Finish

[Originally written for the September 18th 2012 edition of Write Club, where I soliloquized on “Finish” against Ian Belknap’s “Start.” Mine was the moral victory. In any case, a fitting post for Easter.]

When I was a child of 11 or 12 I was given, by my parents, the soundtrack of Jesus Christ Superstar for Christmas. Even though I had already decided by this young age that there was no god or heaven, I was still obsessed by one particular section, very near the end: Jesus is moaning on the cross, his senses bewildered by all sorts of buzzes and cackles and demonic chanting, until finally he says “It is finished. Father, into your hands, I commend my spirit.” And there the track abruptly ended, buzzes and cackles and all. In the sudden silence it felt a little as though the whole world had ended. I was fascinated and terrified by the magical finality of this ending. He said those words, and then ceased to be. I would lie awake at night convinced that if I too were to utter those same words, then I too would cease to be. My non-existent soul would be claimed by this non-existent Father, just as non-existent Jesus’s was. I was even a little afraid I might say the words by accident. In hindsight, it was probably a bit of wish fulfillment, as most fears are.

When we talk about being finished, we’re talking about being dead. Or not being dead, rather—you can’t actually be dead; to be dead is to not be. There is no aspect or quality of “being” called deadness. You can’t exist in a deadish fashion, deadily. Our grammar just breaks down if we try. We can’t even say that “so and so died.” Dying isn’t something that you can do, because, it’s the end of “you.” By the time you get to the end of the sentence the subject is already gone. You start out with an Abbot and Costello routine—Who died? And you end up babbling like Vinny Barbarino: What… Where … I’m so confused!

We are compelled by language to think of death as just some new state of extreme inactivity. I’ll sleep when I’m dead, we say, when our death doesn’t actually seem so close. I will miss you, we say when it does. We just can’t get it through our dumb dying heads that there will be no I or we to sleep or miss or even to not sleep and not miss. We will be finished, except no we won’t because if you are, if you are being, then you are not finished. It’s called grammar. Just go ahead and try to argue with it.

Meanwhile, for every single thing except for us—except for you and me and everyone else that couldn’t be here today—we have this law of conservation of matter and energy, so that nothing ever ceases to be, it just turns into something else. For every single thing except for us, nothing is ever finished. The story of every single thing except for us can never end; there’s always something more to say, some story within a story. For a while it looked like the universe was ultimately headed toward a state of entropy or heat-death, but now we have these “multiverses”, an infinite number of worlds—each with its own conditions of suspended disbelief. And that makes even our heat death universe just a little bit more suspenseful. Because maybe we’re actually in the universe where everything crawls to a complete standstill for eons and eons, and then one day a bunch of balloons and crepe streamers fall from the sky celebrating our one trillionth millennium of the perfectly distributed stasis of all matter and energy. I mean you just can’t know.

Speaking of crepe streamers, I am reminded that roughly around the same time I was lying awake making sure not to accidently Commend My Spirit, I was attending an elementary school whose students carried on a tradition of flying crepe streamers out the window of the bus on the last day of school. Not the last day of school—there’s still such a thing as school, school still exists—but the last day of the school year. In all my life I have probably never participated so fully in a ritual as I did flying those streamers out the window of that school bus. To this day crepe streamers have a mystical quality to me, archetypal and primordial in their perfect, tightly coiled state of origin. The dry, rustle as we unfurled them out the window to catch the mild June afternoon breeze seemed to be an involuntary gasp of anticipatory joy, and for the entire bus ride home the streamers’ fluttering, like Tibetan prayer flags, seemed to liberate us from time and everyday reality. The whole bus, and all of us in it, had become a benevolent dragon from some Madeleine L’Engle book. School was over and what lay before us was the eternal forever of summer.

And then summer ended and school returned, and there were a few rituals for that too, new school clothes, new school books, new sharpened pencils for writing on clean white new school pages, we were starting over, being reborn, but not entirely convincingly. It nagged a little that what we had so triumphantly put behind us three months hence was back, unvanquished after all, undead, like that Jesus guy. School, like that Jesus guy, had something more to say, and it was good news only in the way that Brussels sprouts were good, or good manners were good, which is to say very, very bad.

