Here's the next page from my book of 303 Drawing Prompts (the previous page accompanied yesterday's entry); the prompt for this current vision was "When pigs fly".
Dear diary,
Yesterday I had an allergy attack or something — I don’t know what to call it, but it was just like God says about his leviathan in the Book of Job (41:18-21):
By his neesings a light doth shine, and his eyes are like the eyelids of the morning.
Out of his mouth go burning lamps, and sparks of fire leap out.
Out of his nostrils goeth smoke, as out of a seething pot or caldron.
His breath kindleth coals, and a flame goeth out of his mouth.
I’m just trying to convey that I was pretty miserable. And today I still have glowing coals in my eye-sockets. Therefore pity me: Mar your own health with a prayer for Bryan.
So this will be another short entry, because I didn’t have enough time to write this morning, and when my voice is hamstrung it’s hard to get it to walk very much in the garden (Genesis 3:8).
And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden...
*
I only have two thots on my mind right now. The first is about land, and the second is about forms of government. Let’s get the boring one out of the way first:
Thot #1: GOV’T
I’ve learned recently that absolutely zero United Statesians know what the word “democracy” means. They just know that it signifies something vaguely good. Thus, if a waiter at a restaurant were to ask them if they’d like to try today’s special, which is “democracy served with dipping sauce”, they’d all say “Yes, I’d like that; but what kind of sauce comes with it?” — Note that they ask for details about the sauce but they neglect to make the waiter define democracy, even tho they have never known its meaning. If I were one of these innocents, I’d say to the waiter, “Could you tell me how your democracy is prepared: how pure are its ingredients, and how deeply it is fried?” Cuz then the waiter would answer me like so:
“Our democracy allows every individual gardener who haunts the common area of our country, beneath these Babylonian Towers, to have a voice that can walk in our government: Each soul gets one vote, and that’s how everyone together decides, for instance, who should serve as God Catcher, or which of us should possess the Auto-Virgin-Dragon (to be the brains of that constellation) for the upcoming eon. Every ingredient of the government is elected by the people, as opposed to being appointed by some small group of seraphim — heavenly senators, A.K.A. thugs. It’s different from a kingdom, because a kingdom has a king, to whom everything in the country legally belongs. To view it thru the lens of an average goose-person, democracy is unlike being in a gaggle, because they who can suffer being led by grounded officials end up poking around on the median between freeways until doom strikes, instead of sublimating themselves like a prince in the air. Yet democracy also differs from serving in a skein, which is, by definition, airborne, because only one goose acts as the tip of the pyramid when you’re flying in formation, and that supreme leader is not elected by her peers but rather installed by an agency of intelligence, which makes all the decisions in secret about where the rest shall travel (Florida), how long they shall stay there (past winter), and what portion of the annual budget shall go toward arsenal ($800 billion) — for geese are perpetually at conflict with all other suburban pests: their entire economy is based on warfare; and military armaments make up the bulk of their GDP (gross domestic product).”
My point in having the waiter explain these various ways to prepare cuisine is that it helps me to lay some blame on gentlefolk. Since they sleep thru church and ignore their children, gentlefolk presume they commit no sin; they think the roughhousing that goes on in the world has nothing to do with them. But listen to this: When a gentle soul opens up his refrigerator (I’m assuming this person resides in the same suburb as the flock of geese above), he sees fruits and vegetables, also an expanse flowing with milk and honey. Then when he looks to his right or to his left, he sees bunches of bananas; for bananas are not to be kept inside the fridge; unless they’re overripe, in which case you store them in the freezer until you have time to make muffins: add chocolate chips to the mix, then offer them to your co-workers and they will love you. — OK, but my aim here is to expose a scary conspiracy: Note that the fruits and the vegetables, the milk, the honey, and the bananas all seem so innocent. Well they’re the opposite of innocent: they are the cardinal sin of the gentlefolk (here I refer to those same diners who placed an order for democracy without checking which test tube mothered it). For nice nations faraway, which have interesting names that no suburbanite ever pronounced, are the realms where the foregoing foodstuffs are fashioned. And what happens in these places? Like anywhere, these places have people, and those people have souls, and every soul’s wish is to participate in collective self-governance; so the inhabitants establish a democracy that allots the populace one vote per soul, and they elect themselves a paradise, where they cultivate fruits of knowledge, which fruits they sell to every Adam and Eve in the surrounding wildernesses, and they use the proceeds from these sales to build schools and hospitals: this keeps the beings of their citizenry shipshape. What’s wrong with that? Nothing, obviously. But the transnational corporations that slither about the forbidden parts of these harvestries in paradise dislike the locals living off their own labors. So this is what they do (the transnational corporations): they smash the elected government and install a dictator. But then they keep calling this dictatorship democracy; and the democracy, which they replaced, they label corrupt: that way their scheme sounds more appealing to the gentlefolk, who fill the “demand” side of the supply-demand equation, and who are presumed to be less comfortable than free-traders are with the pastimes of murder and theft. So the corporate-centeredness of this newfangled dictator allows the transnationals to pocket the proceeds from the produce, leaving the banana-makers impoverished (for smart dictators pledge their allegiance to power not people). Meanwhile the comestibles in or around every suburbanite’s fridge are at once slightly cheaper and of lower quality than they would’ve been had non-dishonest outfits farmed them. So that’s how the gentlefolk got their sin.
