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<\/a><\/p>\nWe play touch football on a Saturday afternoon in Auburn in 1984, both of us in our final months of high school. He goes to the Sacramento Adventist academy and he’s an A student. I go to Placer High and I’m a B student. Craig follows the rules in everything and he wins in everything and his cockiness is so subtle, you don’t resent it, you admire it because he earns it. He could be obnoxious but he isn’t. His family hosts me for many a Sabbath. I never host Craig. My home embarrasses me. <\/p>\n
I don’t have the discipline to play the game the way Craig does. I could never write poetry like he does. I don’t think I could endure law school and other polite conventions. My life reveals I refuse the burdens of marriage, family and mortgage. <\/p>\n
My job that afternoon is to cover Craig van Rooyen, who plays wide receiver. I bump him at the line. He runs past me. I play off him to take away the deep route. He runs under it and brings it down and runs past me. I try everything a seventeen-year-old knows, and a few things I invent on the spot, and none of it works. The other team throws to Craig all day because they have watched me fail to stop him and they are not stupid. I spend the afternoon looking up. He spends it in the air.<\/p>\n
There’s a blonde girl on my team. She’s two years younger. A great body. A few weeks before, she taught me how to kiss on a Saturday night in the loft of Dr. Zane Kime’s home. She would glide her lips on mine and her tongue would dart around my mouth and then dance with mine. In five minutes, I went from a boy who didn’t know how to kiss to a boy with a PhD in kissing. <\/p>\n
The previous girl who kissed me just jammed her tongue down my throat and I was so unnerved, I barely talked to her for the next three years of high school. She became a big success in polite society. <\/p>\n
I never saw the blonde again but I transmitted everything she gave me over the next few decades. While women have registered many complaints about me (chiefly that I don’t put much effort into relationships, I guess I’m a typical Aussie male), they never complain about my kissing. <\/p>\n
I have not seen Craig since our final game. Next I knew he was working as a journalist in San Francisco circa 1994. Then he went to UCLA School of Law, took an MFA in poetry at Pacific University, and sits now as a trial judge in San Luis Obispo<\/a>, hearing criminal cases that run from a suspended license to murder. He writes poems that appear in the good journals. None of it surprises me. The boy who caught everything became a man who rises in two professions at once, and I am still, in a manner of speaking, on the ground, watching him go up.<\/p>\n This is an essay about Craig’s hero systems, and I read them through Ernest Becker<\/a> (1924-1974).<\/p>\n Becker’s argument in The Denial of Death<\/em><\/a> is this. A man knows two things no animal knows. He knows he will die, and he suspects that while he lives he might not matter. The first terror is the grave. The second is the worse one, the fear that he might pass through his whole span and leave no mark on the cosmos, that he might be a creature and nothing more. Culture answers both at once. Culture hands each man a hero system, a set of tasks and prizes that promise him a feeling of cosmic value if he performs them. Do this and you will have mattered. Do this and some part of you will outlast the body. A hero system lets a man deny death without admitting he is denying anything.<\/p>\n A man can serve more than one. The trouble starts when they pull against each other.<\/p>\n Craig grows up inside the most literal hero system on offer. He comes of age in an Adventist home in the seventies and eighties, the same world I half belong to. His father, Smuts van Rooyen<\/a>, holds a doctorate and pastors Adventist congregations, and for a time works for my father, Desmond Ford<\/a> (1929-2019), at Good News Unlimited<\/a>. I never saw my father so excited about a hire. He jumped in the air when he announced it. Smuts is a spell-binding preacher and writer and his three children surely make him proud. The Adventist promise carries no metaphor. The dead sleep. The King returns. The graves open and the faithful rise to meet Him in the air. Death comes, and then death gets undone. Every Sabbath rehearses the rescue.