Morningthots on maternity

[I found this image in the ads, delivered to our physical mailbox — it’s an artist’s rendition of the the Shekhinah.]

Dear diary,

In the last entry, I told you about my “Baby’s Book,” which we found when helping my mother move to her new abode. It’s hard for me to read those earliest records without wondering what my mother was thinking when she had me. What did she desire in a child; what did she expect from motherhood? What was she hoping an infant would do for her life?

Why do mothers have children? (I focus on moms and ignore dads because my own father remained aloof from our family: although he was present physically and even supportive in the sense that he’d occasionally glance over to see what the wife-&-kids were doing and then give the “thumbs up” sign, we children were mostly my mother’s pet project.) I’m interested in the tendencies and thoughts of all mothers; I’d like to know if there’s a generally shared view; and I’m curious how much my own mother resembles others.

I could ask my mother directly: “Did you want children; and, if so, why?” Then I could ask a million follow-ups. But the idea of personally questioning her strikes me as something that would be doomed to fail, because my mother is an expert at lying to herself about herself: when it comes to introspection and Life Truths, she’s a tangled mass of terrified evasions. Plus, she’s not even present at present – I’m alone here, up on the mountain, in the small hours of the morning, meditating. So let me begin to wonder around . . .

Did my mom truly want to have children? Yes: she dutifully absorbed the ideal from TV-culture, which depicted a happy family in a nice home with two cars in the garage and a chicken in the pot. She saw this scene and said: I fancy that. She desired to paste herself into that dream. So she wedded a local zero, and they brought forth Yours Truly.

My birth was in 1977 – see David Lynch’s film from that year: my mother is Mary X, and I am the Eraserhead baby.

Yes, mom found a mate and produced me. Bryan Ray, her firstborn. Was I the ideal child? Decidedly not. The type of babe that my mother expected was one who would look up and smile and babble in a way that could be interpreted as meaning “Mama! Savior! So loving and generous thou art! Thou hast given my life its neat little place in thy dream-vision, and for this I adore thee!” But, instead, I was a mewling and puking mess – I wailed in my cradle and gnashed my gums and roared and shook my head and gave her no rest, as I kept screaming:

My bowels, my bowels! I am pained at my very heart; my heart maketh a noise in me; I cannot hold my peace, because thou hast heard, O my soul, the sound of alarm . . . Destruction upon destruction is cried; for the whole land is spoiled. I beheld the earth, and, lo, it was without form, and void; and the heavens, and they had no light . . . and, lo, there was no man, and all the birds were fled. For thus saith GOD: “The whole land shall be desolate . . . the earth shall mourn, and the heavens above be black: because I have spoken it, I have purposed it, and will not repent, neither will I turn back from it.” (Jeremiah 4:19-28)

This was not the type of thing that my mom wanted to hear from her precious infant. So, although it’s true to say that my mother did indeed desire children, it’s also true, at the very least, to say that she had second thoughts about this creature that she had unleashed.

If this all sounds too melodramatic, I assure you: My report here is strictly accurate.

In 1970 the American columnist Ann Landers asked, in a controversial survey, the following question: “If you could redo your life, would you choose to be a parent again?” More than ten thousand letters by parents were sent to the editors; 70 percent of them answered, “No.”

That’s from a footnote that I found in a book called Regretting Motherhood by Orna Donath. I sought out this title to help me better understand my mom. For she has been a larger part of my life than usual, as of late, which has caused my bemusement about her to reach a fever pitch: I just spent every single weekend from Spring to Fall of last year working closely with her – helping her clean out the family house, downsize and move out – yet this time together did not result (as I fondly hoped it would) in a strengthened bond or greater warmth between us: no, on the contrary, she remained as cold and prim as ever. Up to this point, I had always assumed that her demeanor was a judgment against my moral deficiency – the fact that I’ve never “honored” my mother enough, in the sense of the 5th Commandment of the Decalogue (Exodus 20:12) – but after thus dedicating ALL my free time to her, over this recent season, and outdoing myself in the process (never have I worked so hard or felt so much stress), and then observing that my actions failed to effect the slightest softening of her reserve, I conclude that her bearing is not a reaction to my own behavior but rather an aversion to the state of motherhood itself. In other words, what I presumed had been a complex tangle of personal censures was only a distaste for her position. Although this is obviously not the brightest possible finding, it was a relief to realize that there’s nothing more that I need to do – no action of mine, whether good or bad, could ever alter her comportment: she will always be unforthcoming, as she simply and naturally abhors the role of mother.

So, like I said, this led me to check out Donath’s book, Regretting Motherhood. I’m sure that my mom has never heard of it, and she might even recoil from that titular concept; but I’m convinced that it illuminates her attitude in a crucial way. Reading it was so cathartic to me that now I want to share some key excerpts. In the course of her study, the author interviewed oodles and oodles of mothers; the engaging part of the book is that it gives direct quotations from these women. Donath provides the name of each interviewee while giving her number of children and their ages, between each quote; but I’ll skip listing the participants and instead present their answers in succession, so as to feel the accumulating force of their concurrence.

QUESTION:

If you could go back in time with the knowledge and experience you have today, would you become a mother / have children?

(The author notes about the mothers that “All of them answered in the negative . . . their retorts were definitive, and many women replied before I had finished asking the question.”)

ANSWERS:

If I could go back today, I’m sure I would not bring children into the world. It is completely clear to me.

§

I wouldn’t have children, period, without question. . . . I always say, I made three fatal errors in my life: one was choosing my former partner; the second was having children with him; and the third was having children at all.

§

I’d totally forgo having children. [The interviewer then asks, “All three of them?”] Yes. It hurts me very much to say that, and they’ll never hear that from me. . . . But I’d forgo having them, totally. Really. Without batting an eyelid.

§

It is crystal clear to me that if I had known what I know today . . . I wouldn’t have had him. Clear and simple. . . . Not a single day goes by that I do not say, “I’m lucky to have only one.” And this is after I say to myself, “It is a pity I have one at all.” . . . I would rather be without.

§

I definitely wouldn’t have children . . . I wouldn’t choose this path.

§

Can I say to you now, looking back, that it’s worth thirty years of suffering? [Gestures to accentuate vehement negation] Absolutely, definitely, certainly—no. NO. Would I do it again? Never.

§

In hindsight, I wouldn’t even have one child.

§

I can’t stand it, being a mother. Can’t stand this role. . . . I can say with certainty that, if I knew then what I know now . . . I wouldn’t have a child. Wouldn’t have one.

§

Even today . . . if a little leprechaun came and asked me, “Should I make them go away like nothing happened?” I would say yes without hesitating.

§

If I could redo life, would I choose to be a mother again? No way. . . . For what!? It is a real waste of time. Total.

§

I wouldn’t have children.

§

If I had had the insights and the experience I have today, I wouldn’t have created even a quarter of a child. The thing that is most painful to me is that I can’t go back in time.

§

If someone had shown me the future—I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t have children. I absolutely wouldn’t. . . . I would erase that part of my life if I could. . . . I say to myself: I wish I could wake up and they’d be gone. . . . I know it’s not a nice thing to say but . . . I really regret the way my life has turned out. [Long pause . . .] I really would like to go back and change things.

