Heresiarchy

I.     Genesis

Though she has many sisters, the Muse of music is without question the oldest of human gods. From the beginning of our days and in each of our cradles, she has bestowed courage to the afraid and hope to the downtrodden. She is the light in the darkness. There were not ever Gods in heaven, but divinity on the face of the earth is yet alive.

Every human except the most severely debilitated participates in the rapture of song.
Even the deaf can feel purity and harmony vibrating through their very bones.
They experience the presence of the goddess because their body connects to the land and air.

Architecture requires mathematics.
Literature requires language and language has many requirements.
Sculpture depends on knowledge and availability of materials.
Drawing and painting are constrained to creating ephemera until secure shelter is found.
Only the art of music is implicit to the world.

The miracle of music is the heritage of our people. Proper exposure to this sacred phenomenon transmutes the soul into a pillar of the temple of humanity. Wonder and triumph threaten obliteration each time the raw power of the Muse comes rushing from the molten rock far beneath my feet into the poisoned clouds above. Her voice is every wave upon the sea.

II.     Anathema

The immediacy of the perception of music presents a danger to those who seek unity of spirit among the human societies. The vast deviations in personal or cultural taste imply an elemental difference that separate the kind of people who enjoy listening to pop country from everyone else alive. Acknowledging this difference leaves us with the terrifying knowledge that an entirely corrupt and malignant genre can fabricate the illusion of beauty into the minds of millions, or even billions. Further inspection makes it clear that the separation is far deeper than one deplorable genre of music. The divide in humanity’s ability to enjoy art made outside the blessing of a Muse amounts to nothing less than the chasm between the righteous and the wicked.

A disastrously warped perception of one kind of virtue eventually prompts foolish men to create cruel and misshapen idols in celebration of many malevolent ideals. The veneration of blasphemous shrines quickly grinds any mortal spirit to dust- and into the empty space within the body where the gods give us the sacrament of beauty, the hollowed men force the sacrilege of images that claim falsely claim divinity. As soon as a heresiarch becomes strong enough, they condemn their children and lovers to this same monstrous fate.

 Their descendants after one generation have no opportunity to avoid perdition, and the few children blessed with genius and commanded by the gods to create beauty are beaten until they dare not speak again of dreams. After three generations a people can never be saved from their fate and brought back into the light of the gods- any who reject the faith of their elders suffer madness, for what man or woman could live surrounded by demons and not be broken by the knowledge? The uncountable heretics eat and dress and smile and fuck like normal people but they are shadows wearing human skin. They make a mockery of holiness and do not ever know it.

Though historical warlords and their philosophical heirs have succeeded in establishing minor princedoms and empires for a few thousand years, our species under the guidance of the gods has been tribal since time immemorial. Artists (and especially musicians) living and dead are the makeshift high priests of our makeshift tribes, pressed into position by accident and necessity. They serve the gods by continually reminding humanity that beauty and transcendence are birthrights- not accidents.

I was born into a tribe that did not honor the gods,
but I never brought their ways into my heart.
I remember my childhood,
knowing that our ways were flawed
and that our faith rested on a foundation of lies.
I knew that our conception of beauty
was not connected to what I felt when I looked upon the world,
aware even at six years old
that there was something severely wrong with everything
I heard and saw and felt
from those creatures who claimed to be my people.
I remember my father's hands around my neck
because I said too loudly that his rhetoric was idiotic.
His rhetoric was idiotic
and he would have known that
if he was still a man,
but like the rest of the tribe he had been dead inside for years before he hurt me.
I remember suffering for speaking the truth in more tactful ways,
before I realized that the others were shells
left behind by a man or woman that had destroyed their essence
and that those who could not hear the gods
would never be able to hear my voice.
I remember thinking that it would be easier to just give in to authority
and obey all commands-
then I hit myself as hard as I could in the side of the head a few times
as a reminder that no price is too high to pay for freedom.
Inflicting violence upon myself was the only way
that I could avoid the temptation of surrender.
I escaped the evil of my upbringing but I paid for it.
I will forever pay for it.