<\/p>\n Then Craig subtracts God. I read it in his poems. One of them<\/a> stages a father whose small daughter points at the figure on his T-shirt and asks if it is God. The father lies and says yes. The figure is Bob Marley (1945-1981). The poem turns on the longing for a picture of God a man might keep in his wallet next to the snapshots of the kids, and on the absence of any such picture, and on a reggae beat standing in for a liturgy he can no longer sing straight. Craig keeps the rhythm and loses the doctrine. He keeps the waiting and loses the One waited for. There is his subtraction story. He carries the ache of the Adventist hero system into rooms where the doctrine holds no standing, the courtroom and the poem. He shops a manuscript he calls Extinction Picnic<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n The word to watch in Craig’s life is grace.<\/p>\n In his father’s world grace has a hard technical edge. Grace is unmerited pardon. The sinner cannot earn his standing and does not try. He receives. The quarrel that cost my father his place in the church turned on this word, on whether God saves by grace alone or keeps a ledger of each believer’s record and audits it in a heavenly court. My father argued for grace against the ledger and lost his standing. Smuts rejoined the church and did right by his family. Craig grows up watching two men he loves take grace to mean two different prices.<\/p>\n Carry the word into other lives and watch it change shape.<\/p>\n For a grower in the Edna Valley, grace is the season. He prunes and trains and waters, and then the weather decides. A run of warm nights in September gives him a vintage he could not have commanded with any amount of work. Grace is the gift the labor cannot force. His hero system is the vineyard, and what tells him he has not wasted his years is the great year that arrives unearned.<\/p>\n For a session drummer holding a one-drop reggae beat, grace is the pocket. He drops the kick on the third beat and leaves the first empty, and when the timing lands the whole room leans. He cannot fully explain the timing and cannot teach it past a point. Grace is the beat that sits right. His hero system is the groove, and the groove either blesses him or it does not.<\/p>\n For a hospice nurse, grace is the quiet death. She has watched the body fight and watched it let go, and she calls it a mercy when a man dies without the long struggle, when the breathing slows and stops and nothing tears. Grace is the easy crossing. Her hero system is the good death, and she counts her years by how many she has eased.<\/p>\n Each of these people would nod at the word and mean something the others might not recognize. Becker’s point holds. The sacred word is not one thing. It takes its content from the hero system that needs it, and it means what lets that hero feel his life carries weight.<\/p>\n Now set Craig in the middle of them. On the bench grace is a ration. He decides whether a man stays in custody or goes home to his family while the case waits, whether a conviction ends in probation or prison, whether a frightened witness gets heard. He calls it listening to the people in front of him and working out something that helps them. He worries on the bad days that the system he serves was built to mark certain men and shield the powerful. On the good days he thinks the law bends enough to do some good, if the men who apply it stay humble about the views they inherited and keep checking them. Grace here is discretion, bound by evidence, rationed by law, handed down from a man in a robe to a man who cannot see his face.<\/p>\n In the poem grace is the line that arrives on its own. Craig says a poem dies the moment the poet tidies the self on the page, the moment he grooms how he looks. The poem has to come up out of the body, the senses, the goosebump and the back-beat. He says the poem opens inside the reader and runs on past the last line and reaches no verdict. So the same man hands down verdicts all day from the bench and writes, at night, the one kind of speech that refuses to reach one. Grace on the bench is the right judgment. Grace in the poem is the held breath before any judgment, the door left open.<\/p>\n Becker kept his respect for the rare man who can watch his own hero system work and name it without flinching. Craig is that kind of man. He says outright that poetry and judging live in different worlds for him, and that he gets uncomfortable when they touch. He knows the robe turns him into a symbol, a head above a bench, a neutral surface that shows nothing but its reasoning. He knows the poem asks the reverse, the body uncovered, the self left raw. Most men run one hero system and mistake it for reality. Craig runs two that contradict each other and keeps the seam in view. He does not pretend the judge and the poet are the same man in different coats. He holds them apart on purpose and feels what the holding costs.<\/p>\n Three things to fix in place before I stop.