Logos Pleroma, chapter 2
If an Army marches on its stomach, then the world moves through stories. The earth moved and all I got was this lousy bridge bomb! Am I right, Ernie?
From the time we’re born we’re exposed to narratives. One of rhyme and reason’s first injections into our nascent psyche speaks to our instinctual fear of falling. A sleeping arboreal baby. The wind blows, and a bough breaks.
No one asks why the heck the baby’s in the tree because it’s just a nonsense song meant to lull a baby off to sleep. The lilting lines are round and soothing. Throwing in a “You Are My Sunshine” and your work is done.
Once we get our feet beneath us, the stories start to grapple with weightier matters. The Ant and the Grasshopper, as well as the Tortoise and the Hare and the Lion and the Mouse get at universal wisdom through the anthropomorphized animals of Aesop’s Fables to delight a child’s sensibilities and distract them just enough so that the moral of these clever tales sink in at the level of the subconscious and, like the fear of falling, become (almost) instinctual: hard work and thrift; patience and persistence; mercy and humility, just in time for a year or two of Greek and Roman antiquity with perhaps a little Norse thrown in if for nothing else the pyrotechnic pageantry and doomsday badassery of The Twilight of the Gods.
All the basic tropes and archetypes of our lives’ heroes journeys are transmitted down to us in the years of formal education and late night bullshit sessions through stories. At least that is until the impending American Ragnarok of these latter daze when education’s devolved from mastery of Dewey Decimal to typing in answers in the form of a question to the Great and Powerful Google, the revelator of maximal and inch-deep information, and late night philosophizing became races to see who could whip out their phones fast enough to get the answer from SIRI, their and everybody else and their mother’s personal assistant.
It’s insidious, see? That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. So what if I told you that something went wrong nearly 2000 years ago that would ripple down from antiquity into these latter daze that would explain the origin of this systemic malaise hardwired into the global operating system. And this time it’s not the federal government, but the institution of religion that takes the lead role of the ubiquitous and ominous TPTB.
The extent of their moral credibility would be through creating a new fable and slapping Aesop’s label on it. The astute reader would know something was up before making it past the title though: The Rat and the Shotgun kind of gives its immoral attitude away, not to mention several other and sundry incredulities.
At no time in history at least since I’ve been living has there been such a horrifying deterioration of native language learning, in my case that would be English, and like I said, I’ve never heard a more terrible giant sucking sound around the place the subject once embraced. I don’t know if it’s George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” that got the avalanche of bad to worse thundering down the mountain of our once great education system or simply the fact that technology killed the necessity to get up and actually go study in a library without the help of AI nor the shallow reach of a search engine.
Even now the hisssssstories are being written by the lizard people of Alpha Centauri who have picked up our backfilled radio waves come to them from the future, whether human or Memorex via Google through a machine learning algorithm. Though we may be dying out as a species sooner than later the cockroaches will play pinochle on our snouts and Abe Kaplan’s Mr. Carter will still be telling Henry Dinklage’s Fonz to stick it up his nose with a rubber hose as the sound cloud from our long dead civilization bounces around the Van Allen Belt because AI is still prone to err in various subtle iterations. Put together through the shambolic symbiosis of willfully arranged words on some kind of plane available for the naked eye to see through radio program or teleplay, whether etched in stone or put on paper or floating in the aether on some iridescent pixelated screen, there’s no getting around the necessity of stories to set the scene and make sense of the chaos churning daily on the ever changing panopticon of God’s green Earth and its often brutal and always fickle nature.
Do you hear that, Mr. Anderson?
Whether nursery rhymes, fairy tales, history books, bullshit movies vested with universal truths, restaurant or hotel directions and the point-by-point recap of your 10-year-old’s first little league homerun the world unfurls through the constant recitation of a zillion and counting never ending stories, some that are the same and only differ slightly by one or two syllables as they’re handed down through the generations, and others that constantly are changing to fit the zeitgeist dependent on TPTB’s bad faith manufactured consent. Tales of all heights and profiles influence is inescapable and it behooves us to understand them on a visceral level lest we allow ourselves to be swept away on a tidal wave of unearned emotion.
Drop the pretense that it really, really matters whether it happened in some other place or time because these arguments are the ones that so easily divide us. We get emotional because in our minds somehow latch onto believing something can’t be true if it never “really” happened. But then why did Jesus always preach to the public in parables? Figurative language and metaphor make their points subtly without caving in their audience’s head with a hammer. One need not quibble about whether or not Daedalus “really” escaped his imprisonment in Crete along with his son Icarus, employing wings fashioned with bird feathers held together with wax, but understand the primacy of the message of keeping to the middle path when Icarus met his fate by flying too close to the sun. Nor whether Eve got Adam to bite the apple in some lush garden built by God, but what that bite implied for the detriment or the betterment of humanity depending on if you can see that knowing the difference between good and evil was really the thing that made mankind human.
Literalists will say otherwise, but mythology is not a dirty word, it actually negates the need for historic actuality in favor of universal truth. Truth is the purpose that makes the civilization real. Even then, the sweet sentence of said is onerously transubstantiated once it’s translated through the clutching, power hungry grasp of man. Aesop’s Fables notwithstanding, to put it plainly, anything man seeks to glorify is ineluctably corrupted and only fit to be burned back to the ashes in the dust that it came from.
And so, if you have eyes to see then see. It’s my charge to convince you the power of Christ compels us to save ourselves through the steadfast pursuit of knowledge instead of steadfastly believing that some jealous, power mad and psychopathic god is going to save us and lead us to salvation. Yes, I know, that’s heresy, and I am hopelessly naive to still believe in the expression the world has almost completely banished from the lexicon of applicable axioms that individuals are still allowed to act upon: The Truth Will Out! As my guy Thomas Wolfe would most likely have attached to the pediment of tin foil that will be my epitaph: “O’ lost, and by the wind grieved. Ghost come back again!” What can I do otherwise? I’ve got a story to tell. I will love my enemies and hope for a reprieve because with friends like this, who needs ‘em? The parallels of the story of The Fall to our current national political situation are too eerily similar and anyone apostate to the strictures of MAGA are equally thrown off their pedestals and called antisemites and traitors. Something I am certainly going to be slinged and arrowed with, with the added bonus of being accused of being anti-Christian, a heretic I think they call it.
Did I already advise you to gird your loins? If not, please do.
The precious Truth, like the red, red krovvy and pron will be known by its fruit. In a word I stake my claim on Jesus’ name—”God Saves.” The missing piece of the story kept from the world by TPTB and its implication for the history of Western Civilization will blow the minds of those who still have minds able to think and eyes that still care, if they dare, to see.