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Authors: Michael Bishop
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those would be good things to stress. But he could also say that anyone may learn to appreciate both kinds of beauty . . . if not repeatedly warned away from the former by philistines and from the latter by snobs. Maybe, in rendering certain judgments, he came on like a snob? He didn’t like to think so. You couldn’t praise the bad just because it was accessible. Or dis the praiseworthy simply because it failed to excite the masses. Unless, of course, you didn’t give a damn about the truth. Xavier didn’t think he was an elitist. He believed in the Keatsian doctrine “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” and he didn’t like people to mistake pewter for platinum. Out of this reverie, Xavier found that The Mick had retreated to his bedroom. He followed him to his door.
“Mikhail, do you think I’m a snob?”
The Mick, cross-legged on his bed, sat under a poster of the hoodluminati band Smite Them Hip & Thigh: five teenagers of three distinct racial phenotypes and six different hair colors. Linked by an electronic umbilical to his music, Mikhail unplugged.
Xavier repeated his question.
“You’d know better’n me, Uncle Xave.”
“Let me rephrase: Do I seem to you a snob?”
The Mick smiled cryptically. “Do you think I’m a fucking yahoo?”
“You’re unfinished. And too quick to label boring what you don’t yet understand. But you’re no yahoo. You’re too smart.”
The Mick considered this. “You’re unfinished, too. You in your high-art way, me in my hoodluminati rat hole. Your way may be worse.”
Xavier would have liked to argue this, but he had to pick up Bari at the Salonika Trade Mart, and so their discussion came to an indeterminate end. Still, he left thinking that it might be a good experiment to sit down—when he had more time—and listen to the irritating hoodluminati yahoos known as . . . Smite Them Hip & Thigh.
Maybe.
10
Critical Mass
One morning, Xavier took Bari and The Mick to mass at Christ’s Episcopal Church in downtown Salonika, a lovely white edifice in the classic Greek style. Mikhail hadn’t wanted to go—he’d never gone with Xavier to church before—but when he learned that Bari was also going, he reconsidered.
On the walk from Franklin Court to Jackson Square, he slouched along behind Xavier and Bari in his blue jeans, sneakers, and a clean white T-shirt with his Ephebus Academy tie. Xavier had been about to forbid him to come, if he dressed with so little respect, but Bari, a vision in mockingbird-grey and eggshell-white, had urged Xavier to relax his standards—not to demean high communion, but to make it easier for Mikhail to go with them. “What’s more important, Xave, that he look like a little earl or that he take part in the Eucharist?”
Even Xavier knew the answer to that question; and in the wide, cool sanctuary of Christ’s Episcopal, as the choir on the balcony sang to guitar and flute accompaniment, the issue of the kid’s dress ceased to matter. Xavier felt uplifted by his presence in the church and exalted by the music. Nietzsche would puke, but Xavier was religious not just by childhood upbringing but on tested philosophical-aesthetic grounds. Preparing for high communion, he felt exactly as he did when strolling past a superb exhibition in the Upshaw or seeing Aeschylus well performed at the state theater.
So what if The Mick had schlepped into God’s house clad like a retropunk whirled through a men’s shop? So what if Xavier’s head still throbbed from too much wine at Lesegne’s? So what if Bari had come along more to keep him company than to take the elements? And so what if his nephew was paging the Book of Common Prayer as if it were an out-of-date volume of Comic Buyer’s Guide ? What mattered now was this sublime striving toward Godhead. A sublime striving—as scandalous as the notion struck most priests—spiritually akin to the Nietzschean urge to obtain to the Übermensch .
“Are you all right?” Bari asked
“Mikhail, do you think I’m a snob?”
The Mick, cross-legged on his bed, sat under a poster of the hoodluminati band Smite Them Hip & Thigh: five teenagers of three distinct racial phenotypes and six different hair colors. Linked by an electronic umbilical to his music, Mikhail unplugged.
Xavier repeated his question.
“You’d know better’n me, Uncle Xave.”
“Let me rephrase: Do I seem to you a snob?”
The Mick smiled cryptically. “Do you think I’m a fucking yahoo?”
“You’re unfinished. And too quick to label boring what you don’t yet understand. But you’re no yahoo. You’re too smart.”
The Mick considered this. “You’re unfinished, too. You in your high-art way, me in my hoodluminati rat hole. Your way may be worse.”
Xavier would have liked to argue this, but he had to pick up Bari at the Salonika Trade Mart, and so their discussion came to an indeterminate end. Still, he left thinking that it might be a good experiment to sit down—when he had more time—and listen to the irritating hoodluminati yahoos known as . . . Smite Them Hip & Thigh.
Maybe.
10
Critical Mass
One morning, Xavier took Bari and The Mick to mass at Christ’s Episcopal Church in downtown Salonika, a lovely white edifice in the classic Greek style. Mikhail hadn’t wanted to go—he’d never gone with Xavier to church before—but when he learned that Bari was also going, he reconsidered.
On the walk from Franklin Court to Jackson Square, he slouched along behind Xavier and Bari in his blue jeans, sneakers, and a clean white T-shirt with his Ephebus Academy tie. Xavier had been about to forbid him to come, if he dressed with so little respect, but Bari, a vision in mockingbird-grey and eggshell-white, had urged Xavier to relax his standards—not to demean high communion, but to make it easier for Mikhail to go with them. “What’s more important, Xave, that he look like a little earl or that he take part in the Eucharist?”
Even Xavier knew the answer to that question; and in the wide, cool sanctuary of Christ’s Episcopal, as the choir on the balcony sang to guitar and flute accompaniment, the issue of the kid’s dress ceased to matter. Xavier felt uplifted by his presence in the church and exalted by the music. Nietzsche would puke, but Xavier was religious not just by childhood upbringing but on tested philosophical-aesthetic grounds. Preparing for high communion, he felt exactly as he did when strolling past a superb exhibition in the Upshaw or seeing Aeschylus well performed at the state theater.
So what if The Mick had schlepped into God’s house clad like a retropunk whirled through a men’s shop? So what if Xavier’s head still throbbed from too much wine at Lesegne’s? So what if Bari had come along more to keep him company than to take the elements? And so what if his nephew was paging the Book of Common Prayer as if it were an out-of-date volume of Comic Buyer’s Guide ? What mattered now was this sublime striving toward Godhead. A sublime striving—as scandalous as the notion struck most priests—spiritually akin to the Nietzschean urge to obtain to the Übermensch .
“Are you all right?” Bari asked
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