Only we can ever really end, only you and me and everyone else that couldn’t be here today. Everything else just goes on, or turns into something else, is reminded of some new important thing to do or be or say, and it’s a fearsome thing, to be finished with something that’s not finished with you. This is what maybe was so memorable about that scene from Jesus Christ Superstar—the dude just winked out like a light. And it was really finished, except no it wasn’t! he came back, and did more stuff, and according to John of Patmos at least, he’s going to do even more stuff later. And we have to keep hearing about it. It is so manifestly not finished…

At this point Scheherezade lapsed into silence. Her sister Dunyazade said to her, “what an unusual and entertaining story, sister. If you are not too sleepy, will you tell us what became of this strange, unsatisfied man and his oratatory contest?” “With the greatest pleasure” said Scheherezade. “But this story is nothing compared to the one I will next relate: The tale of the three wise judges…”

Adelaide's Fork

[I read this piece at the Ray's Tap Reading Series on March 16, 2013. The evening's theme was "Manners, Please."]

It is said that at meals the Holy Roman Empress Adelaide would hold aloft her fork midway between palate and plate. It was the custom in 10th century Europe for those dining with the King and Queen to stop eating when their Sacred Imperial Majesties set down their utensils. Adelaide, who had the appetite of a sparrow, knew her guests would starve if she indicated she was done eating prematurely, so she would pantomime in this manner, her fork extended in the air, as though posing for a painting.

Adelaide died in the year 999, and thus was not able to attend--or strike a pose at--Judy Chicago's 1979 installation piece, The Dinner Party, now on permanent exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, a piece featuring place settings for 39 women from history and folklore: Sappho, Judith, Ishtar, Emily Dickinson, Margaret Sanger, and 34 others. Adelaide did, however, somehow connive to have her name inscribed on a porcelain tile on the floor on which the banquets tables rest, the “Heritage Floor,” bearing the names of 999 women in all, also drawn from history and folklore, and chosen to contextualize and support the 39 guests of honor.

Adelaide was canonized by Pope Urban II in 1097, but before she was Saint Adelaide, or even Empress Adelaide, she was just plain old "Addie from the Burg," Adelaide of Burgundy, named for the Kingdom where she was born―and, not coincidentally, of which her Dad, Rudolph II, was King. Judy Chicago was born Judith Sylvia Cohen in 1939. It was the custom at that time for children to take the family name of their fathers. In 1959, she took the name Judy Gerowitz, upon marrying her first husband in California, where it was the custom for women to take the family name of their husbands. When she remarried in 1965, instead of taking, this time, the name of her new husband, she took, in defiance of custom, the name of her city of origin.

It is the custom in the city of Chicago in 2013 not to deceive those who have entrusted us with the privilege of delivering our orations unto them. Great was the gnashing of teeth and rending of raiments when performance artist Mike Daisey tried to use "poetic license" to justify bending the facts for rhetorical purposes in his one-man show The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. (The title of which being a play on Irving Stone's 1961 biographical novel of the life of Michelangelo.) The popular radio program This American Pledge Drive devoted an entire hour atoning for the social transgression of excerpting the show, crooked facts and all. So I would like to pause here to acknowledge that it was not actually a fork that Adelaide extended in the air, but a knife. Though the table fork was used in the 10th century by nobles in Persia and the Middle East, it was not customary in Northern Europe until as late as the 18th century. To eat using anything but ones fingers in the time of Adelaide was just in bad taste. I said fork, earlier, because it fits our social sense of what the facts should be better than a knife would have. But I want you to know, it was not a fork. It was a knife.

