Good and evil are a godless man’s gods; contriving, inventing, assigning meaning to the world made in his own image—all in some flailing attempt to re-interpret the world; his fall into consciousness was indeed a fall: from the heavens of knowing to the plane of confusion and contrivances in wild speculation; a happy ass thrown into a cold river.
To cast blame on a fiction who cannot defend itself, to invent its rules and regulations in superstition, and worse: to impose those fantasmagorías—nothing more than a funhouse mirror’s reflection of our own distorted and histrionic senses of cause and effect, the fears with which we fill dark corners and half-creaked closets—to cast those haunts not only upon ourselves as self-reassuring hair-shirts, but to lie so pervasively to ourselves that, in keeping with our lie, we narcissis dare to ensnare our neighbor in them. That is, our hairhsirts must become fashion, and by force of tradition or by snare, by hook or by crook, to convince him too—with his own inward guilt and with weakest suspicions otherwise covered by his brilliant and otherwise courageous nature, his natural strength—and finally, and most terribly, calamitously, and meanly: to call that sugar-sprinkled cancerous weakness God! And to mean it! And to have forgotten it ourselves—that the ghost was never there—never in our room, only our books and in the stories of our fearful fathers. And to throw away rationality to it! And to remind him all his life, straight through to death, never flinching in ‘faith’ and thereby cementing for not only oneself, but for all generations to come, some abstract authority…and for a time to be its corroborative valid-dictor-ian, its chief forgetter and beggar of low things, it’s salesman. To lay the blame even at the feet of our own sons: this I can agree with alongside the selfish and meager faithful, is indeed our generational sin—perhaps the real original sin. Requiring a madness be held as truth, inventing ceremony to sell a profitable mystery, and to possess the gall to baptize others in the name of such suspicions. A man with god in him is by these means convinced otherwise: his godliness is taken from him. His knowing becomes his questioning. His strength of will becomes his doubt. A god shaped hole in his heart is recognized but he is never told that the very stories of his priest, this self-appointed storyteller and seller did the carving, and that a bit of forgetfulness might wake him from his dream—the dream where god has forgotten himself; the dream where good and evil lurk beneath his bed and above it.
The god of the spirit of man, the spirit that moved him forward, demeaned and crucified; we told his story as long as we could bare its shame—then we killed him again, in vengeance for our freedom (freedom from the slavery from which we gained it), and buried him deeply; just above the water table, just above forgetting.
With no stage left upon which to dance for our betters, we fell to despair. If we have buried our father, perhaps we should wake mother—that toddler’s trick we all know. Perhaps for her we can dance, as dancing for one another seems to throw meaning past meaning—more an enraged unmoored ship fighting the wake of its contemporaries on a still boundless and unknown sea. So to worship the sea, is there spirit in her? Certainly she is in us, her wildness and unsurety. To worship our own dancing atoms, does this sate our fears? Do our vessels rest more calm? I think not. And doesn’t Melville’s madman’s march after his soul yet speak to his spirit? No, the ocean is no good thing to worship alone.
Great mother rising, kneel to earth now where father spirit lays slain. Osiris, dried, drawn, and quartered; it’s Kali’s Yuga now. We will