[Alt title: "Awaking Annoyed Again".]
Before I begin to gripe, here's another page from my book of 300 Drawing Prompts. (I shared the previous page just yesterfortnight.) Todays's prompts were "Water slide" and "Digeridoo".
Dear diary,
Gee whiz I’ve been annoyed lately. I have all these house repairs to do, and I hate doing them, because I hate work, but if I don’t do the work and get the repairs done, then I won’t have a sink to bathe in or walls to punch. So I force myself, every morning, to finish some task on this house; and yesterday I thought I could tackle the…
Long story short, every tool or supply that one purchases in 2019 USA has something wrong with it. So you can’t just buy a tool or supply and expect to fix your house. No, first you must buy a tool or supply to fix the tool or supply that you just purchased; & only then can you begin to fix your house.
But seriously, no house can ever be fixed. Jesus was only kidding when he talked about setting fire to this whole planet.
Plus I saw another John Ford movie, My Darling Clementine (1946) — I had watched this one before, but I decided to re-screen it cuz I heard that it’s yet another of Steve Bannon’s favorites. As I explained earlier, in a couple of posts that I'll link to below (keep an eye out for the phrases "the first four films" and "the fifth film": those are the hyperlinks), recently I worked thru, with pleasure, Bannon’s Top Five List, in anticipation for Errol Morris’ upcoming feature-length dinner chat. By feature-length dinner chat I mean like some sort of filmed conversation with Mr. Bannon that lasts the whole movie; I haven't seen the thing yet, so I can only refer to it according to my groundless presumptions: and I can't help imagining a presentation à la My Dinner with Andre (1981), but with Morris and Bannon in place of Shawn and Gregory, so Errol could even call it My Dinner with Steve, if he hand't already named it American Dharma. The film (I’ve heard) is, in some way, structured around the films that its subject (Bannon) holds in highest regard; and I wanted to be “up to snuff” and “in the know” about all the above. (I wrote about the first four films on the night of our annual State of the Union address, and I wrote about the fifth film on the following Monday morning — that last movie took a little longer to reach me, cuz I had to order it from a faraway library.) My favorite among that first batch was John Ford’s The Searchers (1956). I remarked how there’s a scene right in the middle that seems to have been directed by my favorite modern filmmaker David Lynch — it’s the part where the Log Lady makes her cinematic debut. Well this other Ford film that I just watched, My Darling Clementine, is equally excellent. Ford is really good with melodrama: I watch just about every scene with my eyes brimming with tears, cuz I’m so invested in the characters. And I actually hate the “Western” genre; so I don’t know how Ford is able to win me over like this. But in this latter film (Clementine) there’s ALSO a scene that seems to have the Lyncian touch: it’s the part where Old Man Clanton (played by Walter Brennan) whips the men at the bar: Jesus fucking Christ I’ve never seen anyone whip anyone with such ZEST — and it happens really quick. And I like when Clanton says “When ya pull a gun, kill a man.”
Yeah so I intended this present entry to be a venting of frustrations; nevertheless, I just now mentioned my watching of this Ford film (Ford is quickly becoming my favorite director) amidst all my other annoyances, NOT because the film was bad BUT cuz it made me glad when I was sad: & this made me mad, as it went against my better nature; for "The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth," as Ecclesiastes always sez (7:4). —To be clear: the movie itself did not directly increase my annoyance; rather the opposite; howbeit AFTER WATCHING FORD something happened that really DID further my annoyance. You ask, "What was it?" Here, I'll tell you:
I stupidly chose to watch two modern pictures about World War II, right after Ford’s masterwork. I won’t name the movies or their director, cuz I hope that God annihilates all memory of them from off the face of the earth. But to go from Ford’s poetic genius to the awful smarmy slack-witted warfare propaganda of 21st-Century U.S. Thug Nonculture. It’s almost enuff to make me pantomime spitting.
Then I woke up this morning and dressed myself with the clothes that were lying in a heap on the floor beside my bed, for this was the outfit that I wore yesterday (I always wear the same clothes every day; & then every other week I change my outfit), and I noticed that there’s a hole in the sleeve of my nice collared shirt. So this also was annoying.
