Some months ago I had a dream.
In my dream, I was driving down a country road in Bessie, my orange 2004 Honda Element (so named for her bovine good nature). The ground rose to hills on both sides (as it does in the Central Valley) and, as in the Central Valley, the hills were clothed with sparse yellow grass, revealing, in some patches, the volcanic rock beneath. On each hill were strings of barbed wire, but no animals were behind them.
After twists and turns I emerged in a strange place, which I somehow understood to be a zoo for rare animals. But it was deserted: the swimming pool in the center is drained of water, the pens are rusted and empty, and everything is very still.
My dog is with me. My dog is a sweet little Maltese named Cleopatra (Cleo, for short). She and I explore together, but there’s not much to see. “We’ll have to come back when it’s the busy season,” I tell her. And then I wake up.
Last night I had a dream.
In my dream, I was in the back seat of Bessie, and Bessie was filled with people, two of whom I could identify. We turned down a country road and the hills began to roll on either side (hills of volcanic rock) but the grass was lush and the barbed wire enclosures housed all manner of beasts: cows, horses, llamas, emus, yes, all the usual, but also hyenas, wolves, boars, apes. The raise their voices as we pass, as if in fanfare.
The car (which I am not driving) winds to the end of the road, and we arrive at the same zoo as before. The pens are filled to bursting with fantastic animals (lizards? so many lizards. birds, too) and the central swimming pool has been filled with water once more. Cruising smoothly about the pool, clothed in vivid green, is the largest crocodile anyone has ever seen.
My dog, Cleo, is there again, and suddenly I realize she’s been hurt: her paw is bleeding.
Lazily, smoothly, with unhurried grace, the largest crocodile anyone has ever seen cruises to the edge of the pool and parts its jaws.
I am seized by the urge to feed my dog to the crocodile: to place her between those half-open jaws and let her be taken. It would be proper; it would be right.
With a wrench of will I resist the urge and fall backward, trembling, looking at the crocodile, awkwardly cradling the shaking bleeding Cleo in my arms.
There is no fence around the pool, I realize. If the crocodile wants to, it could clamber out of the water and devour us both. But it doesn’t: it closes its jaws and returns to cruising.
The people who arrived with me begin to walk deeper into the zoo, towards its center; they say we’ve all been invited to meet the zoo’s proprietor.
And then I wake up.
You had a dream where you encountered a herd of chinese women/unicorn hybrids who could not speak any human language, but communicated through the use of their expressive eyes.
Katie: these are djinn. One of them can (will) be yours.
Should you find yourself there again, walk among them without fear. Regard each one carefully: observe each detail: the rhythm of their breathing, the dreambeat of their hearts, the delicateness of the bone structure, the dilation of the pupil, the slenderness of the wrist. Take each permutation of form as it is presented to you and let it penetrate deep into your heart.
Then, as you finish observing each one, nod to it, and let it go. They are all beautiful; they are all peerless; you will wish to keep and cherish and have all of them, but only one is yours, and the others must be released.
When you encounter the chimera that belongs to you (or, if you prefer, the one you belong to), it will be easy to recognize.
It will try to kill you.
For those of you not in the know, I am indeed writing again.
If you desire, y’all can follow me on my new blog:
theprinceofsomething.wordpress.com
Enjoy. ❤
Dapperparasitism contains 101 posts (102, now) and it is finished. I am no longer in contact with the things that originally impelled me to write it and so I cannot write it anymore.
This experiment has been more successful than I could have hoped, and I have you guys to thank. So: thank you. Thank you very much.
If there’s anything you particularly liked, let me know. The things in the Personal Favorites section will probably end up in whatever portfolio I end up developing (especially “the Minotaur” and “Christ in the Garage”), and will get a little more play. The Oracular stuff might end up there too. Some lovely things, however, may never see daylight outside of this blag (I can’t imagine sharing the comparative religious studies stuff ever again, for example; that stuff was all for my personal development, and I don’t know who else would be interested).
Except Batman. I might end up doing a lot of comparative religious Batman work.
But if you have something you liked that you think I should hold onto, please, don’t hesitate to let me know.
Have a lovely day.
<3,
Tyler
Once you have entered and exited Hell through any given door, that door is thereafter forever closed to you: seek it out, and you will find it only a blank stone wall.
Yet fear not, for the doors to Hell are legion, and though you wander destitute for twenty years there will always be a door waiting for the touch of your hand.