*** 

The custom of naming children according to the paternal family name is a troublesome one, and--second wave feminism notwithstanding--it would be no less troublesome if the convention was exchanged for its matrilineal equivalent, since in either case the family name of one of the parents must be effaced from history. We speak of names and bloodlines as though they were the same, but blood and words do not follow the same rules. Biology and culture do not follow the same rules. Some might say this is why we have culture in the first place―to liberate us from the shackles of biology, of the blood, that realm wherein nothing can be named, but only experienced, in a pulsing crush of now-ness. Each parent gives each child half of its genetic confabulation, but this does us little good when it comes to saying who each of us are. Sure, we're all children of the mitochondrial Eve, but try writing that in your next artist's bio. Try telling that to the person behind the counter when you renew your drivers license

It is the custom today in certain parts of Brooklyn, New York, to try to circumvent this problem by naming one's child after both parents. So Sally Smith and Tom Jones have a baby girl, who they name Eliza Smith-Jones. But what happens when Eliza Smith-Jones grows up and marries Ebenezer White-Brown? According to custom, their child will take the name Smith-Jones-White-Brown, and when little Jedediah Smith-Jones-White-Brown grows up and marries Bryce Miller-Rodriquez-Anderson-Sanchez, well, you can see where this goes. This is a custom that, to quote my good friend, Michael of Brooklyn, just doesn't scale.

We can easily reconcile the conflict of blood and bloodline, of culture and nature, as Judy Chicago did, by simply abandoning the whole concept of of genealogy, a concept whose social value may have outlived its usefulness. After all, who really cares who David Bowie's parents were? Or Amiri Baraka's? Or Marilyn Monroe's, or Madeleine Kahn's, or Louis CK's? However, my purpose here is not to solve your problems but rather to exacerbate them. I seek to raise blisters. In the realm of ideas--which is to say in the realm of customs, of manners--we accomplish very little if we are not prepared to exaggerate. A name cannot convey everything that we are. It conveys one thing only, with terrifying reduction. If we're feeling clever, we can employ a portmonteau, whose secret code points in two directions, like Texarkana, or spork, or sexcapade. But only two directions. Sometimes three, as with flounder, which is a collision of flounce and blunder, with an echo of founder for good measure. But even here, pointing in three directions, we are talking about a number so many fewer than infinity. In fact, if my math is right, three is infinity fewer than infinity.

You see the pickle we're in, the predicament, the predicklement. We cannot stop the world without names. We cannot transcend the muteness of the ever-flowing now until we implant something in it with just a little staying power, lodging it into the endometrium of the eternal ever-flowing now. And from this implantation grows everything we have ever known and everything we will ever know: language, law, economics, ethics, art, religion, theater, ads on buses, book jacket blurbs, facebook memes, reading series, mustaches... which is to say all the different kinds of manners our species can devise. But just how real can any of it be? Compared to the infinitely ever-flowing now, just how profound, how true, can something as one-dimensional as an identity, as a name, ever hope to be?

 *** 

Bronzino's famous painting “Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time” is notable for, among other things, the use of the figura serpentina, that twisted and extended presentation of the human form into a spiral pose. Long before cubism, Bronzino and the other mannerist painters used this and other exaggerated techniques to show that which could not be represented with the techniques of classical naturalism. Torsos with both breasts and buttocks simultaneously vectored toward the viewer. Background figures with no fealty to classical perspective or unity of light and shadow. The mannerist painters knew that the word “grotesque” has its roots in the greek word krytpe, the hidden; the concealed. In order to display what was real and true, they had to portray those things which would never emerge in the natural, phenomenal world, not even given a thousand eternities. Things that may only come to be when they are contorted, extended, stretched, embroidered, masked, mocked.

That story I told of Adelaide, with first her fork, then her knife, I really don't know what utensil she used, don't know if that bit about having to stop eating when the Queen stopped is true, don't know if when she held her knife or fork aloft in the air, she also twisted her torso so her breasts and buttocks were pointing in the same direction, don't know, don't much care. I do care, just a little, that someone just told you a story about it, and that someone happened to be me, whoever that is.

Constitution: A Ghost Story

[Written for Lucky Pierre's America/n, a "13-hour Election Day discussion/performance of the Constitution" at Chicago's Defibrillator Gallery, November 6th, 2012. All of the presentations from the event were later published in book form by Half Letter Press. ]

So many of the basic concepts associated with our history were presented to us at such a young age that it can be very difficult for us to see them afresh. For example: Who were the authors of Constitution and Declaration of Independence? Some fellows called The “Founding Fathers,” we reflexively utter. To the extent we give it any thought at all, most of us take this term to indicate those men who founded, built, or established, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and so on and so forth. 

