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...................................................................... Grottoes:MemoriesofChristaphobia New York is Babylon: Brooklyn is the truly Holy City. — Christopher Morley think I know where, if not precisely when, I first discovered landscape: two grottoes in Brooklyn, by (with? in?) Our Lady of Grace and St. Joseph’s Catholic churches. I walked by each frequently . They were always so quiet, well tended, with pine trees and distant statuary on the lawn, forbidden and bidding figures to a Jewish kid raised with the fear of God of the other, especially the goyim-troika and the confusing omnipresence of Mary. In my case it was a strategic mistake, this turning of the cheek toward the other, toward the mystery of their strangely sad gods. Our God, the lawgiver, bestower of somber proclamations, was stalwart, upright, unpained, Talmudically logical (and not uninteresting for this), but certainly not sad. He could invoke neither empathy, since as a child I could not sanction his feelings toward wayward, if chosen, people, nor sympathy: too powerful. To experience any aspect of the Catholic (difficult to avoid when one’s parents committed the strategic mistake of settling in Gambino Territory, Avenue X) was forbidden in profound and mostly unspoken terms, naturally unspoken because to speak would be to admit the existence of the other, as unacknowledged as the statehood of Israel is to the PLO. Brooklyn was not quiet, Brooklyn was not well tended. There was nothing of Monteverdi and van der Weyden in my Brooklyn. Nothing solemn, nothing classical. It was a messy life full of slush and bodily functions. We lived in the top half of a row house for the first thirteen years of my life, my maternal grandparents in the bottom half. My brother and I shared a small room and designed our cohabitation through opposition. He had a Confederate flag; I bought a Union Jack. I He started listening to jazz. I colonized folk music. Rock and roll was our imperialist’s China, divided into areas of interest. (This continued even after we moved downstairs to separate bedrooms. The shared wall was ours, and as though rebelling against the proximate tyranny of our lives, we skirmished for control of it. Phil Ochs would duel with Dizzy Gillespie. I would play Leadbelly records at levels too high to enjoy, and he would come back with Coltrane too loud to endure .) Vanilla and chocolate, Mets and Yankees, tomato and tomahto. Space was a tactically defined commodity: he would bomb me from his residence in the top bunk; I gave him choppy seas with a baseball bat when he most wanted to sleep. Our nights were a fiercely fought doubleheader. In the mornings, my mother would emerge from a mysterious hour in our bathroom, leaving it almost unbreathably smoky. My parents’ choice of a folding door for their bedroom is extraordinarily anomalous to me, considering their intimacy. It was as though they yielded to a privacy-less existence in a failed stratagem to outwit its impossible equations of space and sound. We were aurally oppressed without knowing it. A murmur from either of the bedrooms, which shared a wall in the back of the house, would carry clearly. That is probably the reason for my adult mania for silence, for not having the sounds of others intrude into my psychically sensitive ears. In my late teens I visited a forum at Pompeii and was treated to the acoustic cliché of hearing a pin drop in the center circle from way up in the bleachers. I was unimpressed. I had heard pins drop all my life. But the grottoes always seemed supernaturally quiet. Of course, they weren’t, technically. They let in as much of Brooklyn as any garden-variety garden. But the space shaped my sense of sound, or rather soundlessness, as though a natural, still life could still noise, as well. The distant Madonna at St. Joseph’s, so sensually gentle holding that forbidden child of hers, that lost son of my tribe. Judaism always seemed masculine to me. The women always seemed like a sideshow, with two exceptions. My namesake, David, who I was led to believe took the other sex rather too seriously, and one moment from the Book of Ruth, which I happened to read for some now unfathomable reason, when I was eleven or twelve. I have remembered the line “Rue is for Ruth” since, a line whose comprehension has been forever shadowed by its echo and assonance. Even so, this verbal mystery, built on Grottoes...

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