The word spirituality fills me with anxiety. As the member of our department of religious studies who teaches contemporary religion, (New Age, popular culture, Asian religion in America, that sort of thing…) I should be a spirituality expert, ready to use the word as a clever retort for my cynical family members, as a piece of sage advice for my sincere, confused graduating majors, or as a contextualizing quote for the religion writer from our local paper.

In other words, I feel I should have a handle on this whole spirituality thing, but I really don’t. When I think about spirituality, I ask myself, throat tightening: what do I need to know? What conversations about it should I be injecting myself into? Who’s writing about it? Whose brilliant new definition of it is so broad, or so narrow, or so unexpected, or so obvious, or so self-conscious, or so un-self-conscious, that we academics can no longer talk meaningfully about spirituality without nodding metaphorically or literally in the direction of this exciting scholar?

I can toss off an article on a particular religious group in contemporary America, or put together a chapter about how some artifact of pop culture is, in fact, religious. But if I want the security of a tenured position at the best possible institution, and the prestige of having written a serious work of scholarship, I need to write a book whose title uses big words and that does not evoke any particular time or place.

I need to write an academic book about spirituality.

The word spirituality fills me with anxiety. Sometimes as I work on my laptop (or pretend to) late at night, my wife will ask what I am writing. An article or an entry or a book review, I’ll tell her.

“What are you doing that for?” she’ll ask.

“Well it’s part of my job.”

“So are you getting paid for it?”

“No, but I get to keep the book.” Or: “They should send me a copy of the encyclopedia when it comes out, plus $60!” That fails to impress, as does my monthly paycheck.

“You’re a good writer and you know a lot about religion. Write a book that will sell,” she says, “Make us some money. Get famous.”

Why not? If professors of economics serve as consultants to the very banks they study and professors of medicine are paid by the companies whose drugs they test, why can’t professors of religious studies financially exploit the subjects of our investigations? What is wrong with a little money and publicity? Why can’t we cash in too?

I need to write a popular book about spirituality.

The thought of writing a book about spirituality, whether academic or popular, fills me with anxiety. Shouldn’t these kinds of books just write themselves?

In the academic book I’d like to write, a smooth and vague language, full of whispered half-promises, conjures the free-floating theorizing that can only happen when the discipline of religious studies merges with postmodern theology and cultural studies. The popular book I’d like to write could be found in any of a dozen sections of the local bookstore: New Age, Self-Help, Eastern Religions, Psychology, Fitness, Humor. Or better yet: next to the cash register.

Shouldn’t these kinds of books just write themselves? Maybe not, but the titles can. And that’s a start.

So Louis, the Webmaster, and Laura, the Instructional Technologist, helped me create an automatic, random title generator, which has inside of it over one and a half million possible book titles about spirituality. At last I am no longer anxious about spirituality; I might even feel a little bit spiritual myself, for the first time. Because I have harnessed the power of randomness and automation, which are unthinking, productive, and modern, like spirituality itself.

I created this generator for myself. In using it, I have noticed that in all these potential book titles, the word “spirituality” stands like the eye of the hurricane, the vacant signifier, the placeholder, the empty vessel…

And now I invite everyone to partake.

http://sieglere.people.cofc.edu/title.php

Spirituality appears in the queerest of places. Since the fall of 2009 I have been spending time with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. For more than thirty years the members of this international, religiously unaffiliated organization have been serving as nuns to their communities: originally mostly gay men but increasingly also including bisexuals of all genders, lesbians, transgender people, and queer folk. In their capacity as (in their words) “twenty-first century nuns,” the Sisters fundraise, educate, advocate for, support, and care for their constituents. All this they do with a sex-positive twist, however; the Sisters, in fact, were among the first to produce sex-positive safer-sex materials after the identification of AIDS among gay male populations, and they continue to concern themselves with both the fun and the health and safety of sex.

Though AIDS is not the Sisters’ sole concern—they fundraise and advocate for causes ranging from sex workers’ rights to gay retirement homes–it is one of their earliest and most central areas of advocacy. As a result, they often take part in events such as AIDS walks and rides, and they are generally out in force on World AIDS Day. On December 1, 2009, I joined members of the Order of Benevolent Bliss in Portland, Oregon for a “walking vigil”: an event that was part bar crawl, part awareness-raising, part ritual, and part, well, pure Sisters.

It was a slow Tuesday night when we arrived at the first bar; the eleven members of the order who were present, along with myself and a handful of friends, dominated the room. The Sisters were decked out in their customary habits: bowl-shaped coronets and colorful veils above whiteface and glam makeup, fancy dresses, and footwear ranging from sneakers to platform boots. Ruth Les’Bitch wore the gray hood and white lips of a postulant, and Novice Guard Justice Once was accompanying the Sisters in order to assist and support them. Several Sisters wore the white veils and formal habits of a novice. But tonight it was not only the novice Sisters who wore white. Two of the fully professed Sisters, usually found in black or colored veils, wore white veils as well. Sister Krissy Fiction explained to me that she was wearing the “Veil of Remembrance”; Sister Maya Poonani was wearing the “Veil of Shame.”

The Veil of Remembrance, worn by Sister Krissy Fiction, honors those lost to AIDS

For several years, the Order of Benevolent Bliss has conducted a walking vigil on World AIDS Day, and each year two of the fully professed Sisters, or FP’s, have worn these white veils. Carrying a black permanent marker, the Sister wearing each veil approaches people during the vigil and invites them to write on her veil. On the Veil of Remembrance go the names of those who have died of AIDS whom the bar patrons wish to remember; the Veil of Shame bears epithets they wish to forget.

The Veil of Shame bears epithets directed at many different groups

As we walked from bar to bar—five in all this evening—I watched the Sisters interact with those around them. They talked about World AIDS Day and about the two veils, greeted people in the bars and on the street, even sang a little karaoke in one establishment. They were greeted with a mix of delight and confusion, depending on their familiarity to the bar and its individual patrons. At one point, Sister Ohna Fuckin’ Tirade pulled me aside to tell me that she had been approached by a woman curious about who the Sisters were and what they were doing that evening. Upon learning of their vigil, she confided to Sister Ohna that her father had died of AIDS years before, but no one in the family knew except herself and her mother. Sister Ohna was clearly moved by this incident, and told me that it is not unusual for strangers to spontaneously share intimate stories with the Sisters. Repeatedly, Sisters have told me that members of their communities will confide to a Sister what they would never confide to her “secular [often male-identified] self.” Though they use the term “secular” to refer to their lives outside of the Order, the Sisters are being simultaneously parodic and serious when they make such categorical distinctions.

