(Sorry about this image—I just took the eyes & mouth of a swimmer from the cover of a junk-mail ad, & turned the frown upside down. I agree: it looks gross.)
Dear diary,
I’ve come to the firm conclusion that I’m against illness. I don’t like fevers or sickness of any kind. I favor health and pleasure. I like friendliness and social harmony, not catastrophe and meanness.
I can tolerate the idea of markets, if they help people; but, if they hurt people, then I wish we’d just discard them.
What is a market? I don’t know. But let me describe what the word makes me think:
A market is a square of ground containing no grass but only dirt, and the dirt is orangey in hue. You set up a table and fix an umbrella so that it shields you from the sun. Then you place your wares on the table. Anyone can visit the marketplace: you simply walk in and look around; and, if you spot some wares that you want to own, you can buy them.
HOW TO BUY WARES
Pick up a ware and ask the merchant “How much for this ware?”
The merchant answers: “Fifteen shells.”
You counter “One shell.”
The merchant bows to you and exchanges his ware for one shell. You have mastered the art of the deal.
[End of HOW TO BUY WARES]
So that’s the marketplace, in a nutshell. But what does this have to do with my new anti-illness stance? Well I’ll tell you:
My original intention was to work into my description above a scene where someone who has a slight cold tries to buy some wares, but I decided against doing so. That’s how much I’m against the concept of illness: I don’t even want to address it in print, lest it become canonized along with the rest of my writing, which is genius. Let us pass over in silence whatever cannot be praised.
*
Isn’t it curious, however, that certain creatures are born looking repulsive? Is that their fault? Does a pre-being get to choose how its face will appear once it is born? And if you choose to look beautiful, is your desire automatically met, or must you labor to achieve this goal, so that if you’re incompetent at face-planning then you end up ugly? Is there a charge, a cost, a price in the nonexistent pre-world for physical attractiveness? Does the pre-world have a marketplace? (I’m absolutely certain that the pre-world is ill.)
*
Repeatedly I’ve recorded in these pages of my journal the Spiritual Teachings of my biological sister Susan. She believes that if a person thinks positive thots then positive events will ensue. So this makes me wonder:
What happened to spiders; were they not thinking positively enough before they got born? Cuz I judge that being born as a spider is about the worst thing that can happen to you, and therefore you must have been carping, criticizing, complaining and thinking obnoxious pre-birth thots, which caused you to grow more and more spidery until BAM! you got yourself born.
On a side note: Nobody feels guilty for killing a spider. (Actually, I myself feel guilty, but I’m not a normal person.)
I think that if you were to find yourself born as a spider, you’d not think that you were ugly until someone told you so. You’d probably find other spiders attractive, but not in the way that Pierre-Auguste Renoir persuades viewers of his paintings to find his female subjects attractive; rather, as a spider, you’d respect your fellow spiders the way that a mercenary respects fellow mercenaries:
You behold your enemy. You admire their fierce appearance and their armor; all of their deadly weapons in those thick heavy holsters, and that glorious shield, so vast that it brings to mind the Aegis of Zeus — these things win over your heart, and you desire to become one flesh with their possessor, and to bear offspring upon the battlefield of hate.
*
Plus, diseases are people, too. They have a pre-birth face, and they decide how they’ll look once they mature, and whether they’ll attend an Ivy League college. So they probably have some trait in their fellow beings that they can lust after. Viruses love viruses; bacteria love bacteria; bugs love bugs — otherwise, how would illnesses reproduce? If bachelor pathogens did not find their fellow pathogens cute, they’d never court & wed them; instead, they’d end up like the Apostle Paul and his first Christians, who all died out because they did not procreate:
Now concerning the things whereof ye wrote unto me: It is good for a man not to touch a woman. For I would that all were even as I myself. I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, It is good for them if they abide even as I: chauvinistically antisexual. (I Corinthians 7:1; 7-8)
However, the merciful feature that the Devil built into this world is that anything real can always be made unreal. As Paul admits in the same epistle:
Is any man called being circumcised? let him not become uncircumcised. (I Corinthians 7:18)
So if you’re a spider, you can always un-spider yourself. Likewise if you’re an illness or a cult-member or a homely human like myself, you can always stop believing in your cause. Begin to play for the other team, mid-game.
IF YA CAN’T BEAT ’EM, JOIN ’EM
Here’s a passage from the essay “Fate” by Ralph Waldo Emerson:
One key, one solution to the mysteries of human condition, one solution to the old knots of fate, freedom, and foreknowledge, exists; the propounding, namely, of the double consciousness. A man must ride alternately on the horses of his private and his public nature, as the equestrians in the circus throw themselves nimbly from horse to horse, or plant one foot on the back of one, and the other foot on the back of the other. So when a man is the victim of his fate, has sciatica in his loins, and cramp in his mind; a club-foot and a club in his wit; a sour face, and a selfish temper; a strut in his gait and a conceit in his affectation; or is ground to powder by the vice of his race; — he is to rally on his relation to the Universe, which his ruin benefits. Leaving the daemon who suffers, he is to take sides with the Deity who secures universal benefit by his pain.
