VERITAPHOBIA

VERITAPHOBIA

By Andrew Paul Grell

January 22^nd 2021

They’ve told me I should maintain a journal from now on. That details will be increasingly important. The first detail was to figure out what the difference is between a diary and a journal. Dia is day in Spanish, Jour is day in French. Both languages from Latin. Big help. I shouldn’t even give them the courtesy of writing this in English. Let the bastards wade through my rusty Aramaic, it would serve them right. English is so top-heavy in synonymous borrowed words that they had to assign slightly differing meanings to the words in each pair. Naked and Nude. One is without clothes, the other is a purposeful statement. Who decided which was which? In any event, a diary is personal. A journal should be presentable as a record. So journal it is.

The event of the day, a day which will forever be known as the morning after the Night of the Long Indictments. Good job on the prosecutors keeping the Grand Juries on the QT all this time. I can just see his name in gold letters at the entrance to Sing Sing. That’s one disaster I’m happily not a part of. As far as I know, none have been empaneled for your faithful and true journalist.

Breakfast was cheesy eggs and Cap’n Crunch, coffee and fresh fruit. If the pattern holds, lunch will be Fish & Chips. How quaint, what is it, 50 years after Vatican 2? Hopefully, after lunch, the common room crowd will continue to enjoy the ongoing adventures of Gilligan, the Skipper, the millionaire and his wife. Cable news is limited to after 10:00 PM.

So, gentle reader, how’s that for a first journal entry?

January 23^rd 2021

I can see this is going to be a slog. This morning I realized I should be doing these entries before I go to sleep to get in a full Dia or Jour, either way. I’m worried this new convention may make the project technically a memoir. Today I received a letter—a real paper letter, apparently, I’m not yet quite fit enough to handle the internet. Is anyone fit to handle this electronic Hydra?

Today’s Gilligan’s Island was one of my favorite episodes. An island native wanders into the castaways’ little hut village. He’s invited to lunch. Thurston Howell III asks everyone to note if the wild man holds his fork in his left hand, in which case he’s from Harvard, or his right hand, in which case he’s from Princeton. Lunch starts, and the aborigine grabs the contents of his bowl and scarfs it down. “Good Heavens, a Yale man!” is old Thurston’s comment.

I know that’s not what they’re looking for in the journal they’ve asked me to keep. So I’ll mention that today I received packet of x-rays and medical and dental reports. Someone’s arm was broken, an eye damaged, and two teeth were less than gracefully endodontured. I’ve been told that I had some involvement in that process.

January 24^th 2021. 

I’ve been getting pudgy during my stay at the Monastery of St. Timothy. I’m not under monastic orders and I’m not a prisoner. I ask Brother Giordano if I might borrow his old Schwinn Collegiate bicycle. When I was first welcomed into the realm of the sacred and contemplative, I made myself useful tightening headsets, seeing if bottom brackets were on the point of collapsing, truing up wheels, making sure brakes worked. That was the upside of my stay here, a tight locus defined by cloisters, cells, galleries, chapels, and the garden fencing. I loved Big G’s bike. A collegiate actually used for getting around a college. He had soldered his name and dorm number on the downtube, Jordan Bruno. My cycling friend had confessed to attempting to Americanize his name.

 Abbot Abbot left his cell and had three stout monks in tow, each with his own bike. How could his parents have known that he would take vows? Marrying in the Sixties, the couple named him after Abbie Hoffman. I asked him once if he had read Catch-22, and he got the joke immediately. The head of the Monastery took seriously his vow to keep me safe and blessed us as we rolled out. Spinning in meditative cadence, our eight-wheeled quartet toured six miles on the narrow road through the rough and rock-strewn terrain. Just like in the cartoons, vultures were circling our party. Someone must have tweeted that I was on the move; by the time we returned, six protestors were at the border between the profane and the sacred. “GOD IS NOT AN ALIEN” was the theme today.

January 25^th 2021

Today Gilligan’s Island was replaced by F-Troop. In ten years of, from time to time, attempting to find my old favorite show somewhere in the vast repository of the dozens of streaming services I used, I could never locate it. Miracles happen, at least for low values of miracle.

