Dancers on the surface of an abyss

The last chapter will reveal all. 

All the twists and turns of my odyssey will be untangled and woven together into the complex tapestry of this mixed metaphor of my life.

I am not ready to think about how this story could end and sent to the printer and all the pages bound into a book. Bound like a hostage and placed on a remainder table with the other literary remains.

Instead of a physical object made of ink and paper there might only be a collection of unbound electronic messages in a cloud.

 I like to imagine one of these messages striking like lightning, lighting the sky and crashing into the earth and really shaking people up. Waking them up from this collective anxiety dream.

It might be news of something that happened a quarter of a century past, I don’t know. I don’t want a story that is like one of those celebrity bios where the only interesting part is in the beginning and tells how I happened to do the thing that made me famous and the rest of the book is a boring slog through ordinary life with occasional celebrity appearances and recipes.

If I become famous I might never know about it. I need to appreciate obscurity and learn to function in the dark. 

I don’t know how to prove I have an immortal soul and I don’t know how to prove I don’t have an immortal soul, any more than I can imagine the limits of the universe or the beginning and end of space and time and what possible initial situation preceded the birth of the cosmos. 

Imagine your soul was conceived simultaneously with everything else in a Big Bang or small whimper in the void.

Scenarios for an unending afterlife sound wearisome and unsatisfactory, even as an infinite series of reincarnations, of possible births, lives, and deaths, perhaps learning from my successes and failures and evolving, also seem unsatisfactory, but maybe the point of existence isn’t satisfaction, because satisfactions are contingent, and some say one can be liberated from the wearisome life and death cycle through the cessation of craving but I don’t know, I don’t know.

Some people believe we are living in the last chapter of history and that prophecies written in the Christian Bible are being fulfilled, signs of the End Times are appearing. When the Bible was being edited and the canon was being established the inclusion of the book of Revelation was controversial. It’s position at the end makes it seem like the conclusion of a narrative begun with Genesis, as if written by the same author at a desk in Eternity, rather than a collection of documents organized by a committee.

When people invented books they began to imagine that the world is a book and a human life is a book. We now live in a time when books are no longer books.

Read the chapters of my story in any order, the book of my life is unbound.

The pages fall like snow from the clouds.

Three paintings and two texts

 

Star flower and king ego pursued by skeleton 

Paradise Now

 

Behold Neuroplastic Man!

The city is the soul writ large

the city is the cosmos writ small 

The city is a transmigrant soul

cycling through cycles, circles and spirals 

evolving and revolving through the generations and regenerations

the tragedies and farces of history

Our cities will be training grounds, the farcical dictator says

Chicago, Portland, Memphis, Philadelphia, New York

are training grounds

What are we training for?

What uncivil war?

The real war is invisible the real war is in the soul and the city is the soul writ large

The enemy is coming with guns and tanks and boots on the ground 

 AI bomber shitzkriegs and crypto currency scams 

nationalist idols and corporate control 

While Mammon eats at the law like a brain worm feasting on a lunatic

pardoning the guilty and incarcerating the innocent 

Bulldozing the People’s House to build a big ballroom for the naked king’s big ugly balls

I watch the political theater on my screen unsure of what it means or what matters 

I watch ICE agents brutalize people in their homes 

I see millions take to the streets to shout NO KINGS

and take to voting booths to vote YES DEMOCRACY

Greetings from the democratic socialist republic of New York.

I see Lady Liberty on Canal Street giving the finger to fascism,

enlightening the world.

Let those who are without guilt throw the first sandwich.

Don J in Hell

The movie ends with the White House in flames and the President on the roof. 

Like Cagney in White Heat.

Top of the world, Ma!

He was trying to burn the Epstein files in the Oval Office but goofed and spilled the lighter fluid the fire spread 

This is not a good ending, not morally good 

Maybe a good ending but a bad end

Conflict between moral goodness and a good story. Poets vs philosophers in Plato’s Republic, Homer vs Pythagoras

Poets make the gods look as bad as us, but ultimate reality is Good 

Even the Biblical poets sometimes project a wrathful deity 

I want justice for my enemy and mercy for me 

Lord have mercy

I need to believe that even a malignant narcissist is redeemable even if I don’t want to believe it 

Because I need to believe that even I am redeemable 

I need to believe our nation is redeemable 

The biblical teaching is that a holy land is redeemable no matter how far it strays 

Even Nineveh was redeemable, to Jonah’s chagrin, so America must be also.

The President is concerned about the afterlife, he said

thinking about mortality, he says

We laugh at him because he doubts he will get to heaven 

Not that we are certain about ourselves 

Not getting invited to Dick Cheney’s funeral is the best news to happen to him this month.

He bombs boats in the Caribbean but hasn’t yet started a real war, but there is time 

Cheney started real wars, Big Time.

Big Time was Dubya’s nickname for Cheney

The President has his own wars and we all live inside his head 

He strips protections for the endangered human species

As the world burns

There is time, perhaps, to negotiate which circle of the Inferno he will be assigned to.

