Dear diary,
I’m just gonna ramble in this entry; I’m just gonna relay the things I’ve been doing and thinking lately: nothing special. It’ll be like I’m off at war, and I’m writing a letter home to my beloved family.
From your kinsman Bryan, out on the battlefield, to aunt Bess and uncle Jaazaniah, along with your offspring my dear cousins Lucy & Alice, and the pet pig Clyde:
Greetings. I don’t know when, or even IF this wrinkled, rain-streaked parchment will reach you, but I am writing in the month of February, on the day after Valentine’s (I asked the woman whom I found myself in bed with this morning “Will you be my Valentine?” and she said “Yes!” so I said “Thank you so much,” and she said “You’re welcome”) in the year 7617 — note that that is the reversal of the date 1776, the old country’s birth-year. I got dropped here from a flying machine. The war is rough, I admit: we must make one box of pasta last for two meals sometimes; and every day I must shoot at people whose names I only just learned and can barely remember. Yesterday I shot at Shaphan, father of Jaazaniah; tell uncle I’m sorry, but the knave was acting like an enemy, so I had no choice in the matter. Yes, war is hell. But it’s my duty to serve my country, and for some reason, which I’m sure makes perfect sense to the bigwigs in Washington, we must remain here attempting to slaughter people and damage private property. I trust that it will ultimately make the world a better place to live.
Anyway, yesterday I finally got to watch the latest film by Errol Morris. This is the one where he interviews Stephen K. Bannon, the guy who is credited with being the genius who got the 45th U.S. Prez elected. It’s called American Dharma (2018). I just rented it from an online streaming service, cuz there’s a shortage of movie theaters out here in no-man’s-land. Most of the theaters got bombed out, long ago. I wrote to you a while back, telling you how impatient I was to see this movie: it took a long time to get released, because Morris could not find a distributor — apparently nobody wanted to touch it, because everyone so intensely hates the film’s subject, the aforesaid Mr. Bannon. I myself have a soft spot for hated people, so I was very eager to know what all the fuss was about.
Before watching it, I read a great deal about the film, which is not something I’m accustomed to doing, but this time I overindulged in pre-screening research, due to the fact of the delay in the release. In interviews, the director Morris mentioned that he structured his film around its subject Bannon’s own favorite movies; so I had already found copies of all those films and enjoyed re-screening them (most were classics I’d seen before, but I wanted to refresh my memory). I also sought out and found a number of speeches and interviews that Bannon himself had given at various places. — I learned to like Bannon, in the process, to my surprise. I even learned to love him, as a human being — I mean this sincerely: I love his voice, his style of speaking, his quick intelligence, his grasp of reality. I love his taste in movies, and I love the way he’s so eager to persuade but also to LISTEN. Maybe it was just the way that Morris’s film was framed, lit, & photographed, but it seems that when Bannon’s listening, he’s really listening intently, especially to criticism; but there also seems to be a gear somewhere in the machinery of his mind that never stops spinning for the sake of…
I was going to write “...for the sake of power” or “...of domination” or of something selfish or sinister — but then I think I’d be giving into the hype about this man. After all, I think he’s really interested in the truth, and he’d be willing to change his mind if you could convince him that he’s on the wrong track about something. The problem is that people try to change his mind about precisely the things that he’s already got correct. He’s correct about United Statesians being basically serfs in a new feudalism ruled by debt. I honestly don’t even know what exactly he’s wrong about, because nobody ever allows him to state what he proposes to DO about this awful state of affairs — they’re too busy arguing back at him that the system and its institutions, the establishment and the elites, are all OK. (I know that if I truly cared to know the man’s stance, I could attend to his own productions, podcasts and propaganda; but then, what on earth would I have to write home to you about!) However, if his solution is to embrace more tightly and enact even further the ideas associated with so-called Reaganomics, then I am wholly and staunchly against him:
In that last case, I would need to perform my own full-length movie interview with Bannon where I persuade him to make government transparent and directly democratic, and to limit both the top and the bottom of the wealth graph, and to guarantee basic needs to EVERY earthling, and then to watch the borders of nations naturally dissolve. Bannon will end my film declaring: “Dear Bryan, you have won me over — I now agree with you, and with your friend Oscar Wilde and your other friend Nietzsche: we should make poverty impossible, while assuring that thin, sharp spikes on either side of the scale, on the side of the ‘have nots’ as well as on the side of the ‘haves’, cannot exist. I like what you’re saying because you’re not pushing for some sort of bland equality where everyone remains exactly the same, economically: you’re just saying that basic needs must be unconditionally met, and the obscene wealth and the obscene poverty must vanish. That seems reasonable and correct, to me. Will you allow me to be your political strategist, in the next election for Soft Global King? I think you’d do a bang-up job.” And he would slam his fist into his palm, when voicing that hyphenated term “bang-up”, and I’d manipulate the noise of the slap, in post-production, so that it echoes loudly on the soundtrack.
Now I would like to address this next part of my letter directly to Lucy and Alice, and also to Clyde, the pet pig (but only jokingly so, in the latter case, as I’m pretty sure that Mr. Clyde doesn’t understand English):
When you begin to idolize a certain person, especially if your attraction to him is mental, by which I mean that you admire the way that he thinks, it is extremely important to note the way that he dresses, and to try to emulate that. So I suggest that we all (I use the word “we” because I expect you all to share my infatuation; for I am your kinsman, and the Bible expressly commands you to honor your relatives), I say, I suggest that we all go find ourselves some brown boots, like those boots of Bannon’s which appear in the documentary a couple times, shot in close-up; I think we need them. Also we should buy more collared shirts, and wear earthy tones beneath a dark green jacket, and I think that there were hints of tawny corduroy on certain parts of his uniform. I’m not kidding about this. If I make it home alive, please have these supplies waiting for me. Fold the items of clothing neatly, wrap them in thin paper, and place them in rectangular, cardboard boxes. But make sure that none of the tags of the clothes, or any of the boxes, have the legend “Made in Vietnam” printed upon them. This instruction of mine will make sense to you, if we ever get a chance to screen the movie together. Until then, be good to poor Clyde.
I hope you all are saving these letters that I write to you, and not just tossing them into the fireplace after you read them. You should get a binder for the purpose. Label it “Kinsman Bryan’s Epistles from the Battlefield” and keep it in a safe place, so Clyde can’t eat it.
Now in the last instant-text message that I received from you, you asked me to explain in detail all my wartime experiences. Oh my goodness! there’s far too many of them to write down — if I told you about ALL of the adventures I’ve been thru, it would fill so many books that the world couldn’t contain them: they would burst the world’s lid. But I can try to give you a taste of what the average day is like for us lowly soldiers out here in the trenches, where we live like as well as with rats.
As I said, we’re packed like rodents into these trenches. All of us are Frenchmen, but we don’t speak French: not even amongst ourselves; we only speak U.S. English. For we love the Americas. Yet we hate our commanders; and we hate this war, although we outwardly claim to believe in it. Do we actually believe it, really and truly, in our heart of hearts? I know not. A soldier must ACT, never think. We have a job to do, & we must perform it without reflection. Courage, not cowardice — that is our motto.
*
OK I’m back, dear fam, after a surprise attack, which occurred between that last sentence and this one that I’m writing now; that’s why I placed a star above (*), and that’s also why my handwriting is now shakier and there’s blood spattered on the parchment.
What happened is that about seventeen grenades came sailing into our trench from somewhere out yonder, on the other side, over the rainbow. I suspect that they were using a grenade launcher, because there’s no way that an actual enemy could have gotten close enough to our trench to toss that many explosives in by hand. We have the area immediately surrounding our trench riddled with boobytraps: Most of them are the kind that look like steel jaws, which clamp shut upon one’s leg if one steps inside. And a few are deep holes that we dug in the ground; then we covered over the surface with a woven layer of thatching made from straw (I’m referring to the dried yellow stalks of grain that one would normally use to stuff the shirt of a scarecrow, not a thin hollow tube of plastic used for sucking pure-grain alcohol from a canteen), so that, when an enemy approaches creeping thru the grass, he or she will step upon the yellow square layer of woven thatching unknowingly and fall into the pit, like Lucifer from Heaven, or the Titans into Tartarus. Most boobytraps depend upon the enemy taking a literal, physical misstep.
And if you’re wondering what each above-mentioned pit is like, I can vouch that they are even worse than Hell. And if you’re wondering exactly how deep each pit was dug, I can bear witness to the fact (because I myself helped to dig them) that they’re deeper than Hell:
. . . as far underground
as earth is distant from heaven:
such is the distance from earth’s surface
to gloomy Tartaros.
That’s a quote from Hesiod’s Theogony (lines 720-721; Lattimore translation). And here’s some further information (ibid.; 722-725):
A brazen anvil dropping out of the sky
would take nine
nights, and nine days, and land on earth
on the tenth day,
and a brazen anvil dropping off the earth
would take nine
nights, and nine days, and land in Tartaros
on the tenth day.
