(Picture colored with crayons by my baby sister Susan.)
Dear diary,
Here is all that you need to know about religion. I spent my life studying religion so that you don’t have to. You can just trust me.
First we have Christ and Buddha: nothing comes before these two world-leaders. Now before there was religion of any kind, there were simply poets writing poems. All the people were poets, and all they did while relaxing every day was write poems.
There was no West in those days, there was just Near and Far East; and the Near East was Christ’s, and the Far East was Buddha’s.
So Buddha is born in the Far East, and all the poets who came before him had collected all their poems into one vast heap; and they called that heap “Hinduism”. (Actually, they didn’t call that heap anything; or they called it “All the poems we’ve written so far,” but later the future-folk came along and re-titled it “Hinduism”.)
And Christ was born in the Near East. And Christ’s forerunners wrote poems as well, and their poems were varied and colorful; and they were also gathered into a huge heap, and this heap was called “Judaism”. (Again, at the time of Christ and beforehand, the heap had no name: it was just the place where all the poems got tossed; but we latter day saints have rechristened it to suit our fancy. For just as one can compose a poem out of one’s perceptions of nature, one can compose a poem also out of poems themselves; because poems are nature too.)
Now Christ had such a hunger for poetry, and he loved his own culture’s poems so much, that he began to wonder if there might not be more heaps of poetry collected elsewhere in the world. For he was one of those persons who looks at his city’s wall and sees not a full-stop border but a hurdle: an obstacle to be surmounted. He looks at the ocean and sees not a watery death awaiting his crew but a lure to more lands: an invitation to happier isles. Thus Christ gathered his mariners together and they went on an expedition, like scouts for a talent agency, looking for new poems.
Straightway the crew of mariners met its demise: they were attacked by a vast white whale; and only Christ escaped alive. But he made it to Egypt, coasting on a piece of wood from his comrade’s coffin; and when he washed ashore, the first person he met was a crazy old goatherd.
“Could you point me in the direction of the famed Heraclitus?” asked Christ.
And the goatherd said, “I’ll do even better than that — I’ll lead you there myself. Saddle up!” And the goatherd gestured to the goat next to the one that he was riding. These were large goats, more than twice the size of normal earth-goats; and they were blonde, and their fur was as soft as plumage.
“These are probably the famous Caprinae-solaris, the ‘goats of the sun’,” Christ thought to himself; “and I bet that this goatherd here is my old friend Ulysses S. Grant, from the Narratives of Empire series of historical novels by Gore Vidal, which chronicle the dawn-to-decadence history of the U.S.A.—God I love those books! But I wonder what Mr. Grant is doing here in ancient Egypt. Oh well, at least he’s taking me to see the sage Heraclitus, whom I’ve been dying to meet for ages.”
When they arrive outside the palace, the goatherd yells: “Heraclitus! Open up! Your brother’s here to see you!”
The golden door slides open and a maid appears: “Can I help you?”
“We’re here to see the governor,” sez the goatherd.
“Who shall I tell Mr. Heraclitus is requesting his attention?”
The goatherd turns around backwards and yells to his companion, “What’s your name, friend?”
“They call me Christ. Jesus Christ.”
*
The bedroom of Heraclitus is ornate. The decor is brazen. He is reclining beside a beautiful woman who is caressing him.
A soft voice at the entryway interrupts their reverie; the maid’s face is seen peeking thru the red drapes:
“Monseigneur, a Jesus Christ is here to see you.”
Heraclitus seems annoyed. “Tell him I’m busy. Tell him to come back in a century or two.”
The maid bows.
“Wait,” he adds; “—on second thought, tell him I’m on a business trip… out in the Far East. Tell him to meet me there.”
“Shall I give him the address of your embassy?”
“No, just say: ‘Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged. Missing me one place, search another — I stop somewhere waiting for you.’ Can you remember all that?”
