Sly Uses

What the hell are you driving at? I know. Shut up. Blast you. I have reasons.

Life, he himself said once, (his biografiend, in fact, kills him verysoon, if yet not, after) is a wake, livit or krikit, and on the bunk of our breadwinning lies the cropse of our seedfather, a phrase which the establisher of the world by law might pretinately write across the chestfront of all manorwombanborn. 2:36 pm

A father is a necessary evil. Listen to me, I know. Who’s your daddy? Do you really know? You have a woman’s word for it. Ok yes, she is your mother and amor matris from whichever direction you approach it may be the only true thing in life. So why then, come on tell me, do the Roman Catholics and their spin offs base everything upon fatherhood’s rock hardness, when we are all born from the eye of the whirlpool? Why? Listen to me, I see you. Straying in your thoughts. Get back here. Come back to my theolologicophilological (I ought to be stopped) theory. Now. Where were we. Father religion. This god is all their daddies. Yes. I’m fine. The church like the world (both micro and macro cosmos) is founded upon the void, the uncertainty of which (even the unlikelihood of which) fatherhood represents. Or perhaps it happens the other way around. Yes. Pay attention. The fear of daddy we feel as children while simultaneously feeling secure in his protection from danger we ascribe by apostolic succession to God the father. Yes. Feel it. Furthermore, heretofore, once again, hereafter (are you condemned to do this?) old Nobodaddy will tell you himself that his role was a brief spurt of inspiration (expiration more like) and off he goes. And agenbite of inwit? What’s that? Oh shake it off Nobodaddy. Mingo minxi micxtum mingler. World without end amen. Oh I will be condemned. (Am I a father? If I were?) Look, this enthroned one, this everybody’s daddy, says Sabellius, was son of his own son. The man felt himself with child foetus that was himself. How’s that? Come again? One coming is sufficient; Here. Have an example. An example. Well, look at Shakespeare. Or whatever his name was. Breathe. Breathing. ~~Rutlandbaconsouthhamptonshakespeare~~marlowe wrote Hamlet. He was not the father of his own son, he was the father of all his race. He was everybody’s daddy. Am I battling against hopelessness? Fight with me. Our worst enemies are in our own house and family. Stand! Fight! Kid, your growth is my decline. Your youth is my envy. Your friend is my enemy! You brought me pain. Her too and you ruined her body. You divided her from me. Get down from there! Be careful! You increase my cares. I worry sick about you. Slow down! Look both ways! Don’t talk to that perve with the candy. Don’t impregnate before you can pay. Dont do anything stupid. Good Christ, listen to me!

Space: what you damn well have to see.

April 4th • Scylla and Charybdis

Then Eno a daughter of Beulah took a Moment of Time And drew it out to Seven thousand years with much care & affliction And many tears & in Every year made windows into Eden. She also took an atom of space & opend its center Into Infinitude & ornamented it with wondrous art. 2:06 pm

Forming. Forming. And I thought the afterlife was for fulfilling. Try resurrection some time! I died. I came back. Who does that? I must be, yes, I am a God. Yes. Yes. Feel it. I was the formless spiritual and now I am the Allfather, Adam Kadmon, the heavenly man. Jesus Christ I’m a magician now, the magician of the beautiful! Oh yes, I am back. I was never an ordinary person. I lived the life esoteric, and look at me now! Get a glimpse of my elemental! Not so blurry today. This is the virgin birth, right here. In this space. At this time. Soul reinserted into body. I am God!

Krishna: Stop!

Wait, what just happened. Who are you? Why did everything just freeze in place? Why are you blue?

Krishna: I have stopped time. Listen to me, I will tell you the secret of life.

I already know the secret of life. I am the secret of life! Look at me. I’m back, baby. I’m here. I’m in a library talking Hamlet with a kid and an old new critic. And I am the only one here who knows the truth of the afterlife that the kid dances around.

Krishna: Those who are without faith in my teaching cannot attain me; they endlessly return to this world shuttling from death to death.

Ah, but that’s where you are wrong blue man, I haven’t been reincarnated. This is not your ordinary metempsychosis. You are looking at resurrection! This is altogether a different kettle of fish.

The Ondt: [Clipping the end of a cigar. Havana. A fine Romeo y Julieta] You smell like a kettle of fish, Æ, your Auric egg’s gone bad.

