A SERMON BY DOCTOR PEP
459
better state than we. The Mithraic communion of bread and wine
and the totem animal masks of the cult, almost all we have left, are
hidden
in
a little trimming of St. Peter's throne. The White Tower
ketchup bottle is not enough of a symbol of the sacrifice of life and
the true fact is that death is not farther but closer to us when we are
so perfunctory and unbeholden, and the real and free presence of life
is in the necessitous drink and the hungry bite of the man and woman
who know how food is supplied and have met the debt of labor and
acknowledgment.
As
far
as
I am concerned, I know my debt. The one foot of
my original two that touched the ground is shod in the hide of
beasts; my coat is trimmed with the skin of them. I don't know what
the fur of my collar is, wolf or badger, tickling my neck. It seems
mostly like the anonymous hock-shop article that never had a parent
or a birth and was never anything but the trimming of a garment.
But when the thaw comes and I feel it against my skin, why it gets a
little pungent of the cave and the forest from the heat of my body,
and then I remember what it is. I remember the animals and that I
am pieced together inside and out, from joint to strap and from
liver to buttons by their favor. Because I am a prince of life, ladies
and gentlemen? And the natural chief of the hierarchy, the speaking
over the dumb? This I must be to deserve. Otherwise what excuse
is there? I ask you it from my heart.
Am
I deserving? For I have to
be.
Now, friends, some of you will be thinking of the rule of nature
and will ask my opinion, for instance, of the tame cat eating her
way wag-headed into a mackerel with her nice needles; somebody
will direct me to the Lincoln Park Zoo and the whole bar-marked
congress of brute life ten minutes by car from the main stem; and
will mention for sure the wiry clinging mantis that gnaws off the
head of her mate in their climax. Likewise we kill and devour. Which
is all very well if you think of us only in nature. Yes, I feel the drum–
bumps of the species in me, of
all
of them. I appreciate that I am
not the star-browed Apollo measuring one noble foot of space between
the eyes. I am even one leg short of the average stamp of Adam.
But folks, I partake of everything in my
o~
flesh; I strum on Venus–
berg and float in the swamp. I do a one-leg schottische along Clark
Street and buff the friendly public with my belly. I stroll in the zoo
