Dear diary,
We live in an age whose truths are too harsh to consider. You can’t even look at them, they’re so ugly. You must lie to yourself, stick your head in the sand, and engage maniacally in overwork so that your thots don’t turn in that direction. I think, at least for your average United Statesian, the word propaganda could take the place of art in Nietzsche’s saying: “We possess art lest we perish of the truth.” For the propaganda that we U.S. citizens are drowning in actually saves us from the poisons of history and foreign reality.
When I speak of truths that simply cannot be faced, I’m thinking of a number of things: Who the U.S. “founding fathers” were, exactly (their non-mythologized aspects); what the U.S. did to the previous inhabitants of this apartment (I call the land an apartment, for the sake of self-amusement), and, after breaking in and making itself at home, what the U.S. then proceeded to do to certain occupants of the neighboring apartments: in short, the lifestyle that the U.S. has engaged in almost continually since its own blood-soaked birth. And which continues to this day. (Is it increasing or decreasing, this violent tendency? I can’t tell cuz I’m afraid to look.)
Sorry — I don’t wanna continue writing this type of serious, critical entry; these things were just on the top of my mind because yesterday was the Fourth of July: Independence Day. So, the morning after, I wake up with all my patriotism depleted. But anybody can complain about the obvious injustices, and others have surely already done so, much better than I ever could; so I’m wasting my time and yours if I continue in that vein. I’d rather find a different perspective to address the phenomena.
Is it not bad but actually good to pledge allegiance to an object, a flag? Maybe that’s not idolatry; maybe it’s a decent thing to do. Alright, I’ll do it. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the democracy for which it stands, oops I mean the Republic. One nation under God...
I can’t do it. My attitude will never improve. But that’s OK. Some of us decorative plates were made for breaking. That’s the purpose of our faultline, our fatal flaw: the crack is not a defect but intentional. We’re like that special type of glass that they use in movies, which is easy to smash thru, for the filming of chase scenes or battle scenes. Or in those scenes labeled “husband returns to the apartment drunk and enraged,” we’re like a vessel of pottery that’s easy to break.
O LORD, thou art our potter; we are the clay: we all are the work of thy hand. (Isaiah 64:8)
And to those who disagree with this way of viewing mankind, lo:
Surely your deception shall be esteemed as the potter's clay: for shall the work say of him that made it, “He made me not”? or shall the thing framed say of him that framed it, “He had no understanding”? (Isaiah 29:16)
We are artworks that God sculpted for the pleasure of destroying:
He shall break us as the breaking of the potter’s vessel that is broken in pieces; he shall not spare: so that there shall not be found in the bursting of it a sherd. (Isaiah 30:14)
Sherd is short for potsherd, “a broken piece of ceramic material”.
The above verses are all from the Book of Isaiah, but this trope was later taken up by my archenemy himself, the Apostle Paul, in his epistle to the Romans. And I quote:
The scripture depicts God as saying to Pharaoh, “I created you for the sole purpose of humiliating you. I led you to the Red Sea, and when I baptized you, I held you underwater by force and did not let you come up for air. By thus over-cleansing you, I reasoned that I could expand my fame, which is always my goal.”
This proves that God will either show mercy or withhold it whenever he feels like doing so, and he’ll break forth in rage upon any one of us whom he has crafted to resemble a “bad guy” — basically, God is a common gangster, with a common gangster’s psychology.
But now I suppose some heckler will interrupt me with a half-baked argument and say “Why does God find fault with us? We are simple villagers: We’ll do anything he asks, just as we would for any local gangbanger — we only want him to leave us in peace: stop tormenting us!”
Nay but, O heckler, thou stupid fool — thus I answer thee:
Who do you think you are, sassing back against GOD!? Shall the thing formed say to the monster that formed it, “Dear monster, Why have you made me so monstrous”? Hath not the potter power over the clay, from the same lump to craft one figurine in the shape of a “good guy” and another in the shape of a “bad guy”? What if God, just for the sake of showing his wrath, and to make his power known, impatiently endured the behavior of his antagonist (that’s a fancy word for “opponent”, who in this case is JESUS or wait no oops I mean SATAN), for the sake of boosting the movie’s suspense, and so that the Happy Ending, where the bad guy goes to Hell while the good guy gets married in Heaven, which our Lord had written into the script from the very first draft, would seem even more of a relief when it occurred, not fake or cheesy like some arbitrary stop-point where the dramatist just got tired and decided to call it quits becuz he couldn’t manage to dream up characters any less limited than himself!
(Romans 9:17-24)
P.S.
So anyway, what we did yesterday is ride our bikes to the park, like usual; and then in the afternoon we brought books to the Areopagus and read them aloud. We brought five titles — they’re the same ones I told you about earlier. And there was nobody else there, for most of the time: we had the place all to ourselves. But at a certain point it began to rain: then this adult couple who had been walking on one of the nearby paths ran up and took shelter under the roof of the Areopagus (for our Areopagus is roofed), and they sat uncomfortably near to us. And I was reading aloud at the time. Now this made me nervous, because I happened to be reading the Holy Scriptures, which I myself do not consider Holy, for I do not distinguish between sacred and secular — it’s all either one or the other to me: I care naught but for aesthetics — and yet I knew that this intruding couple was not aware of my anti-religious stance; therefore I stopped in mid-sentence from reading the Scriptures and reached into my death-bag and pulled out Moby Dick. And I read from that book instead. It was the part where the crew of the Pequod catches and kills their very first whale. This was more comfortable material to give voice to, in front of strangers, than the Bible. Then, later, when God’s punishing rainshower stopped, the couple stood up and waved goodbye to us and left to continue on their travels. Once they were safely out-of-view, I returned to the place in the Scriptures where I’d been interrupted, and finished the chapter. In this way, supposing that the God of this World had caused the rain to fall that afternoon, in order to draw that particular couple into the Areopagus with me so that they could hear the message of His Holy Word, I circumvented this plan and exposed them to a wicked text instead.
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