Over the course of the evening, Sister Maya’s veil became covered with familiar epithets for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people as well as for Jews and people of color, while on Sister Krissy’s veil the names of the dead multiplied. Ultimately, the fate of the Veil of Remembrance was to be preserved in the order’s archives; the Veil of Shame, however, was the focus of a ritual that ended the evening.

We had arrived at C.C. Slaughter’s, a popular bar populated largely by gay men. Though it was relatively empty on a Tuesday, the Sisters still found plenty of people to talk with. After some time, Sister Maya disappeared, returning with the Veil of Shame in her hands and a clean veil on her head. The Sisters and a handful of others went outside, where a bartender had brought a metal tub and an open bottle of beer. One Sister placed the veil in the tub, and the bartender poured the beer over it. Sister Krissy Fiction, an ordained UCC minister in her life beyond the Sisters, led the gathered crowd in a chant to banish the epithets on the veil, and after some searching for a small lighter, Sister Polly Amorous set the cloth aflame.

Sister Polly Amorous lights the Veil of Shame while Postulant Ruth Les’Bitch looks on

A number of the Portland Sisters, and Sisters in other cities as well, have told me that the work they do in whiteface is an important part—and sometimes the central part—of what they call their spiritual lives. Like many people in the U.S., the Sisters describe their spirituality as an individual connection to the sacred that can be, but is not necessarily, connected to the beliefs and practices of organized religious groups. Some Sisters have what they term a “spirituality” beyond the Sisters themselves, characterized by everything from Christianity to an eclectic mix of practices to agnostic beliefs with no particular form of practice. Other Sisters describe their involvement with the movement itself as their form of spirituality or even of religion.

Left to right: Sister Polly Amorous, Postulant Ruth Les’Bitch, and Sister Krissy Fiction look on as the veil burns.

World AIDS Day is a particularly evident example of the very queer spirituality that is present in the Sisters. Elsewhere that evening, and earlier, the Sisters had offered a blessing to open a more traditional AIDS vigil at Portland’s mostly-LGBT Metropolitan Community Church. But for the Order of Benevolent Bliss–characterized by one member in an interview with me as the least spiritual order of Sisters in existence–offering blessings and gathering in a church are unusual activities. Raising awareness, however, honoring people’s grief, and serving their communities, are weekly and sometimes daily occurrences for these “queer nuns.” The ritual may not invoke deities, the organization may not be officially religious, and the order may be “the least spiritual” of them all, but among the Sisters spirituality is often everywhere.

To stay sweet and meek
Right at your Savior’s feet
For He will make a way to keep
‘Your Dorothy’ as His very heart beat
Then why not stay soft, tender and sweet
You have no other to seek
Cause He will forever be
The very one you need
So come and see
When He calls Your Dorothy
‘Please come and see me’
Because, I cause you to fall in love with me
And I want You solely for my very heart beat

P.S. How do you like that? Dedicated to your Dot from Father in me.

Happy S. Love to Dorothy L. Moore
January 8, 1949

In what context might a portrait photograph sent to one’s object of love and desire also be an expression of spirituality? Or a devotional poem about God’s power to fulfill all needs also a statement of need and desire for human emotional and physical, perhaps even sexual, contact? How might the above photograph of and poem by Happy S. Love provide access to the ways that spirituality can structure and convey erotic desire and sexuality?

No trace remains in the archive of Happy S. Love’s identity or life before she joined Father Divine’s Peace Mission Movement, most likely in the 1940s, and took a spiritual name to reflect the transformation she underwent through her belief in the divinity of Father Divine. She lived in one of the movement’s residences in Newark, New Jersey, having broken ties with her family of birth in favor of her new family of brothers and sisters in the movement. In doing so, she also chose to commit herself to a sex-segregated, celibate, communal life. Everything about members’ lives prior to accepting Father Divine had to be left behind. In their lives with him, they adopted new attitudes toward embodiment. Father Divine preached, quoting and expanding on Romans 12:1, “’I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, Holy, acceptable unto God, for such is your reasonable service.’ That is to give up your body for the Spirit’s sake and recognize the Spirit and the Life as Supreme. And when you do that, you are seeking the Kingdom of Heaven. You are looking to the Heavenly state of consciousness and not to the material or mortal state. . . .” The communal residences, often referred to by outsiders as “heavens,” served in many ways to help Divine’s “Angels” sacrifice their mortal bodies to a spiritual purpose. In coming into Father Divine’s Kingdom, Happy S. Love also pledged to live out the movement’s theological perspective that race was a product of the negative mind under the influence not of God, but of “the other fellow.” Members refused to use racial language, opting instead to speak of people as “dark complected” and “light complected,” and people of different complexions ate, worked, and lived together, even making sure that shared beds were integrated. As one of Divine’s “Angels,” Happy S. Love lived in the glow of God’s bodily presence in the person of Father Divine, surrounded by her spiritual sisters and brothers.

Into this world came Dorothy (Dot) Moore, a “light complected” student at Bemidji State Teachers College who had discovered the Peace Mission Movement through friends from Minnesota who had relocated to the movement’s headquarters of Philadelphia. The archival record does not reveal whether Moore was pursuing personal spiritual questions or was simply curious about her friends’ life choice when she spent her summer vacation in 1948 with Peace Mission members in Philadelphia. It was probably not until the winter of 1948-1949 that she met Happy S. Love during a visit she made with Father and Mother Divine and some of the Philadelphia followers to Newark. Happy S.’s intense melancholy after Dot’s departure gives some sense that the meeting affected her greatly. She wrote to Dot following the visit, “I was feeling bad nearing the end, especially when I saw the last of you. . . . But Dot how happy will I be again when you come home to stay forever.  .  . .  I miss you.” Happy S. wondered in her letter whether Dot missed her and her “crazy ways” and hoped that Dot wouldn’t mind the correspondence. Below her signature, Happy S. included the poem she had written to Dot presumably to demonstrate how much she enjoyed her company. But, she was certain to add that, when she spoke of Dot as “you,” she meant “Father in you” and that when she spoke of herself, she meant “Father in me.”