January 26^th 2021

Today I received a thumb drive with all of the available footage from the incident’s venue.  It had complete coverage of the debate from the introductions to the Pro case, me, to the Con case, Professor Dr. Phineas Ethan, my erstwhile friend and former colleague, all the way up to the less-than-graceful resolution. Phinny is a big deal, I was honored above my station to be allowed to debate him. More dogged than any dog when he’s on the trail of something. For almost 20 years he searched every codex collection he could access until he found, in a church basement in Mekele, Ethiopia, a codex of the Book of Tobit, four pages of which were a palimpsest on top of a section of Aramaic text which appears in the Book of Matthew in Greek. It’s amazing how many ancient, presumed-lost texts have been found in church and synagogue basements in Ethiopia and Egypt. Professor Ethan had found the first physical confirmation of the Q-Document, the long-hypothesized source of the Gospels. This has little to do with the debate save for highlighting his academic ranking above my own puny independent scholarship. Our debate was “Resolved: “Operational Information within the Text of the Pentateuch requires a Special Intervention of Some Kind.” Translation: there’s some sort of true information in the Bible that likely could not have been put there by the locals, so how did it get there?

Dr. Ethan was not up to his usual game; the commanding and expository voice of certainty was dialed down to about a five. Still, everything was rainbows and unicorns until the Professor’s rebuttal segment, in which he asked me if Aliens came down from space and wrote the Bible. Note that the no-god participant suggested aliens, but I get the flack for it.

I won the “audience-as-judge” debate by two votes. The video shows Phinny walking out from behind his podium to shake my hand. Audio was a little muffled, but it was clear enough to make out “Congratulations, Space Boy.” Then a shot of the losing side of the debate holding his head. My own humble back was to the camera at the time, my arms both moved but it could not be determined if either of them attempted to occupy the same space as the celebrity professor’s face or arm at the same time. An enhancement of a clip from an audience member showed two teeth hitting the stage floor. Nobody actually saw me, save for the handshake, physically contact my snarky former friend. According to the video, the only hand to contact Phinny’s head was his own. Yet here I am, agreeing to “not leave town.” Damage to the rock-star archaeologist’s eye was a tragedy. It took gigapixels of rods and cones to distinguish the same letter in west or in east Semitic, and the answer to such a question could have a major impact for half of the world, and the other half of the world would likely be impacted by the original impact. The original research had better be correct.

January 27^th 2021

Today the common room TV was showing a Welcome Back Kotter marathon. I’ve forgotten; would it by irony, dramatic irony, or some other kind of Irony to watch Vinny Barbarino and know the sad and wasted path of the actor. I would have loved to have had him represent Dianetics with Phinny and me in a three-way debate. I asked Brother Sun why the monastery had a TV at all. He told me that the sacred space had TV, radio, and internet to know what to pray for in the outside world.  The rotund little monk smiled at my “Yeah, right.” Then he gave me the straight dope. Many of the Brothers were under vows of silence but laughing was not considered a violation of that vow.

January 28^th 2021. 

I had forgotten that there was an interview scheduled for today between Nones and Vespers. It was with the Young Turk Cara Santa Maria and handsome Don Lemon from CNN. Don would do the human interest and the scientist would handle the, well, science. They started slowly, going over my past actual technological work, especially on the transportation system. Not only was it a saving of about $3,000 a year per family, but now that the plague is here, an entire mechanized division of light human and electric powered vehicles is in place to move everything around from where it is to where it needs to be. They asked about stratospheric wind. I told them we already had 6,000 megawatts of spinning reserve and that when the Bonneville kites launch, it could double that.

Cara broke in to describe how if you’re twirling in 15 MPH wind and then the wind doubles in speed, you get eight times the power. She faced into the camera. “And that is why we need windmills near the top of the sky, where the strong winds blow.” They elided the public fraud modeling years and harpooned into the eye of the current controversy. I was having a good time. I had rounded up some reading light candles, the ones with the most wax on the holders. Brother Otis did me the favor of moving Chant practice to a chapel where the sound would absolutely carry, at least some of it, to the mikes.