For your Lover has prepared a feast, and He has set a place for you, and no matter how late or early you arrive to the party you need never fear that you will lose your seat to another.
All has been made clear.
There is a properness to things: a way things must be: should be: want to be. Its scale is not human; it is cosmic. It is vast, unknowably so, and seeing any one piece of it is like peering at the skin of an elephant through a microscope: my perspective is too limited to allow me any real understanding of the larger picture.
It is daemonic law, or, if you prefer, the Word of God.
It is beautiful and terrible and sometimes it fills me so full that I think I will burst.
I have trouble looking directly at it. I feel like Perseus holding the head of the Gorgon: I wield this thing but I can never behold it myself, for to do so unmoderated would be more than I could bear.
I know that one day I will look at it (how could I not? How could I go to my grave without knowing, finally, what Medusa’s face really looks like?), but it does not seem to me that that day has come yet.
Michelangelo, discussing sculpture: “The statue is already inside the block of marble. All that you must do is look for it, and bring it out.” I have begun to feel the same way about human beings, and, for that matter, gods: they are already there, inside the meat and blood and stone, and all I must do is look for them, and chisel them out. I have begun to think of this process as flesh-sculpting, and it fills me with a sort of
serenity? Which I never thought I would possess.
Frankenstein was right: it is possible to assemble dead components, stitch them together, and bring the whole chimera shuddering to life. They just have to be the right components: this arm, this heart, this brain.
I would be hard-pressed to pin down precisely what I’ve learned during my exile. I mean, there’re the basic, surface things: I can speak Andalusian Spanish with more confidence, for example, and playing capoeira 4 or 5 days a week gave me both dexterity and, somehow, abs (they kind of freak me out? I never thought I would have them and they look like aliens on my torso; I have decided that I will enjoy them for as long as I can but not expect them to stay). But there are many things that I can’t begin to explain yet: I start to talk about them and the words come out flat and wrong and the information eludes all attempts to communicate it. Which is fine: all it means is that I’m not ready yet.
I’m trying to be patient. I’m getting better at it? It’s easier, these days.
I know I’ve said that I’m sculpting, and I am, but I can’t shake the feeling that, somehow, sneakily, I am the thing being shaped, and not the other way around.
Though it probably works both ways. And then simultaneously works in neither of them, just to piss me off.
All of which is a long way of saying I threw rocks at the Oracle until I realized all I was accomplishing was hitting myself in the head.
BUT THAT IS OKAY
SELF-MUTILATION IS PART OF THE LEARNING PROCESS
Your Christ was a great blasphemer; why, then, do you abhor blasphemy?
Why would you hate the homosexual, and the scientist, and the witch, and the whore?
For what Christ taught was not to be docile, but to transgress.
For Christ did not come to bring peace, but a sword.
Look into your heart.
Reflect: are you Christian?
Or are you Pharisee?
It is the tradition of most temple-building cultures to christen this place or that the center of the world. Every local temple in India, for example, believes itself to be this place; for the Muslim it is Mecca; for the Christian, it is either the Garden of Eden or the hill upon which Christ was crucified; China called itself the Middle Kingdom, and meant it; the Greeks thought Olympus, and the throne of Zeus were collectively the navel of all creation.
Scientists or philosophers (men of reason) would say that we can attribute this trend to the inherent egocentricity of human beings; we solipsistically believe ourselves to be the middle of things, they would say, and we continue to believe it despite evidence to the contrary for we are stupid, slow beings, our biology stuck in primordial darkness, our nerve endings so clumsy and inefficient compared to the gleaming gorgeous machines men of reason hold in such esteem.
Men of reason are often correct, but they know little of truth; indeed, the distinction between what is factual and what is true often escapes them, and if they are aware of such a distinction they often decry truth as being unenlightened superstition, or as of having roots in silly emotional impulses that, not resembling the cool logic of a machine, are unreliable and have no real value.
By which I mean to say that in this case (as in so many others) men of reason are correct, but that in their correctness they have failed to grasp that which is actually important.
For (and I am about to tell you a secret) the truth behind the story of the world navel is this:
Is Mecca the Center of the World?
Yes.
Is Golgotha (the hill on which Christ was crucified, and beneath which lie the bones of Adam, the person who precedes all people) the Center of the World?
Yes.
Is each temple in India to a goddess of poxes or love or cruelty or beauty are these the center? And the mountain of Zeus and the rivers of China and the mobile temporary shelters made by nomad medicine-men on the plains of what became the United States? Are these the Navel of the World?