Thot #2: LAND
[NOTE. I write these bracketed, italicized remarks after composing this second section. On re-reading what follows, I am moved to call it a failed experiment. The problem is that I over-elaborated. My original idea was simple: I just wanted to point out the way that land ownership has shrunk over the ages. Two generations ago, everyone owned a large amount of land that they farmed; then the next generation moved into houses with small yards that they don’t farm; and lastly nowadays we all live in single-room apartments that have no yard at all — the environment is nothing but paved streets and sidewalks, and farming got monopolized and relocated elsewhere. That’s all I really meant to say; but I got bored with referencing the different temporal periods, so I indulged in the conceit of reincarnation and used the birth dates of favorite artists who belonged to those ages to delineate each span. Once all that fancy footwork was done, however, I realized that only a quiz-show savant would be able to decode the personages that I aimed to reference from the given dates alone; so here I’ll list them, in hopes that maybe it’ll make the passage less tedious when the reader encounters it: The 1805 birth is Joseph Smith, whom I admire NOT for his Book of Mormon but for “The King Follett Discourse” (I linked the title’s text to my own recorded reading); tho I shifted the actual date ahead 48 hours so that it falls on the holiday. The Nov. ’76 deathday is for Man Ray, born Emmanuel Radnitzky; I like to tease the idea that we got our identities tangled, cuz he stole my last name; and since I was born in the spring of ’77, it seems passable that his soul tripped during its escape and got dragged into me by the celestial archons. The next date is Orson Welles, whom I rate as the Best Ever Movie Director — for even his financier-mangled films evince genius; and I like that we chose the same U.S. State to be born in: Wisconsin; tho he appeared in the southeastern-most corner, whereas I claimed the north-northwest. Finally the ’68 death was Duchamp; because he means the world to me, and, “Besides”, as he inscribed on his gravestone: “it’s always the others who die”. — Alright, on with Part Two...]
And then the second thot, like I said, connects to the first thot, cuz the second thot is about how land is used. Right now I live in this rambler house that has a small yard, and it’s been almost three full weeks since I last mowed our lawn, because we recently planted new grass to see if we could get the patchy and bare areas to fill in, and we didn’t want to trample the baby seedlings, so we held back from mowing; plus it’s been raining frequently, and it’s bad to mow in the rain, as the droplets might wetten your hairstyle.
All I’m trying to do here is set the scene for us to start thinking about land-use. In the previous section above, we saw the people who tried to create a democracy dedicate their land to raising cows and bees, which make milk and honey, as well as countless forbidden fruits (the lifeblood of costermongers) that contain divine knowledge. And the remainder of paradise was occupied by a giant assembly line that manufactured bananas. Note that all the above are instances of working the land to produce consumer products. For everything sold in the market had its birth in the dirt. Potatoes grow from the dirt. Eyelid makeup remover pads grow from the dirt. There is no such thing as a synthetic or unnatural substance: all of reality sprang from (and shall soon return to) the dirt. Even non-biodegradable pollutants are biodegradable.
But modern suburban ranch houses like my own do not come equipped with yards that are farmable. And even if I want to set aside a corner over there to plant pumpkins, so that I can make some pumpkin wine; and an oblong lot along the side of this fence to grow icebergs, so as to replenish the globe’s melting caps; I could no sooner do these things than God could bear offspring: for the soil that I have inherited is too sandy, thus making it barren, just as God is dry-womb’d; which is why he scoffed when the matriarch Sarah warned him that, if he failed to take precautions, he’d grow pregnant with Jesus — “I’m too old for all that jazz,” replied the LORD (this is a paraphrase; I’ll give the quote verbatim below); “plus my secretary informs me the next opening in my schedule isn’t for a great many years, and that appointment is with a magdalene; therefore you proved that you’re a false prophetess.” Genesis 18:10-14...