Has anyone ever done that? During the Olympics in ancient Athens, I wonder if the Minnesota Vikings football team ever decided to join the Green Bay Packers, right at the end of the game, just before the Packers scored their last goal, so that everyone could be a winner.
I think that this would be a good strategy: if humans and viruses could learn to coexist. We could make a pact with them, saying: “Behold, all that humankind hath is in thy power; only upon its surd put not forth thine hand. In plain speech: Just don’t utterly destroy us.” So if the viruses agree to refrain from annihilating our atoms, they can invade our bodies and live inside of us, like we all do to God and Christ.
“We dwell in God, and he in us; for he hath given us of his Spirit.”
—John the Evangelist (I John 4:13)“As I live, ye shall live also: I am in God, and ye in me, and I in you.”
—Jesus the Christ, in St. John’s Gospel (14:19-20)“You put your disease in me. It helps me. It makes me strong.”
—Dorothy Vallens, from the film Blue Velvet (1986)
But I can’t help being prejudiced against illness, because I really don’t like the idea of us trying to live together. I’d rather win this game of life, and pulverize our parasitical stowaways. Score the requisite touchdowns so that the virus loses the championship. Make them refrain from competing next season.
Cuz I like when people are strong, and their skin looks healthy & smooth. I prefer for people to be in full bloom: in perfect physical condition; fit as a fiddle; hale & hearty; robust; aerobicized: I’m talking tip-top condition.
But then illness appears and makes everything slow down. (Time nosedives when you’re having unfun.) Illness causes your skin to look bad, and it makes you tired. You no longer want to go chase bears at the park; you just sit and stare at the wall. Then you die.
*
And all that pain that you felt before dying: where did that go? What good does the pain in sickness that precedes one’s expiry do for the world? Is someone gathering up all this suffering that we’re forced to feel privately and storing the substance like grain in a silo, for reuse later?—Is it like money? Is pain the coin of the nonexistent realm?
“I want all my garmonbozia (pain and suffering).”—the ‘Man From Another Place’,
in the 1992 film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
*
I buy into the fairy tale about humankind beginning from humbler origins. But it’s funny because I also buy into the myth about God being a mirror that shattered itself into everything that lives, and humans are the most advanced remnant of this now-nonexistent divinity.
Are those two notions contradictory? Or can that first idea, the one that sees humans as the result of lesser beings progressing toward greatness, be reconciled with the second idea: that Mirror-God was great but then she shattered, and now all the shards are trying to magnetize themselves back up to exuberance again?
The answer is that the views are easily reconcilable: for the first-mentioned of those two guesses concerns the story from the point after which the looking-glass besplintered itself. Capisce? Alright, let’s move on…
I fear that my favorite type of creature, humans, came from something like viruses or bacteria in the beginning. That’s why I have a hard time with my anti-illness stance: I can’t feel comfortable eradicating all disease, since it’s like killing my own beloved forebears & ancestors. Additionally I fear that if humankind ever goes extinct, which it seems to be wanting to do pretty soon (I give it a couple more decades of party-time, tho, before the cops come & haul it to Ur-life), that, after humans are gone, the little beings will dutifully continue our abandoned process towards apotheosis: all the viruses bacteria pathogens bugs & germs, all these fuck·o·nauts will be the building blocks of THE NEW LIFE (“La Vita Nuova”) on account of the fact that they love existence so intensely.
I’m saying that if we annihilate all the world’s plagues, we’ll be committing genocide against our own heir(s). And I’m on the fence about whether this is a good idea or not:
Should one destroy one’s throne, to prevent anyone else from ever inhabiting it? —That’s a tough question to answer, for me; cuz I’m still a bit enraged about the fact that we somehow lost the Ark of the Covenant. I think I’d actually prefer that things NOT be obliterated, even if that means that we have to let the…
No, no, no. I was going to end that last thot by saying “we have to let the latest illness run its course.” But I totally disagree with this idea, the instant I endorse it. Cuz it should be OK for humankind to win the fight, and to become the LORD. Every jerk shall be allowed to serve some part of a term as president, sooner or later: that’s what it sez in the U.S. Constitution, unless they’ve amended it. We shouldn’t let pity for our own originators lure us to kiss the ring of this upstart, this usurper...
CONCLUSION
Kill the plauge, that’s my final answer. If we feel any compassion for this virus that is ravaging our loved ones, we should remember, while actively working to thrust it abyss-ward, those lines from “Song of Myself”, by Walt Whitman, from the part where section six turns into section seven:
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?
I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.
Thus, don’t be afraid to rise up & join me in conquering all illnesses so that humankind may fuse via solidarity & mutual forgiveness to re-form THE EVERLASTING ONE in the future zone of Eternity.
(I wrote that last sentence only as a joke, but I still kinda dig it.)
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