Dear diary,
I wake up angry about life, because my lot is to be constantly striving just to attain normalcy. If the world were correct, normalcy would be what I would wake up in, and I could either bask at that neutral zero level or choose to strive for something beyond. Instead, I’m shackled to the bottom of the sea. Who keeps me here? I assume I do. Now this fact about it being my fault that the world is incorrect makes me want to write down my thots in the form of self-questions, as if I might discover within me, lying nearby the kingdom of heaven, a key insight which will solve everything; or at least reverse the curse, like when the guests of the dinner party in The Exterminating Angel (1962) at long last leave.
But this idea of playing both sides in a rapid Q&A session bores me before I begin it; plus I’ve now forgotten all the things that I wanted to ask about; so I’ll abandon the plan.
Isn’t that weird, by the way, that you must in some sense know beforehand the scope of the answer that you seek, in order to embark upon questioning? You must be able to identify, at the very least, the person or the place, if you hope to make the slightest progress, for instance, when searching for a long-lost love, especially one you have never met. Person or place: either one of those two concepts will do; but you cannot lack them both — thus in order to avoid the state of bootlessness, you must either have preconceived your princess, while remaining clueless about which castle she’s trapped in; OR ELSE preordain the aforesaid heavenly kingdom, while remaining unaware of which princess contains it: it could even be your own self — in other words, the dragon ate it.
But I myself own neither crucial term. That’s why I’m so hard to trail: I have no idea WHO I’m looking for, or WHERE she might half-be (I only grasp the WHAT WHEN & WHY, since they are contained in my catchy slogan that’s easy to remember because it’s an acronym, MEGA: Make Eternity Great Again — so WHAT equals Eternity; WHEN equals Ongoing that is to say Now which equals Again; and WHY is No Reason); thus if I enter a bookstore, there’s an equal chance that the detectives will find me in the “Gardening” section as in the section for “Snake-handling”; or even the area labeled “Morality”: it all appeals to me; I’m sorta driven by whim. Now think how much easier it would be for the detectives if they could say “I know exactly where to find him, because this gentleman prefers blondes.” Then they could burst in and raid the appropriate province of the local beauty parlor, and cuff me and book me.
Yet I wonder if a successful lawyer who’s been at the same successful firm for more than three decades ever stops and thinks to himself “What the heck am I doing, spending so much time and dedicating all my energies to the game of judicial argument? Is this all there is to being alive? And why am I putting my children thru law school and expecting them to follow the very same path as I did, downward to doom? Is the human form nothing but a placeholder for the hex of legality? Why do we keep a system of justice (so-called) which strives to punish whoever breaks the rules of society; but we establish no corresponding system to reward whoever sublimates society? How can we determine whether this is the fruitfullest way to arrange our play? (I almost employed the term civilization there, but play better befits what humans do.) Well, we could start by simply asking ourselves the question: As we look around the world, is everything in the best imaginable position? And the answer is YES: for Bryan is chained at the oceanbottom.”
But when I escaped into the bookstore above, and, in search of me, the detectives went around ransacking the shelves and injuring other patrons in the process, I listed three sections that I might browse thru while waiting to be apprehended. The first was “Gardening”, and there was also “Snake-handling” and “Morality”. I just want to mention two things about those sections. (Incidentally, this is worth noting because it offers readers a peek behind the drape of authorial intent; thus, when a member of a book club asks “What did the author MEAN by writing this passage?” I’m basically telling you straight up exactly what I was thinking; so, if you’d shut up and listen for one second, maybe we could get somewhere — remember, I got two detectives on my trail and they could nab me any moment.) OK, here’s the deal:
The last thing I did before going to sleep yestereven was dig in the rock beds, which formerly held mulch, on either side of our driveway (we recently had our driveway torn up and re-asphalted, and its flanking mulch-beds got destroyed in the process); now we noticed that there’s way too much debris underneath these beds, so we’re shoveling it away to level the ground before replenishing the mulch. This chore caused gardening to be on my mind. That’s the first of two things that I wanted to tell you. The second is this:
Having mentioned gardening, and needing additional subjects to fill the shelves of the bookstore that I chose as my makeshift hideout, following the official guidelines of free association I ended up thinking about Eden from Genesis — I mean the biblical scripture not the video game console — and so I wanted to use “Snake Husbandry” as my second bookstore subsection, in memory of the serpent from Chapter 3. (“Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made.”) But since husbandry in this case refers to “the care, cultivation, and breeding of cute little snakes” whereas I was not so much looking to care for, cultivate, and breed creatures that are more subtil than anything the LORD God ever invented, but rather to BE one of those creatures; to kenosis myself into the serpent costume, as it were, so as to offer the first humans salvation from ignorance; I chose to go with “Snake-handling”, cuz that means specifically “operating a serpent body from within the cockpit of its soul like a pilot handles an aircraft”.
(Now this is just a diversional aside, but while researching the above terminology, I stumbled upon a related word whose etymology I found interesting: husband consists of Old Norse “hús” and “bóndi”; hús means house, and bóndi means occupier and tiller of the soil. The two combine as “húsbóndi”, which means master of a house. This has striking implications for modern society, since barely anyone owns their own place anymore; we all either rent, or pay a lifelong mortgage to a bank, or simply go homeless; thus almost nobody can afford to be an actual, literal husband, a house-master; therefore the institution of marriage is technically unattainable.)
And what does the serpent save the first couple from (now I’m free-associating toward the third and final bookstore section label from the parable above)? That’s right: Morality. For the LORD God in the story from that chapter in Genesis propounds Morality as the very first lie. I say “propounds” instead of “creates” because the LORD God only uses and abuses morality, he did not create it. (The more one looks into matters, it turns out that there’s very little in the world that the LORD God truly did create; most of the stuff was already here, so at the most he merely recycled it.) Alternately, you could say that the Genesis story’s LORD God stands for Morality, since he draws a distinct line between right & wrong, or obedience & rebellion, with his “tree of knowledge of good & evil”, about which he says “Do not eat it, or you’ll die!” But they don’t die, in fact they just become moralists like the LORD:
And the LORD God said: “Behold, the humans have become like us, to know good and evil!” (3:22)
This is the LORD God admitting that he told the first-ever-recorded lie; it also proves the serpent’s assertion true; thus making her the first genuine prophet.
The serpent said: “Ye shall not ‘surely die’; for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil.” (3:4-5)
That’s what I meant when I said that the snake would grant them salvation from ignorance.
But the funny thing about the tree in question is that it can either appear attractive or unattractive, depending on which angle you view it from, and what lighting you use when you film it. For the phrase “knowledge of good & evil” might mean “the comprehending of all things from good to evil, from one extreme of possibility to the other” — in short: “Wisdom”. However, for the purposes of my daydream, I choose to take it as meaning “the parsing of reality into ‘thou shalt’ & ‘thou shalt not’: good & evil, the terms employed by a master to brand his will upon a slave, or a computer technician to program a weaponized robot” — in a nutshell: “Morality”.
(I wonder if I’ll ever get Genesis out of my mind; if I’ll ever finally get beyond its charm. I don’t think so; I think it’s here to stay. Genesis and Hamlet and Quixote and Jesus… Who else? That can’t be all the immortals that possess me. A sad Legion I’ll make, if I don’t acquire more...)
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