Add this. It is to add.
Those two brief sentences form the last line of the poem by Wallace Stevens "Add This to Rhetoric"; I quoted them because I feel like I'm writing a prose blog (not a masterpiece; no, seriously, this doesn't deserve to be called a masterpiece) that could be titled "Add This to Bryan's List of Recent Annoyances".
So, in accordance with the revised title of this entry, I might go on & on listing all the irks that I’ve experienced in the past few days, but I’d rather focus on the bright side of life. I’m a positive person. I understand that life is a gift. I don’t take life for granted. I am thankful every day, just for being alive. So here I’ll count one of the blessings I recently received:
When we were at my mom’s house for our March 3rd feast, Colleen (my brother’s lawfully wedded wife) mentioned that one of her acquaintances is a member of a certain religion, and she (Colleen) was wondering if anyone at the dinner table knows anything about this particular sect. It’s an American belief, which is to say, it was born on the East Coast of the United States circa the 19th Century.
I took this question as a boon because I myself couldn’t answer that I know one single thing about this religion. And I’m being purposely vague right now when mentioning this religion, because I don’t want to focus on any single group but rather on the idea that groups are born and grow and change. And I want to think about what groups really are, and what belief truly is, and what it means to say that you identify with a particular sect, and what’s the difference between religion and poetry, etc…
Alright so ya got religions like Moses, who hefted two stone tablets down from an active volcano. Moses was born in Egypt. Or at least he somehow ended up in Egypt. I myself am here in Minnesota, so even if I could fashion two tablets that seemed to be convincingly written by God, still nobody would listen to me; cuz Minnesotaners are thot to be stupid. Because we don’t have volcanoes in Minnesota. Plus I’m not royalty.
RE: Moses and that final word above ("royalty")
[This place in the entry does not deserve its own bold heading, but I installed one here anyway because I was getting bored with all the regular-looking text.]
Apparently (again, this is only if memory serves) Moses was born to a secretary or computer programmer who worked in a cubicle of some mega-corporation, back in the day, and this wage-laborer could not afford an abortion, cuz only the Prez was allowed that level of luxury; so Moses’ mother bore her babe into a trash can, and she placed the can upon the Nile, which is a river in Egypt.
“I’ll dump him in the river.”
—Officer Duke
from the film Wrong Cops (2013)
Anyway, so the babe eventually ended up at Trump Plaza, which is the place where Pharoah lives, even to this day. And that’s how Moses was adopted by the royal family. He became an honorary Trump.
But then he fell from grace when he escaped from the all-glass skyscraper with his best friend Buddha, & they set their eyes on the world, & found that reality was stuffed like a turkey with inequality. So Moses and Bannon (I changed Buddha to Bannon, just this once, cuz I realized I’d rather have some consistency with the foregoing text, where I talk about watching Mr. B's Top 5 Film List), I say, Moses and Buddha now approach the official Pop Culture Icon and introduce the idea of Health Care as a Human Right to the entire universe: even to slums like Mercury and Saturn, they made it a clickable add-on. So all the countries in the solar system opted for MEDICAL COVERAGE to be ticked off as arguably doable; thus, in no time, it became an official necessity, and it was ultimately etched as Commandment Eleven upon the Twin Tower Touchscreens.
Goddamnit, I’m just trying to explain the origins of belief; but I’m getting hung up on the notion that Moses was a lucky aristocrat, which fact gave his tablets an edge-up on the competition. So let’s review what we’ve learned:
SUMMARY & CONCLUSION
The religion of Moses came from Egypt and then he broke up with his family and moved his people into the desert; but then he died and his own God buried him and the people left the desert and settled wherever. And to this day they’re still kinda wondering where Moses intended them to…
And then we have Jesus, who was a follower of Moses; so this is the first instance of one poem coming out of another. The original poem gets pregnant, via the birds and the bees, and then it crouches down and opens the matrix for heresy:
& the king of America spake to the working-class midwives, and said, “When ye do your office as nurses who are trained to assist pregnant women in childbirth, I say, when ye perform this task of midwifery for the working-class women, and ye see them upon the stools, which indicates that they are entering into labor; here’s my commandment: when ye go to help them deliver their newborn babies; if the creature comes out a lad, then ye shall lance him: but if a lass, let it live.”
