Sometimes events are too bizarre for us to assimilate directly, and that is where literature comes in. “We have art,” said Nietzsche, “in order not to perish of the truth.” And in order, he might have added, not to perish of confusion in the face of certain outcomes. When one of this country’s Super Bowl heroes is a killer who scrawls a bible verse on his forehead with a red marker (not with his own blood, as first luridly reported) and then hangs himself from his jail cell window, we need a little assistance.

Flannery O’Connor’s 1965 tale, “Parker’s Back,” helps point us, in the oblique way of art, toward some of the underlying truths, I think, of the Aaron Hernandez story. No one explored the links between violence and piety better than O’Connor.

Like Hernandez, O’Connor’s main character, O.E. Parker, is a big, vain, restless, bellicose, substance-abusing, tattoo-blanketed young man with a weird relationship to religion. He lives in a very Christian environment (this is paralleled in the real world by all the coaches – Urban Meyer at the University of Florida in particular – who tried to Christianize Hernandez) , and everyone’s always trying to draw him to the revival tent; but though he’s willing to listen, and though he marries a starkly fundamentalist woman, he stays aloof. He thinks he’s smarter than everyone else, except in one instance: “It was himself he could not understand.”

Parker’s tattoos are all-terrain manifestations of obscure furies: “His dissatisfaction [was] acute, and raged in him. It was as if the panther and the lion and the serpents and the eagles and the hawks [on his skin] had penetrated his skin and lived inside him in a raging warfare.” When his mysterious rage really acts up, he inks another predator on himself, lets that do the talking, and somewhat calms down: “Whenever Parker couldn’t stand the way he felt, he would have another tattoo.” By now, he’s running out of room: “With the aid of mirrors [an] artist had tattooed on the top of his head a miniature owl.”

**************

Aaron Hernandez’s tattoos were more varied than his fictional doppelganger’s: Mom and Dad; symbols of the gang to which he belonged; abstract designs. But in one crucial respect O’Connor’s character and Hernandez were aesthetic twins: Both men sported large images of Jesus on their backs. Parker has his done after a particularly intense bout of typically enigmatic destructive rage. Among a panoply of Jesus images to choose from in his tattoo artist’s book, Parker is irresistibly drawn to “the haloed head of a flat stern Byzantine Christ with all-demanding eyes.”

Looking, with the use of mirrors, at the completed tattoo, he remarks on the way “The eyes in the reflected face continued to look at him — still, straight, all-demanding, enclosed in silence.” He’s thrilled with the tattoo, and can’t wait to get home to his wife, who, with her pious Christian ways, will, he’s sure, be just as thrilled (she’s appalled at his idolatry). But because he’s so excited, Parker also wants to get rip-roaring drunk, so he delays his return in order to spend some time in a bar/pool hall, where his friends insist on seeing his latest tattoo.

When they laugh at what a religious fanatic he’s become (Parker objects that he hasn’t a religious bone in his body), he “lunge[s] into the midst of them and like a whirlwind on a summer’s day there [begins] a fight that rage[s] amid overturned tables and swinging fists” until he gets thrown out.

“Parker sat for a long time on the ground in the alley behind the pool hall, examining his soul. He saw it as a spider web of facts and lies that was not at all important to him but which appeared to be necessary.”

Aaron Hernandez’s back-tattoo was far more benign than Parker’s, a kitschy meek and mild thorns-bearer who gazes up at sympathetic doves and angels.

While Parker seems to have wanted to carry the weight of a permanently judgmental Jesus on his back, Hernandez’s tattoo seems to have been more of a Jesus-has-got-my-back number. Indeed, during his murder trial, prosecutors made much of another religious tattoo of his, a smoking gun on whose muzzle GOD FORGIVES appears. The biblical verse Hernandez wrote on his forehead in death also goes to salvation.

****************

So what can we say of these actual and fictive macho men, unable to understand or accept their physical nature (reports are emerging that fear of his bisexuality becoming public motivated Hernandez to commit murder), equally unable to take on the reality of a soul, and so desperate in their muteness to express something that they raked their skin with messages?

“My father believed that man by nature was a mess,” writes Norman Maclean in A River Runs Through It of his preacher father, “and had fallen from an original state of grace.” Pretty much all of Flannery O’Connor’s characters are a mess, grappling with the quandary of having been born a human being in a world riddled with physical and metaphysical traps.

In the world of O’Connor, the existence of a salvific god is not at all good news, since it simply oppresses most of us with a sense of failure relative to the obligations a serious religious life demands. (Parker’s soul “was not at all important to him” but “appeared to be necessary.”) Aaron Hernandez came up in the pagan world of gangs and made a smooth transition from that reviled violence to the venerated violence of football (his family thinks most of his problems can be traced to concussions he got on the field), but, as with Parker, he absorbed the idea that although he didn’t seem to have one – or at best, he had a flimsy web of facts and lies – having a soul was as necessary as having a body.

Neither of these men, let us say, had a soul, or even wanted one. Neither had any of the stuff we associate with a soul – like a conscience. Neither could even conceptualize such a thing as a soul, even when they sat down, bloodied after a fight like Parker, and really thought about it. The best they could do was acknowledge the importance of soulfulness to other people and therefore try to mimic the condition. Please the coach, please the wife. The pathetic literalness of their backside Jesuses was the best they could do; it was an offering to a world of believers from a world of pagans — pagans miserable and belligerent at having been expelled from their idolatrous world.