For members of the movement, celibacy, one part of a larger strategy of control of the material in favor of the spiritual, helped to ensure physical health and eternal life in this world. Father Divine warned a member of the dangers of not fully letting go of the material, writing, “of course, if you do not get rid of resentment, anger, lust, passion, jealousy, envy, and every other characteristic of carnality, you cannot remain well, healthy, and happy for those characteristics will bring adversities upon you and cause the return of such old afflictions as you have been freed from when you first received the witness of the Holy Ghost.” Celibacy was also a tool to help focus attention on God in the person of Father Divine. Father Divine himself underscored this in a letter he wrote to Moore in 1948 in response to a question she posed about her correspondence with Wonderful Love, a female follower and member of the virginal Rosebuds in Philadelphia. He wrote, “it has been somewhat of a ritual between MY Real True Buds that they would correspond only with the ONE they so greatly admire and therefore, put no one between their LORD and SAVIOR.” He required this focus on himself rather than on relationships of any sort with others and expected his followers to keep him at the forefront of their minds at all times. “Do your job conscientiously,” he told followers, “but think constantly of me.”

Observers of the movement from its early days in the 1930s were skeptical of the claims of celibacy and focused especially on the question of whether Father Divine had sexual relations with his followers. The media gave particular attention to various accounts of former members that Father Divine did not practice the celibacy he required of members in their daily lives, most notoriously the charges leveled by Faithful Mary in the 1930s and Ruth Boaz in the 1950s that they engaged in sexual relations with him. Some observers also noted the possibility for the expression of same-sex sexuality in the sex-segregated world of Father Divine’s “heavens,” assuming that some followers acted upon this impulse. Behind the sensational headlines, the nature of daily personal interactions among Father Divine’s followers remain difficult to recover. Any challenges believers might have faced in working to subordinate the material to the spiritual and to keep Father Divine in their thoughts at all times might, indeed, have involved a struggle to remain celibate, but also to resist emotional attachments to other members.

Happy S. Love’s brief correspondence with Dorothy Moore allows us to consider how an individual might attempt to make sense of human desire and sexuality in the context of a particular set of religious habits, practices, and spiritual vocabulary. Happy S. made clear in her letter that she enjoyed “keeping company” with Dot, but was aware of the possibility that her assertion might be interpreted as contrary to the movement’s theology concerning directing emotional energy toward anyone but Father Divine. Consequently, she clarified her position by noting that, “what I mean by company like a friend. In a way of speaking to pal around with. Because you seem to be a happy person.” And yet, she forged ahead, appending the love poem that opened this entry and sending a photograph the following month. Happy S. penned her love poem in the spiritual vocabulary of the Peace Mission Movement through which members often spoke of their devotion to Father Divine in romantic terms. From one perspective, the poem can be taken as an act of spiritual witness in which Happy S. assures Dot of Father Divine’s love and ability to fulfill all needs – “you have no other to seek, Cause He will forever be, The very one you need.”

In addition to offering this assurance to Dot, Happy S. deployed another element of the Peace Mission’s theology that allowed her to express a more personal message in the movement’s vernacular. Father Divine preached, “BE STILL and know that God is in you. It is indeed wonderful! God is in you . . . WAITING for the STILLING of your conscious mentality, that HE might work through you and that HE might not only work through you, but that HE might manifest Himself, as a reality in the lives of the people.” When read in light of the knowledge that God was in her and that Father Divine could work through her, Happy S.’s poetic rendering of Father Divine’s ability to make Dot fall in love takes on new dimensions beyond the movement’s official theology. That Happy S. found a way of speaking her desires, unacceptable in the normal and literal course of things within the Peace Mission Movement, in the movement’s own spiritual vernacular comes into sharpest focus in the postscript to her poem: “from Father in me.” At the same time that Father Divine’s theology was intended to limit the development of emotional attachments and sexual contact between members, the movement’s theology, practices and spiritual vocabulary made it possible for Happy S. to form a connection to Dot that remained true to her commitment to the divinity of Father Divine.

“Beaver!” “Beaver up the stairs.” Some guy in chinos at my Los Angeles public high school would shout out as an up-skirt view opened on a staircase. In the 1960’s, a high school girl’s pubic hair marked the site we all wanted to see, to touch, to enter. Pubic hair was iconic. It marked pleasures yet to come. We all hoped to get there.

In the avant-garde literature of those days, pubic hair was everywhere. In a hallucinatory scene in William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, finally published here in 1962, Johnny has just doused himself and Mary with gasoline. “He is a boy sleeping against the mosque wall, ejaculate wet dreaming into a thousand cunts pink and smooth as sea shells. Feeling the delight of prickly pubic hairs slide up his cock…..”

Not today.

“He’s never seen it,” a friend recounted to me about his good-looking, sexually active collegiate son.

What, I asked?

“Snatch,” he replied. “It’s like a princess phone. He sleeps with girls all the time. He’s never seen a woman’s pubic hair.”

My years of “third-base” are now a half-century past. Just like the rain forest and the ozone layer, pubic hair has been disappearing on young, fertile, desired and desiring bodies as my own body has aged.

I think you can see the world from down there, or at least now that the bush is being cleared, how our world has changed. Emile Durkheim, the French founder of sociology, took intimate moments—acts of suicide in his case—as a way to gauge the state of social solidarity. We can do likewise with the waxing, shaving, sugaring, plucking and even lasering of female pubic hair. Its disappearance tells us something about womanhood, the state of love, the human and the relation of body and soul. Pubic practices are rites by which we construct who we know ourselves to be. What are they telling us?

What began as a following of the inward movement of the bikini line—maxing out with the thong—has morphed into removing all a woman’s pubic hair. The shearing is accomplished with disposable razors or increasingly via the Brazilian wax, in which hot wax is applied with sticks, then cotton cloths are laid down on top of it and ripped away, taking it all off front and back, right down to the soft little hairs subtly cloaking the bottom. The shave—with quick, rough re-growth and ingrown hairs—can require almost daily attention. The wax lasts four weeks or so, but it hurts, women report, particularly that very first time. The cheaper the version, the more the pain: The less expensive, low-grade product takes off the first layer of your skin with the hair. Salons hand out rum shots and apply numbing creams; clients take drugs and anti-inflammatories to get through it; women do breathing exercises and shout out profanities. As the hot wax gets ever closer to the center stage, the pain level rises. Some women cannot bear it. The waxing of the mons has become a feminine frontier, a marker of one’s ability to endure pain for the sake of beauty.