<\/p>\n The shape of the hero. Craig rises. He rose on the field and he rose in the law and he rose in the journals, and the rising reads as grace in the old athletic sense, the body doing without strain what the rest of us cannot do with all our strain. Under the rising stands a man who lost the literal God of his childhood and kept the hunger that God once filled. He pours the hunger into the verdict and into the poem. He is the preacher’s son who became a judge, which is to say he took the family trade, the rendering of judgment, and moved it from the heavenly court his tradition placed above the clouds down to a courtroom on the Central Coast, where the stakes are a man’s liberty and the appeal goes to a higher court that is only a building in another city.<\/p>\n The unnamed rival. Every hero shapes himself against an enemy he might not name. Craig’s rival is the ledger. The accountant God who keeps the books, opens them in the judgment, and reads off the record. That God broke my father and parted Craig’s father from mine. Craig’s whole posture answers Him. The grace he rations on the bench, the verdict the poem withholds, the picture of God the daughter asks for and cannot get, all of it runs as a long argument with the One who keeps records. Behind the ledger stands the older rival, the grave, the thing the Adventist promise was built to defeat and the thing no robe and no poem defeats.<\/p>\n The cost the ledger cannot price. Craig pays in partition. He spends his working life as a symbol, covered in the robe, his face a surface, his body hidden behind the bench, neutral whatever it costs. The poet in him needs the body in full view. So he lives one life that depends on covering up and another that dies the moment he covers up, and he holds them apart with care, and the holding apart is the price. No docket shows it. He hands down grace all day and writes, at night, the speech that keeps the verdict back, and the man who does both cannot be one man in one room. I saw none of this from the field. From the field I saw the ball go up and Craig go up after it and the certainty that he would come down with it in his hands. I came down with nothing, that day, and I have turned it over for forty years, which is its own immortality project, the boy on the ground making the boy in the air into an essay so the afternoon will have meant something. <\/p>\n The Poetry<\/strong><\/p>\n Read across all of them and one move repeats. Craig keeps the entire religious vocabulary of the Adventist childhood and aims it at targets the church never sanctioned. Yahweh, the Golden Calf, Peter’s denial at the cock’s crow, Jacob’s ladder<\/a>, the Emmaus road, the Song of the Sea, “O Holy Night,” the rivers of Babylon. The grammar survives. The God it pointed to does not. So he prays in a tongue whose deity he has retired, and he points the prayer at Bob Marley, at Aretha Franklin, at a Prozac tablet, at a heron in a park. Craig and I grew up with intense in-group identity that required a significant loss of personal freedom in exchange for community. How do you think Craig learned to navigate this? The ball goes up and Craig goes up after it. No matter how fast I run nor how high I jump, Craig always floated above me that day and he always caught the ball. Forty two years have gone by. … Continue reading
\n“Reading Exodus<\/a>” runs it as comedy first. Yahweh wears the pants and threatens to unleash a season of plagues, and the speaker daydreams about turning that power on his marriage, then admits “my people” means mostly himself. The poem stops joking at the Golden Calf. The people strip off their wedding rings and pitch their lives into the flames, faces lit, the sky ready to fall, and he turns your eyes to the dancers at the fire. The joke was his way of walking up to a thing he can’t say straight. He does this often. He clowns until the floor drops.
\n“Prozac Ode<\/a>” runs the same circuit through pharmacology. He hesitates to call the pill Savior, notes that blasphemy has lost its sting, then turns the molecules into lopsided Stars of David, tiny rabbis posted at the synapses holding off the void while the Song of the Sea plays. Chemistry becomes another name for God. A boy raised on the soon-coming King now takes his deliverance from a gel capsule and still reaches for Exodus to name the rescue. The Jewish material there is worth your eye. He crosses both testaments and reaches into the siddur without strain, a preacher’s son who treats the whole inheritance as his to spend.
\n“Till She Appeared and the Soul Felt Its Worth<\/a>” lifts its title from “O Holy Night” and writes Aretha Franklin as the voice of the Almighty lodged in a human throat, calling down judgment and then singing the country back into one piece, note by bent note. A dandelion forces up through cracked pavement. The hymn line about the soul feeling its worth gets handed to a soul singer. Same move. The sacred word stays employed by changing employers.
\nTwo poems sit closer to the bone.