Krishna: That rotten egg smell is your sulfuric breath, Ondt. What are you doing here? How did you get into this moment? I stopped time, this is our now. Out, Ondt!

The Ondt: [making faces at himself in the window] Honey, this is my space. I can crawl into your now through spaces smaller than red globules of man’s blood and back out through Blake’s buttocks into eternity if I like. You hold to the now all you like, but it is the here, through which all future plunges to the past.

Krishna: Fine. Æ, we shall proceed regardless. You have not become deathless; you have merely become manifest without a rebirth. You are most certainly not God or even a god. I am God! I am known by everyone as the many, the One; behind the faces of a million gods, they can see my face. I am the ritual and the worship, the medicine and the mantra, the butter burnt in the fire, and I am the flames that consume it.

The Ondt: [Taking the form of the Lord of Loaves] Got a light? And hey, don’t burn up all that butter.

You both need to cool it. Look, I used to think that the world’s revolutions were born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant’s heart on a hillside, from the people for whom the earth is a living mother. But I don’t think so anymore. The world’s revolutions are born from those of us who say this verily is that. I took my own fate by the balls. The point is I am the point. I have free will! I used to think that God is a stage manager in the theatre of the eternal, but I am beyond that now. I am God if I say I am God. What of it? You can be God too if you like. And look there, you see that person breathing all over us? That one who clicks instead of talks? And stares and stares, eyeballs moving here and now here and then over to here. There is God. God is a click in the street.

The Ondt: [Blowing smoke rings] The peatsmoke is going to his head.

Krishna: [Crossing his arms defensively. He is caught between the devil and the ocean of Theosophy] I know all beings who have passed, and all who live now, Æ, and all who are yet to be. In the face of the one who can see all temporalities, how can you be so distressingly shortsighted? How can you believe your will is free?

You guys can blow smoke up my ass all day if you like, I don’t care. I know what I know. Talk until you are blue in the face. I’m making plans.

Heteroousios Dinner Theatre Presents: Contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality Starring Arius the Illstarred Heresiarch!

February 9th • Proteus

11:03 am

God: Hello! God here. Aleph, Alpha, no headset chatter please. Jesus let me know when you have places.

Jesus: Nobody can find Arius.

God: What! Why? Entrées are coming out of the kitchen already. Just look! Plate after plate of clotted hinderparts. Where in my name is he?

Jesus: Not, not one of us can find him.

God: Oh Christ.

Jesus: [materializes in the booth] I’m here.

God: Holy Jesus Christ you scared the shit out of me! What are you doing in the booth? It’s as if you came from nowhere.

Jesus: Sorry. I thought we should keep this off the headsets. Arius said some odd things before the show. Something about how you are not really my dad and we are both part of the same thing. And that I should be co-stage manager instead of ASM. Also, he didn’t look very good.

God: I know, he was terrible in the first act, coming down the steps flabbily, with splayed feet.

Jesus: And he had the worst gas. Smelled like he was about to have a violent relaxation of his bowels. Those front row tables! I wept for them.

God: Is that what that was? I smelled it in the booth! Look, we can’t just sit here navel gazing, we’re out of time. Have you checked the toilet?

Jesus: I just had that same thought. I’ll look there, but I have a bad feeling about it.

God: I just thought that same thing! It’s like we have one mind. Oh and Jesus, we should look into replacing him. How about Adam Kadmon? He can play anything. Where’s that review of Edenville? Here. Listen to this: “he was a man and a woman at the same time” he can play all the roles! And this: “quite pure in breeding. He could give birth parthenogenically at will.”

Jesus: We can have a cast of thousands!

God: “and he had a body that could pass through trees and stones” that might be hard to plan for. Think our technical director is up for it?

Jesus: Heva? Come on, she’s a viper.

God: Well, go see if Arius is stalled on the throne or somewhere. And don’t forget we are meeting for drinks at The Ship at half twelve. And by the way, go easy with your money like a good young imbecile.

Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!