Don continued with the interview. He asked me how the belief that I thought the Bible was written by space aliens began. I reprised the debate for him. I told him that there was specific cosmological, geological, biological and a whole heapin’ helpin’ of other ogical information, written in the poetic format of Genesis, of course, not literal, that matches what we know of what went on from the beginning of time until the Iron Age. But which likely would not be known by the unsophisticated people we believe wrote the words in that book.  I brought out the charts. I hate PowerPoint as much as I love pointing to things on non-electronic surfaces. The switch from plant-based clothes to animal-hide clothes. The Out of Africa L3 migration. Neanderthal/Human cohabitation. Bricks baked in kilns. Joseph’s Famine.  Adult lactase persistence, the ability for grownups to drink milk, reaching the Middle East. All present in the scripture, all poetic, none of it textbook, all parallel to the peculiar forms of dating in Genesis.  I had looked to Cara for some support, so I didn’t look like a crazy arm-breaker or tooth-knocker-outer. She came through for me and prodded me onto manure, Bible harvest rules and soil nitrogen content. Infectious disease control. Labor rights and social safety nets.

I turned back to Don and said that in my Pro case I specifically said that all of the “matches” between Genesis and Science could be explained by people having kept durable records farther back than we now believe recording things started. It was Ethan who suggested I thought aliens wrote the Bible. And that since I had death threats, the FBI tracked the viral spread of the calumny to Russian bots. I pointed to things on my chart and mugged for the cameras and got Cara and Don to nod their heads from time to time. I was harmless, a guy who likes to figure stuff out, usually useful and helpful stuff. And in no way or sense a pugilist.  

January 29^th 2021.

Several interesting things happened today. At Terce, a physical paper package arrived for me. It was a summons and complaint seeking three million dollars in damages for Phinny’s injuries. I went back to my cell, wrote out a check for the requested amount, and signed it but left the counter-signature line blank. I composed a note saying that someone would drop by to countersign if Phinny would provide a holographic paper letter, signed, stating that I did not punch him and also apologizing for calling me Space Boy.

At Nones, the bizarre TV channel in the common room, which I don’t recognize from any of the cable or streaming services I subscribe to, was playing “My Mother the Car.” What an omen to walk into a depiction of both transubstantiation and the transmigration of souls. Or one soul, anyway. I haven’t used the word “transmigration” Since I read Philip K. Dick’s “Transmigration of Timothy Archer.” It’s a book about scrolls with information, operational or not, that didn’t make it into the Canon.

Finally, at Compline, the monastery’s sole daily copy of the New York Times made it to me directly from the hands of Abbot Abbot. Naturally, the crossword was about 60% filled in, in ink, some of it clearly wrong. But there on the op-ed page was a guest editorial by Brother Sun. It was full of five-dollar words like theodicy and ontological but didn’t quite rise to the difference between homoiousios and homoousios. My consecrated friend’s position was that if (1) there really was operational information hidden in plain sight in The Good Book , and (2) that information could not have been known by contemporaries, then (3) the literalness of scripture gets thrown under the bus, and (4) we should find out how that information got there. The church owes it to its members to tell them the truth, whether it’s God, a bunch of people with long generational memories, or space aliens. People simply must not be afraid of the truth.; it’s too dangerous. Touching and brave. But now I’m Space Boy again, or at least a third of me is.

January 30^th 2021

At Vigil last night, I was awoken by pebbles tossed at the window of my cell. It was a woman in a Poor Claire’s habit. I met her outside in the little truck garden and she handed me an envelope containing Dr. Ethan’s medical and dental records.  The Nun told me she found it on the front passenger seat of her Volvo. I was right when I met Dr. Ethan on the stage that he wasn’t his usual self. Osteoporosis, Pyorrhea, and other conditions I couldn’t spell or even recognize. I hand the Sister her envelope back and asked her to destroy it. Naturally I couldn’t sleep, but at the sound of Prime, I walked into the Abbot’s office, picked up the only telephone on the property, and booked a flight to Salt Lake City and had one of my Utah senior VPs pick me up at the airport and get me to the salt flats.

January 31^st 2021

Dear Journal,

I’ve had a quite fortnight. Writing to you was a blast. I hope you enjoy your well-deserved rest in my bottom desk drawer.