On the grass, or: Off the grass

One of our neighbors delivered to our house a small book for us to read. He left the book in a bag — it was this brown paper bag, and I photographed the message that he wrote on its front side. The bag was hanging on our door. We had spoken to this neighbor earlier in the week: he explained that he is concerned about the vast amount of plastic that we humans are dumping into the oceans: he said that he is very conscientious about recycling, and, whenever possible, he avoids all use of plastics. So, when he dropped off this book that he hoped we might enjoy, he left it on our doorknob in this bag, which, I should re-emphasize, was made from paper, with a note handwritten in black permanent marker declaring: “I Hate Plastic!” (see the picture below, which features our neighbor's penmanship) and then he drew a smiley face beneath. Now I stress that I did not manipulate this smiley face in any way whatsoever: from the day that it was created, it had only one eyeball — just like Officer Rough from the film WRONG COPS (2013); in a key scene from which, the music producer remarks, "your marketing idea is fantastic: a black, one-eyed, slightly monstrous policeman..." — I don't know whether this aspect of my neighbor's drawing was an oversight or intentional, for I’ve not spoken to the artist since the day in question; but, I repeat: the original smiley face is a cyclops.

The plastic artist, like the epic poet who is related to him, is absorbed in the pure contemplation of images. [On the contrary,] without any images, the Dionysian musician is himself pure primordial pain & its primordial re-echoing.

—from sec. 5 of Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy

Dear diary,

Is there anything fun about life? No. But we can pretend that there are passable aspects to existence. Think about trees, how annoying they are. We chop them down to make paper, which gives us books. That’s about as good as it gets, in this world. But everyone’s always squawking: “Save the rainforest! Do NOT chop down all the trees! Ye lumber companies, operate your businesses sustainably! Plant new seedlings everywhere that you go! For if we run out of woods, the planet will die, and the bugs will take over!”

Well I’m trying to pretend that there’s at least one fun thing about this world, so let’s imagine that we not only ignore these doom-sayers but that we go full bore and annihilate all plants everywhere. Jesus says:

I am come to send fire on the earth; and what will I, if it be already kindled? (Luke 12:49)

I’ll tell you “what will you” since I kindled the whole globe down before you had a chance to show up: You will reign with the insects. Beel means “Lord”, zebub means “of the flies” — that’s your name: Beelzebub, which the encyclopedia admits is “a derogatory corruption of Ba’al Zəbûl, ‘Lord of the High Place’ (i.e., Heaven) or ‘High Lord’.” Again, Jesus says:

If I by Baal-zebul cast out devils, by whom do your children cast them out? thus they shall be your judges. (Matthew 12:27)

Lastly, King Solomon assures us that

The LORD said that he would dwell in the thick darkness. (I Kings 8:12)

My point is this: I have no point; I just wanted to quote a few bible passages, to give this entry the look of legitimacy, in case any scholars happen to pass by.

Getting back to my pet peeve, tho: Living trees. I say we chop them all down, leaving Earth completely forestless, and murder all the houseplants as well (I suggest straightforwardly burning them) — all the grass, every herb yielding seed, all the fruit trees yielding fruit after their kind, even the trees that the LORD God planted in his garden eastward in Eden, the green trees that are pleasant to the sight, and good for food, which the LORD God made to grow out of the ground; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil — kill them all, so that not one blade of grass survives. For the smallest sprout shows there is really no death (“Song of Myself” sec. 6) and we MUST get people to start taking this dimension’s lesson seriously.

I wanna be able to fly up in a spaceship and look back to Earth and see not a green-and-blue marble but rather a mostly brown ball, or better yet murky gray.

And the tributaries of the river that goes out from Eden to wet God’s garden — Pison, Gihon, Hiddekel, & Euphrates — which supply water to all the oceans of Earth, are not exempt from having their plant life exterminated: there should be no seaweed either. For the vegetation at the bottom of the sea, of rivers, and of lakes, sympathizes with that of the land; as Shelley explains in his “Ode to the West Wind” preface.

I’m just saying that we can’t take any chances. If the germs are to usurp control of our universe, they’re gonna need a clean workplace. And bugs cannot stand greenery; just ask President Beelzebub.

*

The thrust of my statements here this morning is twofold:

1. to establish a game plan: to rid Earth of trees, just for the sake of experiment — I wanna figure out exactly how bad it’s gonna be, trying to survive in a plantless world; because the naysayers claim it’ll be horrible, but I don’t quite trust them;
2. I think it’d be great for the economy, if we homeowners could be set free from the endless task of mowing our lawns.

Recall the scientific study that concluded that every human being, given an average lifespan of thirty-seven years, will have spent ALL her waking hours on the act of lawnmowing. And then, when one sleeps, the remaining time is similarly wasted, for in the book-length survey of that field, bearing the apt title Leaves of Grass, in the same section of that afore-quoted “Song of Myself”, our subject (grass) is defined as the beautiful uncut hair of graves. So you see the only way we’re going to escape this cycle is to burn the whole place down.

As our esteemed colleague Andrew Marvell proves (in “The Mower to the Glowworms”): Your courteous lights in vain you waste. And prior to presenting this finding, he takes his audience to task in a fashion almost anti-sycophantic:

Ye country comets, that portend
No war, nor prince’s funeral,
Shining unto no higher end
Than to presage the grass’s fall;

Ye glowworms, whose officious flame
To wand’ring mowers shows the way,
That in the night have lost their aim,
And after foolish fires do stray...