\n“North<\/a>” puts a boy in the stands while his brother rounds third and the fathers stand to cheer the promising sons. The boy slides down among the grown men’s legs, a fugitive with a cloud atlas open on his knees, and aches for a far northern lake he has never seen. Overhead a lone goose flaps out of formation and stays up on longing past the reach of physics. Hold that against my field. I spent the afternoon on the ground looking up at Craig in the air. Craig spends his poems on the ground too, writing the boy who could not rise, the kid against the gym wall while others danced. The man I remember soaring writes from the seat I sat in.
\nLife is a spiral staircase says Dr. Stephen Marmer<\/a> and we’re always moving between helplessness, feeling small in a big world, mastery and grandiosity.
\n“Jacob’s Ladder<\/a>” is his fatherhood elegy and his statement of vocation. After the night of angels the ladder goes back to cleaning gutters and trimming ivy. The consolations come small and unrecorded, the shock of finch eggs in a hidden nest, a man on his back squinting string-lights into constellations. Then the grown daughter leaves for her own life, and the father climbs into the ivy to finger an abandoned nest whose straw and eggshell hold the only record of the loss. The claim to keep is his: these unrecorded hours add up to a man’s life, and he alone writes them, in ink that vanishes, milled from moth-wing dust. There is the poet’s hero. He keeps the record.
\n“Respair<\/a>” makes the same vow at the level of language. Words go extinct every few minutes, woolfell and mooncalf and poltroon, and a grandfather loses the day he last held his daughter’s name, and Peter denies Christ before dawn, and the poem sets itself to keep everything alive through memory. It closes wanting to bring back one lost word, respair, an old Emmaus-road word for hope returning after long despair. That word might be the whole manuscript. He named the book Extinction Picnic<\/em><\/a>. He writes elegies that refuse to quit hoping.
\nHe told<\/a> an Adventist audience that a poem wants words to become flesh and reach another body, that it fails at this, and that the failure moves us. He called poetry the reverse of incarnation, flesh trying to escape into words and missing the mark. He thinks the work is to make a sound a reader hears as his own. Read the whole run and you hear a man who lost God, kept the liturgy, and pours it into bodies, a singer, a pill, a goose, a daughter, a dying word, to keep the old hope running under new management.<\/p>\n
\nHe translated it. That seems to be the route, and it sits between the two clean exits the trade usually offers.
\nThe hard version of the bargain runs through diet, the Sabbath, dress, courtship, reading, the company a man keeps. You hand over a long list of freedoms and the group hands back belonging, certainty, a name, a people who will bury you. The two obvious doors are obedience and rupture. Obey and keep the community. Rebel and lose it, and carry guilt out either door. Craig took neither. He kept the forms and drained them of the binding content.
\nThe two careers show it. The judge wears a robe, sits above the room, renders judgment, holds neutral, speaks for a law larger than himself. That is the shape of the elder and the priest, the remnant role he was raised inside. He kept the shape and changed the master. His authority answers to evidence and the civil code now, not to a church court that can disfellowship him. The poet confesses, testifies, bares the body, takes the revival-meeting posture, and signs no creed, risks no membership, loses no standing for saying the wrong thing. He took the two oldest moves of his childhood, the bench and the testimony, and ran them in rooms where no one can revoke him.
\nThen the irony. The poems handle sacred material by joking with it. Yahweh as a tough guy threatening plagues. Prozac as a hesitant Savior. Aretha as the voice of God. A boy raised where this material was policed and deadly serious learns that comedy lets him hold it without kneeling and without spitting. Irony is the tool of the man who loves the thing and refuses to obey it. He keeps Exodus and keeps his freedom in the same line.
\nThe interview gives away the method. He says a poem dies if he grooms the self on the page, and that the bench asks him to disappear into the role and show nothing but his reasoning. So he built two rooms. In one he is all role, covered, neutral, safe. In the other he stands exposed, free, unaudited. The community he grew up in wanted the whole man to conform, Sabbath to Sabbath, in public view. He answered by splitting the man, so one part could go free on the page where no elder reads the minutes. The partition is the navigation. He pays for it in the discomfort he names, the two worlds grinding when they touch, and it buys him a free zone the group never granted.
