We pine for a plurality of theories yet desire they give us together the sum total of truth.
We make the Bible an adult toy for our own pleasure,
denying the end therein brings the climatic optimum for sin.
Roland Barthes told us,
“The birth of the reader must be
at the cost of the death of the Author
to give writing its future.”[1]
This cannot be undone,
nor can the consequence of this be contained.
Who will stop writing?
The pen is mightier than the sword, we say.
Joining us, others say,
the ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of the martyr.
Who then among us
burns with a Fahrenheit 451-plus fever high enough to lead us,
and be the first to put away ink and pen?
The “Destruktion” of deconstruction
defies our deadened will lording over our dull reason.
From rafts of passion we chart history as a churning sea,
a single text that throws up pieces of rhetoric we collect as written debris.
We pronounce logic a product of convenience.
We tell the truth in the present tense with passing interest.
The Word of Righteousness is for the mature,
who have their powers of spiritual discernment trained
by constant practice to distinguish good from evil; whereas
we carry out the act of reading as an exercise for increasing
our miraculous powers of seeing change in all things.
In the name of ending violence
we virtuosi of vitteas cubed[2] track down to make inquiry of,
violate and lynch a text heard harboring heresies of heteronomous authority.
We rip off of it what we say are irreconcilably undecidable differences,
which we alone find woven into the fabric of the text’s metaphorical garb.
We descend without end into a never before gleaned
array of forbidden or hypocritical hidden meanings,
pronouncing Milton burned with a sodomite’s lust for Satan and
the Marquis de Sade wrote to incite our praises to the glory of God.
We give even God a new name, naming the majestic name, “I am not.”
We have become loud-mouthed boasters,
swaggering braggarts with tongues of brawn.
We seek in secret to enfeeble our listeners so
to make the case in public that we alone are strong.
High flown and over blown,
our great words
grant nothing,
acknowledge nothing,
mean nothing,
except we alone deserve to be heard.
__________________________
Notes
[1] Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image-Music-Text (1977).
[2] Fit x Fit x Fit: Sections of a poem, ballad, or song suitable to circumstances of our own description, spasmodic utterances spoken when possessed by a seizure caused by a loss of healthy consciousness.
Our Great Words
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OUR GREAT IDOLS
Remember not, O Lord, our offences, nor the offences of our servants; neither take thou vengeance of our sins: spare us, good Lord, spare thy people, whom thou hast redeemed with thy precious blood, and be not angry with us for ever.
But we pine for a singularity of theory
And reason it alone will
Give us nothing but objective truth.
We make the Bible an adult machine for acts and facts
Denying the end therein neglects
The climatic optimum for intimate life.
It is often told us that
The life of the Author must be
At the cost of the death of the Reader
To give objectivity its future.
O Lord, in Your mercy, this can be undone.
The consequence of this, in Your mercy,
Can be contained.
O that we would ‘Taste and see
That your Word is good’.
In your mercy let others join us and say
Blessed is the man that trusteth in You,
The Writings.
Lord, if Wisdom is personalised why not
Your Writings?
Did not your servant Hamann see the Servant in both
Jesus Christ and the Writings?
Can not Your Writings have been said to be
As but a carpenter?
Also can Your Writings not ask
‘Whom do men and who do ye say that I am?’
But whereas our Jewish forefathers,
With your servant Luther, did see
The construktion of deconstruction in Your Word
We defy this.
Our deadened will subjected to our heightened reason
We chart history as a neat timeline
A single straight re-d thread
Upon which as an extra-mental reality or validity
Floats ethereally the objective meanings
We collect as truth.
We pronounce logic a product of divine inspiration.
We tell the truth in the past tense,
Through allegories,
With passing interest in the present because
Our desire is of the future.
We banish Ecclesiastes and fail to live the conflicts
With joy and faith of the present.
We carry out the duty of reasoning
As an exercise for increasing
Our miraculous powers of objectifying unchange
In all things.
O Lord, Your Word of Righteousness is for the mature,
Who have their powers of
Spiritual discernment trained
By constant practice to distinguish light from heavy.
Forgive us we pray.
O grant to us particulars, not abstractions,
For just as You ‘is’ Many but One
So is your Word Many but One.
With the Many One of this Creation
Let us be enriched by You in all
Speech and all knowledge.
Lord, hear our cry.
Let us be enriched by Your Word
In all diverse speech and all paradoxical knowledge.
O for a literary Pentecost!
But we have even given You a new name,
The name, Omniscience.
And we have the impudence of wild conjecture to say
Of what Omniscience knows
Objective truth is but a subset.
And we perish the thought that
Nicholas and Martin danced because Rashi played.
To Your Word O Lord has platonic and aristotelian Aberrations been added:
High flown and over blown which
Grant nothing but fictitious objectivity
Acknowledge nothing but unreal realist metaphysics
Mean nothing but empty platonic Forms.
For we have replaced You,
The God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob,
With Idols in Your Writings, instead of
You Incarnated in Your Writings.
O Lord, forgive us for desiring
These idolatrous aberrations.
God of Heaven, let Archbishop Cranmer’s Nominalism
Be reaffirmed again.
And, in Your mercy, take away our guilt and
Cleanse our lips.
That it may please Thee to give us true repentance; to forgive us all our sins,negligences and ignorances; and to endue us with grace of the Holy Spirit to amend our lives according to Thy holy Word;
Have mercy upon us.
O Christ, hear us.
Lord, have mercy upon us.
[I confess before you readers that I am lost here in these words to offer a Confession: would ‘we’ have ‘not’ lynched a text harbouring heresies of heteronomous authority etc so that we descend without end into a never before gleaned array of forbidden or hypocritical hidden meanings?]