However the midwives feared God, and did not as the king of America commanded them, but saved the men children alive.
And the king of America called for the midwives, and said unto them, “Why have ye done this thing, and have saved the men children alive? If we don’t faithfully abort all malic embryos, we’re liable to come down with a messiah. And that’d be the end of me. So, please, tell me why you disobeyed my holy command to perform the procedure of post-birth abortion on all the intellectuals of the working-class.”
And the midwives said unto Pharaoh, “Because the Hebrew women are not as the Egyptian women; for they are lively, and are delivered ere the midwives come in unto them: in other words, they shoot their babies out from their wombs before the nursing staff even gets the chance to help them deliver them.” (Exodus 1:15-19)
So Abraham lived in polytheism, a land of many gods. But Abraham fell in love with one single divinity, and he wanted to marry that god and keep him exclusively for himself. So Abraham moved away from his homeland and married Yahweh "the LORD", and they bore three children: their firstborn was Isaac, but he was a dud, so they continued trying to impregnate one another, and they eventually gestated Jacob, whom Yahweh rechristened as Israel. Did I say three persons? I meant just two. So then Jacob-Israel bears twelve sons of his own, and those sons bear sons, and one turns out to be Moses, whose story I told in great detail above; and then later Moses himself gives birth to J. Christ, right out of the grave.
And Moses went up from the plains of Moab unto the mountain of Nebo, to the top of Pisgah. And Yahweh shewed him all the land, unto the utmost sea, and Yahweh said unto him, “This is the land which I sware unto Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, saying, ‘I will give it unto thy seed’. Lo: now I have caused thee to see it with thine eyes, but thou shalt not go over thither.” Then Yahweh took the neck of Moses between his hands, and he closed his hands upon him, until his neck did break. So Moses the spouse of Yahweh died in the land of Moab. And Yahweh buried him in a valley, with his own two hands: but no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day. (Deuteronomy 34:1-6)
So this is the grave plot that Jesus would later leap out from, when the dirt was parted and a claw pierced up thru the ground.
Then about 600 years after Jesus rose from the dirt, the other son of Abraham had a child. That’s the third son of the trinity: the one I forgot to tell you about. Cuz there was Isaac, who was a dullard and therefore got replaced by Jacob-Israel; but then there was also Ishmael: he was actually born prior to Isaac, so Isaac was the secondborn not the firstborn. (It’s a long story; just trust what I said here.) Anyway, so this true firstborn son of Abraham goes out to a faraway land and bears a child. And that child, whose name I’m too afraid to say, becomes either the true rival of Yahweh, or Yahweh’s favorite prophet, or Yahweh himself (!), depending on your perspective. My point is that this latter miracle also eventually instigates a book-sanctioned sect: so that’s how all three Big Box Religions popped out. They just substituted the hyphenated pulpit "Jack-in-the" for the sexy fib "Pandora". Moses made the initial mistake (actually Ezra arranged most of it), and Jesus made one, and also the one whom I referred to as…
Further Reading
& now we come to America. This is where I wanted to be, all along. Forget “North-” and “Central-” and “South-America”: I’m talking about THE UNITED STATES, specifically Western New York.
Revivalism, which we now tend to associate with California, the South, and the Midwest, was a perpetual flame in the “Burned-over District” between the Adirondacks and the shores of Lake Ontario. My own favorite study of American religion is the marvelous book by Whitney R. Cross, The Burned-over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800–1850 (1950).
That’s a quote from The American Religion by the self-styled “religious critic” Harold Bloom.
So after Moses and Jesus had sects, Saul of Tarsus sniffed out the scene (whom we now call Saint Paul) and kidnapped Jesus and turned him into Christ. Henceforward it became customary to simply steal and revise the religions of others, instead of making them up from whole cloth and dying in the wilderness (I’m just kidding, of course: Moses stole his religion too — it’s how cults have always been made; but it’s not polite to admit this about the established ones), religions began shrooming up all over America...
