice. "I'm sorry, can you ... just wait ... ok, I'm ready."

Humphrey, after a patient inhale: "Alright. Take two. The news I have is I'm going to have to send you, Carson, down to the valley. There's a room set aside for you. You can stay as long as you like, take what ever pictures and video you like."

Long hold on Humphrey, as if he's waiting for the camera to stop. Carson leads him on. "Because .... " But Humphrey won't go there.

"That's enough," he says. "You should go. Many apologies." He turns to leave then remembers. "Someone is waiting outside to take you down." Then exeunt Humphrey, leaving the doorway open. Carson lingers on the empty doorframe a while.

"Like I said earlier, I was surprised to find out that Father Max had come to Mashipan a few years ago. And I hoped I could meet him. When Humphrey said he wasn't well, I didn't know that he was in the Mashipan infirmary the whole time, dying."

Cut to the old Mashipan grounds. Dusk is settling, fighting back against the grainy limits of Carson's video. First a shot looking up at Humphrey's room, which is dark. Then panning down to meet Humphrey walking towards the camera. Hands still in pockets. Humphrey strides with purpose, withdrawn. He walks briskly past Carson who quickly pans to keep up with his passing brother. Who then suddenly changes his mind. Humphrey stops, pivots on his heels, and peremptorily reaches for and hugs Carson. The camera swings up and around Humphrey's back as Carson returns the hug.

"I'm sorry," Humphrey says, very closely, the mic on the camera jostling. "Next year, ok?"

"Of course," we hear Carson say over the mostly dark Mashipan courtyard. The camera swings back down when Humphrey lets go. When Carson steadies it, we see Humphrey continuing away, up a path to another building near by. A little wooden sign out front says Infirmary. Carson holds the shot as Humphrey yanks open the door and enters, closing it behind him. The camera timidly searches up the face of the building, finding a window with warm yellow light. A grainy, smudged figure steps past the window.

Voices, a congregation, singing "Silent Night." The New Mashipan sanctuary.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands of people in the enormous candlelit space, ribboned and billowing with colorful wall hangings and drapes. Faces of people singing, following the words, glancing at one another. Children on the floor, some squirming. A woman, eyes solemnly ahead as if listening to the words she's singing. She turns to the camera, to Carson, to us, and smiles.

Outside the windows shine from the inside, exploding the video highlights. There's just enough light out here, against the bluing snow, to sense the size of the building, the forest nearby and the serenity. And while the congregation continues singing, the camera tilts up, past the trees, up the cold crags of the mountain to the faintly lit monastery where Humphrey resides.

Fade. Blackness. Contemplation.

Then the clacking sound of a camera and mic fumblingly turning on. And also, Humphrey's voice. "Sure, one more question. Go ahead." Hurried fade in on patient Humphrey, still in his chair, still being interviewed.

"What are your thoughts about Christmas?"

Humphrey's taken aback a little. Carson's question seems preposterous to him, with some room for humor.

"Well ..." he starts, then apparently swallows a joke. "You're still making this documentary about Christmas? Ok. Christmas – the time of the year around Christmas – seems the perfect time for reflection. And maybe a little more than that. Some fun and partying. Why not?"

He's not very good at this part.

"Anything else?" Carson asks. He zooms in, a little wobbily on Humphrey.

"Alright," Humphrey assents. "Here goes. As an event, a holiday, I think about what it must have felt like to the soldiers of Rome, retreating to their underground caverns, their secret men of war society, every year watching more and more people celebrate the life and death of an executed Jewish political prisoner. And slowly discovering that their own dedicated beliefs about Mithras, the bull slaughter, the sun worshipping, his resurrection, which they guarded jealously and privately, was being borrowed by others not in the club.

They still go through the motions of the feasting and the rituals, which maybe they're still proud of, but what they mean exactly – maybe they're becoming less meaningful. Less inspiring. Especially compared to that other idea people talk about."