Again, those were a sampling of answers to the question about whether one would choose again to be a mother and have children, if one could live one’s life over.

And the following statements were made when the author and interviewer Donath asked her participants if they have found any advantages in motherhood:

I haven’t found any yet. I promise to update you if I do.

§

The truth is I can’t see any advantage to motherhood. Really nothing. I don’t understand what people mean when they talk about advantages. Personally? No. It’s just an unbearable burden for me. . . . Today it is completely, completely clear to me that . . . if I didn’t have children, my life would be much better. I have no doubt about it.

§

For one day of happiness, for one moment of enjoyment, you have to suffer for so many years! And sometimes the suffering doesn’t end. There it is, the feeling of unending suffering. So what is it good for?

The quote below is in reply to the question “If the hard work of motherhood is seen as an investment that bears fruit, does this fruit make motherhood worth it?”

What does “worth it” mean? . . . I don’t see the sense in the comparison. It’s like saying, “A child’s smile is worth everything.” It’s bullshit. It’s not true at all. One has nothing to do with the other—what’s the connection? It’s like taking a knife and cutting a person and then smiling at them. Is it worth the smile? There is no connection. Why should you suffer for it? What is this masochism? . . . I don’t see any reason to suffer for a child’s smile. You can get a smile from a child in the street—you don’t have to go through pregnancy and birth and nightmares and all the rest of it. I don’t connect to that nonsense.

This next quote needs no setup – I just think it’s interesting:

When I see babies, I get anxious. . . . it’s not that I don’t think they are cute, but I feel scared. It reminds me of my trauma . . . I am afraid that it may be contagious and that I will have another baby.

That might strike one as humorous: as if pregnancy can be caught like the common cold; but look how the mother explains what she means:

I read posts in a forum called “Women who do not want children” in order to find comfort and validate my feelings. Because I am very scared. What scares me? When I wanted children, it was not a rational decision, but rather an emotional and uterus-driven experience. I am afraid it will happen again. I am afraid that my uterus will wake up, and suddenly the thought of having another baby will seem nice, and I am scared because I know I will not be able to be sensible, so I try to remember how hard and bad it is. I am afraid to forget. I am happy that the trauma remains; it protects me from having another child.

Finally, I find these last few quotations to be the most unnerving; because the women are discussing the notion of having multiple children despite regretting motherhood:

I didn’t have a problem getting pregnant again, because I said to myself, I have already fallen into this pit, so . . . Once you have one, it’s like having three, or seven. It really doesn’t matter. Once you are a mother—that’s it. . . . I am already here, and nothing can change how I feel.

§

Both my boys want another sibling. If one day I have another child, it will only be for them, because they are pressuring me . . . The fact that they don’t have another sibling is not good for them, but it is very good for me. If one day I crack under the pressure—it will only be because of that.

§

I had two children one after the other because I told myself: Whatever will be will be. It was an accident with both children. I thought to myself that it was a good thing that they were only a few years apart—I could get procreation out of the way and get back to what really interests me.

§

It was clear that I had to have another child, because I had to. Because you can’t have only one child. After two and a half years, I told myself: Okay, let’s get this over with.

And here’s one extra quote that I found intriguing because it articulates certain mothers’ views of others who remain childless:

We believed that if we didn’t have children, our lives would be incomplete; we would not be able to be a part of society. This is the way we saw people who were infertile and did not want to adopt children: wasted and redundant lives. Of course we felt sorry for them, but in the depths of our hearts we also envied them for their freedom and their ability to live without the burden of motherhood, without relinquishments and sacrifices.

I only wonder how much of the negativity attributed to motherhood is due more truly to the inhumanity of Mammon: perhaps these women are more against the struggle of poverty than they are against motherhood per se – however, because the latter leads to the former, they speak of their regret as being centered upon having babies. It could be that the evils of the system are too abstract to lash out at; it’s easier to blame concrete phenomena like kids, even though the hardships of childrearing are often rather symptoms than the disease. The real disease is a set of societal rules that humans created and can likewise cure: our economy could be calibrated to support and subsidize children and childcare the way it currently supports and subsidizes oil and banks. Is it farfetched to think that its members would be less regretful, if the institution of motherhood were deemed “too big to fail”?

Cont. from prev. ent.

[Author’s note: Although this entry is continued from the previous entry, it does not require any knowledge of the previous entry; in fact, I would suggest ignoring the previous entry and jumping straight into this one. Thanks for obeying.]

Dear diary,

Yet I ask myself, in light of all that was said above: Why spend time in resolute sobriety, reading the words of late prophets, instead of awaking every morning to drink sherry by the cask, then spending the rest of the afternoon at the brothel? As Milton’s “Lycidas” always sez:

Alas! What boots it with uncessant care 

To tend the homely slighted shepherds trade,   

And strictly meditate the thankless Muse? 

Were it not better done as others use, 

To sport with Amaryllis in the shade, 

Or with the tangles of Neaera’s hair?

The answer is that I am on the wrong path. I should indeed indulge in strong drink and spend more time with whores.

But it also feels wrong to conclude in this glib way, without considering the consequences of these actions. Admittedly, there is no downside to alcohol; but what about all the children that the harlots will bear – how can I know for sure that they are mine?

I will emulate Joseph, who stood up and served as the father of Jesus, even deigning to provide the seed for his creation, when the boy’s heavenly father abandoned his mother. (Modern slang talkers might say he ghosted her.) This type of situation occurs frequently among magdalenes; but I’m not afraid to sign any number of marriage contracts. Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed.

§

While we were recently helping my own mother move into her new apartment, we found in a box of keepsakes my old baby book. “Baby books are scrapbooks used by parents to record their children’s development and mark milestones; they are often pre-fabricated with fill-in-the-blank areas and places to keep special mementoes.” Mine was titled Our Baby’s First Seven Years. It’s mostly incomplete; the majority of sections and questions were left blank. Yet anything that was filled in was done by my mom. (My dad, though physically present, was a nonentity.) While paging thru the book this morning, I was surprised how staid it is. It leaves me with the impression that my mother is a very limited person. I’ll share some parts from it here – I bet that I can copy out everything of interest before reaching the finish line of this entry:

Parents’ names: Doug & Rita.

Baby’s Name: Bryan Ray.

Named for: Doug’s army friend. Doug & I liked the name and the spelling of it.

A few loose documents are included at the beginning of the book: there is a newspaper clipping with my birth announcement; a Certificate of Baptism (from 8 July 1979 – more than two years after my advent); and a handwritten note with the following list of concerns . . .

Ask Dr. Reed re:

• spots on face
• spitting up & crying ½ hour after eating
• spitting up after having been burped – or patting his back for several minutes & no burp, then spit up when laid down
• loose stool – what does it indicate?

On reading this I reflect that, since those earliest hours of existence, my life has not changed much.

The first proper page in the book has an illustration of a family tree, with places for names on all the branches, which my mom filled in completely; except, on her side, she only entered the name of her step-father and step-grandparents.

The next page, titled “News of the Day,” provides several lines to allow for full reports, under two separate headings: “World news” and “Local news” – both of which sections my mother left blank. . . . But she listed the “Popular entertainers: Barbra Streisand, Robert Redford, Clint Eastwood, John Denver.”

Under the bold word “Christmases” there are spaces to record seven years of memories. For “Year One,” mom wrote: “Minus -15 degrees & weird weather. VERY cold.” Then for Year Two: “Bryan sang Xmas songs and danced a lot.” And Year Three: “Loves to sing Christmas songs – ‘Frosty the Snowman’, ‘Jingle Bells’, & ‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town’.” (Years “Four” through “Seven” were all left blank.)

In a free space on the next page, my mother handwrote the following (I’m not sure why her first sentence is so awkwardly worded):

Bryan does pretending in his playing at age 22 months. I saw him lay a tiny doll on a bed & say “See you in the morning,” then walk away & scream with laughter.

On the “Age 2” page, under “Outdoor play,” she wrote: “Climbs snowbank & slides down, uses broken shovel to sweep snow around.”

This made me roll my eyes – specifically the phrase “broken shovel” – because, when we were helping my mother clean out her garage this past summer, we tried to persuade her to get rid of several shovels that she was keeping, all the blades of which had been grinded down to less than half their original size by intense overuse; but my mother would neither part with these tools nor explain what abusive conditions had left them so ravaged.

In a margin of the book, this handwritten note appears:

Age 3½ – Bryan loves to try on masks & costumes. Loves to pretend he’s someone else . . .

Also:

He recognizes & names letters that he sees on books & signs, etc. He wants to be able to make letters on his chalk board, & gets furious that he can’t yet.

And all the following is recorded under “Personal Habits”:

Bryan loves to be busy with a magnet . . . loves looking at books about magic . . . Very interested in who does the acting in movies & shows.

Hates to go to bed.

I often help him get dressed – which is wrong, since he’s very capable of dressing himself.

Is very receptive to learning about God.

Still needs to work on self-control.

On the page for “Five Years Old,” while she completed nothing else besides “Games Played: Balloon Race; Musical Chair” [sic – I couldn’t resist keeping her singular form of that latter game’s title: it sounds so desolate], my mother wrote in the empty space where you’re supposed to display a photograph:

Bryan listens as I pray each night before bed, & each morning we have ‘devotions’ from a small book. He asks questions about whether God likes certain activities.

Sounds creepy to me.

But, hey, look at this: we’ve already reached the end of the book! – There’s just one last brief account that my mother wrote, on the space of a blank page before the back cover:

6^th birthday – Party at our house. Invited neighborhood kids to play games. Served ham sandwiches, potato chips, & white cake with cherry frosting. Bryan didn’t eat anything.

I remember that birthday. That was the year when a great spirit of indignation descended upon me, and I felt repulsed by all the traditions of my parents’ culture. (To this day, I firmly maintain the same persuasion.)

On pleasure deferred

Dear diary,

It’s like a movie “filmed in glorious black and white.” You infer that there are colors in the world of the story, but each one is only a mixture of those two shades. Color therefore seems to be everywhere while it truly does not exist.

I’m thinking of pleasure and pain again: perhaps everything in our reality is a mixture of those two sensations – so our dimension is not monochromatic but monopathic (or an apter suffix). Could it be that love does not exist but is only inferred? Or all the other equivalents of color in the world of emotion – are they illusory? And, if so, then what does it matter?

It doesn’t matter at all. To say that all human feelings are illusions changes nothing beyond language about our reality. In fact, we’ve made existence more cumbersome, if we now must add the qualifier “fake” in front of all descriptors.

But I still find something interesting about the idea that the raw, simple reaction to pleasure and pain informs all our stances – philosophical, religious, aesthetic . . .

Recently I’ve read deeply in Saint Augustine and in Ralph Waldo Emerson. Both men were moved by the idea of Christian martyrdom. The fact that someone would die for an idea: does this strike you as a proof of that idea’s truth? It impresses me when anyone is willing to go to such lengths, but I find it sadly easy to believe that humans can be deceived; so all martyrdoms appear quixotic to me.

The denial of pleasure for the sake of righteousness. How far does the denial need to go, to qualify as genuine? – A Christian takes a vow of poverty. This is a denial of pleasure. If we ask the Christian to explain himself, he says “I have decided to endure a life of hardship here on earth, in hopes of obtaining a reward in heaven.” – Do you see the trick? Pleasure is not really denied but rather postponed. Pleasure is still the goal; it’s just that the Christian opts for a “long game” strategy, compared to his infidel neighbors who seek pleasure now instead of later.

SEUMAS: I rejoice in the vindication of the Church and Truth.

DAVOREN: Bah. You know as little about truth as anybody else, and you care as little about the Church as the least of those that profess her faith; your religion is simply the state of being afraid that God will torture your soul in the next world as you are afraid the [police] will torture your body in this.

—from The Shadow of a Gunman
by Sean O’Casey

Is there something better about favoring an eventual pleasure over an instant one? I guess, if the eventual pleasure is greater. It makes sense to say “Skip today’s small reward and give me the bigger reward tomorrow.” I understand this, if the choice is either-or. But if one can have both rewards, why not welcome continual pleasure?

After being accustomed to frown on such souls as impulsive, at this point in my life I’m learning to feel respect for whoever dares to prefer any immediate gratification over a promised one. You can call me a doubter, a nonbeliever, and reprimand me for lacking faith; but I have a hunch that it’s all hogwash – all this talk of heavenly promises, of rewards waiting in the world to come for whoever renounces pleasure. I say: all these notions were devised by those who aim to embezzle what should be humankind’s peace dividend. Since time immemorial, small groups of system-gamers have seized the lion’s portion of what should be everyone’s fair share. In other words, all these variations on the idea of “pay now, buy later” are just ways to hoodwink the commonwealth away from the commoners.

Attempting to reminisce

To whoever has been listening:

Now this idea of playing dead reminds me of the old Hollywood Western movies. But I don’t wanna talk about that today — not even a saloon shooting (tho admittedly that is tempting). I feel like writing an irresponsible story, whose plot is thin to nonexistent. Let it fail fast and then take a turn for the tedious. For all I want is to dump into a melting pot a bunch of my adolescent memories of consumer culture . . . reflect back the trash that I was raised on. Just to pass the time while I wait for a boat.

So the first thing that happens in today’s diary entry is that the corpse of the kingdom’s lost princess Zelda Fitzgerald washes up along Paumanok’s shore, because the drunken author has prayed to the sea, in the words of Whitman: “I wait and I wait till you blow my mate to me.” But it’s a local plumber who finds her, not the author. (The author falls offstage after getting everything started – the author should never be a part of any story.) Let us name this plumber “The Missing Link” because he’s heavily mustachioed. And let’s say that his double has escaped from the alternate dimension, and he looks identical to our protagonist except that he’s covered in thick fur from head to foot. So this evil twin attacks our hero by rolling wooden barrels at him from the top of his skyscraper, and the barrels are burning. But then our hero smashes each of the barrels with a hammer — either that or he leaps clear over them like they are hurdles.

Then I suppose we should have our hero battle the Chaos Dragon and win. And then he can discover he’s too late to rescue his love interest; for Princess Fitzgerald has been transferred to another dimension. This probably happened when The Missing Link’s shadow-self escaped from the Dark Tower of Childe Roland.

That’s it? The end? I guess so. I’m already annoyed with myself for starting down this path. I had such a simple goal, and I couldn’t even attain that.

What I thought I was doing here was combining elements from the 1986 video game The Legend of Zelda with the “Princess” from 1985’s Super Mario Bros. game, but placing the wife of native Minnesotan F. Scott Fitzgerald in the titular role of the former game, and confounding her with the murdered heroine from Twin Peaks (1990–2017). All this seemed clever to me, but now that I’ve taken a break to do some lazy-research, I’ve learned that the creator of both the above games, Shigeru Miyamoto, actually took the name Zelda from that very same personage. So I just reinvented the wheel. And apparently Miyamoto and his team worked simultaneously on those two titles, Zelda and Mario, following a plan to collect as many ideas as possible and then sort them out into two antithetical projects, one that would play more like a board game, relatively calm and intellectual, while the other would be fast, wild, and visceral like a pinball machine. So my merging the material from these sources is like taking the heaven and earth from that first sentence in Genesis and smooshing them back into one single uncreated jumble. Quite the opposite of Maxwell’s demon. Neither creative nor interesting.

§

Was anything ever enjoyable about art? I think so. It’s hard to recall, now. Nothing was ever enjoyable about life, which is why I started caring about art in the first place. But now it seems that everything I once thought of as art has died out. Painting is part of two-dimensional reality, which the Internet swallowed up. Music got ruined by . . . I’m not sure what to say about music, but it seems unhealthy nowadays. Plays are no longer performed, and films have faded out. Sculpture . . .

No: the spirit that made so much of the world of art attractive to me is still alive, and we could invest it in the new forms. I’m just afraid to let go of the old forms.

No: “afraid” is not the right word. My aversion is more about taste than fear: I would rather not exchange a physical painting for a picture on a computer screen. Yet why? Is it truly only the assumed lack of longevity? Maybe if I were to part with my prejudice, I might find something compensatory in these newfangled gimmicks . . .

I’ve talked about this already; I don’t want to whine anymore.

But I also don’t want to try to pose as happy when I’m deeply and truly unhappy.

§

All these TV shows, the cartoons and sitcoms from my childhood, like the couple video games that I mentioned above – these products all were made by writers and artists who contributed plots, philosophies, characters, etc. . . . Where do all these ideas go, once the products are out-of-date?

We fly to the future and find some characters occupying the Skypad Apartments in Orbit City. They’re called The Jetsons. This family consists of a father, his housewife, their teenage daughter, one son, a robot maid, and a dog that speaks perfect American. Here’s a sentence from Wikipedia:

George Jetson’s work week consists of an hour a day, two days a week.

I like the ease of quoting Wikipedia. I can see why the kids do it nowadays, to finish all their college papers. Here’s another sentence – this one is from the entry for the Family Ties sitcom:

Much of the humor of the series focuses on the cultural divide during the 1980s when younger generations rejected the counterculture of the 1960s and embraced the materialism and conservative politics which came to define the 1980s.

Doesn’t it already tell us something deep about our society, our Western Way (I’m trying not to call it a civilization), that there IS such a divide, and that the general movement was from pro-love to pro-lucre?

OK, let’s go to war. Will boys play with dolls? Will parents buy their sons dolls? How can we sell ancient brutality to gentle youth?

. . . the word “doll” was never used by Hasbro, Inc. or anyone involved in the development or marketing of G.I. Joe. “Action figure” was the only acceptable term, and has since become the generic description for any poseable doll intended for boys. “America’s movable fighting man” is a registered trademark of Hasbro, and was prominently displayed on every boxed figure package.

Of all the G.I. Joe dolls that I bought, my favorites were:

• SNAKE EYES, because you couldn’t see his face (“he was designed to save Hasbro money in the paint application process, as his first figure was made of black plastic with no paint applied for details, and his head did not require any detail because of the mask”);
• ZARTAN, because his skin changed color (“it appeared beige in its natural state, but when exposed to sunlight, Zartan’s flesh became dark blue”);
• DESTRO, because you couldn’t see his face (“he wears a mask forged from beryllium steel” – in my childhood, I took this to mean that he had a solid silver head);
• AND THE HOODED COBRA COMMANDER, because you couldn’t see his face. (After purchasing this doll as a mail-away exclusive, curiosity got the best of me – using pliers, I managed to remove his iconic hood, which was made of semi-soft plastic: thus I discovered that, underneath, in lieu of a head or any visage, there was just a black knob.)

My own family consisted of one father, his housewife, two sons (my brother and me), and no maids or pets. (I exclude my sister from this account because she was born more than a decade later, by which time my childhood was in an advanced state of decomposition.) Every so often, we all would take a family trip to see our grandparents. And my granddad would hand us kids each a five-dollar bill, to prove that he loved us. This gift would be given to my brother Paul and me every time that we visited. Later in life, we learned that granddad would give the same gift to our cousins – our uncle’s two boys, who were the same age us – whenever they visited him, as well. Now the difference between my dad and uncle was this: My uncle induced his kids to deposit grandad’s gift-cash in the bank, whereas my brother and I were allowed to spend our money on whatever we liked. So, after every visit to granddad, Paul and I would always use our gift-cash to purchase a toy from the franchise called He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, because each “action figure” cost exactly five U.S. dollars. So, after many years of grandfather visits, our cousins ended up with thousands in the bank earning interest, whereas my brother and I possessed a mountain of He-Man dolls. When my grandfather found out about this, he was furious: he determined that he would never give Paul and me any more gift-cash. This made us cry, which caused our grandmother to feel pity, so she begged our granddad to reverse his awful judgment, and he relented. Then we spent the new cash on more dolls. – Have I told you this story already? It’s hard to keep track of what I’ve confessed in this ongoing diary. Here’s another Wikipedia clip:

The blond muscular He-Man (alter ego of Prince Adam) is characterized by his superhuman strength. Along with his friends, he attempts to defend planet Eternia and the rest of the universe from a skull-faced, blue-skinned sorcerer named Skeletor.

The characters that I remember from this series, other than the main two listed above, are Mer-Man, “the ruler of Eternia’s undersea kingdom”; She-Ra, “the long lost twin sister of He-Man”; and Evil-Lyn, an “extremely intelligent supervillainess.” It’s also worth noting that “Planet Eternia’s inhabitants are plagued by the aftermath of the Great Wars, which devastated earlier civilizations.”

I wonder how you rate these marketplace myths against, say, the Theogony of Hesiod or sacred creation accounts like the Popol Vuh.

Now let me grab some quotes about GoBots:

Thousands of years ago, on planet GoBotron, there lived a race of human-like organic entities called GoBeings. Trouble broke out when a power-hungry group known as the Renegades arose and attacked the peaceful Guardians. When a sabotage operation inadvertently caused a gigantic asteroid to collide with GoBotron, the natural disasters that resulted pushed the GoBeings to the verge of extinction. However, they saved themselves by replacing parts of their own bodies with mechanical substitutes, even to the extent of swapping out their brains. Thus, the GoBeings became GoBots.

The origin stories of our toys seem to be trying to warn us about the dangers of warfare. Compare that last legend to the genesis of the Transformers, which franchise (if I’m not mistaken) appeared a year afterwards:

The heroic Autobots and the evil Decepticons leave their metallic homeworld of Cybertron to search for new sources of energy to revitalize their war efforts. They end up crashlanding on Earth, where they remain entombed and offline for millions of years. Awakening in 1984, the Decepticons set about pillaging Earth’s energy sources, while the Autobots attempt to protect the new world.

