My Bayou: New Orleans through the Eyes of a Lover

My Conversation with Death

151 my conversation With death When November came again, more than a year after Katrina, the pelicans showed up too. It was their time to visit us here in Bayou Saint John. I was relieved to see them. Each year it seems as if they might not come again. When they do, it feels like grace. In truth, the pelicans’ arrival represents a turn in the wheel that draws us into the darkest phase of the year. When the pelicans come, the sun has just moved into Scorpio, and we enter the season of death. They are a harbinger of a realm beyond this muddy trickle. according to the Medieval Bestiary, a compendium of animal myths, the pelican is a symbol for Christ. She got that reputation because the mother pelican supposedly feeds her young by pecking open a wound in her own breast and offering her blood to the waiting mouths of her hungry children. one version of the story says her blood offering revives her young, who have been dead three days. She had pecked them to death because they had pecked too fiercely at her beak, demanding food. There is some fact driving this myth. a pelican stores the bloody remains of animals she has caught in her pouch. Then when she brings up the red mash to feed her children, it might appear she is offering her own blood. Thanks to this myth and the bird’s own cooperation in keeping the story going, the Pelican-Christ has come to grace the state flag of this Roman Catholic outpost, Louisiana. I have always enjoyed that such a clownish bird should represent the Constance Adler 152 greatest clown of all, Jesus Christ. This image of Christ-the-clown may have its roots in Paul’s exhortation in 1 Corinthians that “we are fools for Christ’s sake.” God knows what he meant by that. But the line has inspired a number of artists to see this strange teacher, the wandering revolutionary, this silly rabbi, as an intriguing, opaque literary device. Fellini created my favorite Christ-the-clown in La Strada. as a character, Christ is at once appealing and difficult to read, persistent in his power to move us. a seemingly simple puzzle that only deepens the more we attempt to solve it. He left us with crazy instructions. Love your enemies? Bless them that curse you? I don’t think so. Like a clown, he allowed people to ridicule him, laugh at him, and still he never wavered from his message of unconditional love that, in the bitter context of this hell we humans have made, sounds absurd. Most ridiculous of all, he knew exactly when and where he was going to die, and he went along with it anyway. What a fool. The Fool card in the Tarot deck, like a magickal child, roams a dangerous landscape, protected by his innocence and trust. His naive belief in a benevolent universe appears foolish in a broken world of raging egos and suspicion. This enchanted idiot looks ever upward to Heaven and utters simplistic observations that don’t make sense. Throughout our ancient stories , the archetypal Wise Fool has spoken prophecy in absurd riddles. He knows more than he thinks he knows. His words say more than they seem. Recently I went back to my King James to dive more deeply into the Sermon on the Mount, and found that it is the origin for some of the most hackneyed expressions. It struck me that a lot of people who would be disinclined to quote Scripture are quoting Christ all the time without realizing it. There is the line about hiding your light under a bushel, beware of wolves in sheep’s clothing, never let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, no man can serve two masters, salt of the earth, the city on a hill. There was some bad advice: “If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out.” Some good advice: “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” When I got to the last lines of the sermon, I was startled out of my critical literary review. “and every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand. My Bayou 153 “and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew...