Is the alien making or breaking us barbarians?

Dear diary,

I’m intentionally composing these diary entry blog posts so that they wear down even the most well-intentioned reader. I’m writing too many of them, and I’m talking about things that do not matter, in a way that is less than interesting. And my reason for doing so is as follows. I’m trying to mirror my generation. The big development that differentiates our own age from the surrounding ages is that we have these electronic bulletin boards, which lure everyone to say too much about themselves, thus revealing how base and low we all are. The truth is that we’re as distinguished and sublime as our ancient Greek ancestor Sophocles, but given the opportunity to blab about mundane banalities, we cannot resist. And it’s well worth it, for the dead cannot blab: they just lie there forever in their whale-belly, melting and melting.

But the dead have it made, becuz they get to actually BE somebody. They are where they are: that’s a fact — whereas we the living are nowhere in particular: nobody’s ever figured out how to find us. No one can trace our homing signal. One minute we’re watching our daughter’s piano recital, and the next, we’re at the back of a funeral home, bootlegging liquor.

What is a diary supposed to be, tho? Has anyone ever really nailed this down? Let’s take a stab at it. All dairies must be pink in hue. The cover should be plastic, very shiny; and it should have a golden lock that is broken, on account of privacy. One should always scribble in cursive. One should disclose one’s sex life. One should weep onto the pages, so that the ink smears. Always keep an account of how many shillings you have in your purse; and how many farthings and ha’pennies, guineas, maravedís and pesetas. Here’s a sample entry that you can employ as a template:

SEPTEMBER 30, 1659. — I, poor miserable Robinson Crusoe, being shipwrecked during a dreadful storm in the offing, came on shore on this dismal, unfortunate island, which I called “The Island of Despair”; all the rest of the ship's company being drowned, and myself almost dead.

Note how the author leaves you in no doubt as regards the full extent of his disposable income. I also like the next entry, where he badgers the savage:

I asked the stupid fellow which of the gods exactly had made him so stupid. The creature did not understand me at all, but assumed I had asked who was his heavenly father. So I took up his education by another handle, and asked him who made the sea (Water God), the ground we walked on (Earthling God), and the hills and woods (Miss Dorothea Brooke). But he told me the wrong answer: “The maker of all these things was one LORD, Benamuckee, that lived beyond all;” he could describe nothing of this great person, but that he was very old, “much older,” he said, “than the sea or land, than the moon or the stars — roughly the age of Mr. Westbrooke.” I asked him then, if this old person had made all things, why did not all things worship him? He looked very grave, and, with a perfect look of innocence, said, “All things say O to him.” I asked him if the people who die in his country get shipped anywhere? He said, “Yes; they all get shipped to Benamuckee.” Then I asked him whether those that he cannibalizes get shipped thither as well. He said, “Yes.” (It would seem therefore that this Benamuckee offers free shipping on orders over umpteen maravedís.)

I confess that after the first sentence of the so-called savage’s answer, I stopped manipulating the text, because I grew interested in it. Up till that point, I had planned to screw around with the words, out of boredom. Here, I’ll skip ahead and quote a little more:

He told me one day, that if my God could hear us, up beyond the sun, he must needs be a greater God than his own Benamuckee, who lived but a little way off, and yet could not hear till people went up to the great mountains where he dwelt to speak to them. (Here I secretly charged myself: Do NOT mention Moses.) I asked him if ever he went thither, upon Sinai, to speak to his God. He said, “No; they never went that were young men; none went thither but the old men,” whom he called Oowokakee; that is, as I made him explain to me, their religious class, or clergy; and that they went to say O (so he called saying prayers); then came back and told them what Benamuckee said. By this I observed, that there is priestcraft even among the most blinded, ignorant pagans in the world; and the policy of making a secret of religion, in order to preserve the veneration of the people to the clergy, not only to be found in the Roman, but, perhaps, among all religions in the world, even among the most brutish and barbarous savages.
      I endeavoured to clear up this fraud to my beloved savage; and told him that the pretence of their old men going the mountain to say O to their god Benamuckee was a cheat; and their bringing word from thence what he said was much more so; that if they met with any answer, or spake with any one there, it must be with an evil spirit; and then I entered into a long discourse with him about the devil, the origin of him, his rebellion against God, his enmity to man, the reason of it, his setting himself up in the dark parts of the world to be worshipped instead of God, and as God, and the many stratagems he made use of to delude mankind to their ruin; how he had a secret access to our passions and to our affections, and to adapt his snares to our inclinations, so as to cause us even to be our own tempters, and run upon our destruction by our own choice.

I just wanna interrupt here to note that I wish I possessed that much power. The fact is that I’m trapped here in Minnesota, and barely anybody knows of me. But now back to the story:

I found it was not so easy to imprint right notions in his mind about the devil as it was about the being of a God. [...] There appeared nothing of this kind in the notion of an evil spirit, of his origin, his being, his nature, and above all, of his inclination to do evil, and to draw us in to do so too [...] — I had been telling him how the devil was God's enemy in the hearts of men, and used all his malice and skill to defeat the good designs of Providence, and to ruin the kingdom of Christ in the world, and the like. [...] “But,” says my savage, “if God much stronger, much might as the wicked devil, why God no kill the devil, so make him no more do wicked?” I was strangely surprised at this question; and [...] at first I could not tell what to say; so I pretended not to hear him.

The dialogue continues beyond this point and is interesting, but I’ll stop it here because I didn’t mean to get into a religious argument with you this morning. Monseigneur Savage’s point is basically that God should forgive the devil, and I agree with him; but God is no believer in forgiveness — God hates forgiveness so much that he killed his only begotten son, who was a proponent of forgiveness, in order to eradicate that idea from the world. And it worked, because even after Old Rome fell, due to its unwillingness to forgive the debts of its populace, New Rome arose from its ashes with improvements such as credit cards.

Speaking of God’s inferior, unforgiving character makes me want to quote a passage from yesterday’s park-reading. My sweetheart and I enjoy a daily habit of reading at the park. There’s a pavilion by the lake across the street, which we like to visit because it has a pleasant echo: the space is a natural amplification device, like a microphone. We bring several books in a backpack and read a little bit from each one, for the sake of variety. When, over the course of time, we end up finishing a title, we’ll replace it with another; this way, we always have about six or seven books that we’re enjoying at once. Here’s the current list, since you’re clearly uninterested:

1. First we read from the Hebrew Prophets (or I should say RE-read, since this is the Xth perusal) — we work our way from one prophet to the next; right now we’re about halfway thru Isaiah;
2. next we read a chapter in Moby Dick — that’s what I wanna quote from in a minute;
3. then comes the collected poems of James Merrill; we’re nearing the end, in the section of "Translations" — O! actually we just finished that part yesterday (I forgot), so I’ll probably replace it with the collected poems of A.R. Ammons, which we keep returning to; but my favorite of Merrill’s translations was a medium length poem by Guillame Apollinaire: “Les Collines”;
4. after that, we proceed to Friedrich Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy;
5. and lastly we’re working our way thru the collected writings of William Blake (I’ve read certain of his works again and again, but then there are other lesser-known poems and letters and miscellaneous pieces of his that I’ve never read at all, so I decided that we should tackle his collection by just reading it from start to finish, regardless of each work’s familiarity).

Now stop bugging me with all these mundane banalities and let me quote the promised quote. As I was saying:

Speaking of the Church’s God’s inferior and unforgiving character makes me want to quote a passage from “The Town-Ho’s Story” in Moby Dick. There’s not too exact of a connection; I just like how it sounds:

...it is not seldom the case in this conventional world of ours—watery or otherwise; that when a person placed in command over his fellow-men finds one of them to be very significantly his superior in general pride of manhood, straightway against that man he conceives an unconquerable dislike and bitterness; and if he have a chance he will pull down and pulverize that subaltern’s tower, and make a little heap of dust of it.

This is how I see God’s relationship with the devil. Again, I mean only the Church’s God — not Benamuckee, or even the Oowokakee who dare to say O to Benamuckee.

Yet also I feel that I must address this additional scam: Certain modern churchgoers would claim to see the above passage as hinting precisely the reverse of what I said that it implies: they (the non-infidels) would say that it makes more sense to see the passage as indicating that the devil conceives an unconquerable dislike and bitterness towards God, etc… But these people are stupid savages; that is all.

I also want to quote a passage that occurs a few paragraphs later, in the very same story. The story is a story-within-a-story: Ishmael, the narrator of Moby Dick, interrupts his own novel to tell a tale that he heard during a gam with the whaleman Town-Ho (named after the cry that is given from the mast-head when a whale is sighted). He briefly describes the way that a leonine soul, after being affronted by an inferior, masters itself amid the temptation to retaliate. This reminds me of how a devil must often forbear angry angels:

...as he sat still for a moment, and as he steadfastly looked into the mate’s malignant eye and perceived the stacks of powder-casks heaped up in him and the slow-match silently burning along towards them; as he instinctively saw all this, that strange forbearance and unwillingness to stir up the deeper passionateness in any already ireful being—a repugnance most felt, when felt at all, by really valiant men even when aggrieved—this nameless phantom feeling, gentlemen, stole over Steelkilt.

Steelkilt is the protagonist of the story, a mariner “wild-ocean born, and wild-ocean nurtured”; and the mate with whom he clashes is called Radney. We here in the USA of 2019 are wearily familiar with the fact that a corporate coffee-shop franchise named itself after the character Starbuck, from the novel that contains the story at hand. I hereby suggest that someone create a rival franchise and christen it Steelkilts, and let us erect our shops directly facing every existing shop of our angelnemy (angelic enemy), and let this new franchise Steelkilts offer better coffee, at no charge, and each shop should always have Bryan Ray’s Mr. Oizo playlist playing on the speaker system, in case anyone wants to sit inside and sip their beverage and listen to my selection of the finest 21st-century chamber music; & we shall also offer wine gratis, and free spirits.

*

I hate when I find myself quoting extensively from well-loved books in an entry, because then I just wanna keep sharing passages that I admire, instead of letting my own thots flow. I would always prefer to simply type without aim, and see where my imagination flies; but today is a quote-day, apparently; so let’s not kick against the pricks. Let’s accept our calling and become the Best Christian Possible.

This next excerpt is from the beginning (section 3 in Walter Kuafmann’s translation) of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy — it’s actually a quote-within-a-quote-within-a-quote, to match Melville’s Ishmael’s thrice-inward tale, for Nietzshe draws upon Oedipus at Colonus when he unleashes his “Greek folk wisdom”, which is why Sophocles was on my mind above; and I guess this also fits my entry because it has to do with the (mis)understanding of foreign perspectives on the world’s ultimate meaning. I will take my leave of you now, before giving the quote, because I want its words alone to conclude this entry, and I’m also too afraid to face its music.

Whoever approaches these Olympians with another religion in his heart, searching among them for moral elevation, even for sanctity, for disincarnate spirituality, for charity and benevolence, will soon be forced to turn his back on them, discouraged and disappointed. For there is nothing here that suggests asceticism, spirituality, or duty. We hear nothing but the accents of an exuberant, triumphant life in which all things, whether good or evil, are deified. And so the spectator may stand quite bewildered before this fantastic excess of life, asking himself by virtue of what magic potion these high-spirited men could have found life so enjoyable that, wherever they turned, their eyes beheld the smile of Helen, the ideal picture of their own existence, “floating in sweet sensuality.” But to this spectator, who has already turned his back, we must say: “Do not go away, but stay and hear what Greek folk wisdom has to say of this very life, which with such inexplicable gaiety unfolds itself before your eyes.
     “There is an ancient story that King Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him. When Silenus at last fell into his hands, the king asked what was the best and most desirable of all things for man. Fixed and immovable, the demigod said not a word, till at last, urged by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and broke out into these words: ‘Oh, wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is—to die soon.’ ”