All the foregoing fantasies represent only a fraction of the toys or shows familiar to me from childhood. Now that my brother Paul has a couple young kids of his own, I wonder how our junk culture is going to try to stupefy them. My niece is just three years old – although she likes at least one pop song, she hasn’t responded to any of these other types of branded products yet. But my nephew, who’s six, is already a big fan of Pokémon; so let me see what that’s about:

The original full name of the franchise is Pocket Monsters, which has been commonly abbreviated to Pokémon since its launch (with an acute accent over the ‘e’ to aid in pronunciation).

The franchise is set in a world in which humans coexist with creatures known as Pokémon, most of which are inspired by real-world animals or mythical entities based on folklore. For example, Pikachu are a yellow mouse-like species with lightning bolt-shaped tails that possess electrical abilities.

The player character takes the role of a Pokémon Trainer. . . .

I think this reference to a “player character” concerns the part of the franchise that is a collectible card game. I’m not sure whether the whole phenomenon is more of a sport or a show or a toy or a cult or what. And I don’t really care.

The Trainer has three primary goals: travel and explore the Pokémon world; discover and catch each Pokémon species in order to complete their Pokédex; and train a team of up to six Pokémon at a time and have them engage in Pokémon battles.

So at least it eventually leads to warfare and dominance.

I’m sorry that I stole so much material from Wikipedia in this entry. I promise that I’ll never try such a trick again. But this was a wee bit interesting for me; I got to think about some outdated stuff, and I got to learn about the appetite of the upcoming generation. Bye, for now.

You blank what you blank

[The obligatory image is an actual postcard that I received from a colleague, but it has been manipulated: Using state-of-the-art photo-enhancement software, I gently rubbed the “beauty bar” feature over the face of each individual.]

Sir or Madam,

I’m a week late in delivering this BREAKING NEWS: 2024 just changed to 2025.

I did nothing special for New Year’s Eve, or the 1st. I didn’t even stay up past midnight. But I’m embarrassed to admit this. I wish I could say that I partied hard, got drunk and injested loads of drugs – I admire people who know how to live it up and go wild. Here’s what Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his journal on December 28, 1831:

The year hastens to its close. What is it to me? What I am, that is all that affects me. That I am 28, or 8, or 58 years old is as nothing. Should I mourn that the spring flowers are gone, that the summer fruit has ripened, that the harvest is reaped, that the snow has fallen? Should I mourn because so much addition has been made to the capital of human comfort?

I agree with this, partly. But “what I am” IS, in some sense, the closing year. As Tennyson’s Ulysses says: “I am a part of all that I have met.” Also I think of the last lines of Stevens’ “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw 
Or heard or felt came not but from myself; 
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

My instinct is to remark: It depends how much you want to abstract yourself from, or identify with, the shared reality. But then I think: Do we really have a choice?

Let’s conclude that, since this truth is unknowable, what matters most is whatever one dares to claim. So here’s what I am willing to put in writing and sign my name to:

I am the spring flowers that are gone; I am the summer fruit that has ripened, the harvest that is reaped, and the snow that has fallen. These things are my total being. But do not mourn that “so much addition has been made to the capital of human comfort”: only lament that it remains heaped up and unused.

Now, what follows could be seen either as a change of subject or a continuation of all that I shared above. Interpret it whichever way you like.

In my previous entry, I wrote “The fact that mass-farmed meat does not taste awful is a proof that there is no benevolent God.” What I meant was that a compassionate deity could easily disincentivize the abuse of living creatures by causing flesh to lose its savor when tormented. Instead, it is impossible to tell, for instance, when consuming a steak, whether the cow that offered its beef to become your person did so willingly or under duress. – The reason I mention this again is that, directly after I finished yesterday’s writing, I happened to read a tale from the Brothers Grimm, and the following part seemed worth sharing in this context.

. . . Marlinchen came into the kitchen to her mother, who was standing by the fire with a pan of hot water before her which she was constantly stirring round. “Mother,” said Marlinchen, “brother is sitting at the door, and he looks quite white, and has an apple in his hand. I asked him to give me the apple, but he did not answer me, and I was quite frightened.” “Go back to him,” said her mother, “and if he will not answer you, give him a box on the ear.” So Marlinchen went to him and said: “Brother, give me the apple.” But he was silent, and she gave him a box on the ear, whereupon his head fell off. Marlinchen was terrified, and began crying and screaming, and ran to her mother, and said: “Alas, mother, I have knocked my brother’s head off!” and she wept and wept and could not be comforted. “Marlinchen,” said the mother, “what have you done? but be quiet and let no one know it; it cannot be helped now, we will make him into black-puddings.” Then the mother took the little boy and chopped him in pieces, put him into the pan and made him into black-puddings; but Marlinchen stood by weeping and weeping, and all her tears fell into the pan and there was no need of any salt.  
         Then the father came home, and sat down to dinner and said: “But where is my son?” And the mother served up a great dish of black-puddings, and Marlinchen wept and could not leave off. Then the father again said: “But where is my son?” “Ah,” said the mother, “he has gone across the country to his great uncle . . . he wanted to go, and asked me if he might stay six weeks, he is well taken care of there.” “Ah,” said the man, “I feel so unhappy lest all should not be right. He ought to have said good-bye to me,” With that he began to eat and said: “Marlinchen, why are you crying? Your brother will certainly come back.” Then he said: “Ah, wife, how delicious this food is, give me some more.” And the more he ate the more he wanted to have, and he said: “Give me some more, you shall have none of it. It seems to me as if it were all mine.” And he ate and ate and threw all the bones under the table, until he had finished the whole.

That’s from “The Juniper Tree” (in Margaret Hunt’s translation, revised by James Stern). My assumption, when reading it, is that the father will begin to feel a stomachache or notice some ill effect after eating up the black-puddings, since the meal was made from his own child. But look how the story continues:

. . . and the father said, “Ah, I feel so truly happy, and the sun is shining so beautifully outside, I feel just as if I were about to see some old friend again.”

Then a bird that has perched nearby begins to sing a song. “Ah,” the father remarks:

“. . . that is a beautiful bird! He sings so splendidly, and the sun shines so warm, and there is a smell just like cinnamon.”

The father walks outside to have a closer look, and the bird turns out to be carrying certain objects, one of which is a golden chain, which it lets fall:

. . . and it fell exactly round the man’s neck, and so exactly round it that it fitted beautifully. Then the father went in and said: “Just look what a fine bird that is, and what a handsome golden chain he has given me, and how pretty he is!”

I marvel at this upshot. The storyteller might have been our Father in Heaven.

Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you . . . This cup is the new testament in my blood . . .

Saul of Tarsus, alias Paul the Apostle, in his first letter to the Corinthians (11:24-26), alleges that the above words were spoken by Jesus of Nazareth.

As I said earlier, this Grimm tale could be seen either as a change of subject or a continuation of all that I said concerning the turn of the year. And now I add: You might find me in either or both of the male characters.