February 5th • Nestor

$Neither vengeance nor pardon nor prisons nor even oblivion can modify the invulnerable past. To me, hope and fear seem no less vain, for they always refer to future events: that is, to events that will not happen to us, who are the minutely detailed present. I am told that the present, the specious present of the psychologists, lasts from a few seconds to a minute fraction of a second; that can be the duration of the history of the universe. In other words, there is no such history.$ 10:50 am

Why is history a nightmare from which I am trying to awake? I’ll tell you why. We are consigned to the moment we choose to experience. That’s it. Done. Once we’ve turned a moment of now into an event that’s past then that’s that. Live with it. All other possibilities are impossible. History is a trap. I’ll admit this to you, I don’t give a shit, I’m telling you. I am paralyzed by my lot in time. The pain of it. I can’t help it. None of us can. You can’t either. The events of my life have shaped me to what I am at this moment and I am afraid. The choices I’ve made cannot be unmade. And worse, the actions I choose not to perform can never be possible again. No wonder I feel guilt. No wonder I am estranged from the light. Are you afraid too? I’ll lay it on the line for you: it is not just about the things I have done or not done. History is nightmarish because the more choices I make, the more compounded are the infinities of possibilities that are no longer available. Finito. Untouchable. Pick a slim number of things to do to say to never do to never say, and you leave an infinity unchosen. I could have, I should have, I might have, I would have. There is no waking from this nightmare. I am trying but what if at that sweet moment of consciousness that nightmare gives me a back kick? So I go back to lucid dreaming. Deasy is waiting for history to perfect itself into deity. But listen to that? You hear that? That shout? That’s God. There’s God. A shout in the street is all the deity there is. Come one, you know what I mean. You can sniff out the truth. Smell it. When was the last time you shouted for any reason? Joy, fear, rage, ecstasy, what have you. Feel it now. During that shouting moment, that tiny moment, in the space of that sweet bit of infinity in the palm of your hand, you have no idea of history at all. No thought of it, no need of it, no influence from it, no back kick, no memory, no guilt, no remorse, no horrible regret, no nothing. Shout and you are free. You transcend. You are the manifestation of God.

Thus Spake Zaraϑuštra

January 18th • Telemachus

Also Spuke Zerothruster. 9:39 am

Who am I? So many have told of me and have spoken with my mouth. They say I invented magic and then poof! I made astrology appear. With that I gained the foreknowledge of truth that diligent stargazing affords the patient. But those who lived my life didn’t stop there, oh no, not when it was relentlessly clear that I had invented truth itself. Believe me. That’s when my magic, they tell me, turned to the black variety and I became fearsome. Those closest loved me, especially for the words they said with my voice. He that stealeth from the poor lendeth to the lord. I became for some a prophet of God! Imagine that. Nietzsche even said that the priests, those poets of the Veda, were unfit to unfasten my sandals. Of course I too was a Vedic Priest. As I understand, in that capacity I wrote millions and millions of lines of verse. To give myself enough time for such a task, I invented the week. You’re welcome. And born from necessity, I invented hieroglyphics; I used them to hide my invention of Alchemy. Well to speak the truth that element of my curriculum vitae never quite stuck; Those who move Hermes Trismegistus’ mouth had that particular market cornered. Better PR. In my later career I denied to oblivion many deities so I could invent a singular monotheistic morality. Then Nietzsche used my voice to deny morality in favor of truth, my prior invention. Ay me. Well, what could I do? My life is an accomplishment of others. Rather grand and famous others too, I might add. I was the teacher of Pythagoras, they say. Plato liked the words in my mouth so much that he passed them off as his own. Excuse me, Socrates’ own. I was even Yeats’ pen pal! There’s a laugh to rival the one I had on the day I was born. My head came out pulsating and there I was, infant tiny thing giggling away. To my mother’s horror my head could repel the touch of a hand. You can’t touch this. Oh a unique birth to be sure. And rather an unnatural death as well. I’m rather proud of this one. By the time of my doom people were calling me a living star. Can you imagine? Me, a star! So how does a star die? I was murdered by another star. Was it really a meteor? Maybe lightning? You’re asking me? You show me what’s real. I wouldn’t know, I wasn’t there.

The Wind Weaver, Starring Michael The Archangel, with The Apostles, introducing Matthias and featuring four Heretics!

January 15th • Telemachus

Hear, hear! Prolonged applause. 9:30 am

God: [On the god mic] Alright everybody, settle in. We have a 7:00 curtain for tomorrow’s opening and you have a 6:30 half hour so for the love of me let’s be ready for it. Jesus did you call the understudy for Judas?

