What I present here is a work-in-progress. The text will certainly undergo revision, as will
both the selection of musical pieces and their text and lyrics.
The music to all the selections is available, mostly in vocal form as accompanying
instrumental arrangements have yet to be completed.
For the present time, I intend for the initial performances to be
as simply produced as possible. Ultimately, what I envision is this:
The film will open with a staged performance of the first of four parts of
"Universalist Mass for the New Millennium", perhaps in a church such as
Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. The first act of "Puebla" will follow. The viewer will
see the location and hear the ambient sounds. However, rather than having
actors on-screen, The story will be heard as a voice-over, with visuals supplied only for
ambience.
The film will continue to alternate between the "Mass" and the story,
concluding with the fourth and final part of the "Mass".
Just think if this as a "shooting script" but without any directions. We'll figure it out as we
go along.
–Daniel
Puebla
A Digital Film Oratorio
by Daniel Beck Zwickel-Wicks
1st Movement
Prelude: "Listen to Your HeartSong"
"Listen to your heartsong–
It will tell you who you are.
You can reach from the depths of the deepest sea
Outward to the highest star.
"Listen to your heartsong
It will help you be kind, it will make you strong.
Listen to your heartsong!"
Meditation: "Adagio" (instrumental)
Opening Prayer: "Shehecheyanu"/
"Sing To the Heart!"
"Baruch ata Adonai,
Eloheinu melech ha'olam;
Shehecheyanu, v'ki y'manu
V'hi gianu lazman hazeh.
"Amen, amen, shalom, amen."
"Sing to the center of the universe;
Sing it out loud and clear, so that everyone can hear.
Sing to the Heart—Sing to the Heart!
"Baruch ata Adonai,
Eloheinu melech ha'olam;
Halo l'cho shi ra'ich ani kinor.
Baruch ata Adonai!
"Sing to the center... ...Sing to the Heart!"
Introit: "As We Gather In This Sacred Place"
"As we gather in this sacred place
Let us remember those who have died
and will die for our sins
In numbers beyond counting;
"As we gather in this sacred place
Let us acknowledge those who yet
live to grant us grace
In blessings ever mounting.
"Let us not forget those whose
lives end as ours begin
In this sacred place."
Prolog
I am an old man and I can no longer bear the pain. I carry the weight
of too much history and too little humanity. Tonight I embark on a journey and
leave this final journal entry more as a conceit then as a gesture to any reader
as may come upon it—likely it shall cease to exist. I cannot say this as a
certainty for I go the road never yet traveled, and so I leave this to a
posterity which may or may not disappear in my absence.
My name is Jean-Louie Cohn and I am an engineer and social historian,
two fitting disciplines for that in which I am about to engage. I am the
realization of the dreams of H.G. Wells and countless other authors of science
fiction and dreamers of the improbable, and my chariot stands in near silence
awaiting the breath of life from its creator. You see, I am going to find a
certain Frenxican Lieutenant somewhen in 1862 and get him so drunk that
he will wake up some time the next afternoon having missed the battle that
changed the map of the world.
With any luck the specter of the corpses of two million Jews will cease
to haunt my waking dreams, vanishing with the last evil traces of the demon
Jacque LeNoir, known within nouveau-fascist circles affectionately as Black
Jack, author of the Holocaust.
In my mind's eye I see a triumphant post-WW I France, a united States
where now, for all practical purposes, three separate nations exist (four if
your include the secessionist Western Territories); a single Spanish Mexico
celebrating a fifth of May or cinco de mayo if you prefer on which the
forces of Napoleon III under the Brigadier Charles Latrille, Compte de Lorencez
were defeated hard by the "Cerros de Guadalupe y Loreto", the
twin forts of el General Ignacio Zaragoza.