Carson leaves Humphrey to continue, but summons photos and video clips of archeological sites, the caves and temples of Mithras. Grown over with and asleep under grass and trees, moss creeping across the scattered mosaic floors, their columns and stone benches chipped and pocked with disuse, the sun god and bull statuary blunt eyed and stained under the drips of time.

Over this Humphrey says, "The soldiers would have seen how excited the Christians get, how they found inspiration in stories and parables this man told before being executed, some of which sounded very similar to some of the stories they told about Mithras. So much so, this new cult starts to seem more relevant to some of the soldiers. Who normally would have exalted Mithras, worshiped him, and counted on him when they were dying on a battle field, hoping for their own resurrection.

And then we're back on Humphrey in person, in his cell. "But on a day to day basis, the ideas behind their religion would have been slowly stultifying. The ideas themselves stopped regenerating. Because the intellectuals, the priests, who constantly provided creative meaning and inspiration to the soldiers, had already moved on to something richer, more meaningful to them.

"So I think about the quandary they must have gone through, the anger or incredulity they must have felt that at the same time of year they dedicated to Mithras, people, the citizenry, were celebrating something else, but using some of their rituals. Only with greater and greater pomp and excitement. Until, at some unnoticed time, in some unknown year the last few people who cared to celebrated Mithras got together one last time without knowing this was the last time and never did it again. I'm afraid that's what I think of during Christmas, today."

Another Humphrey pause. His fingers then fiddle with something on his chest, the mic. "Is that it? Are we – " Off goes the mic with a click. Black wipes across the screen.

Snow falls over the pines on Mashipan's ledge of the world. The snow falls without direction or drive. It falls on the garden, it falls on the stone benches and on the workers at the top of the scaffolding carefully ratcheting chains around the base of the cross which are hooked to cradling lines running up to a crane whose long yellow arm is grounded to a four wheeled machine waiting to lift and gently remove the cross from the top of the promontory.

* * *

Even after it was finished, I carried Carson's movie around with me, in my mind, the rest of the day. I didn't want to form any critical decisions about it. I wasn't even sure if I "liked" it or was just abiding some snarky annoyance. And annoyance of – what? Its pretentiousness? Its wandering, diverging points of view? First time, freshman glibness? Heroic pointlessness?

By now all the things I'd heard before and after Carson gave me his copy made sense. Before he gave it to me, as I said, I'd heard how frustrated he'd gotten having the size and scope of his movie seem to get away with him, although he obviously didn't do much trimming. It's a good two hours and fifteen minutes. When the scope of a project keeps expanding beyond your ever renewing commitment to patience, it's both exasperating and unnerving.

And after he gave me this copy, after I'd thoughtlessly put it away, I heard of other rounds of frustration. Only one or two festivals picked it up. One in France, another one, I think, in Denmark. Now, I thought in my apartment, I know why. No programmer in America would ever commit themselves to a documentary like this – a history documentary or, worse, a documentary on the history of religion – and push it into a time slot over other films demanding that their issue of the day be heard.

I became sympathetic. If I was ever annoyed or snarkily critical about Carson's movie, I gave it up. It's impossible for a movie that faces indifference like this to do anything but sit at the bottom of someone's closet, or exist in a fugue state of ones and zeros in some corner of the internet. I imagined myself sitting with Carson and telling him what I thought, but even that seemed a little maudlin, too charitable by half. I recalled that he, for his part, hadn't sought me out either, was equally nonchalant about my opinion.

But like I said, something from his movie was still lingering with me. At one point, the Bangalorean heat in my apartment moved me from the couch to my open doorway. Outside my garden apartment, the green of the shrubs and trees and the shroud of rain pouring down seemed like a separate, uncontrollable reality.

I knew I had some work to do and glanced at my watch. The hour was getting late, but the date, which didn't matter to me at first, suddenly, grabbed my attention. It was June 23. I'd missed the summer solstice; in fact, I – we, we of the Northern Hemisphere – were already heading down the long long long fragrant path toward Carson's darkness and delight, a winter future already underway.