Finally, here’s another excerpt from Emerson’s journals (1832 May 19); this passage in turn gives quotations from John Jortin, D. D. (1698–1770), author of Discourses concerning the Truth of the Christian Religion – I only wish to assert in advance, with regard to those propositions in the ecclesiastic indoctrination he mentions, that, speaking as a “man of common sense,” I AM a believer:

Jortin said in his tracts that they who uphold the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity must be prepared to assert “that Jesus Christ is his own Father and his own Son. The consequence will be so, whether they like it, or whether they like it not.” He also said in a letter to Gilbert Wakefield, “There are propositions contained in our liturgy and articles which no man of common sense among us believes.”

That’s all I need to report, for the time being. Thanks for reading this far. I hope you have a pleasant rest of your day.

MORAL OF THIS ENTRY

Feign ignorance. Pretend to be unconscious or deceased when threatened.

Moody brooding morningthots

[For the obligatory image, here’s a napkin.]

Dear diary,

Why would you talk to anyone? You already know what they’re about. They don’t share your interests, and they’re heading toward doom. In the time they have till the end, they will spend their energy in ways that will make the world less and less accommodating to those of your type; and this they shall effect not as one bent on opposing you but rather instinctively, in innocence – they’re unintentionally antagonistic.

So your default stance toward anyone is to minimize your time spent with them. It’s different from holding one as an enemy; for you’re not saying “I want you gone,” but rather “Exist as long as you will, but at a distance from me.”

This next paragraph that I shall write will be a repeat of what I’ve said here before, but I need to get it out of my system again: too often I witness scenes in daily life that invoke it, therefore it’s a recurring thought.

I love animals. Wild or tame. Dogs, cats, or any type of beasts that people tend to keep as pets, as well as the creatures that are usually seen living on their own, self-reliantly, in the great outdoors: squirrels, crows, deer, bears. Our next-door neighbor used to scatter cereal and bread on the lawn in front of his house and then go back indoors and watch from his kitchen window as the local wildlife would approach and eat the offering. And I know many people who keep animals as house-pets. These people all claim to love their pets or the wildlife, but how they treat these creatures from an aim of affection ends up harming them. The best thing that you as a human can do for other animals is avoid them: let them be. The food that our neighbor fed to the local beasts was harmful to them – it was designed for human consumption and not part of what would be, for each type of animal, a healthy diet – and these free meals lured the creatures into a dependence on human charity which resulted in more suffering when, at my neighbor’s moving away, their food source vanished. And household pets are kept on chains and leashes as slaves, and they are given treatment that might appeal to a fellow human but which is torment for a beast. And all from love.

Is God our pet, or more like a wild creature that we feed? Or are we God’s pets? Or are we the wildlife bordering heaven? It’s strange that any of these ideas seem to fit. When people pray as a group, they sometimes say “O God, you are great, you did thus and so for us: we thank you and praise you,” as if they’re rewarding a dog for its good behavior. Is God some big dumb furry being in the sky, breathing hard with mouth agape?

And other times, people pray saying “O God, we need X; therefore, if it is thy will, please give us X; nevertheless, act thou in accordance with thy perfect plan,” as if God is our master who knows better than we ever could about what we need, and who may be half-listening and willing to pour a little more food in our dish, at a time earlier than he had planned, on account of our reminding him.

Whether God is our pet or our owner, it seems right that, if our relationship is to be one of love, then God should let us be; and we should let God be. No interference. Keep our distance from each other.

I hate all talk of purpose in this world. In my optimism, I hope for aimlessness; for, if there’s any purpose at all, it seems that it’s wretched. Generation after generation, over thousands and thousands of years, it has been the same old song: the majority are oppressed, and a few hideous figures botch everything. And every grand system is designed to protect what is ugliest.

The only glimmer of promise that I see here is this: Since ugliness requires protection, especially on such a grand scale, this indicates fragility: so maybe ugliness is inherently prone to fail. Why don’t we let it!?

The best people are gullible. It is better to work together than to struggle alone; and, to cooperate, one must trust. This makes it easy for any deceiver to ruin a bond: one simply takes advantage of the trust. Modernity is replete with advanced technologies, but deception remains the same and uses the same old tool: the lie.

All of human history is a record of the way that lying has morphed. And yet I hate even mentioning this, because the lie is at once the root of the highest beauty.

It’s like strife, warfare: the lie is desirable or undesirable, depending on how it’s employed. Never cease the mental fight; and stop forever the physical fight: eternal peace for reality requires perpetual warfare in the mind. Likewise, let lying endlessly energize the dimension of poetry while enduring extinction in the world of pragmatism.

Why am I speaking so grimly? Who cares about any of this?

What happens is that infants are born every instant, and the world is weird to them. It will take children more than half their life to realize that their whole culture is a sham, one great big waste of energy. At the point when they learn this, in hopes of enlightening others, they can attempt to communicate the incommunicable. Die trying: it always works.

Do we need to nail down this idea about whether God is for or against worldly success? I read in certain religious scriptures that a righteous man shall be blessed by God with a good life. And then I read elsewhere in those same scriptures that God chastens who he loves. And I was born in the cult of Saint Paul, who devised Christianity to lure minds away from the teachings of Jesus; so I was taught that the best way to succeed in this life is to fail: let the Powers that Be vouchsafe you capital punishment.

So what is it? Did God create the world and then hand it off to a flunkey deity, telling him to run the thing? Did God outsource providence?

Why create a world and fill it with creatures that feel positive and negative reactions to it, and then tell those creatures to pursue only the negative? Did God install the positive aspects of the world as a ruse, for punishment, or simply to tease us? On the other hand, if God created the world and populated it with the aim of making its inhabitants happy, then how DOES one explain the massive slaughters that have never stopped since before the World Wars? And the rampant poverty that has always existed – is that a mistake on God’s behalf?

The fact that mass-farmed meat does not taste awful is a proof that there is no benevolent God. If God possessed even the lowest level of compassion, he would make it naturally unpleasant to eat the flesh of any creature that had been abused to death.

Consider that no rotting corpse smells attractive. Did this happen by accident? Why is the phenomenon of sensory disgust not more consistent in its application?

What desensitized us? Why is it not more of a scandal, the fact that we cannot trust pleasure and pain? Are our basic senses part of the lie that fuels the horror show? Who or what is doing the lying? Is God the culprit or another lie?

Why is intoxication the only state worth living for? (I don’t mean exclusively that which is caused by drugs – one can transcend existence’s prison by other means; I myself prefer doodling.) Why is overdosing the best act that a human being can perform and the most blissful way to escape the torments of sainthood?

I like the speech that Aristotle was supposed to have uttered on his deathbed: “I entered this world in disgrace; I lived anxiously; I am leaving disturbed.”

I also like “the words of king Lemuel, the prophecy that his mother taught him,” which is preserved in the Bible:

Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more. (Proverbs 31:6-7)

Yet did you notice that everyone likes flowers? Even mobsters like flowers. There’s something about their straightforward, cheerful bounty that melts the toughest disposition. Speaking as a hardened soul myself, I strive earnestly to subdue their influence and resist their charm, but flowers always win me over.

Semi-abstract morningthots

To control traffic at the road junction in my small town, we use this set of lamps whose colors are red, pure gold, and green.