Beverly Woxell, a tall voluptuous mother of two and a well-known aesthetician in Santa Barbara where I live, had to go up to San Francisco to learn to do the Brazilian wax: It had been forbidden at the beauty college where she obtained her training. When she put it on her menu in 2002, she intended it as a sideline to facials and massage, but a new generation of college women looking to partake in the casual carnality of the hook-up scene, mobbed her practice. Now she does Brazilians all day long.

The young women want, she explains, to be ready for sex, “to be hip, and cool and in the know. They want to look the part, act the part.” They’ve seen the super models who are freshly waxed before putting on the expensive bathing suits and lingerie. “We all want to think,” Woxell says, “that we are a little, tiny bit like that.” It is, she argues, just like a designer bag. “Every girl wants to have Louis Vuitton or designer sun glasses or that one designer purse.” Today, Woxell says, if young women have a casual, un-waxed sexual encounter, they are afraid “it might ruin your reputation.”

The thirty and forty year-old mothers have followed in their wake. “They take their panties off and it is like Jack in the Box,” she says. “Come on its Valentine’s Day, “she cajoles them, “let’s see what the shock factor is with your husband.” Often they can’t do the whole thing. They want to keep a “landing strip” or a “Dorrito chip.”

“‘I can’t look like my twelve year old,’ they say.’”

What does it mean? Hair can do a lot of symbolic work. In science fiction movies, alien creatures are the hairless ones. Hairlessness marks the post-human. Yet it is also marks the divide between human and animal. The hairy ones are closer to nature, to animality. Just think of Jacob and Esau. Esau, a hunter beloved by his father, has hairy skin; Jacob, a mother’s boy of the tents who cheats his brother out of his birthright, does not. Body hair historically has been a mark of manliness. Femininity was located in the hair on a woman’s head, not on her body. For men, it was the reverse: Real men had chest-hair. No wonder a lot of girls find the first appearance of pubic hair unnerving, ugly, even nauseating. A lot of women who wax say they “hate” that hair.

In the sweep of Western art history of the nude, female pubic hair could not be shown. Bosch, Titian, Michelangelo painted hairless vaginas. Even Manet, when he painted the famous prostitute, Olympia, in 1863, couldn’t bring himself to show it. Pubic hair marked a woman’s sexual desire, her erotic passion: to show it was beyond all bounds of modesty. When Francisco de Goya painted La Maja Desnuda around 1800 for the Spanish prime minister, it was a breakthrough: an ordinary naked woman—neither goddess nor allegory—with pubic hair fully exposed. Goya’s model is looking at you looking at her. The Prime Minister kept it hidden in a private room, shown only to those he trusted. Goya was later called before the Spanish Inquisition for this work.

Francisco de Goya, La Maja Desnuda, 1797

Pubic hair signals our capacity to make life; the way we know we are no longer girls and boys. It is an evolutionary relic, its function to conduct plumes of sex pheromones into the atmosphere that signal a female’s readiness to reproduce and critical information about male and female genetic qualities. Ovulating strippers get twice the tips as those who are having their periods. Life-making and mate selection are a smelling affair. Shearing genital hair cleans up the zone. It displays free-standing sex organs, separated from reproductive sense, staging a physical encounter between erect boys and open girls in a magical garden where one can live forever.

A hairless vagina is symbolically unhinged not only from reproductive possibility, but from spiritual union, from knowing. The vagina is our template for the ultimate sacred space, a holy of holies where no one else can enter: unseeable, unsayable, the template of pleasure by which the pains of this worldly existence are to be measured. In Hebrew, to engage in sexual intercourse literally means “to know.” This is not just a euphemism. The connection between erotic desire and knowledge is lodged both in our origin story in the Garden of Eden, and written into the word philosophy—philo, loving, sophia, knowledge or wisdom—a loving of knowledge. That loving is grounded in erotics. A woman’s pubic hair veils the passage, marking the sacrality of that space of knowing. Shaving it away stamps it as a mere organ, a passage where anyone can linger pleasantly, where something is done, not somebody known. Pubelessness is an affirmation of the pure body and a negation of corporeal soul, separating the center of one’s flesh from birth and from knowing.

American women are, in fact, striking a pornographic pose, one that first appeared in the hard-core porn films that were increasingly shaping the sexual imagination of legions of young men. The eye of the hard-core porn camera hovers over female body parts; it’s a visual excess of physical acts with a minimum of sentiment. It is not a love story. Porn displays pubeless bodies to emphasize the organs—the female genital slit (and the erect male shaft)—and thereby defines the standard of erotic desirability. As nether hair disappeared on screen guys increasingly wanted sex with girls who looked like the porn stars they’d fantasized about. They asked and women emulated.

A porn body is not a body that loves, a body to which love adheres. It is a uniform for male fantasy and that fantasy has a history. The timing of bushless porn tells a shriveling tale. Pubic hair appeared for the first time in Penthouse in 1970. In 1974, Hustler published the first “pink shots” of labial flesh. But the porn starlets only began shaving it off in the 1980’s. Until then, they cavorted on screen with full bushes. You can see the same—but slower—progression with the more demur Playboy centerfolds.

A friend of mine, now in college, recounted her conversation in 8th grade with a boy who was startled to discover that females had pubic hair, too. He’d never seen it in the porn movies or the magazines.

Two things happened just before the pubic hair disappeared. The timing is not arbitrary. I will reverse the sequence. In the 1970’s the female teen body became an erotic fetish. In 1974 Larry Flynt began publishing Barely Legal, with frontal shots of eighteen year-old girls. In 1976, an underage Jodie Foster played a twelve-year-old prostitute in Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver; in 1978, Brooke Shields did the same in Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby. Both were underage when they played these parts.

It’s what preceded this that is significant: the female teen fetish went mainstream after feminism rose to challenge male predominance. It was in 1972 that the Equal Rights Amendment, requiring that females and males be treated equally by law, passed out of Congress. Feminists were hairy. Female body hair was a feminist badge—in arm pits, on legs, and particularly at the big V. It was the hairy girls, I recall, who were most likely to demand their pleasures. The feminist was not feminine. Just like Goya’s nude, she looked; she didn’t just want to be looked at. This eroticization of young girls recaptured the pure feminine, the subordinate, hairless virginal female against whom a man was clearly a man.

