In the Tralfamadorian space ship which is a church, Time is understood.  It is represented spatially, along with the fonts of holy water, in the Stations of the Cross.  That is time, that is life.  One thing after another, like frames of a comic strip.  A crucifixion, on-going, each frame a different chapter.  There is no more accurate portrayal of time.  No better history, no better biography, no better representation of living in time.  Here, is the essence of human life and consciousness, one thing after another, and all of it basically similar.

And by no means, not to say it's all bad, not all terror, nor all a matter of suffering and eventual death.  But it flows, and one footstep of life is followed by another.  And this is why people, knowingly, are very careful to hedge their bets.  Their steps are taken carefully.  And this is why they will do things, certain things, like become accountants and tax collectors and consultants to the Roman Empire.

Of course the story of the Crucifixion begins, if you will, if there is a beginning, with the Last Supper, with Jesus' declaration of his impending doom, after his realization of it in the Garden.  And with the wine, which must be then taken seriously, not in vain, not simply the easy social beverage of laughter and forgetting.  There is meaning in wine, as it is also a representation of time.

But, of course, it all began before that, depending how you wish to look at it.  No part of the Christian story can be separate from the Cross.  The story of the Cross of Jesus Christ begins with his birth, his conception, on and on.  Each point of his life fits in.




In the Tralfamadorian understanding, that is our life too, each of us, the crucifixion of the being of higher dimension in the three dimensional world.  Well, once you realize that, things get better.  Then you are able to wisely chide yourself over your own habits, as Jesus does, explicating our sins, as if at a recovery meeting for sinful people.  And he was intimately familiar with sin as we all are, if anything more acutely sensitive, often a sad fellow from his own propensity for sin.... Once you realize the slow on-going Cross of being at least a four dimensional being stuck in a three-dimensional world, then you develop faith.  You get better at things, and then that knowledge, whether or not it's put into words, comes as a huge relief, actually.  Thus it always a matter of perspective, when you look upon your own misery.



There is always that pull.  There is the pull to belong in social things, but there is the pull away, drawing one toward seclusion, toward the desert, to quiet reflection, places where one is not drawn in to behavior lacking seriousness simply by being a social being.  One cannot serve two masters.  Thoughts are found as they are found, but must be gathered quietly.

There are of course, on Tralfamadore, the constant cycles people go through, that of sins personal, followed by forgiveness and redemption.  Like a moon cycle.  Inevitable.  A harmonious society, an equality, an agreement...


A quiet day after going out to visit a small gathering at friends.  Pizza, and later, on the way home, a McDonald's run, and so there is the dough hangover for the allergy sufferer in pollen season, a general lack.   He takes his pills.  He's got the night off.  He takes a shower, and shaves.  Tonight he will stay in.

The hack science fiction writer grown man-child of middle age and too much wine goes down to the store, the sort of farmer's market.  Every now and again there is a good wine.  There are half chickens, if one doesn't feel like cooking.  Ground buffalo.  Free range eggs.  Duck sausage.  Local vegetable produce.

He goes through the cashier line, talking about, learning from, the guy at the cash register, an African American guy whose father's name is Eric Amos, then over to the little bar.  There were three women, one familiar, good looking, a brunette in a red dress with a wheat beer, a carton of turkey and black bean chili, and the three are snacking off olives and goat cheese and flat bread.  They are talking of international improvement projects, Senegal...


On Tralfamadora, there are less worries about such things as economic tedium.  The economy is driven, at least in part, by the engine of sin and fun meets seriousness, forgiveness and redemption, day after day, hour after hour.  To run a stock change of these constantly changing values would quickly reveal, even to the sharpest mathematical and political and corporate business school minds, that all things even out, a collective zero.  Thus liberating the society to actually do things.  Like help people.  For all are involved in the classic inevitable all inclusive process of sin, one moment, followed by the most brilliant of goodness.

For they have, out there, on this nation planet, the model of Earth, no problem with really getting the wildest things that Planet Earth's religious traditions have recorded.  Which are, of course, originated in the visitors, from Tralfamadora to Earth, who are able to casually cross how ever many vast kalpas of light years and distances and atomic removal to appear quite alive and physically present in the most mundane of places.  Taking out the trash.  Doing laundry.  Grocery shopping.  Finding enough bottles of wine or other inspirations for the night's possibilities of a return trip to Jesus and Tralfamadora and Kurt Vonnegut and Buddha, Pali, Sanskrit, the Lankavatarra Scriptures.

On Tralfamador, the most mundane things are the most interesting, the most conducive to the light which is the light, which is the insight, which brings together time, space and light itself into one thing, the one thing which is not the Great Void, as spoken of by the Buddha.

As well as observing and revisiting the shit of planet Earth, in whatever century, the mass idiot things like The Third Reich, or ISIL, for instance, the foolish reactions, terrible actions of the most terrible sort done without the slightest of reflections, without the slightest understanding of time, and completely forgetting the Stations of the Cross.

Is it therefore not a surprise at all that the peoples who have, let's say, seen the greatest earth-bound-human-society-political-military-industrial imitations of true heavenly wrath, as noted by absolute gyroscopic balance upon the planets of the spiritual societies, get it.  They become wise, having seen this bloody bluster of the attempted re-creation, as if in a cinema, but with real bombs and airplanes and political subterfuge--theatrical, farcical, mechanical--of what some madman calls "God's Will,"as he is particularly given to see it.  And from such evil,  the utter comical fake, the complete lack of any attempt at justice, and its utter achievement of any lack of justice, love, and all those things of the spirituality of trees and the Universe...

How, say, the Polish and the Czechs must have the greatest right to laugh at the ridiculousness, of the Nazis, of the Soviets, were it not to hurt so much and have made so many lives that which they are not, disposable, trivial, unimportant, each a part of the underpinning of the whole.  Those societies which can take a drink, make love, have a laugh, continue to speak their own native language in all its fresh and childish beauty... The world and its history are full of such peoples... Real people, who get it.  Who, somehow, have received and welcomed visitors from places like Tralfamador.



The hack science fiction writer who had failed at writing and was now seeing himself stuck as a barman for the remainder of his sad life, had just opened the blue door, and nervous about the coming Jazz Night.  There would be a lot of moving pieces to it, going on all night, and everyone would be hounding him such that there would not be a spare moment.  At such a moment he felt tired, and it was easy to forget about his interesting friends from the far away planet, Tralfamador, sometimes called Tralfamadora, either way.


But here, yeah, no...  There is a great misunderstanding.

It is the very nature of the animal to be sinful, beautifully so, look at the success of fast food restaurants (though they serve a place for the hungered) and bars and trendy places. It is the creature to be sinful in enjoyment, enjoyment of temporary things, and then to fall into the inevitable realization, that pleasure is sin.  And once you've sinned, you want some form of redemption, of forgiveness, of admission, that one has done stupid things for momentary pleasure, then tried to whisk the whole thing away, but with an unease.  Redemption is hard to hold, as it is intangible.

This is how oil and all petrochemicals came about, buried long ago.  The sins of plant life.  The copious layers of plant pleasure, of rutting ferns sinking down into the mud of their own lust, then buried by the lusts of other layers of sinful creatures, on and on, millions of years, the rich rotting and compression...  Sin becomes an engine...  Sin, of such a sort, is organic.  And as Jesus says, it is not what goes in, but what comes out, whatever that means...