Jesus: He’s here.

Matthias: I’m here.

God: [On the god mic] Good. Ok. We reblocked so remember heretics you enter from downstage right and your exit is the trapdoor. Apostles your entrance is upstage center. Try to remember this time Simon, and don’t come charging out from downstage.

Simon the Apostle: Sorry about that.

God: [On the god mic] No problem Simon, just a bit less zealous this time.

Michael the Archangel: Do you want me to actually strike down the heretics or

God: [On the god mic] No no, just take their weapons away and kick them into the void. Right. Let’s see if we can get through this quickly. We need to tighten up cues and everybody be on top of your entrances. Head in the game people, angels. Places everyone, from the top of the show. Standby on lights 1 through 5. Standby sound A. Let me know when you have places.

Jesus: We have places. [To self] Does he need to say everything on the god mic?

God: [On the god mic] I heard that. No headset chatter please. Go to black. Light 1 go. Light 2 go. Sound A go.

[Apostles enter from upstage center and sing polyphonically. Michael the Archangel enters from upstage left. Heretics enter from downstage right.]

Michael the Archangel: [disarmingly] Halt heretics!

Photius: [mockingly] Whatcha gonna do about it? [sing-song voice] You are too weak to stop me!

Arius: [aggressively] Word!

Valentine: [in a spurning tone] Your god has no body! Your god has no body!

Sabellius: [subtly] Whatever. You are all the same to me.

God: [On the god mic] Ok, hold. Thomas, what in my name are you doing?

Thomas: I don’t think this is working.

Peter: Shut up Thomas, do you have to question everything?

Phillip: Was I any good?

Andrew: You were marvelous!

Phillip: Really? I was?

Thomas: I’m just saying that I’m not feeling this. I don’t believe what we are doing here. Doesn’t seem real, I have to feel it to be on board.

Michael the Archangel: Thomas I swear to stage manager, I’m going to kick your ass.

Thomas: I’m just saying, I’m not buying it. The superstition, the void. I mean come on, what’s under that trap door?

God: [On the god mic] Nothing’s under there, it’s a void. Thomas if you don’t get back to your place and do your job I’ll strike you down, I swear to me I’ll do it, so help me me!

Thomas: That’s it. I’m sick of this shit. MACBETH!!

Peter: No! No! No!

Michael the Archangel: Shit! We have enough problems, do you have to borrow trouble?

Arius: You cursed the show! And I wanted to be the one to do it.

Sabellius: Whatever.

Photius: Who here wants to run this show our own way somewhere else?

[Apostles spit over their shoulders, heretics turn three times, crew led by Jesus run outside to circle the theatre three times.]

God: [On the god mic] Holy mother of me it’s going to take an act of me to get this thing off the ground.

It seems to me

January 13th • Telemachus

9:24 am

What are you doing? Me? Oh, I’m typing. Right now I am typing. I am typing now. Here, you see? You can’t see. But what are you doing right now? Listen, I don’t know your now. I can’t know it. Nobody can and you can’t know mine. Picture us together. Go ahead. No, not like that, sheesh! Picture us together standing in a field. We are standing and we see two bolts of lightning strike simultaneously one on the left horizon and one on the right horizon but a bit in front too so we can see them strike down at the same TIME HOLY SHIT GET DOWN! That was close. Did you feel that? Did you feel it? Ok, now rewind, the same lighting strikes are going to happen but this time we are going to stand next to one of them. I know, I know. Trust me. Ok, now we are standing next to where one of them will hit and here IT COMES HOLY FUCKING CHRIST! That was too close. Sorry. You ok? You sure? OK. And look fast over there, the other lightning strike. Did you see it? 5 seconds I’d say. Those were the same ones (we rewound, remember?) but they are not simultaneous anymore because it took time for the light from that lightning strike over there to reach us over here. Ok, so why did I drag you out into this field and nearly kill you? Sorry again by the way, truely. Because I wanted you to see for yourself that simultaneity is relative depending on our position. The now of any event, typing for me and whetever it is that you are doing now (reading I presume, and whatever else you are doing. I’m looking at you sunshine.) You can’t know any now moment unless you know where and how fast. Can any now moment be objective? Don’t answer that. It can’t. It is relativity my dear, it’s relative. And without objective now moments, how can we have such things as lapses of time? Don’t answer that either. We can’t. If there is no absolute now dividing before from after, then no part of succession can have objective status. Do you see where I’m going? When I am going? If successive moments in time depend on our frame of reference, whether we are standing here or there say, the moment we call now cannot be a feature of reality unto itself. Relativity, you see. Causality is gone. Nothing can be said to cause anything now that the now has become so slippery, so protean. Hume says causality is a fiction of the mind, Kant says that the only knowable objective world is a product of the mind, Einstein says successive time is our most persistant illusion. I say this means that we have no free will. But don’t ask me, let’s ask God. Hey God. God. GOOOOD!