Yet, lo: I have the sun on my side: the fool of fools: the sun of God; and some say he’s not just the Deity’s spawn but the Deity himself! This ball of fire that stalks us daily, circling our homeland & waiting to land the fatal strike, has agreed to provide the whatchamacallit sufficient to eradicate 99% of earthly verdure. So, some of the longer grass and weeds in your yard, especially the stuff around the base of the trees in your front yard, is going to have to be reapt on a sprout-by-sprout basis. On Tuesday I went out there with this lengthy shearing tool, like a grabber but instead of a pincer on a pole it had scissors, and I cut the stubbornest tufts right down to dirt-level. Of course I did not succeed in annihilating every last hint of green from all my hectares (I own roughly five), but, you know what they say: It is hard to prove a negative.

Now all I gotta do is wait for yon lightnings to bolt the remaining trees, and we’ll be good to go. I can maybe then start a family business. I’m looking forward to the new weather patterns that’ll erupt in this ecocide’s aftermath. I’ll maybe gain a few customers needing obsidian removal during the volcano season.

And didn’t the ancient Israelites wander for a certain amount of fiscal quarters in the wilderness, after escaping their oppressor? If you think about it, that word “wilderness” is not much different from “desert”. And now it’s a fad to be a “voice crying in the wilderness” and a prophet setting up shop in the sprout-proof desert. You get to go hang out with the pro:

Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the Wilderness to attend Master Class with the Devil. (Matthew 4:1)

There one learns to do that trick whose secret the earthly magicians never reveal:

Whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life shall save it. (Mark 8:35).

Consider the graduation of two famous souls, Elijah & Jonah, who (among countless others) passed this course before Jesus did:

Elijah went a day's journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a juniper tree: and he requested for himself that he might die.
(1 Kings 19:4)

Now God repented of the evil that he had said that he would do unto Nineveh; and he did it not. But this displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry. So Jonah went out of the city, and sat on the east side of the city, and there made him a booth, and sat under it in the shadow, in the desert of the wilderness. And it came to pass, when the sun did arise, that God prepared a vehement east wind; and the sun beat upon the head of Jonah, that he fainted, and wished in himself to die, and said: It is better for me to die than to live.
(Jonah 3:10 – 4:8)

These passages evince a yearning for the devil’s companionship; as prophets know that, after a lifetime of slaving for God, it’s a great relief to touch base with an age-old friend.

But below are the verses that I meant to quote, with regard to the notion of a prophetic “voice crying from the wilderness” begging the whole world to slay all of its plant-life: a sort of Super Self-Slaughter. (If you think about it, what exactly distinguishes a desert from its twin sibling, the garden of paradise? You are correct: the desert is barren of any green thing. It’s like the Statue of Liberty before it became corroded, back in its youth when it was shiny dun copper.)

Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to America, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned: for she hath received of the LORD’s hand double for all her sins. Thus saith the voice that crieth in the wilderness: “Prepare ye the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”

That’s the Prophet Isaiah (40:1-3), from the Original Testament; and now here’s Saint John (1:23) from the Belated Testament (I should add, for anyone who is new to this funhouse of mirrors, that the “John” who authored this gospel is wholly opposite from the “John” who is referred to in this section — that is John the Baptizer: they only share the same name, like the LORD and BAAL, or Beelzebub and Baalzebul):

No man hath seen God at any time, the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him. And this is the record of John, when priests were sent to ask him, “Who art thou?” He confessed, and denied not; but confessed, “I am not the Christ.”

And they asked him, “What then? Art thou Elijah?” And he saith, “I am not.”

“Art thou that prophet Jonah, or maybe Jeremiah or Moses?” And he answered, “No.”

Then said they unto him, “Well then who art thou? that we may give an answer to them that sent us. What sayest thou of thyself?”

He said, “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord’, as said the prophet Esaias.”

Now it was really hard for me to restrain myself, and to abstain from adding a quotation into the scripture, during that part in the fiasco above where John’s inquisitors say: “Well then who art thou? that we may give an answer to them that sent us. What sayest thou of thyself?” Because it reminds me of the scene in Exodus, when Moses is bickering with the Lord God Yahweh about how he’ll convince the people to follow him out of their slavery and into the desert where they’ll all surely die (the God of this world only allows us the choice between civilized-slavery & wilderness-wandering, for some reason; and I am sure that his reason is good):

Now Moses said unto God, “Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, ‘The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you’; and they shall say to me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say unto them?”
     And God said unto Moses, “I AM THAT I AM”: and he said, “Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel: ‘I AM hath sent me unto you’.” (Exodus 3:13-14)

GLOSSARY

But, before we begin, let us define our terms. Here is a passage from William Blake’s King Edward the Third (from Scene 4, a dialogue between the characters William & Dagworth) which I recited aloud to my sweetheart yesterday at the park, in that pavilion that I told you about which gives my voice a resounding echo:

WILLIAM. What is the tree you mentioned? I don’t think I ever saw it.

DAGWORTH. Ambition.

WILLIAM. Is it a little creeping root that grows in ditches?

DAGWORTH. Thou dost not understand me, William.
It is a root that grows in every breast;
Ambition is the desire or passion that one man
Has to get before another, in a pursuit after glory;
But I don’t think you have any of it.

WILLIAM. Yes, I have; I have a great ambition to know every thing, Sir.

DAGWORTH. But when our first ideas are wrong, what follows must all be wrong of course; ’tis best to know a little, and to know that little aright.