MONOMO

Read Joanna Brooks' new book yesterday, and in the evening followed Stirling Adams' invitation to meet "The Scholar of Moab" at a cabin up the south fork of the Provo River.

The big gibbous moon just past its prime winked in and out from behind the mountains as I drove home in the dark. My thoughts were gibbous as well.

Brooks writes about growing up Mormon, fiercely and tenderly Mormon. There's a chapter about her awakening as a feminist while at BYU, years I was there as well, exciting but ultimately disappointing years during which a good university lost its nerve.

Proposition 8 invades California at the precise moment when Brooks is trying to introduce her daughters to the religion of her grandmothers. She recreates the pioneer day celebration she knew as the girl in the book's cover photo and volunteers for the No-on-8 campaign.

Mormon, so Mormon that it hurts to be Mormon. That's her dilemma.

It's my dilemma too. The password I chose when I got a new computer five years ago, MONOMO, was a declaration of independence from the religion that shaped me. There are a host of reasons for officially leaving the church, including disgust at the campaign against people like my brother John. If they officially attack homosexuals, if they elbow good people out of the church because they speak their minds, if there's a single mold for being a Mormon, then count me out.

MONOMO.

But it's not that easy. The photo of me with four siblings and a cousin takes me back to a childhood like the one Brooks describes, a couple of decades earlier, to be sure, but likewise marked by racism and fear of the communist civil rights movement and a generous determination to build the Kingdom of God and the wonder of BYU with its concentration of other Mormons and the erotically spiritual uplift of youth conferences and a two-year mission in Germany and on and on and on. Beliefs and practices and ideas (the glory of God is intelligence, there should be no poor among you, the natural man is an enemy to god, shall the youth of Zion falter?, keep the Sabbath day holy, come unto Christ and be perfected in him, the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them, and by the power of the Holy Ghost you may know the truth of all things) work in me still, leavened (that too!) by Nietzsche and Thomas Merton and Goethe and Adrienne Rich and all the rest, but still fermenting, for better and worse, in my subterranean self.

And then the evening, dozens of people gathered in the canyon to hear Steve Peck read from his fine satire of Mormons. Old friends from BYU, lively younger BYU people, just the kind of gathering of earnest and smart and curious and talented Mormon human beings I left Vanderbilt for. (Why are you leaving? the Dean of Arts and Sciences asked me, we just awarded you tenure. I miss the scent of sage, I told him, and I'm going back to the university that educates my fellow Mormons.)

Here they were again, my fellow Mormons, in a cabin next door to Gene and Charlotte England's cabin where I spent many such thoughtful evenings in similar groups. But even given the liveliness of the good book and the good food and the good company, I was conflicted—oddly and gratefully conflicted.

Conversations felt constricted. And there were conversations I could have nowhere else.

Friends talked of the church retirement system that kept them from leaving. They lamented that their schools and departments could not hire non-Mormons. They mentioned restrictions on inviting speakers. They spoke of battles they chose not to fight so they could fight others. They lamented conservative politics. They feared a growing fundamentalism among Mormon leaders. They mentioned Gene England and Sam Rushforth and Steven Epperson and Dan Fairbanks and Joanna Brooks.

I couldn't help thinking that a few bottles of good wine would have loosened things up. And they needed loosening up.

Leaving the constraints of BYU, leaving a church that demanded unhealthy sacrifices and imposed immoral beliefs, was, in retrospect, lifesaving for me.

And yesterday, in Brooks' book and in Stirling's and Kiff's cabin, I understood again the pleasures of being inside while outside.

Faith-Based Satire: Steven Peck's "The Scholar of Moab"

I just read an advance copy of Steven Peck’s novel “The Scholar of Moab,” due out this October with Torrey House Press (http://torreyhouse.com/upcoming-titles/).

It’s satire of the best sort: biting what it loves, snuggling up to what it hates.

Reading about the man whose monument celebrates “Hyrum LeRoy Thayne, Scholar and Scientist, The Lord’s Chosen Servant and Defender of Moab, 1950-1977,” I thought a good title for a review might be “Faith-Based Satire.” Peck clearly loves the crazy Mormon Moabites he depicts, for he is one himself. He knows these characters – their beliefs and miscreant deeds and rural malapropisms – so well that they may well be mirrors of his own witty and drolly insecure self. (I know I found so many of my own propensities and perversions and prevarications in the persons and events that I suffered an intermittent blush as I read.)

Another title might be “Satire of the Faith-Based.” When Mormon and especially BYU scientists are urged by their leaders to do faith-based science, they run the risk of projects like Hyrum Thayne’s pseudo-scientific article on bumblebee faith published as a joke in the Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America. Neither Hyrum nor his fellow Moabites recognize that the article was published as humor, so the publication establishes him as the scholar of Moab.

What is there to say about a book that includes a mad poetess who claims aliens abducted her newly-born baby, a two-headed cowboy who ends up in art-saturated Vienna speculating about forms of consciousness, a dictionary thief whose diversionary tactics (spraypainting the library wall with Communist symbols and a possible reference to the Gadianton Robbers) infect the minds of his fellow Moabites with Pentecostal conspiratorial flames, a backslider whose worldview nonetheless is distinctly Mormon?

A couple of examples:

Hyrum begins his hand-written manuscript in typical fashion:

“How do I begin? How indeed. The rise from my beknighted state to one of mighty & true erudition will stand credibility on your hoary head. You will see me ascend from a miserly laborer with the USGS to a flagship Scholar invited to stroll among the high & mighty & publish landmark Science in the prestigious periodical the Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America. Why did I underline that? Because titles are underlined in works of Scholarship. Verily, you will learn much more than this. Much more indeed. For I. Even I of my own Labors have engaged with the profoundest heights of Science & Literature. It is from the peaks of these high Heights that I first found entanglements both Wide & Deep.”

Perhaps the most comic character in all of Mormon fiction, Hyrum is a thinker, a cogitator as my father used to say, a philosopher who didn’t graduate from high school and thus has no basis other than his small-town experience and his unexamined Mormon theology against which to judge the new and confusing things that come his way as he molds himself into a scholar with the help of books from the Moab Public Library. Confronted with a problem, he figures it out on his own terms, as in this paragraph:

“So I sat there in the dark on the stage in the cultural hall feeling plenty sorry for myself. Such was the cost of being erudite & Scholarly I figure. Did Leonardo Di Vinci have these kinds of problems? One book at the library says he was a homo. I do'nt believe it. I suppose they think that because he liked to draw naked men standing in circles with arms stretched out. But I think that he drew naked men because he was too embarrassed to draw naked women. Like I would feel mighty strange drawing a naked lady but I never had a moment of trouble standing around in the locker room in high school with a bunch of naked guys. So I figure people that say he was a homo just do'nt know what its like to be a guy playing sports. But all the same he had trouble. He had to dig up bodies so he could peer inside their skins to get the muscles right in his drawings. And so he snuck around at night with his shovel over his shoulder no doubt causing the neighbor ladies of his times Child Protection Society or whatever they called it then to wag their tongues in undulations of cacophony.”

Peck’s novel is rich with dangling placentas and mechanical pencils and Cleon Skousen books and bolo ties worn with platform shoes and contrasting stories from the Salt Lake Tribune and the Deseret News and best of all, language, lots of earnest, rurally fractured Mormon language.