Books and Nectar

Books and Nectar: "He ate the book!"

As a teenager I took art classes from a friend of the family: an Italian painter: Luigi Biolgini. He taught me quite a bit about oil techniques. I would visit his studio after school for a game of chess or an art class. In exchange for the classes I did a bit of yard work and helped him with his english. He was trying to get his green card. Everyone called him “G.”

Landscape by Camille Pisarro

G painted impressionistic California landscapes in the style of Camille Pisarro and drove a 1959 cream-colored Fiat. He called it the “Bidoni,” or garbage wagon. It was always breaking down. He drove like a madman.

The doors would fly open every time he would take a corner at 60 miles an hour. Sometimes he would drive my brothers and I to Sunset Beach, not far from where we lived. He liked to listen to Bob Dylan on the radio: "Of war and peace the truth just twists, its curfew gull just glides"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KQF3r1Owco

I remember one summer afternoon, I was visiting him in the studio. A woodpecker was hammering on the tall eucalyptus behind the house. G. was working a big canvas, slapping out some purple trees in another bad copy of a Camille Pisarro landscape. G. turned to me and smiled, a gleam in his eyes. “Ezekiel ate the book!” he said.

I had no idea what he meant. He looked at me as if I were a complete idiot. “Ezekiel ate the book!” he repeated. I didn’t get it. As he fidgeted with the leaves in his painting, adding color, he kept repeating his mantra: “Ezekiel ate the book.” I wasn’t sure if he were talking about some political action or a rock band. I shook my head and smiled like I knew what he went. He just kept on painting.

One day, G. fired up the Bidoni and raced through the streets of downtown Los Angeles looking for the right place to paint the sunset, when the cops got him for speeding, driving an unregistered vehicle, driving without a license, and overstaying his visa. My mother got a phone call from him in jail, but there wasn’t much she could do. He was deported back to Italy. In those days a long distance phone call cost a fortune and we soon lost touch. My mother got a couple of letters from him in Milan. I never knew what became of G.

But I was left scratching my head over his ecstatic muttering of the mantra: “Ezekiel ate the book!” What book? And who was Ezekiel?

Later, in college, I came across a quote from the Bible. It was from the Book of Ezekiel 3 where the Prophet Ezekiel sees flaming wheels and has a vision of God: “And he said to me, “Son of man, eat what is before you, eat this scroll; then go and speak to the people of Israel.” So I opened my mouth, and he gave me the scroll to eat. Then he said to me, “Son of man, eat this scroll I am giving you and fill your stomach with it.” So I ate it, and it tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth.

I suppose in Italian “scroll” comes out as book. In ancient days, books took the form of scrolls. But why would one eat a book. Wouldn’t it taste terrible? In any case, the riddle was solved. “Ezekiel ate the book.”

Or was it? I was still perplexed. Why would anyone eat a book? Later, as I came to understand more about interpretation, I realized that books are not consumed through the mouth, but through the eyes. The eyes take in the symbolic language which is decoded in the brain. Language is processed. Mind and intelligence provide imagery and analysis. When the message has been digested it may be “sweet” or “bitter.” Ezekiel consumed the internal truth of the book and found it sweet after having digested it.

A neophyte might make a meal of the Bible after slathering it with honey, but this is not the meaning of the passage. Books are “sweet” when they reveal some truth to us, and Ezekiel tasted the nectar of the divine message written on the scroll delivered him by the Lord. I wanted to tell my old art teacher G.

It is easy to misunderstand a metaphor, given that we no longer live in a pre-literate world. In ancient times scrolls were revered. Only the educated or “lettered,” could taste the honey of the scroll. For the uninitiated or unlettered a scroll held great mystic power.

Alfred Hitchcock enjoying a copy of "Love or Nothing."

When studying history we run the risk either of taking for granted the idea that our forebears enjoyed the same ideas and insights that we do or condemning them to the hopeless ignorance of neanderthals. The truth is somewhere in between.

Pizarro and Priest present book to Atahualpa

In the only account of the Peruvian conquest written by an Inca, Titu Cusi, grandson of the Incan King Huayna Capaca, relates that one of the reasons why the Andean people called the Spaniards gods was that “The Indians saw them alone talking to white cloths as a person would talk to another.” The “white cloths” were books. The Incans could see that the Spaniards “talked” to the books by reciting the words printed there. The words held great power since they bound men to act. Therefore the books themselves had some kind of mystic power.

Atahualpa, the king of the Incans once became provoked by the Spanish and threw a book on the ground. In response, the Spanish were so enflamed that they sent warriors against him.

The breviary contained a text that by law had to be read aloud to the Incans, informing of their obligation to swear allegiance to the “Church as the Ruler and Superior of the whole world...and the high priest called Pope, and in his name the King and the Queen.” Atahualpa’s rebellion against the printed word was an act of war.

According to different accounts, Atahualpa asked for the book and scanned its pages, seeing only undecipherable lines of ink. He said, “This speaks and says that you are the son of the Sun? I also am the son of the Sun. Give me the book so that it can speak to me.”

The Incans of the day, of course, had no books. Their messages were transferred by means of Quipo, textiles tied in strange knots that used a curious mnemonic device to record dates, numbers, and even stories from one town to the next. The meaning of the Quipos has long been lost.