But I’m afraid we have fallen victim here to a bit of folk etymology. Sometimes the obvious definition is not the correct one. For instance, our word to “buttonhole” is a misrendering of “button-hold,” a little loop that holds down a button on a garment. And in the context of pinning someone down with your scintillating conversation, it makes much more sense this way, despite the etymological corruption. So too in the case of these men we call “Founders”: Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, Sam Adams, John Jay, Roger Sherman, Patrick Henry—the whole lot, were actually foundlings, abandoned by their mothers and left to die of exposure, only to be rescued and raised by wolves. 

Happily, the proper recovery of this term can give us important new insights to help understand this most essential of foundational documents, from which so much of our national philosophy, psychology, and jurisprudence springs forth.

***

One of the main functions of a constitution is to locate sovereignty. We’ve deposed the Prince, the traditional residence of sovereign power, necessitating a new home for it. In searching for this home, the first question we may ask is whether our sovereignty is  unitary or federal. Unitary sovereignty is centralized; federal sovereignty is distributed among states or provinces. (This can be a little confusing to those of us who paid attention in history class, because the original Federalists—people like Alexander Hamilton and James Madison--actually opposed the “federalist” model, which they felt was inadequate to the job of effective governance. The first American government, promulgated under the Articles of Confederation, was too decentralized, they argued, while the Anti-Federalists—in other words those who supported the federalist model—argued that placing too much power in a centralized unitary government would only lead to a resurgence in the kind of tyrannical oppression the Revolution had just thrown off. Monarchy again, in all but name.)

Where, then, is our sovereignty located?  Is it in “The People,” in the several states, in the Federal government, in the foundling document itself?

***

The typical wolf litter is around 5 to 6 pups. A female wolf has around 8 to 12 breasts. It is rare thing in nature for a wolf litter to number higher than the total amount of its mother’s breasts. But it is also a rare thing in nature for a group of human infant boys to simultaneously be abandoned by their mothers and left to die of exposure, only to be rescued and suckled by wolves until they are strong enough to fend for themselves. We owe our origin as a nation to a very unique historical event, precipitated by Oracular pronouncements that these infant boys would cause great upheaval (as they did). We don’t know exactly how many She-Wolves there were on hand to suckle the Foundling Fathers; that has been lost to history. We do know that at a certain point, the feeding of the Foundling Fathers was supplemented by woodpeckers and other birds. Nothing in the historical record indicates that any of the Foundling Fathers were lost to malnutrition or starvation. But it seems fair enough to surmise that—at least at first—the Foundlings experienced a great deal of anxiety over the impression that there were just not enough nipples to go around—a pathology universally glossed over in the many myths and fairy tales of Foundling heroes.

We can see the remnants of this anxiety reflected in the debate, in the pages of the Federalist Papers, and later at the Constitutional Convention itself, over whether or not to enumerate a Bill of Rights. Hamilton felt that the presence of enumerated rights would imply that any unenumerated rights would be presumed not to apply, which would lead to Tyranny. Anti-Federalists, in turn, argued that enumerating no rights whatsoever would guarantee Tyranny from the start. In both cases it is important, for our present purpose, to mentally substitute for the word rights, the word nipples; and for the word tyranny, a Deprivation of Nipples.

This is our founding document. We should know the minds of the men who wrote it, what their concerns, preoccupations, and even obsessions were. What we discover is that they were so fixated on whether or not there were going to be enough nipples that they never really got around to solving the problem of where sovereignty resided in our system of governance.

Orthodox historians will tell you that the lack of a clear solution owes to a stalemate between the opposing philosophical views of the Federalists and Anti-Federalists, but this view overlooks what all the Foundling Fathers had in common—that they were foundlings! It is much more parsimonious to suggest that they were spending so much energy on nipple anxiety that there wasn’t enough left over to creatively solve the problem of where sovereign power lies. So they fudged it, as in Amendment 10:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

In other words, some sovereignty is delegated to the States, or possibly to the citizens of those states (to whatever extent these constitute a separate political entity), except that more powers may be granted back to the central government at any time by constitutional amendment, which may be proposed by either Congress or a majority of states. Are we clear?