So, normally, these pits that we dig do a pretty good job of deterring the enemy from drawing nigh unto our trench; for what happens is that the combatant, after having stepped therein unexpectedly, will fall for nine days, and, on the tenth, with a thud, he or she will realize that the surrounding backdrop has changed to pure Hell. Finding a stack of stationary nearby, he or she will then dash off a missive addressed to his or her faction among the Forces of Evil, which will read something like: “Dear fellow ne’er-do-wells, I urge you to avoid the square yellow patches of straw which you shall encounter scattered hither & yon round the good guys’ trench, for they are traps that lead straight down to Tartarus; in other words, they are highways to Hell.” And a trustworthy mail service is well-maintained by our own country’s forces, so as to ensure that the enemy receives these important warnings from as many of their own who get hoodwinked in this fashion. That’s why it’s hard for me to believe that the recent attack was caused by a single soldier lobbing a series of explosives as if they were underhand softballs, but instead I firmly believe it was the work of a mechanized grenade launcher.
Anyway, the attack so frazzled me that now I think I’d like to renounce everything that I said up top, when I was praising the subject of Errol Morris’s recent documentary: I hereby do renounce all my former praise of Mr. Bannon. There’s something that doesn’t sit well with me, when I consider my reaction to that film, now that I’ve undergone mental trauma. So please, if you are still listening to this letter being read aloud to you in front of the fireplace by Lucy or Alice (by the way, Lucy, if I may address you directly: did you know that you were named after Lucifer, from Isaiah 14:12 “How art thou risen back up into heaven, O Lucy, daughter of the morning!” — also you might want to notify your sister Alice that she was named after Lewis Carroll’s heroine from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass; isn’t this a fascinating side-note?), I say, dear kinfolk, if you are still listening to my words, allow me to advise you: Do not go out & join Steve Bannon’s movement. I think it’d be wrong to do so. Anything negative that I said in criticism of the man, take that to heart; but all my starry-eyed hero-worship: blot that from the record — I believe I had succumbed to the charm of his charismatic sales-pitch, like when Odysseus had his mariners tie him to the mast and plug their ears while he beheld the song of the Sirens; as it were, I fell in love with the evils of his poetry, and I convinced you all to untie me, and I almost lured you to accompany me ashore, but at a crucial moment I got cold feet and shouted: “Turn back, my mariners, re-fasten me to the mast! & continue on toward the Blessed Isles...” because the shell-shock from the recent grenade attack knocked some sense into me.
I’ve already said too much, but I wanna close this letter by telling you about the alien encounter that I experienced while passed-out. For when the explosions occurred, one after another, seventeen times in a row, I lost consciousness and enjoyed a waking-dream that my Guardian Angel clearly plagiarized from Ezekiel, in the JPS translation:
My Blackout Vision
I found myself at the bottom of a pit with all my enemies. But in this nightmare, we were all actually friends, because we had forgiven each other for whatever had made us try to murder each other when we were still living, up above, on earth and in heaven.So here we all are, just hanging around and chatting near the Chebar Canal in Sheol. Then, suddenly, a hurricane bursts out of the north and rampages toward me — a huge cloud and flashing fire, surrounded by a radiance, and in the center of the fire was a gleam that looked like amber. Also in the center I could distinctly make out a number of monstrous forms. There were four of them, total. Four monsters in the midst.
Now this is how these alien monstrosities appeared: They had the physique of humans; however, unlike humans who only have one single face on their head, these monsters each had four faces apiece. And their bodies had wings. They also had legs, but all their legs were fused into a single rigid cylinder, like a pole for pogo, but it wasn’t spring-loaded. And these monsters who were thus joined at the hip, so to speak, were all covered with sparkles, and their skin was like burnished bronze: the sight resembled a lustrous children’s toy — but there was nothing funny about it; this was all dead-serious: it even almost made me cry.
Now most birds don’t have human hands underneath their wings, but this fourfold creature did. And I was trying not to stare at each monster’s bare breasts, but they kept running their hands hypnotically in graceful circles all over their torso; thus it was hard to ignore how beautiful an extra-terrestrial can be, once you get over your innate prejudices.
And these creatures, who were sorta one vast creature, which was at the same time a spaceship, flew thru the air very smoothly, in any direction, & it coasted with finesse; its movement was not all spazzy like gnats or fruit flies.
Now these faces that the creatures had — as I said, each one had four — were of different animals, like the gods of ancient Egypt: each one had a lion face on the right side, on ox face on the left, an eagle at the back, and their front face was just a regular human. And this human face, on each of the monsters, was not bad looking; I mean, they weren’t exactly handsome, but they weren’t homely either — and they became more attractive as you got to know them, probably on account of their confident mannerisms, and their wisdom and eloquence. (Smartness is a turn-on; at least that’s how I’ve always felt.)
