Dear diary,
We become slaves to our own inventions. — I’m sure that this is not the first time that such a thot has been thunk, but I never claimed to be an original thinker: I only promised you that I’d jot down my philosophications every morning; and this morning I happened to wake musing about how we invent things to make life easier but then we love them so much that we can’t live without them; thus we’re allowed a brief interval where an invented amenity seems luxurious, after which it quickly becomes another nagging necessity.
Now, I could stop this essay right here, since it already illuminated how technology, which was created to be our servant, ultimately becomes our overlord: it therefore accomplished more in just 69 words than most essays do in that many pages. But I want to probe deeper. I want to ask:
How is this role-reversal possible?
I myself blame flux. We beings are snared within constant change.
It would be easier to avoid getting tangled in our own web, if the ground underneath us would ever stop shifting. But this old chaos of the sun does not permit us to remain absolute. One rule for both atom & Adam is impermanence, which funnels us toward the doom of mutation. Darwin’s darling: Evolution.
This idea (evolution) is still controversial, at least among the churchgoers who comprise my family here in the U.S.; for they believe that it is not consistent with true religion, and that the Word of God as revealed in the King James Bible takes priority over all other knowledge. Having even mentioned that infamous ‘E’-word, I can already sense smoke ascending from the red ears of my relatives. So now I address you doubters and sullen mopers directly (I take my place among you as much as among any): Is this concept so offensive that you feel the need to sue me in the court of law? Please don’t. Let me instead try to soothe your anger by explaining what I mean, plainly and slowly.
The idea is that we creatures evolve over time. Consider the logic of a common example:
As we live in a cold climate, if we bear babies that have no hair, they freeze to death. Now a frozen babe does not yield fruit after his kind, “whose seed is in itself,” upon the earth: No, a dead child remains unproductive. But if we bring forth an infant who is hairy all over, so that it resembles an unshaven chimp, then this child will survive the cold climate and bring forth life after its own image, and God will see that it is good. That’s evolution, in a nutshell.
And the LORD said unto Rebekah, “Two nations are in thy womb, and two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels; and the one people shall be stronger than the other people; and the elder shall serve the younger.”
Then when her days to be delivered were fulfilled, behold, there were twins in her womb: And the first came out with orange fur all over, like an orangutan; and they called him Achilles; then, after that, his brother Odysseus slipped out, and he wore no such hairy garment but was smooth like a serpent, and very subtle; and his jaws were found to be clutching Achilles’ heel. (Genesis 25:23-26)
Alright, but say that I live in Hyperborea (as I do), which is very, very cold, because it is located in the extreme north, way above ancient Athens; and I produce asexually (as I did) the first virgin-birth since Christ; and I name my son Zinn, after the historian Howard Zinn; and this lad is hairless except for a jet-black plume atop his head. And let’s also give him a handlebar mustache.
Now what should we say? For, look: the lad’s skin is blue, perhaps because he’s so chilly. Will he survive? — Here is the answer:
Since he’s my only begotten son, I love my boy so much that I am willing to slay a sea lion and swaddle him in its coat (its skin or whatever: the epidermis) so that little Zinn stays warm. Now, at first, my son Zinn thanks me profusely, for he was born with the faculty of speech (he had mastered the English language when he was just a zygote); so, instead of shivering all day and eventually dying, as was his wont before I invented his winter coat, he now luxuriates in our igloo and reads The Tempest over and over, fancying himself as Ariel and myself as Prospero.
But here’s my point: Because I am his savior, my son Zinn is able to live & reproduce his own being, also asexually, in yet another virgin-birth, following my lead in gestating the offspring in his left calf. However, since he will pass on his malady of full-body baldness, the ritual of sea-lion sacrifice will extend as long as his royal line occupies the White House (which is what we nicknamed our igloo).
So Zinn’s original dilemma — his tendency to freeze to death — was solved by slaughtering a houseguest; but this solution could be seen as a boon only for an instant, after which it became yet another sad “fact of life”. It’s now just a sacrament, an evil ceremony.
Thus Zinn’s own son Finn (named after Huck) will see his familial overcoat not as a stroke of luck but as a drag.
Now Finn’s son Twin (Zinn’s grandson) remarks to his mirror:
“Father Finn, Father Finn! tell me truly: why must we slay our good friends the sea lions who serve us gin fizzes in our igloo? They are kind creatures & gentle; I dislike murdering them — I’d rather die than do so. If there is no alt-route, I shall refuse to reproduce.”
[A “fizz”, by the way, is a mixed-drink variation on the older “sours” family of cocktail; its defining features are an acidic juice, such as lemon or lime, and carbonated water.]
Then Finn lies, of course, “just to keep in practice,” as he answers:
“O Twin, my son! O Twin, my son, my son! would God that our manservant Santa Saulus the Sea Lion had been spared, and that the Real Me Myself had given up the ghost and draped its spirit upon thy blue flesh in his pelt’s stead, but, alas, that’s the way that the LORD chose to break this world, O Twin, my son!”
