"Science must begin with myths, and the criticism of myths." -- Karl Popper
Living and teaching again in the States, as our family took long road trips across the Nevada desert to visit my parents Christmas after Christmas, my children’s early years and Joshua trees passed us steadily by. On these road trips, it became our ritual that when my son would fight with his little sister, or threaten to barf, we’d break his boredom by turning every last mountain into an imaginary volcano, with its own god, and a name.
“Pwikhh! Pwikhh! Boooom!”
With delight, we watched our scientifically-inclined boy turn into Vulcan’s evangelical— a pint-sized prophet of sulfur and smoke. In the spring, at public parks, wearing shorts, socks, and sandals, with his short-sleeve shirt buttoned to the top, and his dog-eared copy of National Geographic: Volcanoes! clutched in both hands, he’d saunter up to other kids and he’d ask if they knew the Good News about fumaroles, fire, and sulfur.
Unconvinced and uncomprehending, they’d run off to play tag, the business of the day. Disappointed, he'd turned to grown ups, to offer them his gospel of magma and truth — a gospel they politely ignored, as many adults do all inconvenient knowledge. They took little heed for that fiery morrow. Some even ran to get their kids down from the limbs of an old tree, to make them spit out forbidden Fruit Chews.
Others ran to load their barbecues with briquettes, and prepare to offer up their burnt offerings. But none listened. Would they had paused to hear a young boy’s simple, redemptive words about our ancient fiery underworld. But my boy met his first stop sign on his road to Damascus. He never blinked. Despite the incurious world about him, he managed to maintain his protoscientific vision, and to persecute superstition by asking damned, contemptible questions:
Daddy, how old is Mt. Etna? (About 500,000 years old.) Is Vulcan real? (Of course.) What happened to the people at Pompeii, after they died? (They became a tourist attraction.)Daddy, will you die? (Well, Mt. Vesuvius is far away. We’re safe here. Do you want to find it on a map?) Yeah! Vah-ca-no! Boom! Pwikhhh!
In his incessant search for answers, he found infinite, wicked joy in plowing his parents’ sheets, pillows, and blankets into a massive mound at the center of our marriage bed. In this veritable Satanic ritual, he’d form at the top of the mountain a crater, into which this pint-sized high priest now cast his sacrificial offerings to please his terrible Pagan god: He sacrificed stuffed bears, stuffed kittens, and even Mini Mouse.
Yet no answer found he. The heavens maintained eternal silence. And again my son found himself forsaken.
And so, with fire and fury he took to chanting and dancing and jumping on that marriage bed, screaming the call primeval, bringing the whole of the earth to quake and tremble. Pillows rolled down from on high. His mom’s bra entangled with underwear, socks, and shirts. Lost cookies and crackers crumbled, and turned to ashes and dust, until finally a voice thundered from the heavens: “Get off the goddamn bed! I just made it! How many times do I have to tell you? Man, I just folded those. Fuck!”
Vulcan wept. Thus his priestly days came to an end.
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