Eye-Witness

Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.
     --Cormac McCarthy, "Blood Meridian"--

 The preacher was banging on a bit today concerning the eye-witness accounts of Jesus roaming around the countryside and astonishing the ever-credulous peasants of 1st Century Palestine. The astonishment was due to the fact that the appearances occurred long after he was corpsified which was the result of getting cross-threaded with the Romans who, as it turns out, have no sense of humor when it comes to revolutionaries stirring up the locals when thousands of them are gathered into small areas for already-fraught religious events.

In any case, it depends on which book of the Bible is the literal truth in a given telling, but the number of eyewitnesses to this reanimation seems to be somewhere up in the hundreds over the course of a couple of months if you add them all up. 

The preacher counts this as clear evidence that it happened.

Less clear is how he squares this with hundreds of sightings of The Virgin Mary being out and about. Mary, who is purportedly the mother of the very same Jesus was arguably deader for longer than he was, as it apparently took a couple of centuries longer to get her feet back under her and get on with whacking up po' fo'k around the world with healing miracle juice, or whatever. Since then, she's turned up so often she's as familiar as a FedEx delivery guy, and at least as well documented. Maps exist which pinpoint the top 500 or so sightings so far around the world, many of them involving very large crowds of people seeing her at the same time.

Egyptians Soaking Up An Appearance Of Our Lady of Delusional Crowd Psychology

As a fundamentalist preacher, I anticipate that the Preacher would say that these common-as-rainwater observations are hallucinations, demons, outright lies, or derangement brought on by too much incense and chanting at your basic Catholic Mass. In any event, they're somehow "different" from the "authentic" eye-witness accounts of 2000-year-dead First Century observers as told to mystics and Biblical authors some 50-80 years after they purportedly happened, and re-written and transliterated by half-educated scribes all the way down through history to the Fourth century scrolls which are about the oldest we have, then on to the inerrant copy, third-level translation that he's holding in his hands.

But wait.

Once upon a time I saw a guy I knew (Bobby Anderson, aka "Grim") on a motorcycle headed down the street, northbound to be exact. Only moments later, I was back on the way down that same street (also northbound) and noticed that Grim and his motorcycle had intersected with a southbound pickup which had attempted to make a left turn in front of him.

Grim, in an automatic response, tried to lay the motorcycle down to keep from being tossed over the pickup or through its windshield. This was successful, and the pickup instead only ripped Grim's left leg off just below the knee and slapped him to the ground like laundry onto a rock. Grim, having gotten his center of gravity low enough to avoid vaulting, was still subject to the laws of physics generally, and momentum in particular, so he continued more-or-less northbound, sliding in a slopppy red smear until he slammed into the concrete curb alongside the street. This is where he was when I followed the path of bone fragments and chunks of meat to him and wrapped a tourniquet around his thigh and pinched him off to keep him from bleeding out.

The EMTs turned up and were working on getting him stabilized while the rest of us spent an entertaining five or ten minutes hunting under parked cars and whatnot looking for the leg, just in case the medical people could do anything with it, although I felt that any leg that had left that many bone fragments scattered around would likely be harder to put back into service than reconstituting a champagne flute beaten with a mallet. Rather a moot point, as we couldn't find it, which was becoming something of a mystery until we lifted him onto the gurney and discovered he'd been laying on it the whole time. Heh. Grim always had kind of a…well, Grim sense of humor. 

At any rate, the cops started asking the questions that get asked about this sort of thing. There were ten or fifteen people standing around whenever the big bang happened and Grim's bloody ride slid to a stop practically at their feet. And, here's the part that convinced me that most eyewitnesses are pretty useless: Between a quarter and half of those told the cops that Grim was headed SOUTHBOUND and the truck had pulled out into the street from the cross-street and took him out.

This is not physically possible (reference the smear of chunky bits, not to mention those embedded in the grill of the truck). It was pointed out to those "witnesses" that the truck was still sitting in the oncoming Northbound lane at a left-turn angle with the rear left-turn signal still blinking (the front one having disintegrated and incorporated most of itself into Grim's ex-leg) which meant it was clearly moving SOUTHBOUND, which meant the motorcycle was NORTHBOUND, never mind the NORTHBOUND motorcycle slide marks. Several of the them then instantly swore that they'd seen the truck spin around after being hit by the less-than-1000 pound motorcycle. To be honest, I thought these guys were just fucking with the cops for whatever reason it is that people fuck with cops, but it slowly began to dawn on me that these people were deadly serious. It's what they actually remember seeing, and they were getting increasingly annoyed that the cops and most of the rest of the crowd weren't buying it.

Lesson learned. From that day, whatever anyone told me was subject to me assuming that they were as full of shit as a Christmas goose and whatever they were telling me only had about 50/50 odds of having occurred at all, never mind they way they remember it.*

But wait.