Yes, my friend.
Each one of them (yes) is the center (yes) of the world.
We are also a temple-building culture and we too have a mythical center and that mythical center is New York, which we believe to be the center much as we once believed Rome to be the center.
We are not wrong. And yet we are, for while we know New York to be the center of the world we do not know what that means: what we mean when we say that, think that, silently believe it.
And so we may visit New York (or live there) and come away unimpressed
for were we not promised the Center? But where was it?
It was not in the ennui of Manhattan or the irony of Brooklyn or the big steel buildings or the streaming flocks of taxis that honked like yellow geese
and it was not in the churning dark of the subway and it was not in the slick glittering night people in stiletto heels and expensive clothes
and it was not in the park and it was not in the drink and it was not in the monuments to Liberty and it was not in the monuments to Greed and it was nowhere nowhere nowhere at all
and herein is that which lies (forever lies) just outside the reach of reason, for reason can only take apart and reduce to components and reassemble those components in modified ways
but it cannot grasp (harbor) (abide) secrets.
For if one takes apart a cat to see how it works, the first thing one has is a nonworking cat: it has ceased to be a cat and become an object.
And if one takes apart the Center to find its essential quality all one finds is atoms and molecules and chemistry and, indeed, nothing special at all.
For the Center is not New York, though New York is the Center.
Religious impulses, specific gods: they don’t die. Not really. One manifestation or another can be suppressed, but this only causes sublimation, redirection: the impulse will be expressed somewhere else.
We’ve discussed previously the Thin One, the cold feminine deity of whom all clothing stores and all modern fashion are forms of worship. The next time you go shopping, take a look at the mannequins displayed in places of honor in every store window. Are these idealizations of supposed human perfection not idols? And when you trade the products of your labor for their wares in the hopes of becoming similarly admired, desired, perfect: is that not worship?
With this in mind: the strip club.
Observe that the dancer performs above the audience, not below it. Observe that the worshippers do not touch the dancer, are not permitted to join in the dance. Observe that contact between the audience and the dancer is not permitted, except on those occasions when the dancer chooses to grace one of the patrons with her attention, and even then the patron only tucks a dollar bill into a bodice or g-string.
Observe the ritualistic nature of such an exchange, with its subtle rules and codes of conduct. Observe, too, that the ritual occurs in darkness; observe that the necessary separation between the sacred and the profane (ie the dancer and the audience): if a man becomes drunk and gropes a dancer, the show is over: the spirit of the occasion has been violated.
There’s something very worshipful about all this, isn’t there? Doesn’t it feel like the cult of some goddess? It is, perhaps, only perceived to be part of the underclass, something obscene, because to acknowledge the existence of sex or the beauty of the human form in American society is to violate long-held taboos.
The goddess, of course, is not the stripper herself: the stripper herself is an ordinary woman; like any other person, she has bills to pay and a mouth to feed. As in all religious phenomena, the deity is expressed through the interaction between the ritual and the observer.
One could argue that the strip club is entirely a business that provides men the opportunity to pay what i’m sure is often an exploited class of women to provide a sexual feeling. That characterization is certainly correct.
But all that which is sacred consists of profane elements. The Catholic ritual of Communion involves little more than taking a bite of bread and a sip of wine; Mormons wear magical underwear; in Mecca, Muslims walk around a large black rock; Carl Sagan found the beauty of the universe in giant floating globs of nuclear radiation.
All rituals and religions, taken apart scientifically or academically, are ridiculous and bizarre: it is only when
1) the ritual is properly performed by a person psychologically prepared to be a conduit of the deity
and
2) that properly performed ritual is witnessed by a person psychologically prepared to receive and be transformed by the god
only when these two conditions are met does the ritual express the sacred. If the priests are not ready or the audience is not open, nothing holy will take place. If this happens in a repeated, widespread manner, then that ritual, that priesthood, that religion is dead: there is no sacredness in it.
It no longer functions.
What I suggest today is that, in America, we have built shrines to what the Greeks called Aphrodite and the Romans called Venus and the Egyptians called Isis
and that these shrines are strip clubs.
So we’ve driven Aphrodite underground, but, despite our best efforts, she lives.
You see? The American mythology extends all over; not just in the places you’d expect to find it.
For as the orthodox rituals die (and ours are unquestionably dead) other churches spring up organically to replace them.
Because we need them, you see.
dapperparasitism 