At the heart of The Constitution and Bill of Rights is this paradox: If Sovereignty resides in the People (“popular sovereignty”), then what do we even need government for? Isn’t need of a structured legislative, executive and judicial branch all the evidence you would require for the absence of sovereign power? A mob is not sovereign, nor is any random collection of people in a subway car. On the other hand, if Sovereignty resides in the Government, then what do we need Democracy for? Why should the “will of the people” be any more germane to our welfare than it was to the divine emperors of China or the Holy Roman Empire?

A corollary paradox: if the People who reside in the Several States are the same People who reside in the United States—as they must be—and Sovereignty resides in the People, then how can the states and the Federal government be at cross purposes? After all, each is the political expression of the same sovereignty. Why even have a debate over Federalism at all, if we are taking any of this seriously? Furthermore, if there really is such a thing as “The People;” if we are, as the Preamble says, a unitary “We the People” and not a collection of many peoples or persons, then again I ask what the point of Democracy is. One People, One Vote? 

In that one first phrase in the Preamble, “We the People,” are so many confusions sown. Being united is, you will notice, something that we can’t stop talking about. We’re obsessed with submerging our selfhood into a greater whole, like reverse mitosis. To be united, after all, is more than to merely be allied, or in league, or in solidarity; it is to be fused, like two neighboring vertebrae that have insufficient cartilage between them to continue to function independently. Good fences make good neighbors. “United We Stand, Divided We Fall” is the motto of the codependent family, terrified above all that one member will stand up for herself in a healthy way, disclose the family secrets on Wikileaks, expose the damage, call for accountability. “We must all hang together,” said Benjamin Franklin, “or we will assuredly hang separately.” Well, speak for yourself, Ben.  

This is just the kind of confused pathology one would expect to emerge out of the trauma of being abandoned and left to die, then being suckled by an indeterminate number of she-wolves, and fed by woodpeckers who never seemed to come around often enough, but it never seems to be the right time to bring this up, even now, 233 years after the fact. There’s always some emergency, and if it’s not being abandoned and left to die it’s being taxed without representation by the Imperial British monarchy, or being attacked by Indians, or Spaniards, or the Kaiser, or the bomb-throwers in Haymarket Square, or, Somebody just blew up the USS Maine, or launched Sputnik, or embargoed our oil, or, Violent extremists have taken over the Civil Rights movement, they want to steal your car radio and screw your daughter, or, Somebody just tried to detonate his underwear. There is always some kind of urgent crisis.

And so we eternally fail to confront the fact that we are living in an incomplete, unidimensional political landscape. It all sounds good until you get outside the bubble and start to realize how much doesn’t add up, how much is missing.  We got the One For All part, but we left out the All For One part. We got “From each according to his abilities” but we left out “To each according to his means.” And this makes it inordinately difficult to see actual hardship, privation, or injustice when it resides in an individual citizen or household. We can’t see the trees for the forest; the persons for The People.

***

Foundlings need to survive, and to keep from going crazy they often need to make up elaborate fantasies. But once these fantasies serve their purpose, they tend to just get in the way. At a certain point, these fantasies become useless fictions. Ghosts. 

One of the ways you can tell that the Constitution is a ghost-filled place is that the Supreme Court is always trying to have séances with it. It’s common practice when the Court convenes for Justice Scalia to actually drag out a Ouija board and try to contact the Spirit of the Original Intent of the Words of the Constitution. Scalia, like all originalists, believes that the We The People Ghost of 1789 is real, and trods the earth in chains, like poor Jacob Marley. (Little known fact: Before every session of the Supreme Court, Scalia makes sure to have an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, and a fragment of underdone potato for dinner the night before.)