\nLook at what fills the poems. Cigarettes, a spliff, the liquor store line, lotto tickets, beer garden lights, sex in a VW, a pill for the depression. These are the small worldly pleasures the code forbade. He writes them with tenderness and lives inside them, free of rebellion and free of guilt. A man reclaims the freedoms a list took from him by naming the ordinary with affection. That might be the quietest part of the navigation and the deepest.
\nHe had a father who left and came back. Smuts went to work for the dissident Desmond Ford, tested the wall, then rejoined the church because it was the best thing for the family. My father put his conscience and mission first. Craig watched a man he loved run this exact bargain twice, exile and return, and survive it. My father stayed out in the cold. Craig grew up with a working model of a man who could press the limits of the community and still find a door back in. A boy who sees that learns the thing is not all or nothing, that you can drop parts and keep parts, that the wall has a gate.
\nSo my guess is that Craig learned to keep the music and drop the law. He kept the longing, the liturgy, the hunger for a picture of God, the testimony, the bench. He let go of the claim that the group owned the truth and could price his soul. He found two vocations that handed him the old shapes without the old chains, and a private room on the page where the whole self walks around loose. His freedom came from translation, from keeping the architecture and refusing the lock.
\nIn real life, when I talk about the wonderful things my childhood friends did with their lives, people usually react as though I regret my choices. The conversation makes them uncomfortable. They think I’m manipulating them for praise and assurance.
\nI don’t think I am. I admire my childhood friends such as Craig Van Rooyen and his psychologist brother Andre Van Rooyen<\/a>. I don’t feel diminished by their wins.
\nI notice that when a man talks about others’ achievements, the listener assumes the warmth covers a wound, and they reach to console me. The console is about them. It soothes their own discomfort at a story that doesn’t resolve the way the script expects. Most people can’t hold “he admires their lives and doesn’t want them” as one stable thing. They round it to regret because regret is the familiar shape.
\nI am not running that script. I trust my move into Judaism. I can hold the admiration and the joy at once. I guess that’s a rare position, and it’s hard to say out loud, because saying it invites the very misreading I keep getting.
\nA life that reads as loss to nearly everyone who hears it described, and reads as a good trade to the man who lived it, sits outside the common measure. The career, the marriage, the house, the children, that’s the legible scale, the one a listener can total up fast. I went off it. So when I praise my friends, the listener totals them on the scale, totals me on the same scale, and the gap looks like a deficit to them. They feel the gap before I finish the sentence. The console follows.
\nI don’t feel the gap because I’m not totaling on that scale. I traded for things the scale doesn’t price. Belonging in a tradition I trust. A worldview I developed as an adult and still hold. Health I fought for and won. Those don’t show up on the reunion ledger, so to the room I look short a few columns. To me the columns are full, just full of other entries.
\nI have regrets, but I don’t tune into that channel. My attitude is that given who I was at each stage of my life, I could not have acted differently. I’m not telling you that’s true, I’m telling you that attitude minimizes my regret. Sometimes, when I’m sick, regret presses on me, but usually I choose to watch other channels in my head.
\nAn intense in-group is a concentrated source of things ordinary life hands out in scattered form: belonging, structure, people who notice when you don’t show up, a place where your name means something. Most men who leave one don’t need a replacement. They get those goods another way. Family supplies them. Work supplies them. A circle of friends supplies them. Diffuse, low cost, no creed required.
\nMy childhood friends all left the Adventist church built that scattered supply while they were young. So the trade an in-group offers, your freedom for their community, looked like a bad deal to them. They already held the community. Why pay the price again?
\nI was sick and alone in my twenties while they were building good lives. When a man has little belonging, the price of more drops to the floor. He’ll give up a lot of freedom for it. That’s arithmetic, not weakness.
\nAnd the timing did the rest. They left Adventism while their diffuse supply was already growing, so the floor never dropped out from under them. I left, then got sick, and the scattered supply never formed. When the crisis came there was nothing to catch me. That’s the meaning crisis I felt and they didn’t. This might be the difference in what each of us had standing around when the old structure fell away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"