Feminism did something else as well: it sought to eliminate the sexual double standard, the public, pleasure-seeking man versus the private, love-seeking woman. It was now o.k. for a young woman to be heat-seeking flesh, looking for that spasmic flash. The young women who sought that kind of sex were in the vanguard of pubelessness. The Brazilian wax is part of that new erotic repertoire, a perpetual private reminder that you are always ready for action. “I’m so aware of down there now,” Carrie says in the episode of Sex and the City that brought it to the attention of tens of millions of young women in 2000. “I feel like I’m nothing but walking sex.” The waxed female body is a pure sexual body, its sex a public fact. Looking back you can see that it was not long after women showed their legs and their arm pits—with shorter skirts, nylons and the sleeveless dress—that these hair-coverings were shorn away. The same is now happening with the vagina. Even women who are about to deliver babies make emergency calls to their aestheticians to get waxes. “Everybody is going to be in that room,” one explained to her waxer, “and I don’t want to have any hair.” Pubic space is becoming public space.

For young women the removal of pubic hair becomes a painful rite, my daughter Hannah explains to me, a proud marker that you unashamedly own your sex, that you are ready, accessible, and you demand your own pleasure. It is an erotic sacrifice, not unlike young initiate warriors suspended with hooks in their shoulders. It is a display of badness, not only for the man who dares to get that far, but for other women in the gym or the shower room before whom you show you are willing to go to the limit, to endure a measure of pain for your pleasure, and are thereby owed a measure of awe by other women.

Because women could now forthrightly demand their pleasures—if he got his, she should get hers—they expected their sexual partners to grant them reciprocal oral favors. But there was a problem: American men tend to see the vagina as a smelly orifice, a medium for residues of urine and microbes. “Fishy” is the attribute I remember from the poker games in college. Recent surveys reveal the guys are unlikely to orally pleasure young women outside of a relationship. Some young men I talk to explain that they want their sexual partners to be shorn so they don’t get smells and urine traces on their faces, so that oral contact is more direct. In a society that has banished all human odors through washing, deodorants and cleansers, tooth pastes and mouth washes, it is no wonder that the smell of a woman has also been erased as a baseline experience. Hairlessness, like the vaginal mint, advertises that a vagina has been purified for male taste.

Nature, including sexual nature, can be national. I have been working on the relation between love, erotics and religion among Italian and American university students for several years now. Although waxing kits are readily available, total depilation is rare among Italian women. Men don’t like it if there is not a tuft remaining on the mons. “They would not know where to go,” the Italian women joke. Likewise, hairless pre-pubescent girls are not a big segment of the Italian pornography market. Italian men, who are major consumers of porn, organize their alternative erotic reality around women, not girls. As a result, an Italian woman’s pubic hair tends to be shaped, not eliminated. This survival, I think, is related to the fact that Italians continue, much more than in the United States, to want and to have their sex with love. Young Italian men are romantic—more than their counterparts in America, and indeed even more romantic than Italian women.

For Italian men the smell of a vagina is something earthy. The vagina for them is a prize, a beautiful flower to be admired and won, not as in the United States, a term of disdain, a cunt. In Rome a vagina is una fica, a term deriving from the fig, a great thing, a delightful gift, a ribboned fruit. Among young Romans, the expression fica is a way to convey something extraordinarily good, akin to “cool.” They even make it into a superlative—fichissimo, meaning that something is the “cuntest” and very good indeed. Una fica is not only a sexually attractive woman, it is anything worthy of possession or experience. Imagine an American guy saying: “Wow, that is so vagina!” You can’t.

Reading a woman’s pubic hair is a tricky business. I think the disappearance of female pubic hair marks both a male disdain for a womanly body—its look, its smell, its very nature, but also a woman’s desire to look “clean,” the implication being that their natural bodies are “dirty.” Certainly microbes adhere to hair, but it is not really about hygiene. There’s soap and water, after all. It’s about becoming an instrument of pure pleasure, an active forgetting that one’s body is built to birth and to love. I have been studying student erotics for several years now and one thing is clear: young women who don’t love and don’t feel loved tend not to orgasm when they have sex. Hairlessness, which does not contribute to female pleasure, is entwined with the rise of the pornographic, with love’s erosion as a believable state of grace, with women’s uncomfortable capitulation to sex as a portal to fuller affection. It is a mark of female sexual availability to men on masculine terms, a regular rite of submission. It is conditioned by the fact that just as women are achieving academic predominance and breaking into field after field, the terms of trade are turning against them in the bedroom. Educated women must increasingly submit to the sexual demands of a shrinking pool of suitable men for whom the bedroom is one of the last domains outside of a football stadium where men can be men. And reciprocally for women, it is increasingly only their bodies that set them apart. Bodily hair masculinizes them, so hairlessness becomes a way to hold on to the feminine. Clean is acceptable code for pretty, like the smooth cheeks on their faces.

That women are going hairless is more than another grooming practice that might signal reproductive fitness. It means something. The question is what and to whom? Powerful vectors are at work in our underpants; unconsciously channeling our libido. The disappearance of pubic hair says something about the way we construct our humanness, how we compose our bodies and souls. The disappearing bush is a burning issue.

Sanctifying those who govern, harnessing official religion for state ends, inspiring the people, channeling their dreams—even in modernity angels adorn public structures and monuments, whether in victory pillars, war memorials, or paintings of the apotheosis or heavenly ascension of great leaders. The Apotheosis of Pittsburgh, by the then-renowned American artist John White Alexander, is a series of 48 murals, all painted by Alexander between 1905 and 1915, in the grand staircase of the Carnegie Institute (now the Carnegie Art Museum) in Pittsburgh, a cultural haven sponsored by industrialist Andrew Carnegie, dedicated in 1895. Alexander died in 1915, leaving his enormous mural cycle unfinished. The paintings tell and glorify the story of the building of Pittsburgh through the kinds of industries that Carnegie ran and that made him wealthy enough to found institutions for the people devoted to culture and the arts. In the 2nd-story painting known also as The Crowning of Pittsburgh, a knight in black armor floats heavenward, to the sounding of trumpets, about to be crowned with a wreath by angels, the man who made all this bounding development possible, the hero. The knight is meant to be a virile personification of the city of steel and looks quite similar to the Institute’s benefactor, Andrew Carnegie.

Detail from The Apotheosis of Pittsburgh courtesy of Lee Sandstead

Alexander meant his monumental artistic feat to instill in viewers a historical yet mythological narrative that made American industrial capitalism a manner of fulfilling God’s purpose. I came across images of Alexander’s angels while researching a forthcoming book on angels and modernity. As with so many modern angels, I find these riveting. Despite the supposedly anti-metaphysical bent of modernity, the art of public spaces continues to aspire to shape people’s spiritual dreams. Hence one explanation for the continued ubiquity of angels.