And, in case I forgot to mention, these monsters were nude. But they had soft feathers on certain parts of their body; yet thankfully they didn’t cover their “bathing-suit areas” — the plumage was mostly on their outer arms and on the sides of their legs; kinda like those shin guards that we used to wear when playing soccer, except they were on the sides of their thighs instead of their forelegs (their legs were all fused, don’t you remember?); and these plume-zones were more for decoration, & to enhance their form, like the stripes on a race-car. In no way did these feathers mar the beings’ sensual allure; if anything, they increased it, the way that lingerie can serve to highlight the most desirable aspects of a poem.
So anyway, that’s what the monstrous forms looked like, which I saw in my dream-vision.
And here’s a curiosity: The creatures carried with them, wherever they went, something that looked like burning coals. And its fire, suggestive of torches, kept moving about among the creatures; this substance had a radiance, and lightnings kept on flashing out of it: dashing to and fro among the aliens, like flares or fireworks.
And the monsters had wheels with which they steered themselves; and all these steering wheels had lenses all over them, like the eyes of cameras; and the wheels were joined together like their Grand Unified Hoof-Leg; and their spirit willed always the same path of travel — that is, the creatures apparently did not disagree about where to drive their communal identity, which is why the wheels could be merged and not cause any creaking or friction; and the ship never veered when it flew: it always acted like it knew what it was doing. (No officer of the law could ever find a reason to command this vehicle to pull over for an inspection on suspicion of its driver being intoxicated.) And over the top of the creatures was a form: an expanse, with an awe-inspiring gleam reminiscent of crystal, was stretched overhead.
Now I can almost hear aunt Bess, always so curious about the details of how everything works, interrupting me to say:
“O my dear nephew Bryan, I’m afraid that you’ve left out the most important element of your story; for you have not yet answered the question: How does this thing fly, this monstrous living spaceship? Did it have a standard nuclear-powered engine? Or was it a hybrid like your sweetheart’s snow-white hatchback, which runs partly on battery power and partly on fossil fuel? I can’t proceed any further with my imagining of your divine vision until I know the physics of its engineering.”
Well, aunt Bess, let me tell you. I was about to get to that part in a sec. If you would have been a little more patient, we might’ve been able to avoid having this blowout argument.
Now, as far as the beings’ motor — how it was made; what materials were used; the science that informed its manner of transport; how much horsepower it possessed; etc. — all I can say is this:
Something about the way that the spacecraft functioned caused it to emit a noise like the rage of mighty waters, like a tsunami-monsoon (a tsunamonsoon), or like the din of Shaddai Cascade: infinitely louder than Niagara Falls. Yes, when the thing began to move, it made a tumult like the uproar of an army. And when the vehicle stood still, it went totally silent; and its wings would all droop.
The last thing that you need to know about my vision of these alien deities, or this alien deity (I’m unsure whether to use the plural or singular) is that within the expanse, which I told you was stretched out overhead like its own personal troposphere, there was a helmet-shaped fuselage having within it a translucent cockpit, in the midst of which was the semblance of a throne made of sapphire. And on top of this throne-like furnishing was a humanoid form. From her loins up, I saw a gleam as of amber: it looked like flames encased within a clear frame; and from her loins down, I saw what seemed to be glowing lava: like molten rubies within glass. There was a radiance all about her. This was the appearance of THE EVERLASTING, who was the pilot of the alien spacecraft. After taking one look at this marvel, I fell down on my face. The sight was too resplendent to hold in focus; but I kept trying to gaze up at it, despite fearing that I’d become blind. It was at this point that, as I explained earlier, I ended up blacking out.
When I awoke, I heard the voice of someone speaking. It turned out to be one of my new friends, whom I had met at the Chebar Canal. He was saying “Bry, what’s wrong! You keep moaning sweetly like a gazelle in rut — are you having a nightmare?”
So I thanked my comrade and explained everything I just relayed to you above, my dear kinfolk; including all the stuff about the latest Errol Morris documentary, and my brief flirtation with the views of Stephen Bannon. Then I finished writing this letter, and now I must bid you adieu, for my team needs to go sweep up after the recent grenade attack. There’s rubble everywhere, and we’re running out of dustbins. Yes, war is hell. But I’ll make it thru, don’t you worry. Bind this letter as I explained. And I’ll let you know if I get any vacation time, or if the conflict ever ends. Meanwhile, I miss you all — I send you my love. And don’t forget to feed Clyde.
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