A Pilgrim's Digression

My step-sister was married on Saturday, in Charlotte, North Carolina. We drove down on Friday. It was quite an interesting, if exhausting and at times tedious, experience.

The groom was a young man from the Philippines; his family is entirely American-Filipino, and devout Catholics. My step-sister is from one of the coal-mining counties in central West Virginia. She met her husband at UNC-Charlotte and, with trips to the Philippines and a conversion to Roman Catholicism, he has apparently quite altered her horizons.

The wedding ceremony itself was a mixture of Catholic and Filipino traditions. It lasted nearly two hours–which is where the tedium part of the weekend begins to appear–but overall, it was interesting to witness. At the very least, I will never see something of this nature again in my life.  We’re getting to that age now where funerals are becoming more common than weddings anyway.

Since my wife and I were married in an empty court room, with only a handful of her family present and no one from my family, wedding ceremonies fascinate me in a “Why do people do this?” kind of way.

In this particular case, after much of the wedding mass was finished, the Filipino ceremony began and, as I said, it’s unlikely I will ever see anything like it again. It involved rope, a veil for the groom, and plenty of candle lighting.

After exchanging vows and being pronounced man and wife, the bride and groom knelt on a kneeler to one side of the altar. Two family members came forward and tied the two newlyweds’ hands together while reciting some words about the symbolism of the act.

Then two other family members came forward with what looked to me like a double hangman’s noose. One noose was placed around the bride’s neck and the other loop around the groom’s neck. In my opinion, the nooses really weren’t cinched tight enough to symbolize the true bondage of marriage, but apparently no one wanted the two youths to actually suffer. However, considering how long the two of them had to kneel, trussed up like a cow and bull, I imagine they were far from comfortable.

Finally, two more family members came forward with a large veil and draped one end over the bride’s head and the other over the groom’s, pinning it to the shoulder of his tuxedo. Still, the two of them had to kneel while the Priest droned on. More family members came forward and lit candles, other candles were blown out at some point, children grew restless, adults began to mutter under their breath.

Then there was the liturgy of the Eucharist and the Priest had to explain the whole business of who can and cannot receive the Host. The bride and groom received communion, still on their knees, and when the Father put it in her mouth I thought of Paddy Dignam’s funeral, from Ulysses…well, never mind about that.

Somehow I have got to stop associating Christian communion with oral sex. Forgive me, Lord.

Anyway, I was sitting on my family’s side of the church, and no one got up for communion, or the blessing that could be substituted, so I was trapped in my pew. I converted to Catholicism myself in college, but I still could not have taken communion, since it has been years since my last confession. I am not prepared, to use the Priest’s words. Still, I would have gone up for a blessing, if others in my row had done so.

Brendan, who was sitting with the groomsmen, did go up and following their lead held out his hand for a wafer. The Priest knelt down and whispered to him for a moment, then marked his forehead and blessed him and sent him on his way. The ironic thing is that Brendan, too, could have received communion, having been baptized Catholic at birth. We even named him partially after a Catholic saint.

Eventually, the wedding did end. Brendan had to stay at the church for pictures, and Lynn and I headed off to the reception hall to make sure we had good parking. The reception was a typical American affair with plenty of free booze, food that was probably pretty good but which I can’t remember because I was drunk (all I can recall is that the mashed potatoes had skins in them), and lots of noise.

Maybe the noise was heightened by my drunkenness, but it seemed like I could barely hear anything anyone said to me. And I certainly couldn’t hold a conversation with anyone, not that anyone over the age of 21 was fit for conversation.

I’ve always wondered what the servers must think, having to work a party like that where everyone is roaring drunk and generally incoherent. I’ll bet either their tips really suffer, or else they make extra in tips because people are overly generous in their stupor.

Although I wasn’t looking forward to traveling for this wedding, overall it wasn’t a terrible experience. I still wonder why people put themselves through the trouble and expense. I hesitate to say that wedding ceremonies are a whole lot of nonsense. If lighting a candle and blowing it out makes someone feel special, by all means do it. If being tied up with your bride is symbolically important to you, by all means, go right ahead. It might be good practice for later.

However, wedding ceremonies are a whole lot of nonsense. If Lynn had wanted a ceremony, I would have gone through with it to please her, but it’s something I have little appreciation for. Fortunately we are of like minds on that subject.

Like elaborate funerals, weddings are an industry unto themselves, but I am hardly the right person to criticize someone else for spending money to make themselves feel good. It’s one day in a lifetime–one day that costs thousands of dollars, but ultimately it’s one day that some people want to remember forever, or at least until the divorce.

After finishing up with Augie March last week, I began reading another Bellow book, The Victim. Though Bellow wrote it before his purported masterpiece, I actually consider The Victim to be the better book. It has a lot of the qualities I’ve come to value in a novel: conciseness, a realistic portrayal of characters–their language, interactions, psychology–and some philosophical depth, but not an over-powering avant garde flavor.

What it reminds me most of are the short novels of Kafka and Camus, two of my favorite writers. The plot is simple: Leventhal, a copy editor at a small trade magazine in New York, is stalked by a man he barely remembers, but who claims that Leventhal did him some great harm long ago. As the story unfolds, it becomes difficult to say whether the stalker is right or wrong.

Leventhal has his own grievances, not just about the man harassing him, but about the anti-semitism he seems to detect in the people with whom he works and associates himself. Again, it’s difficult to tell to what degree his suspicions are justified. Leventhal himself, whose mother supposedly died in an insane asylum, sometimes wonders if he is not suffering from paranoia.

The novel is wonderfully ambiguous on just about every point. Who is the victim? Is Leventhal going insane? Maybe the “victim,” Allbee, has a point and Leventhal did ruin his life. There is even a certain ambiguity in Leventhal’s personal story. He has always accepted his father’s account of what happened to his mother–that she went insane and had to be committed, and later she died in the hospital. Leventhal’s wife, Mary (who is away visiting family for the entire novel), has suggested to Leventhal that maybe he shouldn’t accept his father’s account of the event at face value.

I think it’s a bit simplistic to take the novel at face value, as well. It isn’t just the story of a man compelled to self-examination by the sudden appearance of someone he wronged long ago. My impression, especially with the anti-semitism angle so prominent, is that Bellow is examining the ways in which every one of us hurt each other, sometimes unconsciously, and the way that hurt gets spread around through our often careless interactions. Not to go all bleeding heart, but in some ways we are all the victim.