Tale 4: Drink - Second Draft

 Every day, my father warned me of the dangers of the demonic fluid. It is drink which unleashes all of man's evil and eliminates the barrier from beast. It is drink which eliminates health and happiness. Drink is danger, drink is trauma, drink is obscenity and humiliation, blasphemy in the eyes of God and excrement in the windows of memory. Drink is serenity's eternal expenditure: instants of bliss for an eternity of inner violence. 

Trauma is the intrusion of another soul. The intrusion never announces his full measure of control, he simply demonstrates a new section of memory he controls every day, intrusion doubling upon intrusion, exhibiting ever more masterfully that he, not we, are the part of our mind that thinks. 

Perhaps this other soul is a devil or dybbuk, perhaps he's simply another person who deliberately lodged part of himself within you, or perhaps he's another person burdened with his own dybbuk. But whomever he is, he, not you, masters the mind, and you become a spectator within your own consciousness. The self schisms, and half your mind whispers horrors to the other half. Every day, he determine more of your decisions, and with every new decision he makes for you, you wonder ever more if he was you all along.   

For centuries, father did not touch drink. He knew of its ecstasies and torments as well as any man, but he saw what drink made him, and what drink made others, and its humiliations were repugnant. It caused a whole earth on which man has neither self nor divinity, but only sense - pleasures to drown our pain, other people's pain to drown us in pleasure, a whole earth of trauma absorbed and trauma inflicted where man uses his divinity to inflict all the worse. And so where the rest of Earth was wine, the House of Noah was water, kept fresh and pure in wells we cleaned every day along with blessings to a spirited water in a second, smaller well. A spirit whose name we never pronounced, and perhaps we never knew. For an hundred years of our lives, Ham, Jepeth and I knew no drink but water. 

All the while, as the temperature warmed and the Earth began to be fire and rain. Father communed with his holy spirit of the drink. Every day as he had for hundreds of years, he pulled a bowl from the well tied to a string, put a finger in the drink, touched its holy spirit to his lips, and threw the bowl back to the holy spirit. Every day he spoke with the spirit of the drink, and the drink spoke back. For seven hours every day Father  walked around the well, speaking questions and answers, and the pool told him all creation, of its trees and crowns, of its spheres both visible and hidden, and the spirit of the drink made Father the wisest of men. 

The spirit told Father to build an ark and gather every living thing that creepeth upon the earth, for the spirit was wroth with the world and would flood it. The world would begin anew in a second Eden where would live none but the House of Noah's righteous offspring. 

And the Spirit was right, for lo, the world had become drink; not drink still and clear, but torrential and murderous, until all the world was again without form and void. Then the sea level rose, and rose, and rose, until the planet itself rose up and murdered its unworthy caretakers, and all the Earth was but one large ocean, stewed in the iniquities of its trillions of drowned beings and glazed with salt to parch any floating above. And within three days, all remaining life lodged within an ark of 300 cubits.

The invisible spirit told us of the flood, he told father to build the ark, precisely how, and with what, and how large, and how many animals to gather, but he gave us no extra ration of fresh water. All we had was the water within our well, which outside the well must be fermented ere it turn to undrinkable sludge and excrement. So there was only barley fermentation, and wine, and animals, and obscenity. Not even the children could have water, it must be rationed for certain animals who could not survive in alcohol. 

And yet the first thing we brought aboard the ark was Father's pool of drink, of which he made us carry pitcher by pitcher aboard the ark to a pool of stone he'd constructed alone.

Upon the ark at first it was only us and the wine - and father knew what was to come. He told us we had no extra rations for the animals, but to allow ourselves twelve times an eleven month supply for four families - we asked why, he did not say. 

It began not with agony but with joy and camaraderie - days of merry work followed fine nights of wine and song. Then lying with our wives in tents in living quarters on the Ark's four opposite corners. The children would be serenely asleep just after dinner, and so torpid they never wandered. The House of Noah used our great wealth to buy all the crops of nearby families to feed our animals, and once aboard the ark we pickled them within buckets of salt water procured from the deluge outside. 

Father had always been serene, but he was quiet and cryptic and often warned us of what kind of different man he was before encountering the holy spirit. He took to the wine immediately, and his serene self turned upside down to the most dreadful moroseness. None saw him eat, and he said not a word even as he fed the animals. Yet while Father felt submerged in the drink, our work seemed as play. 