I ran my finger along the dripping edge of an ivy leaf and went back inside.

DONE

julebok

* * * * *

Thank you for taking the time to read this book and gamely dodging the mistakes. Please take a moment to leave a comment at the site from which you downloaded or at the addresses below, pro or con or otherwise. Writers dream of the time they hear from others who read the words they wrote alone.

This began at my blog, http://thismodernelk.blogspot.com. You can still go there and check out other work I put up.

You can contact me there or at my website, http://www.chrismatica.com or simply by mailto:chrismartin@chrismatica.com.

* * * * *

BIOGRAPHY

Chris Martin is a San Francisco-based writer and filmmaker. By that, meaning, directing and producing in film, television, commercials and the web. Some of this is too arcane to list, but notable examples include Chris Mason Johnson's Test (2013), Peter and Benjamin Bratt's La Mission (2009), Discovery Channel's I (Almost) Got Away With It, ESPN's Bonds on Bonds, Sundance Channel's Big Ideas for a Small Planet, and others. A former reporter and freelance journalist (SF Chronicle, Philadelphia Inquirer), he has a degree in Dramatic Writing from NYU.

* * * * *

ADDITIONAL ART

Referencing artwork which the reader may not be familiar with or remember well was something I was a little concerned with while writing The Holly King. But the dexterity of ebooks, I believe, alleviates this. Also, there are some photo manips that I used on thismodernelk as illustrations or otherwise breakup the text which I include here as well. I compiled this list at the end of the book, rather than installing hyperlinks in the text because I thought it would be less distracting.

So here's a guide to some of them. Note that by doing so I do not have permission from the authors or owners of these pieces to link from my work to their sites, and their involvement in or association with my work is nil. Many of these pieces, however, exist in the public domain.

~ photo manip of animated Christmas party  elves

~ the Hancock family  Christmas tree

~  Darby Crash, of the Germs. You can also go here for a recording of "We Must Bleed," so long as YouTube permits it.

~ F.W. Heine's The  Wilde Jagd

~ another beautiful Yule Goat or  Julebocken by artist John Bauer, 1912

~ a relief of  Mithras slaying the bull, from the Louvre. Read the description below the photo for a brief overview of the piece. Examples of Mithraeum, or the temples to Mithras abound on the internet and should be seen.  Here is one of them.

~ Botticelli's  Mystical Nativity

~ Titian's  Annunciation

~ sample of the apostle  carpeting in the Hosanna Hills Promontory Ministry

~ phony book and magazine  covers about evangelocalism

~ Fra' Angelico's  St. Lawrence Receiving Treasures of the Church.jpg/503px-San_Lorenzo_\(Beato_Angelico\).jpg), and  Arraignment Before Valerianus from the Niccoline Chapel, the Vatican.

~ Bernardo Daddi's Stories from the Life of St. Stephen, also from the Vatican.

~ Caravaggio's  Entombment.jpg/403px-The_Entombment_of_Christ-Caravaggio_\(c.1602-3\).jpg)

* * * * *

ADDITIONAL WORK

There are more examples of my work at my blog, thismodernelk. But here's one that's buried at the bottom of the blog. A trifle. It supposes that someone has written a letter to the editor in order to share this daydream she's had over breakfast. Not like this can really happen.

* * *

# Breakfast First, then Alpha Centauri

To Whom It May Concern -

Hello. I just wanted to say that this morning I was sitting at the breakfast table when Frank – my husband – comes in and sits down. I still had my tea. Tea my daughter Maureen sent me. She calls it green tea, but it has bits of Rice Krispy in it. I know, huh? I must say it turned out to be pretty darn good.