As easy as it is to expose this position to the mockery it deserves, let’s not forget that the opposite interpretation, the “Living Constitution” of the loose constructionists, is just as spooky and supernatural. In 1920, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that the words of the Constitution

have called into life a being the development of which could not have been foreseen completely by the most gifted of its begetters. It was enough for them to realize or to hope that they had created an organism… The treaty in question does not contravene any prohibitory words to be found in the Constitution. The only question is whether it is forbidden by some invisible radiation from the general terms of the Tenth Amendment. (my emphasis)

We have on the one hand, the originalists communing with the One True Spirit who knows the Letter of the Law, and on the other hand, the loose constructionists Kabbalistically poring over the letter of the law in hopes of raising the Spirit that resides there. We are, in each case, spooked, haunted by our Constitution, forgetting it is an artifact of our own imagination, forgetting it was written under extreme duress, bordering on madness. Like those letters we would write to our friends, fresh out of college, right after we got dumped by the love of our life, and we were heading to Wyoming to become fire watchers. There was some good stuff in those letters, some good, wise, courageous stuff that holds up even today. It’s a good thing we saved them! But--we forget at our peril--we, the writers of those letters, were bonkers. Just like those Foundling Fathers.. We should humbly and sincerely thank them for what they have given us. But we should also consider that the custom of revering a political philosophy created by men raised by she-wolves and fed by woodpeckers may be due for gentle revision. We, the Parented, the Well-Fed, the Nurtured, the Sane, the Confident, the Hopeful, the Unhaunted.

On Empire

[Written for Write Club, a monthly reading series in Chicago that pits writers against each other cage wrestling style. In this bout I presented for "Empire," against "Revolution."]

Good evening, Ladies and Gentlemen. I am honored to welcome you to this convocation, and gratified that so many of you were able to make the long journey. As most of you arrived here tonight by means of secret underground tunnels, you may not be aware of the increasingly dire situation outside these very doors: a throng of humanity numbering in the thousands bearing torches and pitchforks. They await the outcome of these august proceedings.

The question of the hour, as testified by every broadsheet headline, every drawing room conversation, every sermon in every pulpit: should we shut down Write Club?

That is the resolution that stands before us. You all have your ballots. Now let me begin by saying that of all the many charges levied against Write Club: that it is uncouth, that it is lewd, that it is corrupting of morals, that it curdles milk, that it causes genital warts, that the Overlord is implicated in the illegal trade of rhinoceros horn--against all these charges I resolutely defend Write Club. But there remains one accusation that we must take seriously here tonight. That is the charge that Write Club is an instrument of Empire.

Before I move on to the formal charges, an aside, to that faction among you who are hoping for me to address the charge that Write Club is an instrument not of Empire but of Revolution: Let me dispense with your anxiety by assuring you that the two are in fact one and the same, in that both have aims that are total. Revolution is merely Empire dressed in rags. You can dispel this problem from your minds and be troubled by it no longer.

OK then, Exhibit A: Hegemonic expansion. 

Chicago, Atlanta, Athens, San Francisco, Los Angeles. The overlord might be inclined to characterize these as “chapters” of a “consortium” or “federation” of Write Clubs.  He may call them as he will. When the first of these chapters elects to experiment with an 8-minute bout, or when they instruct their audiences to tell six to nine friends about Write Club, well, we will be eyeing the Overlord's reaction carefully.

Exhibit B: The Loving Cup of Deathless Fucking Glory. 

The phrase is from Walter Scott's poem: “Soldier, wake ― thy harvest, fame/Thy study, conquest; war, thy game.

War thy game.

That brings us to:

Exhibit C: Violence.

Day versus Night. Country versus City. Land versus. Sea. Head versus Heart. Life versus Death. Man versus Machine. Pride versus Prejudice.

Philip K. Dick wrote that “Empire is the codification of derangement; it is insane and imposes its insanity on us by violence, since its nature is a violent one.” Let's look at one recent Write Club bout, staged this very evening at Chicago's Hideout Inn, less than 100 miles from our present location: Lock versus Key. Now in nature, you might observe that Lock and Key exist in a state of harmoniousness or complementarity. Keys exist that they may lock and unlock―without them locks are eternally fixed, functionless, ossified. And locks exist to consummate keys. A key without a lock that fits it is no key at all; it's just more idle detritus to clutter up some dish of mismatched buttons and old subway tokens on your bureau. To pitch lock and key in combat against one another can only result in one of two equally futile outcomes: a world of lonely, petrified locks, or a world of lonely useless keys. Which shall we have? It hardly matters.