God [appears in a thunderclap]: What do you want I’m busy.

No you’re not. Don’t you exist in eternity? You can’t need time to do things if you have all of it.

God: Ok, you got me. I was bluffing. So what do you want? And before you ask, I am not getting anyone to sleep with you and I don’t care if your team wins. Conflicts of interest, you understand. You see the bind I’d be in if everybody asks for opposite things. So hurry up, what do you want?

A question, oh lord, supreme one, heavenly father, mother of heaven, holiest of holies, most beneficient

God: Skip the filler, just get to it, cut to the chase, come on, I haven’t got all day. Figures of speech, mind you.

Do you know everything?

God: Yes. Duh. You got me here so at least ask me something challenging.

Well, if you know everything, then you know everything that has happened and you know everything that is going to happen. You know all the past and all the future.

God: Yes, I know everything that is a part of everything. Yawn.

So if you already know everything that is going to happen, then everything we are ever going to do is already done, decided for us. Written down in advance.

God: Yup.

Do we have free will?

God [blushing]: Oh! Shit. Didn’t expect you to ask that question. Well I did, but. Uh. Um. Yeah. Yeah. You have free will. Sure. Why wouldn’t you have free will? You have it. You have lots of it. Yeah. Um. Anyway. I hear sombody calling me. My phone. That’s my phone. Got to take that call. Coming!

[Exeunt]

I have no free will. I am a servant to three masters, a woman for whom I would not kneel, a church for whom I will not kneel, and a third for whom I ask others to kneel, although mostly I have to take care of those jobs myself.

All or not at all

January 11th • Telemachus

God is Not-Being, even he, who made the world out of what was not; Not-Being made Not-Being. 9:18 am

Haines, steeped in a study of American fundamentalism, asked me if I had ever accepted Jesus as my personal lord and savior. Jesus Christ. He must suspect all Americans think that if dinosaur bones exist then there must be dinosaurs roaming around somewhere. What God created must always be, no? Or more likely he must think that in America everybody thinks the bible is a voice talking about us now. Right now. See here in Psalms, it says that the economic downturn will end soon. Such good news! Good God. Yes, Haines, all America believes that in the beginning God said let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth and also under the earth, bones of dead things with aged appearance, and let humanity find these things and argue about Time’s beginnings and how long everything took to make, and big bangs and original sins and first floods and first falls and lines of time and a beginning and an end and a guy on a throne who created it all and has since kept busy involving himself in the daily minutia of our lives. Jesus it took six thousand years to get through one conversation with Haines. He wanted to know about creationism in schools and that sort of thing, but Haines, most (I do not say all) Americans have a fine understanding of Darwin. Let’s hear some nice reasonable science from the man himself and end this discussion right now:

Charles Darwin: There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one.

Shut up, Darwin! Come on man, back me up. What the hell are you doing? Good Christ take it back.

Charles Darwin: I have long regretted that I truckled to public opinion and used the Pentateuchal term of creation by which I really meant “appeared” by some wholly unknown process.

Nice save. (rolls eyes).

I deny successive Time and the deity it creates. You behold in me a horrible example of free thought.

Glory be to the collector of prepuces

January 1st • Telemachus

If we could live on good food like that we wouldn't have the country full of rotten teeth and rotten guts. Time enough. 8:48 am

Milk delivery today. Old woman this time. A lowly form of an immortal delivering a message. Buck invited her in. Haines tried to impress her with his knowledge of working class movements in America and it was like he was speaking a foreign language. Haven’t paid the milk bill in a while, Haines made the woman wait so we could pay. Buck paid most of it, an oblation, said we’d owe the rest.