Around the ascending knight/Carnegie, around across some of the walls of this enormous “grand staircase” flits a bevy of gorgeous angels, slim, vanilla pure and elongated, an art-nouveau-like chorus line, adoring fans, coming forward with gifts. Their garb resembles fancy evening dresses, their faces and expressions not un-innocent. A few of the winged beauties in the foreground—therefore the largest, most prominent, also highlighted because unlike others they wear colored outfits—are topless, their breasts detailed in a way rather risqué for the angelological tradition. This makes an interesting choice for Alexander, whose many portraits of (human) women, though dwelling attentively on femininity and sensual detail, never depict anything immodest. The figures in The Apotheosis of Pittsburgh are not technically angels. Because the painting hails from a classical genre (apotheosis), they are actually winged genies from classical mythology, not Judeo-Christian angels. The different winged beings from different cultures have a history of coming together and interbreeding, however. Most of the artistically-aspiring viewers of Alexander’s paintings would have understandably seen these winged females as angels. The rising black knight, the modernity of all of the scenes of the building of Pittsburgh serve to Christianize the cycle and essentially make these attractive fairies into angels.

Detail from The Apotheosis of Pittsburgh courtesy of Lee Sandstead

By the time Alexander won this assignment he was an accomplished and internationally admired artist, sought after as a portraitist. An orphan, his artistic life had begun in the Illustrations Department of Harper’s Brothers, publishers of Harper’s, and turned into an American dream. With only this brief experience, and a bit of saved money, he set out for artistic training on a European tour, joined up with continental artists, and remained throughout his life intensely active and successful in painting’s institutional world, becoming an ardent missionary for and defender of American painting. Friend of modernists as varied as Auguste Rodin, Stéphane Mallarmé, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James, considered a great American painter like Edwin Abbey, John Singer Sargent, and James Whistler, from 1909 until his death in 1915 he presided over the U.S. National Academy of Design. As an artist, Alexander came to favor Beaux-Arts, art for art’s sake and the ornamental; fluid lines and soft colors, yet sober; naturalism, but idealized. Rarely did he abandon realism in his depictions.

Born in Allegheny City in 1856, later absorbed into Pittsburgh, a sense of local patriotism likely moved Alexander when engaged in the Apotheosis murals. His own American rags-to-respectability and financial security paralleled that of steel-built Pittsburgh and the nation as a whole, each a fulfillment of the promise of America, it’s manifest destiny, built on grit and faith, at least in the telling of works of art like this. Industrial progress and economic growth is the civil religion Alexander lauds in his imperial-sized painting cycle. By the time he received the Carnegie commission he had painted some official monumental art, such as panels for the Congressional Library in Washington, DC, and had been invited to paint a series celebrating Pennsylvania history for the State Capitol in Harrisburg.

Some monomaniacal drive leads an artist to attempt, much less execute, a work consisting of tens of gigantic paintings. (The original commission conceived of 69 individual works.) The grandiose scale of the physical effort, not to mention the work itself, mirrors the life of the sponsoring institution’s founder and funder, Andrew Carnegie, who made his vast wealth as a canny and ruthless industrialist. Carnegie first laid out his doctrine of social Darwinism and redemptive philanthropy in an 1889 article entitled simply and aptly, “Wealth,” later published in 1900 as part of his book The Gospel of Wealth. Cultural centers such as the Carnegie Institute were to serve as the temples of the new social gospel that sought to improve the lives and souls of the laboring masses. Behind Carnegie and Alexander stands the all-consuming drive toward power, control, reputation and empire critiqued in Melville’s contemporary tragic anti-hero Ahab.

In an update on an age-old motíf, Alexander’s self-exposing and gift-bearing angels comprise the (male) hero’s true gift, his reward for performing well, like a man, for leading heroically. Labor entails one of the main themes of Alexander’s Apotheosis murals—he called the whole cycle “The Crowning of Labor”—and a noticeable gender division distinguishes the masculine exertions that built the city from the heavenly compensation of feminine charms bestowed on the male hero(s). The lower level of murals portray the city’s working classes, a theme that was rare at the time, their lives and labor romanticized for art patrons’ consumption, though Alexander’s depiction of “the laboring male body as physically vigorous and autonomous” obscured “the extent to which mechanization had degraded the role of the skilled worker to that of machine operator.” Here panels named “Fire” and “Toil,” the foundation of Pittsburgh and of Alexander’s paintings, evoke materialism as emerging from hellish conditions. The top level, unfinished when Alexander died, was to show the masses closing in on their goal: culture and the arts, achieved by means of the wealth produced by industry. In between, smoke rises from all the industry, forming into clouds on which flit the jarringly erotic angels as well as the knight in black armor floating heavenward. The knight, personification of Pittsburgh, makes Andrew Carnegie, a robber-baron of the utmost wealth, a self-made public intellectual and quasi-celebrity, into the protector and patron of the people he believed himself to be. Sarah Moore reads the depiction of Carnegie—“aloof and sanguine”—as a reflection of his “practice of absentee corporate capitalism” that featured “[i]ncreased mechanization, a transfer of workplace control from skilled workers to management, and a hiring boom for unskilled and semi-skilled labor” and “a rigid hierarchical line of control.”

Moore considers Alexander’s use of medieval tropes—knighthood, chivalry, and one could add the apotheosis theme itself—as part and parcel of the era’s anxious reaction to the power and wonder but also the dislocations of advancing technology, industry and science, modernity. In different ways spiritualized Christianity both resisted and sanctified technology and science. The angels stand in relation to industry in the paintings much in the way Alexander’s own artistic pursuit of beauty was described after his death by John Agar President of the National Arts Club: “We have had little time in this country to devote to the production of beauty or to the study of its forms. We have had to devise and develop a political government, conquer a wilderness, fashion the commerce and industry of a throbbing nation in a vast continent. Our best minds have been too much occupied with these immediate works to find time for the larger spiritual endeavor.” Like Alexander, Agar genders beauty and spiritual endeavors as feminine, ancillary and supplementary to the more primary masculine work of conquest and building.

