Sapping my strength, it
Sucks the soul from me. I can’t
Pin it down, but I
Am made lesser, I
Have my peace stolen. Trembling,
I ask the ether
What it wants from me.
Why I must endure this loss.
Forty-one, vampire.
Those who wait upon
The Lord will renew their strength.
Rise like an eagle.
You are not really
Me. You just show up to hit
Me, infest me, strike
Me down like a dog.
You are not real. Power you
Wield is stolen from
Me. Go back from whence
You came. No more shall you feed
On my strength and will.
I want to run. I
Can’t. This collar on my neck
Catches me, holds me
Down. Each time it bites
My flesh, my spirit falls, I
Despair the hope of
Liberty. It will
Be for me no noose, but will
Become my anchor.
This is where I plant
My cornerstone, where I will
Build my strong tower.
I saw that hunger
In her ice blue eyes, and took
Her in my Chevy.
I snatched her snatch and
Sniffed her quim, so vigorous
It pulled me upright.
I unwrapped her and
Then I fucked her in the field
While the flowers bloomed.
Her ecstasy did
Not quite thaw my frozen dead
Heart, but passed the time.
The Bible is a
Poetic rendering of
Forces opposing
Vivifying one
Another. Exquisite is
Lyric beauty of
Half the psalms. Second
Half, mayhem, devastation,
Murder and death. The
Whirlwinds of clean
And unclean, widdershins. It’s
Mozart and it is
Metallica, just
Like life. Tragedy begets
Triumph, and again.
What a beautiful
Woman, a vampire and
War have in common.
Warning: some of these images really disturb me. No actual violence is depicted, but they’re disturbing symbols. This post is really just a rebus thread representing my train of thought.
I was at my job, and came across the unicursal hexagram on an artwork on one of the walls. I was surprised, as it’s an occult symbol, and my first thought was Lucifer’s Sigil.
Which it resembles, certainly.
Once did a young man
Declare that the tragedy
Of the world was
Wrong, and that he would
Fix it. Did he believe in
Himself? Sometimes. But
Not often. He had
Imbibed and lived a creed in
Which to be crushed by
The machine was a
Victory, representing
The end to the war.
Eventually he
Became a doctor and found
Himself a clockwork.
Would he spend his life
And his substance to turn back
The hands for one more
Moment? He wasn’t
That good, to die in service
Of a lost cause. He
Was selfish enough
To want a purpose for his
Life and work, to write
His name in the stars,
To stop the clock forever.
No martyr would he
Be. He would not burn
On another’s pyre. He
Would steal the sun from
The sky and hide it
In his pocket, to peep at
When he was idle.
I can’t have been the only teenager who saw Fight Club in 1999 and wanted to go out and beat the shit out his friends, in hopes that we’d all feel a lot better and understand ourselves at the end of it.
Chuck Palahniuk’s novel and David Fincher’s film named a dynamic that I’m only now elucidating, with some help from Jung, Crowley, and Nietzsche: why do I crave both beauty and destruction? Why are my playlists a mixture of Mozart and Metallica? Why do I, a good hearted, Christian husband father and physician, sometimes seethe with rage and crave a storm to wash away all this filth? Is nothingness freedom, or is it nothing? Is love a prison?
Nietzsche said that God is an artist, not a moralist. His moods are wildly variable, and while supposedly changeless, He’s in fact endlessly changing, protean. Christian morality is inherently pessimistic, nihilist. It wants the end of the world, it wants there to be nothing, nobody left. A sterile, changeless void.
Certainly, you could argue that Christian morality as taught is untenable. When your thought is a crime, and you commit adultery when you look at a woman, when you are worthy of hellfire if you call your brother an idiot, it’s impossible to follow. The more you read the Bible, the more you realize how strange and subjective the text is. You read the Gospels, and they contradict themselves. Jesus is a son of David in Matthew, not a son of David in John. Jesus is crucified on a different day in Mark and John. The epistles are dense texts addressed to people we don’t know about topics we have to guess about. Revelations tells a compelling story referencing multiple symbolic systems that we don’t have in our current canonical texts.
If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. This is a Buddhist aphorism that summarizes a meta-dynamic I’ve sensed for years is at play within the Bible. The God you can understand is not the real God. If you claim to speak for Jesus, you’re a liar. You’re blessed when you’re cursed. You’re rich when you’re poor.
Through the union of opposites, we annihilate them both and find the unity at the center. Nietzsche said that tragedy was the emergence of Apollonian reason through the catastrophe of Dionysian forces. I’d say this is a pretty fair summary of the narrative of the Bible. Morality occurs from what you learn by engaging in the text and with life, and picking up the pieces from the wreckage of your annihilated life. Kind of like Fight Club.