On all sides we are beset by hordes of enemies.
The barbarian leaders insist that they mean no harm
but immediately turn and order their subjects
to destroy or ignore everything that has been created
through the grace of the Muses.
As I struggle to sleep
I can sometimes hear maddened screaming
beyond the city walls
from their voices in the night.
Some have been dead for decades but their hearts still beat.
I would scream more loudly if I bore such a burden.
The bravest of them reclaim a shadow of the courage
that the Muse gave them in their cradles,
and end their lives
rather than languish in their created Hell
where life cannot offer redemption.
Their suicides are judged harshly
by their relatives and compatriots:
the dead are called cowards
for daring to reclaim their humanity.

If the victorious dead had eyes with which to see,
they would never have allowed their souls to be destroyed in the first place,
but not all have the strength when they are young
to cast a devil out of our own body
if it is allowed to take hold.
Very few people of whatever age can recognize the danger of heresy
until it is too far too late to reverse the damage
they have rendered to their own spirit,
but all know the cure for the disease.
Cold gunmetal pressed upon their eyelid,
they think back to their father's belt
slashing through the air,
the heat and knifesharp pain of it,
and how they stopped fighting their tribe
because they were just scared kids
who wanted to avoid agony and fear.
They were praised by friends and loved ones
when they began to starve their souls,
and without feeling it happen
they were soon dust and ash inside.
They think about the belt again
and the terrible price they paid for comfort
and the love of their parents.
They wonder if they would betray their children
as their parents had once betrayed them.
They ignore the tears coming from their eyes.
They put a little bit of pressure on the trigger
and then more
and the sound of thunder shouts throughout the land.


I feel no pity for anyone
who initially buckled under the strain of anguish.
They sold the the sanctum of the gods
to the darkness in their heart
for a bowl of hot soup,
but that was the deal they chose to make.
All who capitulate to godlessness are cowards
every day that the sun rises on them,
but in righteous suicide they show a flash of purity and courage.
They live as slaves
until the moment they choose to sacrifice the body
that their soul was murdered to protect,
and before their brain stops they are brought forward one last time
into the presence of the goddess and just for them she sings the lullaby
that she sang when they were young.

For their bravery, I honor them.
Hail the victorious dead!

As for the rest of their tribe, let them be cursed.
I shake the dust of my feet at their door.
I curse them with long life.
I curse them with good health.
I curse them with fruitful loins.
May they live forever as they are on this day.

III.     Lerna

I am deemed a pagan because I respect the inspiration of the gods of nature and beauty the way that heretics respect the false gods of their fathers. Once my tribe could be found anywhere with freshwater, but now we are few. A storm rages. The true names of the living and the dead Muses have been lost somewhere, I know not where. Nations crumble and the fabric of society grows threadbare, but my tribe shall not vanish so long as a single person with reverence for beauty draws a breath. We did all that could be done to turn the tide. It was not enough.

IV.     Chthonic

Like her sisters of the other domains,
the Muse of music has always given equal rewards
for evil and for good
for beauty and for ugliness
for love and for hate,
so it is logical that many should choose the clarity of evil
over the tangled web of the gods.

She has never resisted our expressions of freedom,
even when a hindrance could have saved our souls.
She allows heretics to love contemptible music
written in spite of her,
even songs written for money
about high school football or Christmas,
with the same intensity and honesty
that godly people feel toward the soaring monuments
she has inspired through the ages.
I shiver to see a god so careless with power.

Why does she bother to keep us alive, knowing the abominations made from her gifts?
Does she believe she will wither with the last of us, just as she was born with the first?
Could she truly fear death so much?

Autobiography no. 27

On June 29,  2009 I was in New York City
I visited Trinity Church
and I walked through the graveyard
and on the grave of Alexander Hamilton I placed two nickels
for him to pay the boatman with
and I thought it may please him
that the coins bore the face of his enemy.

One thing led to another and
that night I stumbled drunk past the people on the street hawking shirts
of Michael Jackson, who had died a few days before.
After I got to my room I went to sleep and in the morning I got up again.

