Obligations of the Harp. Arthur Saltzman
in its passage through many hands from order to tray. “Where should we go for lunch, Champ?” asks one weekend father, who has found his son swimming in a cage of colored whiffle balls. He speaks to him through the mesh like an attorney colluding with his client over the chances of getting him paroled. “We already ate, Dad,” he says. “I see. Well, what would you like to do next? Where would you like to go? Name it.” “Can’t I just stay here?” Like his parents, if the boy is guilty of anything, it is of loving not wisely but too well.
There is a rumor at large regarding the construction of the first McDonald’s on the moon. Needless to say, it would not be a functioning restaurant, only a hollow mock-up mounted for the glory of the imprimatur alone. There would be just the renowned logo and arches adorning a husk, those rooted commas punctuating the vacancy, interrupting the ash. It would make as firm a purchase on eternity as those other human contributions to the lunar surface do: the abandoned NASA equipment, Alan Shepard’s golf ball, a brittle, ripple-free flag. Imagine peering through a high-powered telescope at the black of space. Then suddenly, like a lost traveler starved for landmarks, starved for sustenance and company, you detect something, a flash at the farthest reach of your vision to satisfy your hunger and lift your heart—a touch of gold. And you are saved.
Well, “saved” is wrong, but you get the message. I currently live no more than an hour away from what is, in terms of square footage, the largest McDonald’s in the world. Its arches are superimposed upon the overpass of Highway 44, clamping it off and heralding the otherwise unexceptional outskirts of Vinita, Oklahoma. For devotees of McDonald’s and defenders of the tourist trade in the Sooner State, it represents a truer Gateway to the West and its mythical promise than does its more celebrated counterpart in St. Louis (where, by the way, souvenirs and concessions are both less plentiful). Long glass cases display the evolution of layouts, logos, and all the jolly products of business calculation like phylogenetic charts. Out of the primordial fifteen-cent burgers emerge hearty subspecies and once-unforeseeable strains, establishing from those humble beginnings one of the most abundant, redoubtable corporate organisms on Earth. In an isolated housing lies a concordance of all the variants that have ever issued from the ur-burger, a record of every modification that’s ever been spatula’d off the grill and every mutation that’s ever risen from the first fry vat on down to whatever it was you just devoured. Plastic heads and torsos of the company clown preside throughout the complex in unmitigatable glee; in fact, the whole garish, hyperactive, make-believe population of McDonaldland have been figured into party favors and plush toys, banks and balloons, collectibles past and yet to come on the market. They’ve rounded up the usual suspects, as it were. As so, on view through the glass walls facing east and west over I-44, are we.
“Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” Rick remarks as the two of them stroll off the tarmac, out of Casablanca’s closing scene and into our collective unconsciousness. It will occur to contemporary audiences that as good a place as any for them to dedicate their alliance might be McDonald’s. Having sacrificed Ingrid Bergman and the sanction of the occupying army between them, who better deserves a break today than these two? Undoubtedly, to stay a step ahead of the Nazi pursuit, they’d get whatever they get to go.
And so I wish our heroes safe passage and fast food. But Casablanca always did bring out the romantic in me.
3 Castaways
each scrap has a shadow—each shadow cast
by a different light.
—Sharon Olds, “The Unswept”
It should be moving water. A pond may provide the requisite serenity, and for contemplative depths a lagoon will do, but either will eventually clog with wrongdoing. Moving water, however, keeps recrimination from building by bearing it away. Tradition may respect all bodies of water equally, but because we are more effectively consoled by the sensation of opening up a distance between our selves and our sins, a river is preferable to a stew of group renunciation. Landlocked urban worshippers have to improvise by seeking out streams, creeks, or drainage canals to accommodate the ceremony. For grace is centrifugal, redemption transitive. And if even minor indiscretions need leaching out, just imagine the rinse cycle an entire race requires.
Dry seasons present special challenges. Consider the way children make miniature rafts out of Popsicle sticks to ripple down the gutters toward the sewer at the corner. In case of drought, they will create the course by running the hose. In a pinch, when cramped quarters limit the participation of larger Jewish populations or, conversely, when one finds himself marooned in Kansas and there’s not a minyan’s worth of Jews within miles, flushing one’s failings down the toilet may suffice. While such a practice lacks the dignity and conventional setting we have come to associate with holy offices, the purpose of the service may in spite of everything be preserved.
If separation and departure are the sources of assurance, airports and train stations might eventually replace the pastoral origins of this and many other ancient rituals anyway. Modern American Jews cluster in cities and must adapt. Would not the Old Testament prophets have benefited from today’s telecommunications? Would scribes have abjured the printing press for compromising the glory of the Word? There is no blasphemy inherent in taking advantage and making do.
We might remember how Herakles cleaned the Aegean stables by diverting a river’s flow to flood the floor. We might pause to think of that resultant rush of dung and muddy straw, with all the massed and baffled animals looking on, were that not the myth of another culture. Still, the principle holds true today.
Many crumble bread to cast upon the waters and lend their efforts symbolic heft. The practice not only resonates liturgically but also satisfies the ecologically minded in attendance since bread readily biodegrades. But well before that process gets under way, birds congregate along the banks to carry off the offerings. A televised contingent from Temple Sholom gathered for tashlicht one September morning at a channel of the Chicago River. By the time the slices had been distributed, the place was dense with starlings, jays, and grackles, who kibbitzed and competed more loudly than the Jews who’d come to demonstrate their duty to the viewing audience. Most of the bread was borne off the minute it hit the water. The most impertinent birds ganged up on the smallest kids, spooking them into dropping their provender and high-tailing it back to their parents, while their tasty sins were quickly divvied up and devoured. Birds are fairly indiscriminate about it—so much the better, for our divestiture has such variety, and its contents from year to year can be hard to predict.
Much of what the birds miss, the fish will nip or the nosy squirrels will loot—nature is full of culprits. The rest will melt and mix in with the river’s other impurities, as if passing down a digestive tract.
It will go better for us if it is moving water. A common philosophy says that consciousness is a stream, but conscience could be a stream as well. “Nothing outside of the flux secures the issue of it,” wrote William James, and that presumably includes our imperfections and that very formulation. You needn’t take faith’s word for the futility of trying to fix belief on solid ground.
As for the children, who had to be coaxed by the prospect of physical activity to endure the services that preceded the ceremony, they, too, have their budding cruelties and tiny crimes to purge. (It was surely no easy matter to convince them that, full of breakfast and on the brink of Burger King, from another perspective they are famished. Clad in Adidas and Levi’s, they are nonetheless in need. What worked was the suggestion that, given the right attitude, their repentance might be fun.) They craved their neighbors’ answers on math tests and took the Lord’s name in vain when the ground ball ducked through a teammate’s legs. They cadged matches and thrilled to the sight of ants shrunk to miniscule black buttons by the fire; they transformed worms into licorice and dropped their bundled skins on a catafalque of twigs. Every one of their recesses contains a little history of affronts and revenges. When they grow up, they will simply expand the perimeter of sin and retribution. Only then will their machinations alert the courts and make the papers. Still, the principle holds true today.
For the time being, they are absorbed, until the whole slices of Wonder Bread that the mischievous try to race take only seconds to capsize and swamp. Although tashlicht