How many millions of reincarnations will it take for him to recognize that the wrathful deities that torment him are projections of his ugly soul? 

He needs to believe his lawyers can work out his karma for him or at least delay for an eternity his appearance before the Judgment Seat

He sits in the holding cell

Since the beginning of Time he has been sitting in this holding cell

What are you doing here?

Isn’t there some other place you should be? Something you could be doing? 

There seems to have been a mistake, you say. I was supposed to be happy by now. I have everything I want but I don’t have time.

Then I will ask you another question 

What are you doing now?

Wasn’t there something you should’ve been doing back then, when you were young?

Can wasted time be recycled?

Can a wasted life be redeemed?

Is America going to Hell?

B2 or Not B2

B2 or not B2

That is the question

That is the question, the question for you

Whether it is nobler to suffer being called TACO

Or to unleash your Massive Penetrator, Baby, and do some obliterating 

This is the gospel of Donald Christ, 

Donald the anointed.

This is his Saturday Night Massacre 

“American warplanes dropped bombs on three nuclear sites in Iran on Saturday, President Trump announced on Saturday night, bringing the U.S. military directly into the war after days of uncertainty about whether he would intervene.” NY Times

“And I want to just thank everybody,” Donald says. 

“And, in particular, God. 

I want to just say, we love you, God, 

and we love our great military. 

Protect them. 

God bless the Middle East. 

God bless Israel 

and God bless America.” 

He seemed to be gagging on these magic words, 

the magic words that will make it right by casting a spell over Maga brains.

He finished his announcement of war the way all American Presidents finish their announcements of war—

 “God bless America,” he chokes.

American Presidents always blame God for their wars.

It gives them deniability.

He wants to be a Strong Man, but he has a weak mind and a diseased will.

I should thank the Ground of Being every day that I wasn’t born as Donald Trump. He is truly damned.

Solstice benediction

God

God

God, will You give me credit for using the name “God” in public? 

— if I use Your name to give credibility to whatever I might say, as if You are authorizing what I claim? 

— if I back it up further by attaching some words taken out of context from Hebrew or Christian scripture, will You give me credit?

What do you mean by “credit?”

By credit I mean belief, trust . I mean, maybe I could manipulate the mind of whoever hears me to believe I am telling the Truth because I believe I am speaking to God, or even For God, or even stating a prophecy? 

— and if “God” is only a word I say for rhetorical effect, spoken in vain, you might say, but effectively short-circuiting the critical faculty of the listener who fears I might actually speak for God? 

— and if I string together phonemes in utterances that sound like a foreign and ancient language, and it sounds like glossalalia will it scare you and convince you that a mere opinion shaped by prejudice and ideology and ignorance is really expressing divine will and that if you don’t believe me you risk being punished forever because you are afraid of an inscrutably angry creator whose will is different from yours and whose alien intentions cannot be understood by your finite human intellect? 

— if I use the word “God” to persuade the gullible that I must be telling the truth because no one would dare pray a lie, would you believe me?

I try chanting 

Kyrie Eleison

Kyrie Eleison 

Kyrie Eleison

My chant is drowned out by the cries of aircraft cutting through the membrane of the sky.

Dear God, we pray, I guess, this is an emergency,

have mercy.

Immigrants are dragged away from their homes and work places by lawless masked men. 

The wealth of the nation is taken from the poor to benefit the wealthy.

Lazarus dies in his own excrement alone on a subway.  The slaughter of the innocents in Gaza is cheered on by God’s people, and also Christians.

Kylie Eleison

Lord have mercy

Help me

Help us 

Help them

Help Israel listen to their Prophets’ call for justice and abandon their weapons and idols of war.

Help Palestine listen to their Prophet call for justice and abandon their weapons and their idols of war.

Help Christians lose Christianity so they can find the Galilean prophet, their rabbi Jesus.

Jesus said that if they don’t understand the prophets they won’t even believe a man who came back from the dead 

— and the prophets said very little besides calling for justice and mercy for the poor and the stranger and the bereaved

A couple of days after the Palm Sunday protest march, Jesus led the protestors to occupy the temple and stop business as usual He  publicly accused the religious establishment of exploiting the poor. 

Jesus told a story about a beggar who went to Heaven and a rich man who went to Hell

Jesus said blessed are the poor, blessed are the peacemakers.

I read Jesus’ gospel as a prophetic call for nonviolent revolution and evolution of consciousness.

But it becomes mind-numbing propaganda when appropriated by the ruling class, the nationalists, the con men, and the paranoid.

Help us Jesus to pity the Christians who want to be millionaires. 

Help us to forgive those who follow men who want to be kings. 

Help us to show nationalists how to love our neighbors.

Help us push the rich man’s Tesla through the needle’s eye. 

This is an emergency, an emergence.

I am being emptied out, thank God. 

There is a lot of ego confusion to go, and a lot of false consciousness to be burned away by reality, but I name Reality “God” and praise Reality.

Kyrie Eleison

Lord have mercy