As was common in European modernism at the time, Alexander’s bevy of angels represent pure feminine beauty, as well as spiritual beauty; beauty as spirit/mind, spirit/mind as beauty. It should be noted that Alexander apparently initiated an evening class for women at the National Academy of Design. He also co-authored an article in 1910 that, typical for the times, warned against the increasing masculinization of women and effeminacy of men. Perhaps he intended his (unprecedented for him) breast-baring women to remind viewers of the femininity that was proper for women. The beauty and sensuality of Alexander’s angels—certainly manifesting “the vitality of a young and vigorous race” of the figures in his painting in general–the quiet seductiveness of the color and lighting aim to heighten the viewer’s response, and thus double the libidinal energies that must be invested in the heroic accumulation of wealth, the wealth that permits the flourishing of society and great art, which lauds the wealth that made it possible. Sarah Moore says that the winged spirits represent “the arts, music, literature, science, and poetry.” Masculine lust for achievement is rewarded through pleasure in/of the feminine. Viewers could be forgiven for confusion about the carnal rewards seemingly implied by these seemingly Christian angels.

The urge toward beauty that is said to motivate biological reproduction Alexander harnesses to invigorate the cultural reproduction of citizens who believe that they should aspire to Enlightenment/spiritual notions of self-fulfillment: autonomy, reasonableness, civility, refinement. Such citizens are to believe, like Alexander, that the ability to achieve personal wealth unencumbered is justified (in the theological sense), even if by means of crushing, within the limits of the law or beyond, the human aspirations to livelihood, health, and autonomy of others. In this telling, the desire that feeds robber-baron industrial capitalism stems from great (divinely-ordained) desire, great both quantitatively and qualitatively. Beauty, art and culture, properly channeled forms of desire, can improve and redeem the working classes—only Carnegie’s knight gets the heavenly girls, as it were—whose working conditions have been eroded through Carnegie’s and other robber-baron union-busting tactics, can erase or compensate for the harms caused in the very process of producing civilization. Paid for by the libidinal hero, high art intends to sublimate, to spiritualize the libidinal hero and his achievements, the latter beneficently (sycophantically, really) equated to the achievements of the people. On the one hand, suggest Alexander’s topless “angels,” perhaps the joke is on high art. The visual metaphor of spirit subverts itself, leaving only carnal figures, the very sign that, despite art’s intentions, best generates the kind of urges capitalism needs in order to succeed. On the other hand, high art, domesticated by patronage, gets to play its joke as well. After all, it has already been well paid. For our part, we continue to take in (to be taken in by?) art’s mythification of the manufactured toils and travails of the working masses, its mythification of our own worlds. We continue to be shaped by painted angels, larger than life, intended to shape us.

After her death by her own hand in October 1902, Craddock lived on as mystical madwoman more than lionized liberal, and that reckoning had everything to do with the career trajectory of one of America’s leading civil-liberties lawyers, Theodore Schroeder. He came to know of Craddock’s case through the Free Speech League, an important precursor of the American Civil Liberties Union, but his attraction to her had much more to do with sex (and religion) than with the First Amendment. One of America’s most devoted (if not most subtle) Freudians, Schroeder turned Ida C into his own Anna O. “I am poet of the Body and I am poet of the Soul,” Walt Whitman had proclaimed in Leaves of Grass, “The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me.” Craddock, as much as anyone of her era, lived amid those doubled pains and pleasures—as yoga priestess, suppressed sexologist, thwarted scholar, ecstatic mystic, and denounced madwoman. Playing Psyche to an angelic lover’s Eros, she channeled a densely erotic and embodied spirituality, but one that remained hemmed in by many of the taboos of the period, including deep fears of masturbation and homosexuality. If far from an unambiguous precursor of today’s spiritualized sex, she nonetheless represented a combustible mix of fascinations in Comstock’s America.

Comparatively speaking, 1998 was a rather dead time to be alive. In the three quarters of a century that American youth has lived its life through the soundtrack of popular music and masqueraded in the styles that go with it, never has a subculture had so little affect as indie rock. Neither dramatically decadent nor morbid, indie rockers were, by and large, simply muted and flat, unmovable. There was resistance in this reticence, a savvy After-Adorno suspicion of the saccharine earnestness of stadium rock and the illusory sentiment conjured in stagecraft’s glare. That is to say that like all identities, indie rock was an identity of opposition. And yet, its resentment suffered sorely from the lack of a suitable object. These were white kids, disproportionately. Reagan was gone, the Cold War was over, and the economy was strong. Without anything to get too worked up over, indie rockers adopted the posture of satisfied bemusement, and the conviction, above all else, to not be fooled again. Read in its own terms (which were essentially those of historical materialism) the languid understatement of indie rock makes all sorts of sense. And yet, the oddity must be stressed: here was a musical subculture whose music knew no dance.

Indie rock had its zealots: earnest makers of sound and taste who circulated in back-to-culture networks of artistic production and appreciation. Based in Denver with a satellite on the hallowed ground of Athens, Georgia, the Elephant 6 collective was one such clique. Contrary to the dominant mood, these people were in no way cool. Perhaps none was less so than Neutral Milk Hotel’s romantic genius of a front man, Jeff Mangum. For those who knew him—and only too soon, those who didn’t—Mangum was a tamer of inspiration, a channeler of visions, an oracle.

A tentative sidebar on the spiritual: even and especially for those hungry American souls that can remember a time before when, rifling one day through the attic, they stumbled upon the faded telegraph report bearing the unfortunate news that God was dead, the irruption that Mircea Eliade dubbed hierophany retains an antecedence in experience. In nature, in love, and perhaps most frequently, in the intimate solitude of recorded music, a moment in time has the capacity to explode with exuberance, devastation, or in a wash of meaningfulness without name. And as the silly theory goes, in the wake of such explosions, grooves of significance are cut in the score of time. And so, for periods of days or weeks of even years before repetition goes stale and our attention is pulled in the direction of further novelty, a path through the woods becomes a discipline, pillow talk becomes a catechism, and an album becomes a liturgy to be hollered at the top of our lungs as the interstate flies by.

So it has been for many with the revelation pressed in plastic as Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. That those first undone by the album were predominantly disaffected ironists calls to mind midrashic meditations over the characterization in Genesis of Noah as a righteous man in his generation. What work, the rabbis ask, does the temporal qualifier—in his generation—perform? Does it accentuate or mitigate the degree of Noah’s righteousness? The same might be asked of Aeroplane. It might well be the case that 1969 saw the release of ten records with such savage spirituality and that my testimony is merely the travelogue of a rationalist blinded by only the dim light of the cave’s mouth. Or, perhaps, the fact that this force of an album emerged from such a wasteland is precisely what makes it a reasonable bet that the children of my children’s children will know it to some degree.

