Aimless Entry Ending with Two Pro-Abortion Bible Passages

Dear diary,

I’m not gonna talk about capitalism in today’s entry, but I wanna say just one thing before I begin. The REASON that I think it’s important to criticize our world’s economic system, which I take to be capitalism, is that I value interesting people; and I’m firmly persuaded that this system of capitalism incentivizes and rewards the dullest among us, while victimizing and obliterating the most exuberant.

Think about all the masses of people who’ve lost their homes because of this system, and who’re jobless, and who’re bankrupt or broke — it’s hard to find even ONE who isn’t a genius: and they’re all so colorful and lively.

Now, on the other hand, consider the successes: people like Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft; Jeff Bezos, who owns all our jungles; and Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of The Facebook, etc. — Hmm… actually I need to end my argument here, because I realize that these guys are all geniuses too, and very lively and colorful; so I’m ruining my own point… I was assuming that when I mentioned the names of some rich folks, they’d all look boring and dusty, but then I typed into an Internet search engine the phrase “Who are the richest men?” and it spat back these fine souls. But I guess I could amend my point to be:

Let us change our system so that it rewards NOT ONLY Bill, Jeff & Mark but ALL PEOPLE. I believe that you could take any individual from the world’s population and put her in the place of one of the persons of this trinity of mega-billionaires, and she’d do as well or better. For capitalism is not a meritocracy but rather something between a game of musical chairs and a slot machine. (By that last term I mean the North American variety: “a gaming apparatus that generates random symbols on a dial, certain combinations winning varying amounts of money for the player”.)

Alright, so, just so we’re on the same page, I’m not gonna say a thing about capitalism today. I’m sick of talking about capitalism. But what shall we talk about instead? How about anything we want. OK, well, what’s the first thing that comes to your mind? Um, I guess my first thot centers upon surrealism with relation to the idea of aesthetic judgment. Well, I don’t know what any of those words mean, so that’ll work fine.

I was watching an early surrealist film the other day. The cool thing about the Internet is that you can find audiovisual material like this film that I watched, and, instead of just watching it by yourself and forming an opinion but then having nobody to talk to, you can look at and read all the opinions in the comment section that appears beneath the video on the web page that’s presenting it; and you still have no one to talk to.

So people were saying stuff like the following, about this early surrealist movie: “This predates Lynch, so it deserves praise.” I think the commenter was referring to the filmmaker David Lynch, who’s one of my favorite directors. So this enraged me, because I think it’s a stupid thing to say. But I also understand why people say things like this, so I forgive them for being so stupid, because I’m stupid too. But here’s my point:

Just because something came first in time doesn’t mean that it’s first in aesthetic dignity. And by “aesthetic dignity” I mean something so marvelous you can’t even begin to fathom it.

I prefer to attempt the difficult work of parsing out who was first from who is BEST. The first is measurable; the best is debatable. That’s why people stick to chronology and history, rather than dabbling with aesthetics and critical judgments. They’d rather focus on what is provable, so that they can have the guiding light of truth to correct them. But I like to strive about in the darkness and find new lustres:

I shut my eyes—and groped as well
Twas lighter—to be Blind—

[from the thots of Emily Dickinson]

I’m not scared of subjectivity; I’m not afraid to be wrong either; I like my mind, and I like your mind — and to offer one’s views about what makes an artwork strong or weak reveals much about the speaker’s inner world, and it opens new possibilities of perspective; so even if it ultimately reveals little about the work at issue, I still find it worth the energy to engage in intellectual analysis.

*

Last night we had a storm that our weatherman prophesied would be severe. This moved all my sweetheart’s students to cancel their lessons, thus she came home early. So we got to enjoy the terror of the anticipation of natural destruction. It was a quiet evening at home, if you substitute the word “quiet” for “unnerving”.

