14 August 2015

Win your diary’s attn & then whine

Dear diary,

Here is the scientific proof that God is gay: He is never seen with a woman. Even when it came time for God to beget offspring, He couldn’t bring himself to spend the night with a female—instead, He had to pass a jar of His divine sperm to a gloved angel, who was instructed to go down and impregnate Mary the same way that the farm worker from Louis Malle’s 1985 documentary God’s Country explains how he artificially inseminates cows. Then, when God’s son was born, the lad proved to be just as gay as his father; for he took unto himself twelve husbands—or thirteen, if you count the one who broke it off. (Judas desired what the Lord is against: monogamy.)

Sorry about that—I just wanted to start this out in a flashy manner; because I once took a class on speechwriting, which taught me that all diary entries should begin with a funny joke so as to capture your diary’s attention, break the ice, and cause your diary to feel that it can trust you; your diary will then immediately relax into the groove of your discourse, and you can be as boring as you like, without having to fear that your diary will stop paying attention. —It’s like removing a thorn from a lion’s paw: Your diary will always love you for making it laugh.

So now that I’ve won your affection, I want to hasten to the point of my speech where the passion has died. I want to dispose of some thoughts that I woke up thinking. You can just nod and ignore me, like a loving spouse.

I was remembering how I felt, back before I had written any books. I was so eager to get my ideas on paper—I was sure that I had many volumes’ worth of creative stuff to compose, but I didn’t know how or where to begin. I can’t recall how I ever started, how I went from having no words to having all of my writings saved in cheap little paperbacks; but, somehow, years later, I find that the task is done. (Who appointed me this task, by the way; and how did it come to have such power over me?)

Seeing all of my compositions in book form made me feel elated. But this elation has already faded—no matter how popular and loved my creations are, they can never be loved enough; and so I doubt their worth. This reaction of mine is, I think, natural—it must be endured, like a woman’s monthly suffering; I’m not intending to complain: I only mean to note that I have the feeling. This was one of the reasons that I chose to record myself reading ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ yesterday: as I understand, Walt Whitman had recently published his first edition of Leaves of Grass, which was not as commended as he hoped it would be—this saddened him; and he preserved his sadness in these lines from section 6:

It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,
The dark threw its patches down upon me also,
The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious,
My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre?

Now I remind myself that the book Whitman is talking about here contains my own favorite writing—my favorite poetry, especially ‘Song of Myself’—the thoughts that he composed for that 1855 edition are truly great: far from black or suspicious, they are the opposite of meagre. …Nevertheless, it helps me to know that Whitman felt like this, because it proves that the familiar feeling—the feeling of self-doubt, of sadness—should simply be ignored.

Time moves differently from how I would prefer it to move: that’s what causes the depression, the suspicion of worth: it’s all just impatience. I wish that time would move quickly past the age of my anonymity and halt and hover around an age of attainment. I’m no different from a dog that wants a treat: my master is telling me to hold a silly pose in order to get the reward—I’m growing tired of this game; I’m starting to whimper a little.

Ugh! Look how easy it is to sink back into dismal thoughts! —Let me remain cheerful: Here, I’ll give a quote from the commentary track to the movie Fata Morgana (1971), spoken by my favorite director Werner Herzog:

There’s so much absurdity that you encounter in the desert… strange remains of civilization… it’s so bleak: it’s not really scenic… it’s something different, it’s primordial, it’s sad… something about creation must be wrong.

That’s better. Positive energy. Now let me end this off in a way that will match how I started: with some unfair observations about the Christian system.

B.S.

If Jesus was the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, then why aren’t all Christians vegetarians? Each time another animal is slaughtered, which is to say sacrificed for consumption, the Christians who partake of it prove by doing so that they disbelieve their own doctrine of salvation. Here is a passage from chapter 6 of the book of Hebrews (verses 4-6):

It is impossible for those who were once enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, and have tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come, if they shall fall away, to renew them again unto repentance; seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put him to an open shame.

(I have one more gripe to vent before I dismiss my fake congregation to watch the imaginary Superbowl. The gripe is an unoriginal gripe: please forgive this.)

Some churchgoers assert that Jesus was the only divine human. By saying this, they ignore their own savior’s teachings. For Jesus taught that ALL humans are divine, when they act according to their own poetic genius, a.k.a. the Holy Spirit that breathes through us all.

Human beings have always been equal to divinity—that’s why Yahweh, one of the gods, kicked us out of his garden: he couldn’t deprive us of our divine perception, but he could block the way to the tree that provides immortality. This made us mortal gods.

Conclusion

It is ridiculous for Christians to believe that Yahweh is of a species higher than humankind—for then his impregnation of Mary is as grotesque as a human planting his own seed in an ape. Or, at best, like I said in my inspired introduction above, it’s like a farmhand artificially inseminating bovines. If species are as vastly different as the church claims that its monotheistic deity is from humans, then no pregnancy can result from their copulating. Thus, let us pretend.

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