Dearest,

What a wonderful world we live in. There are so many people now. Back in the garden, it was just the two of us and our Maker. To communicate with each another, we would need to engage in elaborate physical gestures, hand waving, huffing and purring. Then, a few weeks later, we invented the alphabet and thus were able to send each other love-letters. Our Maker eventually learned our written language, and he used it to build his own massive book – more than a thousand pages long! – which is still one of the best things I’ve read. He claims that it’s a love-letter just like ours, and I partly believe him, although I can’t decipher who or what he’s in love with.

After that, our children’s children discovered how to enslave electricity. So they nailed together boxes of pine and jampacked them with technological advancements in the form of coiled snakes, which would burst thru the air when one pressed the red button. These machines helped to generate content for subscription-based services.

In our teenage years, we took a liking to music and formed an attachment to certain psalms. Now, all other music that comes our way, new or old, is measured against those youthful recollections. Over the ages, music has continually been dreamt up and produced – compositions and recordings keep surfacing every day – and although I myself don’t like any of it, the objective truth is that music has gotten better and better: it’s now streamlined, homogenized; it’s almost perfect: its human element has been nearly eradicated; the whole foreground is filled with aggressive editing . . . stiffer beats, more noise. . . . Sound science declares this very good.

And everyone participates in space and time. People are making money. Some are living happily; others are angry. There’s always violence somewhere, and cheating and scamming . . . But it’s the best system because it prevents any alternative from developing. You want to be on the winning side.

And what does our Maker want from all this? He’s still out there somewhere. He looks like anyone else. He created multitudes as camouflage, so that he and his coterie can blend in. Is he a shape-shifter like that one aqua-god? I sure hope not. Every time I’ve seen him, our Maker has sported the same hairstyle and mustache; and he even dresses relatively the same, considering that so many centuries have passed.

To bulk up, you must eat food and then lift barbells. Or, better yet, do farmwork. The meat that you consume will get transformed into muscles. But if, on the other hand, you wish to lose a little weight, because you gained a few extra pounds over the holidays, then simply cut back on the number of sugar cubes that you stir into every meal. Pig fat melts away in a pan. I only added that last statement for sound: don’t actually try it. For instance, if you’re in the habit of enjoying life (sitting in the sun, on the beach of a tropical island where this type of behavior is still morally acceptable), then just stop enjoying it so much, and you’ll slim right down. Go to the gym and buy those protein bars that they sell. You can take my car.

Here’s what I’m sincerely trying to figure out: If you practice a type of meditation that is designed to clear your mind of all thoughts, will you be able to survive a famine easier than the guy next to you, who wonders about all sorts of stuff? I’ve heard him contemplate going hunting and spearfishing, and he has questioned the ways of providence. But it must take only a small amount of energy to form a thought. How many calories are burned by worrying? I suppose it depends, to a certain extent, on how intense or complicated one’s agitation is. Think of a dog opening a can of soup with a blowtorch. Hold your vision steady. Now imagine several billion copies of the same dog sending each other silent video reenactments of The Synoptic Gospels Harmonized. Do your imaginations get blurrier as you begin to believe? And do you notice the colors of their dream-coats becoming more intense, when you die of starvation while prophesying? Or is all this saved in some surveillance artifact somewhere?

You’ll hear the annoying sound of feedback if you hold your microphone too close to the loudspeaker, during the next rock concert that you sing at. But do your highest thoughts triple in purity when you hold your brain near the Trinity’s pet? (I mean, when you use God’s Lamb as a pillow, while dreaming, and you envision a staircase, and the position of the camera invites you to peek up the robes of the angels. We’re dealing with figuration, here – when I said “hold your brain” beside the whatchamacallit, I did not mean “physically remove the top of your head” as some poets would have it.) For, if thoughts cost nothing, then why is a trim-fit body’s upper echelon always airy? And why are my fellow Wild Westerners always exhausted and scolding me: “You fret too well!”

And all the people saw the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking: and when the people saw it, they removed, and stood afar off. And they said unto Moses, “Speak thou with us, and we will hear: but let not God speak with us, lest we die.”

And Moses said unto the people, “Fear not: for God is come to prove you, and that his fear may be before your faces, that ye sin not.”

And the people stood afar off, and Moses drew near unto the thick darkness where God was.

And Yahweh said unto Moses, “Thus thou shalt say unto the children of Israel, Ye have seen that I have talked with you from heaven. Ye shall not make with me gods of silver, neither shall ye make unto you gods of gold. An altar of earth thou shalt make unto me, and shalt sacrifice thereon . . . And if thou wilt make me an altar of stone, thou shalt not build it of hewn stone: for if thou lift up thy tool upon it, thou hast polluted it. Neither shalt thou go up by steps unto mine altar, that thy nakedness be not discovered thereon.” (Exodus 20:18-26)

I only wanted to share that very last sentence with you, to let you know where I got my idea above about the angelic upskirts; but then I needed to enlarge the quote for context. It’s important to remember that these types of commandments were given after rowdy displays, on a smoking mount, and that the audience was terrified.

People are committing loads of sins nowadays. I didn’t reside in Sodom or Gomorrah, before Yahweh destroyed them, but when I hear about the way that the residents of those places misbehaved, it sounds just like the 21st Century city-dwellers. But the one thing that I’ve never seen anyone do, at least in our Post-Industrial Age, is make gods of silver or gold. I find this exceedingly strange, because I imagine that if I had lived among the people who got to see firsthand that spectacular show upon Mount Sinai, the last thing I’d have been inclined to do is craft an idol of its proprietor. (How would I do that, anyway, since he’s always hiding in darkness? Even expert sculptors need a model to work from.) But the multitudes living nowadays have never heard their God voice a curse: no miracles ever happen anymore; the deity doesn’t send any prophets, not even lying spirits to prove us. So we moderns have no fear of Yahweh God; therefore we break all of his commandments: we’re cruel to the poor, we don’t help the widows and orphans, we allow the ultra-wealthy class to indebt everyone and charge rent for everything that should belong to the public commons – however, none of us has gotten around to making silver or gold relics of Eloah. I say we start. Forget about hiring a harlot for your model: just use a mirror; you own the same image – or look at the Caesar side of any coin – then revise that until you arrive at your ideal. Think about who you would choose to play you in a movie. Mine looks like a little golden statue of Cary Grant. How’d yours turn out? Exactly the same? Ooh, selah!

I didn’t mean to end this way, but just to support my remark about “lying spirits,” here’s the prophecy that Micaiah delivers to Ahab in the First Book of Kings (22:19-23) . . .

I saw Yahweh sitting on his throne, and all the host of heaven standing by him on his right hand and on his left. And Yahweh said, “Who shall persuade Ahab, that he may go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead?” And one said on this manner, and another said on that manner.

And there came forth a spirit, and stood before Yahweh, and said, “I will persuade him.”

And Yahweh said unto him, “Wherewith?”

And he said, “I will go forth, and I will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.”

And Yahweh said, “Thou shalt persuade him, and prevail also: go forth, and do so.”

Now therefore, behold, Yahweh hath put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these thy prophets, and Yahweh hath spoken evil concerning thee.

Longing for permanent sustenance

For the obligatory image, I found in my local newspaper this photo of manned vehicles.

Dear diary,

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. The first sentence of the Book of Genesis, from the King James Bible. The first sentence of the Gospel of John, from the same. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Heaven and earth. Sky and land. Created by Word, which was God and with God at that moment.