*
So I wonder which is the better way to go: Should we keep trying to make this nightmare a better place to suffer in, or should we let ourselves expire until life gets easy? Cuz we could either keep sewing negligees for ourselves so that we can survive in the woods, OR we can let everyone croak who isn’t at least as hairy as a whale.
(I understand that the whale is a bad example of a big-hair mammal; but have you ever seen a regular elephant and then compared it to a woolly mammoth? — well, when I said “whale” I was thinking of some ancient, extinct ancestor of that species: something more like a velvety leviathan.)
That is to say, if we find that it’s too much of a headache to produce enough electricity to control the mood-lighting of everyone’s mansion, and there’s not enough fast cars and “ladies of the night” to go around, then we should just continue to die of natural causes until a babe is finally born with lightning naturally present in its fingertips; no need for a climate-controlled superstructure, since this distant offspring of ours carries a vast shell on its back, and it has wheels under its tummy, with a built-in low-emission exhaust system; plus a crude oil pump for a tail, so that it can just naturally suck the earth’s resources straight to its gut, which serves as a refinery; also well-paid escorts will be a part of its substance innately: they will share the same being, so that procreation can be performed without recourse to exterior souls, thus virtually eliminating the need for any monetary transactions.
But if we grow from ourselves every single support that we need, then we’ll become the world entire, and we’ll have no one else to talk to, and nothing to say; so we’ll begin to value the aspects within us that remind us most poignantly of our former, impoverished existence: the hermit crab will be our favorite interior resident, since he has the courage to leave himself vulnerable while he looks for a suitable shell to call his new home.
And let us not forget how pleasant the condition of neediness can be. For if you hadn’t lacked lime for your morning gin fizz, you would never have taken the trouble to visit your neighbor’s yard in Mexico, to glean fresh fruit from his orchard; thus you would never have had a chance to meet your neighbor’s wife and his maidservant, who happened to be lying there in the grass. And all those children that you begot upon each other ended up doing well in school, and they all married into money, so that they were able to live long in the land that you bequeathed them. And they became mighty nations. Now they need nothing, for they are so rich that even the gods in heaven envy them.
War is a leisure activity now, as peacetime was legislated away. They teach their most docile animals to compete in blood-sport: There is an arena where even cows street-fight to the death. Their land’s most powerful leaders can be recognized by the garments they wear: for they train local sea lions to act as their butlers; then they butcher them when the beasts are in their prime, and they drape themselves in their viscera.
And they believe in eating the flesh and blood of their deities. That’s another reason the gods all covet their lifestyle — lo, the immortals simply cannot experience hunger, as they’re perfect in every way, so their physical form lacks any use for a stomach; therefore the thot of killing a creature with their own fangs, drinking its blood from a goblet, & passing it around to all the members of the Pantheon till everyone’s taken a sip, is abhorrent to them; not because they do not believe in barbarity, but because they have no faith.
Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. (Hebrews 11:1)
The gods see everything, thus they don’t hope: they just KNOW. So they’re nauseated by the idea that they should consume their own heavenly fathers. All they can do is gaze down from their thrones inside the Celestial Court & mutter peer-to-peer criticisms about what the humans are doing, down there on Earth. And nobody can hear what these cosmic judges say except their own solemn selves; and they argue a lot about the value of the ongoings below them, but they’re impotent to do anything about it, since things are disjointed in reality. Therefore, I guess, in a way, the gods DO enjoy lack. They lack pretty much everything that makes life worth living.
EPILOGUE
I guess I’m a run-of-the-mill contrarian. No matter what it is, I’m against it (as Groucho Marx always sez).
So, imagine that you & I walk into a church. We see the congregation gathered before the altar. And there’s a statue of a feline on the altar, and they’re painting its fur with thick, gooey, exterior house-paint. In this case, I would raise my voice and say:
“What’s going on here, people?”
And they’d answer: “We are painting our pussycat green. Because the LORD has charged us either to perform this pious act, or to paint the cat purple. We believe that the sacred scriptures have instructed us to choose between these two royal hues.”
& I’d say: “Perhaps you people should paint your pussy purple.”
Cuz I’d be thinking: If you’re dressed so stupidly, & you’re obviously having zero fun, and THIS is what you think that you should do, maybe it’s time to try the polar opposite of your initial mistake. How else will you know what is able to ward off unloveliness? For none of the good parts of your scripture are coming true; only the wretched parts: wars and plagues… So if the choice is either green or purple, and you can only choose one or the other, like a stiff toggle switch, then I vote purple, only because you all voted for green.
*
Or, better yet, don’t paint the cat at all — just leave it alone. It probably just wants to slink down into the meadow, sit by the stream & watch the water flow by; then plash the surface with its fore-paw, pull up a fish, eat the fish & clothe itself in its scales; then pounce on a songbird, eat its heart & don its plumage as a shaman. Now it owns voodoo techniques that allow the cat to domesticate even hominids.
Yes, it will keep humankind confined as its pet. It will never let it out of the bag again.
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