Entertaining Abasement
Ever wonder about how much more we can fall?
I always loved the reversal of history among those who dig a bit deeper. That the ancients were the revered and learned; we’re the devolving and broken. Those renowned men in Genesis lost to God. But why not reign in Hell? Much profit to be had if you already lost your soul.
Large circles, intricate walkways --- what of our concrete? I love nothing about this place, but we’re not of it, apparently. If I am to be condemned for the rest of my life, hard to defend not taking the sword. One can die by it tenderly. Actually, that might be stupid. What of robbing, of infidelity, of sacrilege and heresy? I can say they’re sins, but I don’t viscerally know. Stupid to do, but what do I know?
The torches flicker ahead and the long abyssal path swivels a sign. Showing staircase beyond the ninth circle. How could I reincarnate not as Jesus, but as Satan, or are they one and the same?1 The Buddha waves at me, holding the gift of a knife. In its reflection it peers a hundred years in the distance, of scholars trying to understand the atrocities we live with everyday. Perhaps they’re the manure to bloom the beauty we desperately latch to.
The brothel becomes my church in the most banal switch. Though who wouldn’t want to reconfigure all the sin as flesh after all? Flesh ends in flesh: all the corruption turns to ash by the end. Let’s force God’s hand they whisper.
There’s a yin and yang solution to the world, it seems. You can yin it up through some certain ascetic inclinations. Love nothing, be nothing, be less than nothing, relinquish language as the broken software programming.
Or you can yang it into destruction. Just yang everything: own everyone, own it all, shuffle about sin as mere coins and candy. String along tales to configure all those unsuspecting. Everything will break, and with every desire harnessed, slaves in legions, upon the throne I will fetch another thousand torches to a universal flare, a torrential sacrifice to dribble down the stairs, by a star born in the swamp of bones and marrow and others’ seemingly deserved sorrow. Didn’t they get the memo?
As long as you dwell in the ping-pong between, you’ll writhe before crushed. And while you may have chosen the same, slowly inching toward the grave, who wouldn’t wonder, on occasion, what it’d mean to truly embody nihilism and challenge the deep-rooted rules that, potentially, are not of divine spark, but of other men and their playbooks?
Everything is permitted, so I’ll rule through tooth and nail.
If in my way I will tune screams toward melody.
God won’t hear, and it seems ignorance cloaked how naked we’ve become.
And with the militia-surround such misery will become my laughing gas.
Of course I find it all absurd… though maybe this is the path of the psychopath, and the psychopath usually persists to the end. If you could, wouldn’t you force God’s hand too? But with deadened eyes, to witness divine miracle by the end, a little confetti and fresh greenlands, well, doubt what will wipe the tar from my destruction.
Nevertheless no amount of acceptance changes the fundamentals. They’re shackles. So hate me. Because it gives life. Though indifference is more sinister; the yin crushes the Earth, don’t you know? Plants will rule us for thousands more.
To be a virtuous man, in its typical definitions, may just mean to be a fool. But who doesn’t love being a fool, too, in the same sort of joy of speedrunning with a blindfold. Don’t you? Even if I stuff “virtue” with my new batch of nonsense by each quarter. Give me nothing less, nor title: I am a bug, that’s all. It’s a matter of taste, not “right and wrong”.
So one can only wonder when “virtue” lays upon the bedrock of commonly concluded horrors. I have no rational choice but to watch a thousand families starve. Drawing the knife along the wall, and if it forms a seven-jagged star2, it’ll be my seal. Take the four-leaf clovers and sever them. I’ll sacrifice everything, carry it all. Hoist up all my father’s sins and grandfathers more. Let me take responsibility for everything, and please understand, I’ll continue the bloodshed and gnashing. I apologize nothing.
And I’ll erect my own disfigured Lady Justice as a warning stake before the kings’ quarters: please understand, all ideals are bugs on the car dash. Weakly pleas squelched, utopias defecated and love crystallized, in its perfection, by a C-section and postpartum depression. Love the pillory, lest in crave of guillotines.
We’re at the end of the passive bloodletting.
Come along, for the stairs seem infinite.