TXT MSG break
(an electronic communication via mobile phone)
My sister sent me an instant text message just now, which I simply must relay to you verbatim. She writes:
Hi, Bryan! Always thinking of you! I hope you get to spend the day doing something you love and enjoy!
So I said:
Thx Suez, yeah, I'm just installing a faucet & sink top this afternoon, so if that doesn't leak I'll be relieved... But I'm already content cuz I spent the pre-morning reading about 7th Day Adventism (cuz Colleen mentioned it) and it intrigued me.
Now my sister answered:
Oh awesome! Did you learn anything interesting?
So I said:
Yeah, well the text that I picked up was something I had already read a few years ago, so it was more of a review than a new learning, but it reminded me how both the 7th Day Adventists as well as the Jehovah's Witnesses stemmed from the same event: a farmer named William Miller was a Baptist lay preacher who studied the Bible on his own and eventually predicted that the 2nd Advent of Christ would fall (pun intended) on the specific date of 22 October 1944. Then when that failed to happen, the adherents of Miller's sect kept on for a while just assuming their math had been incorrect and that, sooner or later, the shit would hit the fan (no pun intended): thus they became known as Advent Christians. In course of time, they dwindled away; but two modern American religions sorta rose from the ashes of Adventism — Ellen White was a self-proclaimed prophetess who wrote scriptures of her own which led to 7th Day Adventism (I couldn't recall much details when Colleen asked about it on Sunday becuz 7DA is very much like our familiar Protestantism, but focused noticeably on bodily health) (& incidentally the "Seventh Day" in their title refers to the fact that they observe the Sabbath on Saturday, or the lone rest period, Day #7 of God's six-day work week); also the Jehovah's Witnesses sect sprang from the same Millerite end-time disappointment, tho in a dissenting way (the JW pioneer Charles Taze Russell, after encountering Adventist preaching, grew convinced that the 2nd Coming would be spiritual rather than fleshly)... So all this history of the early religions native to USA is coming into focus for me, and that's not unfun.
I replied with this real long letter, just to honor that saying "Be careful what you ask for; you just might get it."
OK just now Susan sent one last instant-text message that I shall leave unanswered — in response to my above filibuster, she writes:
Oh that's cool! I think it's interesting how everyone gets so focused on the 2nd Coming. I see it as more of a spiritual / metaphorical situation rather than fleshy, too.
The reason I shall not reply to this is that I think the Second Coming is stupid... I even think the First Coming is stupid... and I think that everything "spiritual" is stupid (so very precious: it's just a way to say that false things are true even tho you can't see them "they're invisible" —right, fine; I guess you win, Mr. Wind) and everything metaphorical is stupid, and the only "Coming" that counts is a fleshly Coming, so it's stupid to even have an opinion other than to say: I'm here alive in this world; what more do you want from me. (I really hate religion.) Therefore, since I don't desire to get into an argument with such a nice young lady like my bio-sis, I'll let the conversation stop right here. [I just sent a final message that was all emoticons, or emojis or whatever you call 'em — it said: "cigarette... sun hat... goat." At least I think that's what I sent.]
End of TXT MSG break
(Now back to our regularly scheduled shit-show...)
So you always meet new people who have strange beliefs. And you wonder where these beliefs originated. And you find out that most of them share some common source. In the U.S. we have the King James Bible. Is that “James the Just, biological brother of Jesus? No, that’s James the monarch of some ex-girlfriend country that we broke up with long ago. We don’t live with them anymore. But sometimes we give them a call when we need help genociding some civilians and stealing their resources.
Whatever you can make from the ideas contained in the Bible…
Actually, I'll rephrase that: Whatever you can make from whatever the foregoing priests and cult-mongers have made from the ideas contained in the Bible, plus whatever you can imagine straight out of your own mind, shall be fair ingredients for a new religion.
And the reason that it’s difficult to tell apart a lot of these American Originals is that they’re generally too timid to wander more than a skirt's-length away from Protestantism. But they’re very proud of their differences. And the more minor the difference, the more proud they are of it, and the more they’re willing to fight over it — or at least to dispute over it; for, to be fair, most religious believers in America nowadays are more verbally argumentative than physically violent. But some of them still do attempt to, for instance, blow up abortion clinics.