But now that I’m writing this on the morning after, I can spoil the story by telling you that nothing really happened. That’s what’s nice about weathermen; they’re always hyping up their warnings, saying things like:

Behold, I will make thee an horror to thyself, and to all thy friends: and they shall fall by the sword of their enemies, and thine eyes shall behold it: and I will give all thy colonies into the hand of the king of England, and he shall carry them captive into England, and shall slay them with the sword. (Jeremiah 20:4)

And yet none of this ever happens. The U.S. is neither an horror unto itself nor unto its friends. It doesn’t really even have any friends. (Real gangsters never do.) And the colonies did not get carried away by England and then slain by the sword. The colonies are with us, to this day. They became a great nation, which carries away the colonies of other nations, and slays others with the sword.

So most weathermen are bunk. But I do like the warnings that they put on their “storm advisory” website — here’s my favorite line from last night’s decree, which occurred under the heading “What To Do During a Storm”:

Stay inside a building or car that’s not a convertible.

Isn’t that kinda funny—the addition of that last detail? We are also informed that “Rubber tires won’t protect you from lightning so avoid touching metal inside of a car.” I actually did not know this.

When I was a child, my father and mother would force me to join them on a long trip to grandma’s house, and whenever a lightning shower occurred, which was almost every single trip, my parents would try to calm me by telling me: “We’re safe inside this diesel station wagon whose beige exterior is flanked by fake wood panels, because its tires will protect us from Jehovah’s thunderbolts.” So apparently this is another thing that my parents were wrong about.

*

Now The Beatles released two albums during their career as rock-and-roll nerds: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, in 1967, and the self-titled (or untitled?) double LP known commonly as “The White Album”, in 1968. Note those dates: one year apart. (By the way, they released a great deal of other albums during their career, but I wanted to focus on just these two.) This is a good illustration of the point that I made above, about first versus best:

Stop a shopper at the mall — make sure it’s an older man. Now ask him what his favorite Beatles album is. He’ll answer “Sgt. Pepper’s”, every time. Now, this is wrong: for he should have replied “The White Album”; but he’s all mixed up inside and incapable of holding a trustworthy critical judgment, because he’s an elderly male who lived thru the end of the 60s: as such, he experienced the release of the former title and got to know it before listening to the latter, thus he categorizes it as “better” in his soft brain, when he should have filed it under “first”. It’s the same thing that I would do, if I were equally stupid: I would favor David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) over Mulholland Drive (2001), instead of saying the reverse (as I do, to this day), just because the former preceded the latter within the nightmare of clocktime.

When I first saw Mulholland Drive, while leaving the theater I remarked: “That was basically just Lost Highway made better.” And I was kinda angry about this, because I wanted to see something utterly novel from Lynch; but now that more than a decade has passed, I can clear away the cobwebs of chronology and appreciate that Mulholland Drive deserves praise as the superior film. If the old man whom we met at the mall was as keen as I, then, for similar reasons, he would agree that “The White Album” is The Beatles’ best.

But I should mention that altho Mulholland Drive is one of Lynch’s masterpieces, I currently still think that Blue Velvet (1986) is his finest film of all. And that title has ascended in my rankings recently; for, if you had asked me my opinion about a year ago, I’d have favored Eraserhead (1977), which happens to be Lynch’s first feature-length movie — so it’s not always the case that the first shall be last — and this IS a poetic perfection, by the way; but there’s just something magical about Blue Velvet that feels more X. However, maybe I’ll find the results have changed yet again, next time I poll myself.

And my mother’s favorite Beatles album is Rubber Soul (1965). So there’s seemingly no end to her wrongheadedness.

*

Being that my biological parents were such bad decision-makers, it’s amazing that I even survived into adolescence. I look back on my life, and its timeline resembles one of those animated cartoons where a character — say, an floppy-eared humanoid canine — is walking itself down the street amid skyscraper apartments, whose inhabitants keep carelessly tossing items out of their windows from above: dumping wastewater, throwing trash out, someone even drops a grand piano — not to mention Jehovah’s lightning bolts — and all these objects land on the street nearby, each one narrowly missing me.

Or like when a frog and a turtle produce a hybrid offspring that tries to slouch across the street, and all the traffic almost hits it. It’s pure luck that I made it to the other side.