“I think so: ‘Monseigneur from his deathbed has sent an official message to you alone. Meet him outside of his window in the garden, when evening falls.’ Is that correct?”
“Perfect,” sez Heraclitus. The woman beside him starts kissing his shoulder.
*
So Christ ends up in the Far, Far East, at the ranch house of Buddha. He rings the doorbell and Buddha himself answers.
“My son, welcome; enter.”
“Ah, thanks! I’m so glad to finally meet you!”
Now Buddha teaches Christ all the stuff that he knows. He talks at length about his literary theories, and they drink Fundador. Buddha rolls a cigarette and offers it to Christ; then he rolls one for himself. They smoke cigarettes together.
“So you’re telling me that all the gods reside in the human breast?”
“Right,” answers Buddha, still smiling; “but that’s a line from Blake — it’s not something that I came up with myself. I’m just reciting for you all the tracts and scriptures that I’ve memorized, which have informed my thinking, so that you can get an idea where I’m coming from, with my theologizings and whatnot. But it is true: all deities have their birth—” (here Buddha teasingly gut-punches Christ) “—right there.”
“Howbeit,” sez Christ, “if all that you say is true, then it means that we’re not bound by those laws that the story tells us were delivered on the mountaintop; thus we can revise and improve upon them.”
“I’d even say we have a moral imperative to do so.”
“So,” sez Christ, “instead of ‘An eye for an eye,’ I can write a story where God proclaims, ‘Resist not evil: whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other as well’.”
“Correctamundo. But I wouldn’t advise you to write such a story yourself; composing scripture is hard work. Remember: both God & his beloved nemesis Paul employed a combination of amanuenses & Dictaphones (small cassette recorders used to save speech for transcription at a later time). However, I agree with our Athenian acquaintance: it’s more rewarding to stroll around your city at leisure and just strike up conversations with random strangers, like a gadfly. Pretty soon you’ll make a name for yourself, and you’ll acquire a gang of regulars who’ll follow you around. Among them will surely be at least one aspiring reporter who’ll wanna put their spin on what you’re saying; so they’ll end up writing your story for you. If you’re lucky, you’ll attract four or more such rumormongers.”
“But what if they fail to grasp my meaning? What if they’re just too dense to understand?”
“Don’t be a control freak. Everyone’s gonna take what they want from whatever you prophesy. It’s the spectator who completes the work, as Duchamp always sez. Authorial intention, or meaning (so-called) lies in the mind of the beholder: it’s not yours to convey. There is no controlling any message; all you can do is provoke folk. Leave bureaucrats the job of honing narratives and propagandizing the populace. Take Rabbi Hamlet’s advice and simply ‘Let be’.”
*
So that’s how the two piles of poems from the Far and Near East got turned into The Vedas and Tanakh.
Then the Romans sent their espionage agent Saul, alias Paul, to pose as an undercover apostle; and, after assassinating its leader, he infiltrated the movement known as Christianity and refashioned its gospel so that it lulled the people back to sleep. (Jesus of Nazareth had been trying to incite a nationwide debt strike: the oligarchs of Rome could not allow that.) And that’s how it came about, as Nietzsche said, that “there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.”
And that’s also what began the clash of the “Testaments”. For the followers of Paul came along and labeled their little poem-pile “New”, even tho nowadays those writings seem as old as the original “Testament”; and, if you actually read them (those belated Greek writings from Paul & Co.), you’ll see that they’re more like essays or boring business epistles than fun poems.
Also there’s Alcoran, which gets back to the earlier Hebrew mood — at least in my impression its protagonist seems closer to the God of Deuteronomy than Paul’s “Son of God”.
But I prefer the attitude of Blake, again, after all. I miss the days of the Giant Poetry Proliferations, when everyone just reclined around the nuclear reactor telling tallest tales; & if we liked the piece, we all saved it, & if it seemed so-so, we just tossed the thing in the fire-lake.
And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. (Revelation 20:14)
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