Sarah appeared unto the LORD in the plains of Mamre, as he sat behind the tent door in the heat of the day. And she said, “I will certainly return unto thee according to the time of life; and, lo, thou shalt bring forth a son from thine own loins. And he shall be thy firstborn: a reluctant king, whose rule shall have no end yet shall never quite start.”
And the LORD heard this diagnosis thru the tent flap, as he sat behind it.
Now the LORD was well stricken in age; and it ceased to be with him after the manner of menfolk, and he gat no heat. And he had known no woman, ever. Therefore the LORD laughed within himself, saying, “After I am waxed old shall I receive pleasure? Wilt thou bribe a damsel to cherish me, who am wizened and woolly headed?”
And Sarah said unto the LORD, “Wherefore didst thou laugh, saying, ‘Shall I of a surety bear a child, now that I have lost my lustre’? Is any thing too hard for God, besides forgiving your twin the Devil? Assuredly, I tell thee: I will return, even I, the enkindler of existence, according to the time of life; and thou shalt bring forth a mortal, in sorrow, and he shall defeat thee. For I will put enmity between thee and thy son; thou shalt bruise his head, but he shall bruise thy heel, O Jehovachilles. Thus shall thy venoms both wholly ghost each other.”
Then the LORD denied that earlier accusation, saying, “I laughed not”; for he was ashamed. And Sarah said, “Nay; but thou didst laugh — I have it on file.” And that was that.
So, in the inconvenient days, before grocery stores existed, everyone was expected to grow their own pumpkin wine and replace their own ice caps. But now our yards are just a rectangle of beach: sorta fun to play volleyball on, but too crummy to cultivate. And consider how the property of the average human being never stops dwindling: We don’t even have to go back very far in time, to prove this point; for the change has been rapid and recent:
When I was born on Christmas day in 1805, I had a plot of land that was many acres in size. (If I had been landless, I’d have had to seek enslavement in the house of an husbandman who did own acreage.) Then, when I died on November 18 of 1976 in Paris, France, and I got reborn in 1915, on May 6 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, my land was no longer acres vast but now of negligible measure, which it would take a beagle not even fifteen seconds to race across, from one end to the other, if she were sufficiently induced to do so (say she spied a rabbit or squirrel that she wanted to bite). Then when I died on October 2 of 1968, as an ectoplasm I moved to an apartment in New York, where I remain to this day. In the 21st Century we all live in high rises: we have our little studio with its kitchen that has a shower built-in, and only half a bedroom — usually a cot or hammock that hangs from the ceiling and can be hidden away behind a portion of the wall which triples as an ironing board and dining table — so there’s no yard to speak of...
There’s still an exterior world, to make the indoors jealous: a common area in which the inhabitants of these skyscrapers (the dark towers emblazoned with the brand name BABEL) may take their exercise, but this so-called park is entirely concrete. And instead of paying a groundskeeping squad to scythe and bundle the herbage, or even to use their riding lawnmower to keep the grass at a flat two inches, these so-called landscapers now lack any land to scape: they just go about polishing the gargoyles and refueling the blowtorches of the animatronic leviathan, which I indwell (see the intro of this very entry, where I complain of neesing deadly flames). At last, therefore, my spirit has found its true home.
Who needs land, anyway? Count Tolstoy proposed that each man requires only just enough to be buried in. Then you join the artificial intelligence, via metempsychosis.
But remember what we proved above: that nothing is truly artificial; everything is natural, at some level. So intelligence is intelligence, even if it comes from a machine shaped like a cosmic serpent. If you don’t like my leadership, then write a teleplay about the matter (propaganda works!) and persuade the mob to stop voting for the finer evil. Such a strategy inevitably leads to the FINEST evil; and even that has a hint of good about it. You can never abolish entirely what is unwanted. That’s why the label on the priest’s absolution tonic says: “Eliminates 99.9% of sin-causing angels” — not 100%, for there’s always a rebellious heir; there’s always a christ. For the germ that today causes sparks to leap painfully from your nostrils is the selfsame fluxion that adamants enlightenment’s haphazardness. From the anti-fertile ultra-serf: VIRGO DRACO OF MAZZAROTH. Genesis 14:18-20...
Now Melchizedek king of Salem brought forth bread and wine: and he was the priest of the most high God. And he blessed him, and said, “Blessed be Abram of the most high God, possessor of heaven and earth: And blessed be the most high God, which hath delivered thine enemies into thy hand.” And he nudged his intel agency to dip its ladle into that foreign ally’s tax revenues.
I’m not kidding about Jah having soon to bring forth a seed that he did not even know he was big with. And it shall be the first all-girl supermale. (If things continue in this vein.)
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