Autobiography no. 26

In the long hazy moments before the sun rises upon the world,
I sit in a deteriorating chair on the porch behind my house.
Steam rises from my lungs or my coffee cup.
The world is new and I am old.
The dog tosses a ball to the ground four or five feet away from where I sit.
She thinks that I will rise from my chair to throw the ball to her.
Either she is right, or I am.

On the Floodplain

Ideas and places left behind by time illuminate a view into ourselves that many do not ever wish to see.

We looked for the building for more than an hour, driving slowly down a dirt and gravel road always looking at thickets and copses. We drove down County Road 58 and didn’t find what we needed, so we continued on. We turned onto County Road 59 and drove and in one of the yards by the gravel road an angry redfaced redneck with a dozen pigs in his yard hooked his thumbs under the suspenders of his denim overalls and he stared at me and I stared right back at him and a small boy was sitting in the driver’s seat of a derelict full size van. I waved to the boy because I wasn’t thinking. He waved back, as can be expected, but the boy’s relative saw the boy’s friendly gesture in return and the man’s eyes hardened.

As we continued down the road there were no more eventful moments to be shared with the locals. The land was lush and fertile and everywhere crops grew and the weeds grew too and the air was filled with the sound of the redwing blackbirds shouting out their specific vocalizations, phonemes so foreign to the tongue of my mother that I declared my inability to transliterate or find a semblance of meaning within their warbling tones.

We resolved to take one more pass around the County Roads, since the building certainly existed and certainly it was on the road we had been travelling. Suddenly I looked over my left shoulder and said “Darling, slow down. We need to turn around. I think I saw a roof through the trees.”

We turned around and made our way to the copse of trees that I had noticed and I felt my heart begin to race in exultation, because I had found what had been sought.

She said “I can see the roof!” and we parked the car out of the line of sight of the road. When we got out of the car she came over to me. As we saw at a brief distance the entrance to the abandoned school, she looked into my eyes and her pupils were huge although it was a bright day and she kissed me like she really meant it. The doors were invisible or removed or decayed, and in any case no barrier obstructed the entrance.  The stone and metal were still structurally sound but the trees that grew over all things and the ivy climbing walls gave me the sense that I had come upon a holy place, one that nature was retaking, and that I should tread lightly upon this sanctified ground.

 As we approached the steps to the school the sky began to fall with the violent buffeting of wild turkey’s wings. My love became alarmed because she was unused to turkeys waking up from a perch above her head, but soon enough she calmed and we went into the abandoned school. To my everlasting shame, I did not bring anything to clean the site and so I was forced to view cardboard and Doritos wrappers and crumpled bags from McDonald's and the occasional 24 oz. can of beer and it was my lot in life to pretend I did not see them. And I let the trash lie there on the hardwood floors of a schoolhouse abandoned for my life and ten years beyond it. We are judged by what we do not do.

There is much more to say of the building. It still stands. In one room there is a piano in abject disrepair. Some of the floorboards have caved in, but not nearly all. There is a marvelous breezeway outside of the section of the building with the classrooms. Not far from the center of that breezeway you can hear the constant horrifying buzzing of a thousand stinging insects. If you should unwisely trace that sound to a particular open-air room, the buzzing amplifies to unbearable levels and the sense of danger becomes palpable, but even as everywhere the air vibrates in threats of pain my skin was not pierced. I backed slowly away and muttered and shouted curse words under my breath and soon enough the evil flying bastards got back to normal.

There is more to say, but
I do not know how to begin.
It was a lovely day in April. We had just hiked for several miles and that was nice,
and then she remembered that we were near an abandoned building she wanted to visit
and long before we walked out the archway and down the stairs and got back in the car
I was aware that I was in love with her and that my love made no more sense
than a thousand wasps deciding to build a hive in an abandoned schoolhouse.
It did not need to make sense. It just was. In one room the wasps build nests.
In the next I fall in love.

Earlier in the breezeway I found a couple spent shotgun shells and I put them into my pockets out of habit. Half the wheel of the year has turned since that day in Carden Bottoms. I once prided myself on being a man with roots, though I am admittedly a poor one. I did not feel the need to travel and explore, reasoning that my books contained all the knowledge of countries familiar and foreign. But what immeasurable happiness could have been lost if I had not taken a trip that day!