For I believe the battle at Puebla to be absolutely pivotal. In a
nutshell: The French lose. No more Mayan Dynasty, no Northern and Southern
Mexico, French and Spanish biting and hissing and scratching like the British
and the Irish, vainly attempting to hold together a country occupied by an
absentee European landlord. The Confederate States, lacking the support of the
French, lose their bid for autonomy, remain with a union of States with
Louisiana but a sleepy backwater state rather than the trade nerve center of the
continent. Perhaps the Western Territories forget their enmity over time and
remain in concord with the Union. Such a mighty nation would easily help to
defeat the Prussians.
Mexico would in all probability not be a factor at all and without
Northern Mexico, Louisiana and the Confederacy, Germany would stand not a chance
in Lenoir's hell of defeating the French and its allies.
A triumphant France would not suffer the indignity of defeat leading to
a massive economical collapse and an inflation where, literally, a wheelbarrow
of Francs is needed to buy a family's groceries. And a Belgian half-Jewish
carpenter son-of-a-whore would not rise as the savior of Royal France to send
two million Jews to the ovens. You see, with a German defeat in WW I a fat and
complacent France would never entertain such a monster and leave not so much as
a stain in the path of history.
So tonight I intend to go after that French-Mexican Lieutenant whom I
believe inspired the French to victory in 1862. I intend to bring along a few
20th century devices as insurance. I shall not return to Israel for in the
absence of a Holocaust the need for a Zionist homeland should be sufficiently
lessened as to leave Palestine the sleepy, peaceful land God intended it to be.
I shall not miss my job with the Ministry of Defense, designing weapons with
which to terrorize the Palestinians; I am sick to death of the blood on my
hands. I shall not miss Israel and its fanatics.
I intend to jump only partway back to the second decade of this century
and observe from a cantina somewhere in Baja's La Paz the Prussian defeat. Then
contemplate the Torah with a shot of tequila in one hand and a Havana cigar in
the other, in proper communion with the Master of the universe.
For the Germans will know better than to allow a dog like Lenoir to rise
to power and goose-step across Europe with two million dead Jews in his wake.
They are a people of culture, of industry and efficiency. Certainly they could
better rebuild with vigor than the contentious and arrogant French. The Germans
are a proud lot and their Jews are a partly a source of that pride.
And those two million of my brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers
and aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews and cousins will die natural,
peaceful deaths, far from the flames of war.
My chariot awaits. Peace shall be wrought in Puebla.
[Translated from the original Hebrew by Rabbi Benjamin Lieberman.]
Act I
I'm at the top of Mt. San Jacinto, a ten-mile hike from Humber Park in
Idylwild. If I go back a couple of miles I can catch the new tram down to Palm
Springs. From 45 degrees to 105 in about a half an hour.
I prefer it here; there's nothing much happening down there that interests
me. The wildflowers coming up were a riot. The air's a bit thin but the view's
stupendous—the Springs, Mt. Taquitz, Hemet but that's not much. Just a few
friends and a great bunch of old farts. With a median age of 55, grass growing
is slightly more exciting than the action down there. Graduation and I'm outa
this burg. San Diego "surf-&-muchachas" State, here I come!
Hell, Palm Springs, maybe I misjudged you. Nature is cool but at 16
hormones doth rage. So I'll sign the log to leave my mark and have my lunch
before I go back.
I usually come up with friends but this time I needed to do it alone. I've
something in my pocket that puzzles me to no end. It reads like either bad
science fiction or worse history, I'm not sure which.
And something about it scares the shit out of me.
The school was called Shimber Berris, meaning Valley of the Birds, and was
located in the town of San Bartolo, Territory of Baja California, South.
My brother and I were the first two students there, an experiment I was too
young and stupid to be nervous about. Its founder, Dr. Burden, had been a
missionary in Africa and was then the town doctor when he had this bright idea.
My folks, who'd had me in private schools where my mom taught, partly for our
tuition, got hooked and helped finance the first nine months of its existence.
By train and bus I came, through Los Mochis, to the fishing village of
Topolobampo from which we embarked for La Paz in a boat called the Blanco which
should have been called Termites-Swimming-Like-Crazy which were mainly what kept
us from sleeping with the fishes. Thence by Shimber Berris' old Dodge army
truck to San Bartolo, 65 miles of desert scrub to the south.