So Frank, he drops into his chair as normal, still reading his magazine from the bathroom, and reaches over and without looking up pinches away the end piece, just a bit of crust really, of toast. From my plate. Crumbs fall in a line from my little plate to his chair. A rabbit could follow it. I saw the whole thing, but my mind was elsewhere.

This happens with him. It's his way of saying "I see you sitting there staring into space." Even though: he won't drag his eyes up from his article. Not involving himself in the necessary social interaction such a comment really needs.

And you can just sense – well, I can sense, but it's pretty obvious – you can just sense with the way he raises his eyebrows and pinches that corner with those fingers of his, that he isn't really reading when he's pinching. Because when his hand comes back with whatever it is he's helped himself to, you can see his eyebrows relax back into position. Then he's reading. First he's reading, then he's pretending to read but not saying hello or I'm hungry – then stealing – then reading again.

That is the morning conversation.

You can guess I prefer just thinking my thoughts with company like that.

Well, so what? you say. Fine. Just let me finish.

So I decide it's not worth it to get up and fix him some toast. He'll manage. He'll probably go to the clubhouse later, I think, because his friend Max will be there for lunch because Max likes the French Dip on Thursdays and Frank just goes to talk politics, be with the boys.

Well, the French Dip then makes me think of slices of roast beef and the juice they give you in the cup. And naturally I think: that juice they give you is like liquid beef. It is. Not ground-into-pulp liquid beef. Not squeegeed beef, but I mean = liquid beef. Like the commercial says, the very essence. Yes that's right, I agree: the very essence. You don't need the texture of the meat, because there in front of you is the beef. As a liquid. And it comes to me of course as spring follows winter that: people are going to be eating food like this in years to come. We all just need the nutrients and the tastes but the actual structure of the foods is not you know so important than if you can just have a cup of chicken or right: a squirt of pie.

Is this a good thing? I can't tell. What I do know is that I like on movies and tv when someone in a far off galaxy – a human, right? – on a space ship – or even here at home – on our Planet Earth – pushes a square button on the wall and a panel you haven't noticed before slides up and there you are: the meal of the day. In a cup, or maybe if it's polite, the cup sits on a saucer. Or maybe the food is pink and square on a white plate next to a green ball. Lettuce and tomato. I get it.

But again, I think, is this a good thing? Food comes from the earth. My father rest his soul was a greengrocer's and before that his father drove wagons from the farms into town. The guys who delivered every morning came in with dirty boots and dewy aprons. Some of them quite attractive. At least that's how I remember it. And yet here we are now at the point where we can make whatever is or was the cow into a liquid that is or was him, the cow. I honestly can't decide if that's a good thing or not. Because it's pretty smart of someone to go through all the trouble of figuring out how to do that and we shouldn't say no to having people investigate new ways of doing things. That would be unethical and not good for society, right?

Now, the reason I'm on this, you know, track of reasoning is from this night out with my daughter Maureen the other night. And that she writes her own blog as she calls it about what she eats and where. Making a small name for herself and maybe meeting boys too. The girls today are free to be as crafty as the boys. I said craFFty. Any way, this very nice boy she brought with – his name was Jimmy, thank god, as in you know, a little Irish – the entire night he, the two of them spent talking about science. Such as, taking little bits of DNA from this that or the other thing and putting it to use somewhere else. A little here, put in a thing over there, is what I understood. I don't even think Frank was listening.

Now, do I think that's good? I don't know. I know I should, you know, be up on things, form opinions. But come on. I'm sixty-three years old. People smarter than I think this is the way to go. But I'll eat soup, thank you very much, if everything's going to be liquid. I don't have to experience the wonder of somebody in a white coat taking a perfectly good living farm animal, whirl it up and separate it into molecules and then rearrange those molecules like beads on a string and voila! Your beef, hooves and all, is a rose. A real rose. That you snip from a branch. Because I have heard that that's what they can do, in order to make the rose, I don't know, stronger? Strong like a cow? Well yes, excuse me, but they are doing that, at the very least thinking about it. Maybe not a rose because you don't eat roses. But a cow, made into a pink flower, sitting on top of a green branch made out of I don't know seaweed or maybe paper which probably wouldn't have any taste any way, and if it did, it would definitely be sugar free to keep the bugs away? So ok: that would be impressive.