This doesn't apply to me, of course. I know what I've seen and done. I put up a lot of old memories (and/or fictions) on this blog, and the ones that aren't outright fictional bullshit are as real as sunrise, and happened as reported, even after the intervening modification pressures of years. For example an old story that I wrote back in 2017 was about being a kid in a small town in Montana at Christmas, and the Christmas concert we'd do every year in the gym.  Click here, if you want a reminder:

https://asbestosdust.blogspot.com/2017/12/christmas-story-except-with-nazis.html

The rest of the story, which really wasn't part of the story at all, was that several years later, that gym burned to the ground, right to the slab.

The building was huge, truly, and the fire was spectacular. Flames billowed up over the houses 100', maybe 200' high — it could be seen all over town. The pain of that piece of my childhood turning to ash before my eyes was real and immediate. By then I was in high school. Our band instruments were on the second floor and went with the rest. The town gathered behind the undermanned fire and police lines to gawp. Ms. Schantz, the algebra teacher with the weird kid who was one of my classmates and who lived just up the block was fighting back tears as she crossed the lines to bring the firefighters and cops hot coffee and soft drinks and sandwiches while they tried for hours to keep the entire block from going up. It was touch and go. But at the end of it, the gym was gone.

It is one of the clearest memories I have of those days. 

The other night, I was scouting around through a "family tree" site, and discovered that they had digitized the entire collection of yearbooks from that little town. I spent a couple of hours rooting around through them. I found pictures of myself I don't remember being taken. God, I was such a little kid. Old friends, old enemies…all there. And I was looking through yearbooks trying to find a girl I dated once after I was out of school, and she was still in. It was a pretty terrible date, but even so it still made me smile. I found her. Still hot, her black and white senior picture.

One page over from a two-page full-color spread of the gym on fire.

There it was, thick tides of sparks falling like hail through glowing clouds vomiting up into the sky, swirling red and yellow. I had not expected that, and it took my breath away. But not as much as reading the dates.

I hadn't lived in that city for years before it happened — when it happened, I had long since followed my family to another, less habitable spot in another state chasing the oil-fields behind my father; in fact, by the time it happened, I was half-way though my first tour in Southeast Asia. I spent the rest of the night researching it, and in the end there was no doubt — not only hadn't I been there, I was literally as far away as I could get without leaving the planet altogether. I hadn't set foot in that town for any reason at least two years before it happened. The disorientation at this discovery was a near-kin to vertigo. What the fuck had happened? It was all very Rod Serling.

Rod Serling Screwing With Me

I know I went back to the town when I got back into the World from the first tour, and spent far too much time self-medicating with old friends from my childhood, considering new directions my life was going. It's when I had the funny/terrible date with the hot girl. And apparently I'd been told of the fire, maybe seen pictures of it. I don't actually know. But I do know that up until that moment staring at those dates on that page, I'd have sworn any oath you care to name in any venue that I'd watched that gym burn.

I presume that if I'd also remembered Jesus striding out of the flames to help Ms. Schantz with the coffee and sandwiches, our Preacher AND a substantial number of other people would count that as further irrefutable evidence of the pretty sketchy idea that he's still alive. I could probably start a whole new branch of the religion.

And there's the problem. Someone claiming to have personally witnessed something, and who clearly believes it, counts as gold-standard evidence practically everywhere. It's bullshit, of course. What they're reciting is their MEMORY of what they've seen — and do we really need to talk again about what a clusterfuck memory is, the biases, the re-framing, the rearranging, the reconstructions, the false narratives and outright fabrications your brain is capable of?  I didn't think so.

Never assume you know something you've seen. Prove it by something outside your own defective wiring, and that doesn't mean asking the guy you've already told a story -- he'll just remember yours. And for sure, if it's important, don't ever take anyone's word for anything — get the data.

FOOTNOTE:
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^{* Grim's fine, last I heard. He wound up losing most of the leg, even the parts that weren't scattered across the road or stuck in the pickup and the ground slapping busted up a bunch of stuff and fair-sized chunks of the intact parts were peeled like an over-ripe apricot from the momentum-slide. But he's back on a motorcycle. He can afford to do that pretty much full time these days due to the pay-out from the lawsuit. A fortuitous chain of events upped the settlement into "holy shit!" territory. The estate of the raggedy but well-to-do old fart who ran over him settled with as little fuss as possible, because the old fart surprised himself by dying unexpectedly not too long after he met Grim. The respectable and complex pile of resources, property, and money generated by his four car washes convinced his inheritors that they needed to be putzing around in court paying lawyers to annoy some guy that "Da'" crippled like they needed a collective sore dick. So in the interest of immediately unencumbering and dividing up the unexpected windfall and running as far from car washes as they could get, they settled big. Grim's check had lots of zeroes, and the old fart's family was able to move on and deal with their grief at Da's passing by converting the remainder of his estate to happy things and new houses. And so it goes. ↩}