Something immensely disturbing began that summer that supposedly connects
with the death of six million Jews, if you believe in time travel.
I was an eleven-year-old gringo's worth of mischief on the loose in
La Paz, and I was having too much fun to realize I was lost, or to even worry
about it. The Burdens were getting supplies and I managed to sneak away while
they were looking the other way. It was a typically blazing hot day but I had
my straw hat on. The first time I went outdoors in our village without it I
nearly got sunstroke; I'm a quick study. A radio somewhere was blaring the
jingle, Tome Pacifico—¡y nada más! which sounded pretty
good even though I didn't particularly like beer and the smell of a street
vendor's tamales reminded me that I was pesoless. I turned toward the
source and I saw this old man sitting at an outdoor cafe table.
At least he looked old—I mean really old, much older, I
think, than he actually was.
He looked like a monk, like the skinny ones who thought that starving
themselves made them holy or something. Except he had an unlit cigar he was
more chewing on than smoking, the thin, ascetic hand holding a shot of Tequila
curiously steady. I may have had a kid's boundless energy but he made me
bone-weary just looking at him. One good siesta, he'd never bother even
waking up. He was reaching to pick up the ancient fountain pen next to a diary
or something when he noticed me staring. I got a bit nervous, not to say
embarrassed, and began to walk on and he reached one of those monk's hands
toward me.
"Hey, kid!"
[All this in Spanish, of course, but a strange kind of Spanish that
reminded me vaguely of relatives. Jewish relatives.]
"You look thirsty. Hell, you look lost. Let me buy you a refresco
and we'll figure out how to get you back to whoever you belong to."
Before I realized I'd decided to take him up on it, in my mind I was
already slugging down a cold Squirt (¡Nunca le deja sed!)
"What're those you're writing? Some kind of code or something?"
My Spanish was pretty fluent by now but then he surprised me by replying in
English. Now he sounded like my Jewish relatives, except more like French than
Austrian.
"It's Hebrew. That's what we spoke in Israel."
"Israel. That's where all the Jews went. My father talks about moving
there all the time. How'd you know I was American?"
"Child, you may sound Mexican but you don't look it. Do you like to
read?"
"Yeah."
"What sorts of books?"
"Oh, science fiction mostly. You know, I used to live in Tarzana.
It's named after Edgar Rice Burrough's Tarzan. He wrote science fiction all the
time. I even wrote a story once about shrinking and discovering that atoms were
tiny solar systems and discovering a new planet with its own civilization."
"Aha! A writer, nu? How about time travel. Do you like to
read about that?"
Suddenly the smile faded and he appeared about to collapse and he looked so
sad I almost cried. I didn't know what to say so I just sat there, sipping my
Squirt. He seemed lost, distracted. Then he carefully screwed the cap back on
the Waterman he had been using and clipped it in his shirt pocket. Funny, I
just thought of that. It was a emerald-green, tortoise- shelled Waterman. He
went through the old leather notebook, pausing here and there.
"Six million dead," he mumbled.
I distinctly heard him mutter, six million dead and it gave me
goosebumps. I'm sure it was just a kid's imagination but those words carried
the smell, almost, of a large number of corpses. And I realized I was
looking at a dead man in all but fact.
"You know what your name means in Hebrew?" I had told him my name
was Daniel. I nodded. "God is my judge. Well, God is mine, too.
"You like science fiction?" He looked purposely through his
journal and found the pages he was seeking, separating them from the rest,
neatly folding them and handing them to me. "I am through," he said,
more to himself than to me. "I am through." He looked up and
searched my eyes, then smiled fleetingly. "You know, by all rights those
pieces of paper shouldn't exist. Ah well. Have a good life, Daniel. Shalom."
He rose and walked away.
My last impression of him as I heard Mrs. Burden's exclamations upon
discovering my whereabouts was of the strangeness of his clothes. I hadn't
realized it before but they looked somehow peculiar. They looked maybe European
but somehow, well, different. And his shoes. I had never seen anything
like them.