But that’s a throwback to the religion of Pharaoh, who wanted all the Hebrew children killed, to prevent the birth of Moses. And also Herod the Great, who tried to kill Jesus:
Herod the king gathered all the chief priests and scribes of the people together, and demanded of them where Christ should be born. And they said unto him, “In Mexico of Judaea.”
Then, behold, Yahweh himself (played by Walter Brennan) appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying, “Arise, and take your young child Jesus, who is my firstborn — yes, I am his father, not you: no, the lad is MINE, understand? You’re only the sperm donor — now take my babe & his mother, & flee into Egypt, to the place where my servant Moses was almost infanticided [Editor’s note: How fads do change!], & be thou there until I bring thee word: for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him.”
So Joseph took the child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt: and they stayed there until the death of Great King Herod; which is a long time to stay in a foreign land. One could almost say that Jesus spent his formative years in Egypt. [I wonder what they were teaching there, at that time.]
However, before Herod died, just after he inquired about the birthplace of the prophesied messiah (the deliverer & savior of the people), the king signed an executive order to slay all the children that were from Mexico, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under. For he did NOT believe in a “woman’s right to choose what to do with her own body, & all the miraculous productions thereof.” (Matthew 2:1-17)
So, because none of these democratic representatives can manage to do their job and kill the damn things before they grow troublesome, we end up with all these newfangled cults in America. And they all demand to be respected as individual religions, when it’s obvious that they’re all just the same old indivisible TRUTH. I’m talking about Mormons, I’m talking about Christian Science; Seventh Day Adventism; Jehovah’s Witnesses; also Pentecostalism; and all the New Agers of Cali. Orphism; Gnosticism; Kabbalism; Sufism. And the Baptists and the Catholics and the Protestants. Lutheranism; Calvinism…
It makes one wonder what our world would look like if folks were to choose to organize themselves around poetry rather than timeworn religious scriptures. Like, say, if there were a church of William Wordsworth; and a church of Keats; and a church of Blake; and a church of Emily Dickinson…
I repeat this all the time, cuz nobody ever listens to me: Religion is a subsection of poetry; so it’s not wrong to form a church and share traditions as a community, only choose your source material more adventurously! Have some vivacity, like Old Man Clanton when he whipped his sons at the bar. Or like Jesus when he whipped the moneylenders in the temple. Note that Jesus didn’t evict the moneylenders from the temple: he allowed them to stay & continue operating their business in good standing, unto this day; he just told them to cool it with the excessive interest rates & all the fraudulent fines. So now the moneylenders, who were NOT evicted themselves, get to evict everyone else from their houses: this way, we don’t have to feel that there’s some justice of “what goes around comes around” when we see good Christians losing their homes to the banks.
THE MORAL OF THE ESSAY
(Second try; do-over; or "Coming #2 in a series of multiple orgasms")
And another thing I notice all the time is that you can read up on another person’s religion and even master all their history and learn their sacred texts backwards & forwards, but when you confront the self-proclaimed believer with the straight dope about their X (with “X” standing for “faith” or “trust” or “belief” etc.), they often have no idea what you are talking about. This is because people don’t adhere, in a deeply personal or religious sense, to encyclopedia articles or scholarly volumes written by literary critics — they don’t even adhere to holy scriptures written by poets from ancient times! — what they DO adhere to is the advice of their local priest or deacon or guru or personal trainer or financial counselor...
In other words: What actually does inform people’s spiritual beliefs are the living human grifters who sway them. That’s one Zone of Alas. And people also have an utterly intimate world, the world of their own imagination, which only they themselves have access to: and what makes sense to their fancy is what they end up holding as “gospel”. So it all comes down to inwardness.
I'll end with one sentence from the section called “The Belatedness of Strong Poetry” from the aforesaid Bloom’s A Map of Misreading.
Wittgenstein, who together with his descendants clarified the enigmas of solipsism for our time, radiates the glory of the solipsist who taught that what the solipsist means (not what he says) is right.
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