I am Bryan the Scientist. I made the Big Bang. And I was also with myself while I was me. And I still am.

Are you OK with what I wrote above, when I equated heaven with sky and earth with land? Or should I have said “vacuum” and “matter”? I haven’t learned much since my infancy. The earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. I was in my rocket ship, in outer space, watching all this from a distance. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

I can’t remember if I made anything smaller than atoms. When my Big Bang happened, everything exploded; and by “everything” I mean all the building blocks of reality. Oh, now I remember: quarks are smaller than atoms. By “smaller,” I think I mean “more essential.” I’d like to remember what the key, fundamental, primary parts of reality are, because the lastingness of anything that is built (which means literally everything) depends on the durability of these most basic blocks. And my goals are long-term.

Say that you fashion a cabin from wooden logs. The logs are either indestructible or prone to evaporate. If the former, the cabin may fall apart but the logs will remain: you can cause the cabin to die, but you can’t kill its wood. Now consider the opposite case: The most sturdily constructed cabin is bound to collapse when its logs dry up. It shall surely die. It will not matter that Abraham Lincoln is with you, and that you are Abraham Lincoln. Even if, before Abraham was, you remain.

Presumably you can instill something with longevity by way of an ingenious construction. But that’s just longevity; a structure can only be permanent if it’s born that way. (By which phrase, I mean something more like “not ever born,” if that makes sense.) What goes up must come down; what was begun must end; all bodies decay: so every structure, however long-lived, is yet impermanent. Tho I’m questioning whether its parts may possess permanence. Were the building blocks created? Did they have a “made on” date, like cattle or Adam? Or was the stuff that comprises us always here, floating around in one form or another? Did God slay the Chaos Dragon that is the Universe and then rearrange its members to make the present World? Or are those elements from which reality is constructed smithereens of the eternal mind, and thus impervious to entropy? In the sense that “nothing is got for nothing,” do thoughts have a “cost” to produce? – are thoughts exempt from Emerson’s law of compensation, or can we say that thoughts are truly nothing? What springs from nothing is free to do as it likes, and to stay as long as it wants? But if the ultimate ground of physicality is thought, then how does something that is, at heart, nothing, become so worried about its survival? And if change had a birthday, then when will it stop? Maybe cyclic repetition is change’s way of dying. And then the Spirit of God devising reality from nada (chaos or divine thought) is like a corpse reminiscing.

Creatio ex nihilo. In the 2013 film Wrong Cops, written by Quentin Dupieux, after delivering an impromptu eulogy at his colleague’s funeral, Officer Duke is approached by the wife of the deceased, who says “[your speech] was beautiful – I loved listening to you.” Duke answers: “Well, I’m glad you liked it, ma’am – I just made it up.” Then, in section 7 from the first lecture of Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem says

[Take] the idea of “creation out of nothing.” . . . This Nothing from which everything has sprung is by no means a mere negation; only to us does it present no attributes because it is beyond the reach of intellectual knowledge. In truth, however, this Nothing—to quote one of the Kabbalists—is infinitely more real than all other reality. . . . In a word, it signifies the Divine itself, in its most impenetrable guise. And, in fact, creation out of nothing means to many mystics just creation out of God.

Is that important? Does that do anything for you? To think of the creation as coming out of a blob of stuff or non-stuff, and to call the whatness God or Word or Nothing – does this get us any closer to our desire?

And what is it that we desire? . . .

[NOTE. I’m adding these bracketed statements as a postscript. You can stop reading here; the entry fell flat. Not even halfway thru its projected term, it proved itself an abortion. From this point on, what I wrote descended into quibbling over the meeting of basic needs. I will leave the remainder of text for anyone who’s curious – I like to provide the example of “What not to do,” so as to help fellow journalists avoid the same pitfalls – but I advise you to save yourself the time: press the “eject” button and fly from your seat in the reader’s jet out into the wild blue yonder, and dream up your own heaven and earth from the everything-ness of thought.]

And what is it that we desire? Consider our shortfall: We lack food, clothing, and shelter. Those are the basics. But we hanker after booze, better bodies, and environs so favorable that one need not protect oneself from them. My earthly father (cursed be he), in his role as our family’s provider, used to fix a great gulf between the concepts of “want” and “need.”

The solution to hunger? Manna: they tell me that the name means “what is it!” Tradition claims it’s the food of angels, “a light, pale sponge cake made of flour, egg whites, and no fat, typically baked in a ring shape and covered with soft icing.” Though the Bible says

. . . behold, upon the face of the wilderness there lay a small round thing, as small as the hoar frost on the ground. And when the children of Israel saw it, they said one to another, It is manna: for they wist not what it was. And Moses said unto them, This is the bread which the LORD hath given you to eat. (Exodus 16:14-15)

“The LORD” is Yahweh: he’s the boss from another planet who came to Earth and attempted wrangling the Israelites. He fills our feedbag, but we prefer drugs.

The next need is clothing, and the solution is white robes:

. . . a door was opened in heaven: and the first voice which I heard was as it were of a trumpet talking with me; which said, Come up hither . . . and, lo, a great multitude, which no man could number . . . stood before the throne of God . . . clothed with white robes . . . And one of the elders said . . . These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. . . . They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat. For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes. (Revelation 4:1 and 7:9-17)

So this divine Lamb is made of manna; and our robes are white because they’ve been dipped in Lamb’s Blood – one might think that this would dye them red or pink, but it’s probably a lighter sauce with a base of cream. The robes fit well; we enjoy wearing them because it’s good to be pure, and all your needs are met when you stand next to God. Though it would be better if the shape of our flesh were so naturally beautiful that it would render fine raiment superfluous; and if our physicality were so well-adapted to its surroundings that it would need no covering.

To find shelter, let’s look at some info about the housing market. In the first few verses of chapter 14 of his Gospel, John’s Jesus says:

Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you.

I think of mansions as being standalone residences that are even bigger than houses – so it seems strange that a house would contain multiple mansions; but that’s fine, if that’s how they’re made in heaven. We’ll accept whatever you have. Now John’s Jesus assures us:

I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.

So he will be with us. Does that mean he’ll live with us? (Is he included with the house, like a davenport or mother-in-law?) “I will receive you unto myself” – what does that mean, exactly? You are what you eat: Perhaps he will be us, as the Word was with God and was God. . . . Somewhere in Paul’s mad letters he talks about God being in Christ, and Christ in us, and we in Christ and God, etc., etc. . . . Everything is inside everything else, as well as encompassed by it. Directionality has gone topsy-turvy: left is right, black is white, to is fro, and up is down in the void-formlessness. But it’s nice because it’s warm here. The crisis of homelessness has been postponed.

So those are the basic necessities. They’re all constructed from the building blocks that I mentioned. That’s why I hope to figure out how long these quarks can last. For if the quarks that make up the atoms of the Blood of God’s Lamb are prone to fizz away like the logs of Lincoln’s cabin, then I’ll either need to come up with a new name for whatever proves tinier than quarks, or else we’ll have reached the great Nothing again, and another Big Bang might be called for.

And if we left the Nothing alone, without creating anything from it or detonating it, what then? Probably some type of unpleasantness would suggest itself. Most likely it would be another aspect that has always existed but which one never notices until everything that surrounds it has been amended.