Any way, to continue: this is all going through my head at breakfast. It's just like us, I decide, to try to convert a cow into its liquid form. In the laboratories. Because doing such a thing, it seems to me, and I was thinking this so help me God when Frank came in from his you know "morning elimination," I was thinking: if you look at where we are now and where we've been – first refrigeration, then instant noodles then Tang – remember Tang? – then of course, just listen: liquid cows. That's what's next. Because it is all part of the entire effort to blast into space and leave this planet behind. It's clear to me. You can look back and see it all come to this.

And when we do blast off, we can't take cows with us. What good would a cow in space or for that matter on another planet do? It's almost like kidnapping, which unfortunately did make me smile a little on behalf of the poor cow wondering where the hell it's being taken to and why, peeling past Saturn. But it's because we'll want to have something cow-like, something to remember it by. It would make a body homesick for his planet when he should be piloting the space craft. Converting a cow into liquid is a lot less trouble in upkeep than having it in its four-legged version, you know – pardon the image – piling onto the white tile of the spaceship. Its hooves would probably not keep it upright on that kind of floor anyway. It's like ice.

So that's why I'm very quiet with Frank this morning. I don't tell him anything: don't touch my toast, or nicely, do you want your own? Because I'm sitting there, admittedly riveted with myself. As my daughter says, in my head. And still in my gown. Not realizing the tea's got cold. Struck that we, the human race, all of us, are unconsciously working like demons, fighting wars, building skyscrapers, digging, I don't know, canals, just to .... well, in fact, I had this image of breaking out of the earth like you would from an egg. From the inside. Only, with a tremendous explosion. Fire with rocks and debris flying into the heavens with a bright powerful light pouring out of the center of the cracked open earth. Maybe we are supposed to go through all this trouble learning things, breaking things, cluttering everything up and then just like that rocketing off to distant planets without cows or butter or ants or flowers, hopefully bringing some of them with us, but I know, not all of them. Just leaving the earth behind like a messed up, stinking crib. The worse feeling.

So then I look at my husband. He was still reading his magazine. After all that. I felt like I just woke up. I mean, whew! And me, still sitting in my gown, not made up, at the table, with a plate of crumbs and my cold tea, and across from me, my husband, Frank. Who is now beyond pretending not to look, as if I don't exist. Just blissfully ignorant.

And yet here am I, sitting in my safflower kitchen on a cloudy spring day, an oldish, if you like, woman in a retirement village in a duplex which if you look down from on high it has a roof and a little white patio like all the others – if you just picked up that roof and saw tiny me sitting at my kitchen table with my tiny gnarly husband sitting with me there, you still wouldn't have any idea what I was just thinking.

Which got me to wonder what I must look like. Its a bad habit, but I'll sometimes put myself in Frank's place for a moment and pretend to look at me staring off into space, thinking god knows what. It's a bad habit that always gets me to go leave the table at a restaurant or even in my own kitchen and take a look at myself, beauty-wise. But today I decided, well, why, if I was busy self-examining myself thinking these things, then why couldn't I just put all these thoughts into him and watch him go through it himself and I watch him, step by step: first the French Dip, then the liquid beef, the meatflowers, breaking out of the egg, zooming off into space, so many thousands of years in the future that we, us two, myself and Frank and you, and everyone we know and their generations times ten, would be forgotten dust in the hooves of the cows rendered into liquid for the benefit of space travelers. Who maybe won't even look like us? Right: he probably wouldn't bother at all.

Well any way, you had to be there. It seemed funnier when I sat there pretending Frank was thinking all this.

Peggy Anne Sullivan

Naples, FL

###
