Corita Kent (Sister Mary Corita):
(tame) hummed hopefully to others (1966)
Inscriptions and Marks- Signed: l.r.: Sister Mary Corita

Printed text reads: TAME [IT']S [NO]T / Somebody up there likes us. / A hum came suddenly into his head, which seemed to him a good hum such as is hummed hopefully to others. Pooh / Deep within every man there lies the dread of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the tremendous household of millions upon millions. That fear is kept away by looking upon all those about one who are bound to one as friends or family; but the dread is nevertheless there and one hardly dares think of what would happen to one if all the rest were taken away. Kierkegaard

" … one helluva way to make a name for myself."

I was Exiled in considerable shame. Not shame bestowed by anybody else, with the possible exception of a certain misguided skip-chaser who called several times each day from different numbers to harass me about my recent bankruptcy, and most certainly not the citizens of my hometown, who treated The Muse and I with only the utmost decency and respect once our dilemma became public. No, I'm afraid I shamed myself. This was perhaps a misguided act of sincere contrition, for it sure seemed that someone should take the blame for everything leading up to our being expelled from our Eden. In my own misguided fashion, I blamed myself and set about extracting satisfaction in the form of the most profound damage anyone can ever do to themself.

Shaming is no simple form of blaming. It stands as probably the most self-destructive act that can be accomplished without a scalpel. I should know because I'm practiced enough to have earned a Grand Master status in administering it. After being Exiled, I left with my tail tucked insecurely between my legs. I carried my shame, dutifully reinforced, for the following few years. I encumbered our transit and arrival, our orientation, and our eventual integration. It hounded me every inch of my way into Exile and continued chasing me through it. I sense vestiges of it haunting me still, for when I instill shame, it sticks.

It also stinks. It produces one of those stenches everyone senses, but few can find the source. I knew the source. I still know it. It was a crime of happenstance, one of those infractions against which no immunization exists. It just happens. Because it's fundamentally causeless, it's one of the easiest to blame oneself for. The lack of fingerprints or a weapon means that the perpetrator could have been anyone, and the weapon, anything. It's humblingly easy to ascribe responsibility to anyone alive when no crime was committed. Let the guiltiest one earn the indictment. Let them also serve the sentence without hope of parole. There's no justice like an injustice owned. There's no more effective punishment than one that was self-inflicted.

I had honestly believed that the universe was more caring than that. I thought we might deserve special handing, that we might have deserved to preserve our place in our garden at least, but we were rudely cast aside and adrift out into an apparently indifferent world. I would eventually be proven wrong on almost every point after our punishment turned out to be the most curious reward. As a testament to the fact that nobody could possibly know how any story might turn out, our Exile would end up being the cure for itself. We would serve our time and would ultimately be released with sufficient resources to not only repossess our beloved Villa Vatta Schmaltz but to perform extensive and much-needed remodeling of it, work that we'd have been unlikely to afford had we not been forced to relocate into hotter real estate markets for a few years.

I do not know about The Lord evangelists keep carping about, but this world sure works in mysterious ways. I leave carrying an epic load of shame and return only slightly ashamed, the bulk of my burden having been worked off in salt mines of my own making. I was a terrible taskmaster. I would not let my prisoner rest. The punishment continues to this day. I'm engaging in it this very minute. You see, I cannot bear to catch myself in idleness. I must be producing something that might ward off another bankruptcy and forced evacuation from our little Eden here near the end of the Oregon Trail. My writing is the spell I cast to ward off evils. It is my best defense. It might be the only response I could have had to being Exiled that might make some sense, for, as with all perpetratorless crimes, no amount of time served could ever prove sufficient to wipe the nonexistent slate clean. The sentence must be forever and unforgivable.

Salvation seems a fiction. So does eternal damnation. Both seem produced by the self-same mechanism, namely The Self. I consider myself blessed to be capable of feeling guilt, even in instances where no guilt needed to be ascribed. Mine was no mere victimless crime, for I'm the victim, just as I was every time before. My sentence, duly deliberated by the only jury truly of my peers and handed down by the highest court around, was, in every possible respect, just and well-deserved. The punishment was intended to be the cure. For those who might insist that the punishment was wholly unnecessary, I will present as evidence my catalog, my library of literary achievement, which would not have been possible without the terrible/wonderful yoke of shame I placed beside my name on the self-proclaimed indictment. I might have found some way to write without the psychological burden, but I didn't. Later, this Exile's story will conclude with The Muse and I reinhabiting our Villa, remodeling it, and with me publishing some of the product of my shame. Being Exiled’s been one helluva way to make a name for myself.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Exiled, #PureSchmaltz