Empire imposes its insanity upon us by violence. It is the essence of Empire to look around itself, observe everything that is other, and be filled with the relentless desire to replace that other with itself. And what it cannot replace with itself, it induces into combat by proxy― The Gladiatorial games. Bread and Circuses. It is momentarily cathartic, this discharge of tension between matched pairs, between foes, so-called “opposites.” But when it is over, the fallen are fallen forever, never to be re-animated. Among the corpses in Empire's long trail of dead, how many languages, how many species, how many songs, dances, visions, philosophies, how many men, women, children. It is discourse―conversation―that leads us to truth, but these corpses will never again speak.

Our way seems clear, then. By our love of truth, and dialogue, our love of multiplicity and diversity, we must oppose Write Club. And yet, this paradox. The very act of opposing an institution of opposition―of combat―constitutes a tacit endorsement. As Dick wrote, “whoever defeats a segment of the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus, imposing its form on its enemies. Thereby it becomes its enemies. To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement.”

And so, my fellow members of the secret Illuminati, Freemasons, Rosicrucians, Knights Templar―we would seem to be an impasse. What can be the stance toward a rank evil which can be neither countenanced nor opposed? As a secret society, we have always been known by our deeds, not our words. Tonight we must do the same, taking our cue from the infinite Godhead itself, which permitted the creation of the cosmos only when it contracted its infinitude, allowing finite actuality to condense out of infinite potentiality. Only by withdrawing, making space for what is Other, can the world come into being. It is the only meaningful anti-Imperial act, to make space for what is Other. And in that spirit, I contract my remarks here short of my allotted time.

Notes on The Afghanistaniad

[Written for Lucky Pierre’s “What We Don’t Talk About,” a 12-hour continuous presentation on the War in Afghanistan, in Chicago, on November 5, 2011.]

If the basic story of the Afghanistaniad is to be believed, the facts are as follows:  some 3,200 years ago, in October 2001 by the old Gregorian calendar, a prince of the Kingdom of Wilusa, named Alaksandu, came over the seas to a land called The United States to claim the lesbian daughter of the Viceroy Dick Cheney. This daughter had been promised to Alaksandu by the goddess Ishtar, or Ashtar, in exchange for a golden apple, the present-day whereabouts of which are currently unknown.

Thus began a bloody 14-year war that claimed many of the most promising warriors and princes of both sides, laying waste to vast and ancient olive groves and opium poppy plantations, and driving terror into the hearts of villagers and townspeople across the Hindu Kush. Terror became a fact of life, perhaps the defining fact of life, perpetrated by a people trying to put up a barricade against their own terror, the terror of having a Babylonian goddess give away your daughters for no reason--or worse than no reason: for vain, reactive, thoughtless reasons. The terror of vicissitude, of bad luck, of immortal sociopaths who can neither be stopped nor succored.

Today you have heard many stories from that epic war, how George Bush, the son of George Bush, sacker of cities, poured salt into the furrows of his mesquite plantation, so that the war council would surmise he was unfit for battle, How the boastful General Stanley McChrystal pouted in his tent for days after Barack Obama, deadly archer, seized for himself the war prize slave girl Briseus. You have heard of the conversation that strong-greaved Pat Tillman had with his horse, Xanthus, before leading the Myrmidons into battle, during which Xanthus prophesied the warrior's death from friendly fire, and how the Furies punished Xanthus by striking him dumb on the spot. How in the battle of Wanat, the Waigal River became so affronted by the number of dead piling up between her banks, that she personally appealed to the United Nations for relief, forcing David Petreus, son of Sixtus, to order the destruction of the United Nations with Hellfire missiles launched from rosy-fingered drones, killing everyone inside, including the Waigal River herself. Once considered fanciful, these tales are today regarded as perhaps the best historical document of this period. And yet, even as history, these stories must be given a kind of context. Why should we care—we, with our teleportation machines, our rocket ship public transportation systems, our single unit washer and dryers, our climate controlled pantsuits, our tricorders and phasers—why should we care what happened in a war that ended over three millennia ago?