Here, where I strain to describe the album so as to make it available to the uninitiated reader is where things can only go awry. Nevertheless, let me try and fail to share with you something awesome.

In sound, the album is a circus: punk gives way to folk, which dissolves into a sonic mess and congeals back into rock ‘n roll. Slowed down, the title track’s simple GCDG chord progression could well be reinterpreted as doo-wop. At the core of the album’s instrumentation one can surely pinpoint a rock band, but these elements are wholly enmeshed in a melee of organ, banjo, saws, assorted white noise makers, and a Salvation Army Christmas band horn section, all of which warble collectively from frenzy to dirge. Time and again, the arrangement dissipates and we find ourselves with only Mangum’s voice, rough and raw if not unpretty, alone save for a guitar and a four-track recorder.

The album sets its scene in an American landscape replete with broken families, surreptitious couplings and, presumably, the sorts of winged phonographs one finds aloft over an industrial cityscape on the back of the liner notes and as printed on the CD itself. Its tone is part Chitty Chitty Bang Bang surrealism and part Walker Evans photojournalism, at once jubilantly surreal and brutally ethnographic. As is true of our own world, the world where the album takes place is one of intense wonder and horror. Going on a decade ago I tried to graph the incidence of the album’s recurring tropes. A partial list of that effort reads as follows: death, trailer trash, suicide, I-thou love, domestic violence, incest, the miraculous, music, ghosts, sex, nature, destruction, eyes, mouths, Jesus Christ, abandonment, fetuses, birth, third-person love, shared hatred, carnivals, life as seen from the outside, semen and other bodily discharges, nostalgia, myself, flesh, sister, angels, wings, spines, faces, dreams and speakers.

As a fragment in the genealogy of spirituality, special attention is due to the recurring theme of the two-headed boy. Unmasked on the album’s fourth track as an undead laboratory curiosity, the two-headed boy is the exception that proves the existential rule that, as Aristophanes dubiously reports it in the Symposium, we are, each of us, the divided half of a broken human union. It is the myth that has inspired a thousand movies, a million pop songs and, at one time or another, everyone I know. Aeroplane’s version of this myth goes like this: before we are born, when we are in utero with our unborn twins, we are whole. After we are dead, when we meet on a cloud and laugh out loud with everyone we see, we are together again. In between, for the duration that we are thrown into the world, we fumble toward one another like adolescent lovers who have not yet mastered their body parts. Not always, however, is our differentiation unbridgeable. By making beautiful things—love, children, music—we may find fullness even as we live, united with one another and with God.

Yes, believe it or not: God. Bursting forth from an atmosphere of unformed reverb between the album’s first and second tracks, Mangum’s plaintive voice offers the most unanticipated praise:

I love you Jesus Christ
Jesus Christ I love you,
Yes I do

The voice repeats what it recognizes to be a truly shocking declaration. Whatever can this mean? In the unbroken block of prose of the liner notes, where the lyrics at times yield to second order reflection, an explanation is proffered.

…and now a song for jesus christ and since this seems to confuse people I’d like to simply say that I mean what I sing although the theme of endless endless on this album is not based on any religion but more on the belief that all things seem to contain a white light within them that I see as eternal…

A disavowal in no sense, to an audience that can only assume he must be joking, Mangum makes clear that as crazy at it may sound, he means what he says. And yet, as he translates for the godless, his love is meant without a shred of exclusivity. Not based in any one religion, Jesus Christ here is a metonymy for the endless endless, the seemingly eternal white light that animates all things. Mangum’s God is one that even a secularist can abide, just so long as she knows what it’s like to be a body in a state of unwilled differentiation. In the album’s penultimate stanza, where the two-headed boy bids sad farewell to his soon to be broken-off half, just as Mangum, himself, prepares to say goodbye to the beloved that he will soon bequeath to us, the listeners, this God is further fleshed out:

And when we break we’ll wait for our miracle
God is a place where some holy spectacle lies
And when we break we’ll wait for our miracle
God is a place you will wait for the rest of your life

In my early years with the album, when I was still very much under Nietzsche’s spell, I made poor sense of Mangum’s faith by shoehorning into the first pair of these lines the intimation of the dissimulative character of the divine presence. God as a place where some holy spectacle lies: this would be something along the lines of God and not-God in an extra-theological sense. More recently, however, as my will to demystify has courted its other half, it has been the latter lyric in which I have found disclosed the fullness of the album’s theology, which is also to say, its anthropology. For in the play between “God is the place you will wait for / the rest of your life” and “God is the place you will wait / for the rest of your life,” we find a God at once transcendent and immanent, both achingly wanting and radically present. It is a God that presides over and resides in a world saturated in the beauty and horror of the sublime, which, even at its cruelest, always merits wonder. As the title track concludes in a declaration that comes as close as the album gets to prescription: “can’t believe how strange it is to be anything at all.”

Ignoring for a moment this gentle model of righteous giddiness, I will conclude on a petty note, though one again germane to the genealogy at hand. For these very texts—the potently spiritual ones that inspire in us the impulse to proselytize—breed covetousness, a resentment in this case directed toward those over-readers who would restrict the bounteous spirit of this doctrine-less Word. From my jealous perspective, the emergent standard read of this cult album is just such a travesty. “An Anne Frank concept album,” is how one undergraduate characterized it for me to my dismay. “But,” I wanted to say, “Don’t you see? The album is about…everything!” Which I truly take it to be.

Fault for the Anne Frank reduction may be pinned on Mangum himself, who in an interview with a fleetingly influential magazine at the time of the album’s release identified the famous martyr as his muse and conversation partner. Shortly thereafter, the band broke up and Mangum vanished from the public view, not yet to reemerge. Because the prophet was now in occlusion, the interview—along with similar comments made by Mangum at the time—became the key for unlocking the album. This is to say that these texts became the key for defacing it. Beyond irresistible allusion, I won’t regale you with accounts of rock operas inspired by the album featuring high school children dressed as concentration camp inmates. The internet could provide that, if you like. Suffice it to say, the attempted sacrifice of Aeroplane to the Holocaust affirms a longstanding irritation of mine with the sundry transcendental signifiers of the secular, which dwell in its inner sanctum: the spiritual. As poisonous and stupid as God may have been for discourse—and He can well be—not by killing Him alone do we forego the analytic capabilities to violate the glories of creation.