Atahualpa was curious about how the book spoke and wanted to be taught to listen to it. Angry that it would not speak to him, he said, “Why doesn’t it speak to me?” And saying this he rejected the totem of his conquerors. In an act of war, he hurled the Bible to the ground.

Atahualpa’s frustration flowed from the fact that he could not eat the book and was unable to taste its nectar. In anger, the great king of the Incas wanted to destroy the book. Unable to do so, he fell victim to the Spanish conquest and in generations to come reading and writing took on an almost sacred aura in the largely illiterate territories of the New World.

Execution of Atahualpa

Those who are angry with the message of a book sometimes try to destroy the message by burning the book. The first emperor of China is known as such since he destroyed all the histories of the emperors who preceded him. Those who are unable to taste the nectar of instruction that flows from books are inclined to burn books.

In Nazi Germany, for example, On May 10, 1933 student groups at universities across Germany carried out a series of book burnings of works that the students and leading Nazi party members associated with an “un-German spirit.” Enthusiastic crowds witnessed the burning of books by Brecht, Einstein, Freud, Mann and Remarque, among many other well-known intellectuals, scientists and cultural figures, many of whom were Jewish. The largest of these book bonfires occurred in Berlin, where an estimated 40,000 people gathered to hear a speech by the propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, in which he pronounced that “Jewish intellectualism is dead” and endorsed the students’ “right to clean up the debris of the past.”

The Supression of Ideas: Book Burning by the Nazis

In the 1880s, long before Hitler, Bhaktivinoda Thakura, in his Bhagavata Lecture, pointed out that no book is useless and that book burning is the work of an immature critic: [The true critic] will read an old author and will find out his exact position in the progress of thought. He will never propose to burn the book on the grounds that it contains thoughts which are useless. No thought is useless. Thoughts are means by which we attain out objects. The reader who denounces a bad thought does not know that a bad road is even capable of improvement and conversion into a good one. One thought is a road leading to another. Thus the reader will find that one thought which is the object to-day will be the means of a further object to-morrow. Thoughts will necessarily continue to be an endless series of means and objects in the progresses of humanity. The great reformers will always assert that they have come out not to destroy the old law, but to fulfill it. Vālmīki, Vyāsa, Plato, Jesus, Mohammed, Confucius and Caitanya Mahāprabhu assert the fact either expressly or by their conduct.”

The idea of book-burning and the destruction of thoughts and ideas was explored more deeply in Ray Bradbury’s  Fahrenheit 451, a book so provocative that it is often on the list of “banned books,” in the United States. Bradbury describes an America where books are prohibited by law. Instead of extinguishing fires, state-appointed “firemen” burn books. The people have no need for books; they have cheap popular entertainment and no interest in reading. Reading as an intellectual act is considered dangerous and is prohibited. The post-modern society is also post-literate and has no need for thinking or analysis. In a curious twist, the fireman who burns books discovers a secret society determined to keep literature alive.

At the end of the book we are introduced to a curious group of nerds: each one has eaten a particular book and embodies it. One man is Don Quixote--he knows every line in the book, having memorized it before it was burned. Another is The Works of Shakespeare: He can quote every line. The people in the “literary cult” at the end of the book preserve literature by embodying it. Even after the libraries have all been burned they will keep the written word alive by their own living presence.

A similar position is taken by the sevaites and followers of the spiritual tradition that flows from the study of the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam. The Bhagavatam is the summum bonum of all literature for it perfectly describes the nature and characteristics of the Supreme Godhead, Krishna.

Śrīla Prabhupāda points out in is Bhagavatam commentary:

“It is imperative that one learn the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam from the person Bhāgavatam. The person Bhāgavatam is one whose very life is Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam in practice. Since Śrī Caitanya Mahāprabhu is the Absolute Personality of Godhead, He is both Bhagavān and Bhāgavatam in person and in sound. Therefore His process of approaching the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam is practical for all people of the world. It was His wish that the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam be preached in every nook and corner of the world by those who happened to take their birth in India.”

Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati with books: Book and Person Bhagavata.

In a talk given on the 15th of February, 2001, Donetsk, Ukraine, Bhakti Sudhir Goswami was asked as follows:  “In a process of devotional service some knowledge is revealed within the heart. But should we wait when it really comes or some academic way of study maybe can be helpful? “

Shrila Goswami Maharaj: No, we should... From the very beginning we’re trying study not in an academic way, but under the guidance of Vaishnavas. Just like you can take a book or you can have a teacher, explain to you the contents of that book. So they bring out the inner meaning of the Scripture. Otherwise there is so much there we may misinterpret what we read. So we need guidance. And Prabhupad used to like to quote this one verse, bhāgavata pada giyā bhāgavata-sthāne2, if you want to learn what is this Bhagavat philosophy, then you have to hear from the devotee-bhagavat. There is book Bhagavat and person Bhagavat. Association is very powerful. You could read a book about becoming a drunkard, or go associate with some drunkard. I guarantee, if you’ll associate with those drunkard you’ll understand what it is immediately from the beginning. Whereas reading the book you may get all kinds of idea. But if you associate with those drunkards from day one you’ll have some idea, “O, this is what it means.”