So here I am on top of the world and I finally know what was on those pages.
My Philosophy class was having a section on comparative religions. A
Catholic priest, a Methodist minister and a Buddhist monk had come in and later
a Moslem and a Ba'hai would talk to us too but that day it was a rabbi and I
couldn't get those pieces of paper out of my mind.
I went up to him after class.
Soon after the dreams began.
When I was very young I used to believe that Hitler was still in power. I
knew that I was Jewish, but only half Jewish, and that made a great
difference. My folks don't remember but I used to wonder, out loud, maybe, if I
was safe because I was only half Jewish, if Hitler would leave me alone. Years
after the end of the war, an ocean and a continent away and that bastard still
had that power over me.
So the dreams came, and I saw the marching and heard the speeches except
Hitler was speaking not in German but in French. And behind the swastika-laden
banners not Deutschland Uber Alles but the Marseillaise. After several weeks I
had one final dream.
I was in a cantina, I know, much like I imagined the cantina in San
Bartolo to be (I never actually went inside one), with its wind-up Victrola
blaring old rancheros and Saturday-night boracheros singing Canción
Mixteca at the top of their lungs.
I was sitting at a table across the room from a fireplace and I saw him
enter the room. He didn't notice me; he saw the French soldiers sitting by the
fire drinking cerveza and probably wishing it were cognac. I called to him.
"Monsieur Cohn," I called.
He glanced my way, startled, then started toward the soldiers. He couldn't
have heard right.
"Monsieur, venez ici, s'il vous plait."
Now the soldiers even noticed, but as quickly returned to their
conversation. The man, however, stopped dead in his tracks.
"Qui est vous?"
"You don't know me yet. Please come over here and join me."
"You speak English. You are American?"
"¿Prefiere español? My English is a lot better."
By now he was approaching my table. I offered him a chair, called to the
dueño for another cerveza. Sixteen and I'm ordering drinks for a
stranger. But this is a dream, remember.
He sat down, but glanced nervously at the French several times a minute.
"Monsieur Cohn..."
"How do you know my name?"
"I'll explain. What year is this?"
"Alors..., 1882, je croix."
"That's what you think. Please, look at me. Look at me! You need to
see my eyes. It may be the only way you'll believe me. And you must!
"You can't do what you are about to do."
"What do you.... How.... Incroyable!"
He abruptly rose to his feet and turned toward his original destination.
"1959. We will meet in 1959 in La Paz," I said hurriedly. "We'll
talk about science fiction and time travel. You write in Hebrew in a leather
notebook with a green Waterman fountain pen and you will give me the last seven
pages you wrote in your journal before you left 1992..."
The man turned back to me and fell back onto his chair.
"Vous savez trop, garçon. What I do is vital. I
must...."
"You must listen to me, damnit! You come from 1992. You think that
you can waltz into the past and change history for the better. How many Jews
did Hitler... I mean, LeNoir kill? Two million? Ever hear of Hitler? Of
course not. You guys were too busy in France to notice the Austrian scum.
Believe me, Hitler will do your LeNoir four million better. I'm a Jew! I was
born in 1948 but that son-of-a-bitch gave me nightmares six years and six
thousand miles away. Six million of my cousins he sent to the ovens!
Your tequila and your Havana cigars won't give you much comfort as you sit in a
cafe in La Paz and think about six million Jews."
He looks at me hesitantly, glances at the French, start to speak and then
falls silent.
"Please, you must believe me. Go. Return to your home. You can do
nothing here."
All color has drained from his face. He looks several years older, closer
to how he look in 1959. He swirled the remaining liquid around in his glass,
set it down, smiled a smile that collapsed in on itself. Then he arose and
walked back to the door. His hand hesitated at the doorknob, he glanced at
Maxmillian's men and was gone. I whispered to his shadow, "Shalom. ¡Vaya
con dios!" and fell back into a dreamless sleep.