Still thinking on millionaire Mel & his Mad-Max Jesus.

I guess my irritation stems in part from a sense of identification. Gibson's "Passion" is his own; this vast expense of expensive spirit stems, as passions will (as Dante knew) from a listening, hearing, reading experience; somewhere in his (or his strange father's) biography there was a response to, & some kind of identification with, the Biblical Word.

In the summer of 1973 I was working on a ranch, haybaling, with my brother, in a remote & beautiful part of Wyoming (Cora, WY, pop. 3). After work, in the bunkhouse, with Jim & the rancher's cocky 14-yr-old son, who wore a cowboy hat & liked to shoot gophers with his .22, & liked to bug Jim & me with his sarcastic comments on whatever we mature 19-21 yr olds talked about, with his twangy "well, wowzee-wowzee-woo-woo!"), I lay there reading the Revised Standard Version from beginning to end.

Why was I reading the Bible? I can't remember exactly when it started. But my biography was no less weird & eccentric than anyone else's. I think I was reading the Bible in an attempt to ground myself more securely, in a literary-historical sense, as a response to psychological shock. Because I really was in shock & mental torment at that time.

I had finished 3 years of college. I had written lots of adolescent poems, but had no concept of a practical future. I had played the fool in numberless ways trying to relate to my female compatriots. & I had read Shakespeare's Sonnets, & received the ineradicable impression that Mr. Shakespeare was addressing me, personally, from some extra-chronological dimension. This experience added to my deep fear & justified concern that I might be out of my mind, to put it euphemistically; ie. insane.

The Bible, basically, in a time of personal crisis, took me out of myself, into its epic & social & deeply practical/political/worldly-ironic atmosphere. It must have been that fusion of worldly knowledge and intense theological articulation - added to the fact that I had been brought up & confirmed in & fallen away from a church-oriented family - which utterly overpowered me.

Imagine a reading experience, at that age, which works steadily through the Mosaic books, the histories, the Psalms, the prophets, the wisdom books, the proverbs - this immense cultural epic - & concludes in the crosshairs of the "New Testament" : a kind of panopticon, or multimedia-dramatic grand finale to the consecutive narrative of the "Old Testament". You can't imagine this, actually, unless in some hidden or not-so-hidden corner of your experience you've been through it yourself, & heard the prophetic & not-so-prophetic messages.

So I do not need a filmic resume which dully & brutally pounds upon my head a literalist dogma about a deterministic scapegoat-atonement. I do not need Mel Gibson's version of "right reading". I've read the Word. It's alive, more than any film adaptation; & I'm still reading with it.