A contemporary writer from around the time the Afghanistaniad was composed, Simone Weil, who we believe may have been a Queen or regent of a state called either “DeGaulle” or “Bon Appetit,” had this to say. Please note that while we don't know with certainty what this work she calls "The Iliad" refers to, the best scholarship suggests it must have been some kind of precursor to the Afghanistaniad that all of our children know so well today. Queen Simone writes:

The true hero, the real subject, the core of the Iliad, is force. That force which is wielded by men rules over them, and before it man’s flesh cringes. The human soul never ceases to be modified by its encounter with force, swept on, blinded by that which it believes itself able to handle, bowed beneath the power of that which it suffers. Those who dreamt that force, thanks to progress, belonged henceforth to the past, have been able to see its living witness in this poem: those who know how to discern force throughout the ages, there at the heart of every human testament, find here its most beautiful, most pure of mirrors.

(If I may enter a side note from my own research: later in the text, the Queen refers to a book or series of books she calls "The Gospels." These, too have been lost to us, and while most scholars today regard “The Gospels” as some kind of sex manual or pillow book, it is our belief that these manuals were never actually written down at all, but were rather a loose, orally transmitted song cycle, performed by wandering bards and troubadours, each of whom added his or her own signature feats of sexual congress to the recitation.)

The text continues:

The progress of war in the Iliad is simply a continual game of seesaw. The victor of the moment feels himself invincible, even though only a few hours before he may have experienced defeat; he forgets to treat victory as a transitory thing. At the end of the first day of combat described in the Iliad, the victorious Greeks were in a position to obtain the object of all their efforts, i.e. Helen and her riches. That evening, the Greeks are no longer interested in her or her possessions.

“For the present, let us not accept the riches of Paris
Nor Helen; everybody sees, even the most ignorant,
That Troy stands on the verge of ruin,”
He spoke and all the Acheans acclaimed him.

What they want is, in fact, everything. For booty, all the riches of Troy; for their bonfires, all the palaces, temples, houses; for slaves, all the women and children, for corpses, all the men.

The auditors of the Iliad knew that the death of Hector would be but a brief joy to Achilles, and the death of Achilles a brief joy to the Trojans, and the destruction of Troy but a brief joy to the Achaeans. Thus violence obliterates anybody who feels its touch. The conquered brings misfortune to the conqueror, and vice versa.

How tragically this echoes the themes we see treated in that much more famous poem, The Afghanistaniad, not to mention—for those unable to ignore them—recent developments of our own war-torn time, some three millennia later.

We believe that the year Queen Simone wrote these words, the year 1940 by the Gregorian Calendar, was a time of great peace for the nation of Bon Appetit and her neighbors. But we know from fragments of another epic poem called the Annamiad or Vietnamiad, that this tranquility would not last. I would like to close my remarks with a recently discovered musical fragment of that latter poem—please excuse me while I see if I I can get this ancient technology to operate properly. This device was called “Your Tube,” which we believe refers to the Eustachian tube in the middle ear, reflecting the fashion of the time for music to sound as though one was hearing it from deep within a long hallway, warm and dark, and covered with fine and sensitive hairs.

I leave you with this haunting song from 3 millennia past, "Song for the Corpses," by the troubadour Trinh Cong Son.

Song for the Corpses
Trinh Cong Son

Dead bodies float along the river
They lie in the rice fields, soaked in sunlight
On the rooftops of the city
On the winding, tortuous streets

Dead bodies lying around aimlessly
Beneath the verandas of pagodas
Within the churches of the city
At the doorstep of deserted houses

Oh, Spring, the corpses deliver a scent to the rice paddies
Oh, Vietnam, the corpses breathe life into tomorrow’s soil
The path forward, though full of treacherous obstacles
Because humans have already resided here

Dead bodies lying around here
Beneath the cold, pattering rain
Beside the dead bodies of the old and weak
Lie the dead bodies of the young and innocent

Which body is the body of my sibling?
Within this dark cave
Within the scorched areas
Beside the maize and sweet potato fields.