Yet, why did I want to arrive here, anyway? Is there some sort of reward to being middle-aged? I’ve noticed that most of my peers are bearing offspring of their own. Some are sparrow-cat hybrids; some are sardine-ham combo meals. But I’m not won over to the idea that once you survive the battlefield of childhood, you should turn right around and launch a child of your own out into the fray. So I keep writing these warning notes from the far curbside, and placing my prophecies in bottles, and rolling the bottles back to whoever hasn’t crossed yet, in hopes of maybe helping some future weatherwoman realize her genius. Then maybe someday we saints can all gather here at the Great Goal, the Finish Line near the Beautiful River, and sing as one with Jeremiah, from the end of the afore-quoted chapter:

Cursed be the day wherein I was born: let not the day wherein my mother bare me be blessed.

Cursed be the man who brought tidings to happify my father, saying: A man child is born unto thee. Let that messenger be as the colonies which England overthrew — let him hear shrieks of fright in the morning, and fierce shouting at noontide — because he slew me not from the womb.

Or, even better, if my mother would have died right along with me, before I was born, and left the labor of childbirth definitively unfinished. Ah, that would be best! Then my mother might have been my grave: and her womb would remain forever great with me.

Wherefore came I forth out of the womb to see labour and sorrow, that my days should be consumed with shame?

(Jeremiah 20:14-18)

And the other pro-abortion passage in the Bible (perhaps there are many others, but these are the two main ones that we saints like to sing) is from the holy Book of Job:

Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived. Let that day be darkness… and let the shadow of death stain it; and as for that night, let darkness seize upon it; let it not be joined unto the days of the year; because it shut not up the doors of my mother’s womb, nor hid sorrow from mine eyes.

Why died I not from the womb? why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly? — Why did the knees prevent me? or why the breasts that I should suck?

Ah, would that I had met death before birth. For now should I have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept: then had I been at rest, with kings and counsellers of the earth, which built desolate places for themselves; or with princes that had gold, who filled their houses with silver:

Or as an hidden untimely birth, a miscarried fetus, I had not been: I would now be nothing; as those lucky infants which never saw light.

(Job 3:3-16)

P.S.

I don’t know why this entry chose to end itself with these twin pro-abortion passages from the Bible. The working title for the text file that I had been typing into was “Garbage Day and Yard Waste”; maybe that had something to do with it. (I never know what I’m gonna write about when I begin these diary blogs, so, when I must choose a name to call its blank paper in order to save my progress, I simply jot down whatever happens to be in the palm at the end of my mind, and today I knew that soon I’d have to roll out the canisters to the street which contain the weekly trash and the sticks and weeds, since we couldn’t put the canisters out last night, because of the storm: it would’ve swept them away, and probably most of our garbage would’ve ended up plastered all over our neighbors’ huts and minivans.)

But I like how the poet of Job pictures the state of death as simply being able to lie still and remain quiet, “I should have slept” — it’s the same analogy that Hamlet employs in his famous “To be or not” speech (to die, to sleep… perchance to DREAM!! — that’s Hamlet’s breakthru from Job, for Job remains untroubled by any thot of dreaming, which is to say: any notion of an afterlife) — “then had I been at rest,” Job says.

Also note the cast of characters that he envisions as his hugging and loving bed-fellows, sleeping beside him through death’s night:

“Had my fetus been aborted as per my original request,” he says, “I’d’ve been peacefully asleep forever, with kings and counsellers of the earth, which built desolate places for themselves; or with princes that had gold, who filled their houses with silver...”

Why does Job choose to emphasize that the Death-Bed of Hell is occupied by such royal personages—is it maybe so that he can bring them down a peg? I think so. I think you’re right about that. Good call.

Moreover, why stress that the billionaire class built “desolate places” (McMansions) and that these places were filled with the trinkets that they hoarded? Is it because the scripture writers & biblical prophets were Social Justice Warriors who desired that their earthly mothers had blessed them with abortion, because they all secretly hate God and love the Devil? I think so. I think you’re right about that too. Keep up the good work!