But at the cusp of manhood, no drink could torpor Canaan. In less than one year he'd have taken to wife, but what wife lived to take him? 

The noises began with the sheep of course, and then the goats, and then the dogs and cows, and then to the larger animals, and the smaller, until we wondered if there was an unsullied animal among the 16,000 on the ark. An animal would exclaim that peculiar scream, always the same in every species, and we knew what Canaan was doing, particularly because he would return every morning with terrible bruises. But we all were so besotted with drink that what did it matter? The world was ending, boys will be boys, the animals were drunk too, and were we to believe Father, the House of Noah was the one family in the world who did not enjoy the company of livestock. 

The loneliness of the ark eventually got to our wives, and then to us, and as the drink increased, the revelries decreased. Never again would we see anyone but ourselves, and that realization necessitated more drink. Every simple disagreement felt like a fallen house, which also necessitated more drink. Whenever the rain's humidity caused a sniffle, we feared the mortality outdoors would spread inside, which necessitated still more drink. And whenever an animal fell ill, which was often, we were great with labor to minister them, which necessitated the most drink of all. 

All the while, father had built a new cage, and a large one. We wondered if there was a flying animal we'd forgotten. Father would not say. 

Days grew to weeks, memory blurred day into day, until eventually there were no memories except the wailing of our wives as dawned on them a world of loss, and the raging mischief of our children now tolerant to alcohol bored into our heads, which necessitated still more drink. Raven after dove after raven was sent forth to find evidence of land; but there was only drink, until finally a dove emerged with an olive branch. The Lord had spared us, and thus could we the survivors multiply in a new era of righteousness and favor and grace. 

But the very next day, great human cries awoke us to find Ham murdered, and Canaan locked in Father's cage.

"Canaan! What have you done?" 

Here is the tortuous dialogue between father and grandson which followed:

"I have done nothing! Ham was murdered by you Grandfather!"

"The Holy Spirit warned me something awful would happen, but surely it would be less than this! Murder or defilement among kin is what I expected, and we would punish the offender justly, but what has occurred is so much worse!"

"Why have you murdered my father?"

"Your father tried to kill me before I laid my curse on you!" 

"Why would you curse me?"

"Look at the chalky substance within the drink! The imagination of man's heart is evil from its youth! Canaan has gazed upon my spirit's nakedness and spilled his seed into it! He has raped the holy spirit of the Earth! We shall never rebuild Eden! The whole flood has been for nothing! Humanity now shall continue just as it has!" 

"But I did not...."

"Cursed be you Canaan! A curse you were upon Ham and upon this ark, and cursed you shall be upon dry land! A servant of servants shall ye be unto your bretheren! A blessing shall this Holy Spirit of mine be to Shem and Japeth, but the your house Canaan shall be a servant to the servants of Shem and Japeth all the days of their li..."

"Grandfather, that was milk." 

"What?"

"It WAS milk."

"Did Grandfather really think fermentation and salt would keep a kingdom of animals alive for a whole year?"

"It is not for me to question what the spirit in the drink tells me."

"There is no spirit in the drink."

"SILENCE!" 

"If it's a spirit, then spirit told you what your mind already saw."

"Indeed, the spirit told me the world is fornication and wickedness. Just like y..."

"No, grandfather, the world was already flooding, the spirit told you what your eyes already saw." 

"We do not see but with the eyes of our spirit!"

"No, our spirit sees with our eyes." 

"Profanity! You deserve to be cursed all over again."

"Curses mean nothing."

"You dare doubt my curse?"

"I doubt there's any point to us living now when everybody else is dead."

"Your sacrelidge is ignominy upon the entire House of Noah! Is it not enough that you desecrate every animal aboard the ark night by night?" 

"YOU THINK I FUCKED THE ANIMALS!?"

"You have done evil enough. Do not dishonor us further in the ark of the holy spirit."  

"I curse you too Grandfather."

"Abominable blasphemer! May you be known through all eterni..."

"May you endure your final three hundred years knowing nothing of life but this stupid spirit of the drink or whatever you call that liquid shit and may all the flesh that creepeth upon the earth find no peace in you." 

"Outrageous infide...!"

"May your bullshit visions of the Eden we lost haunt all your days and creep all your nights. May you forever see in me your only impediment to paradise."

Noah immediately charged at Canaan to strike him down but was prevented by the cage he built himself. He reached for the key to the cage, but Canaan pulled Noah's key out of his own tunic. 

"While you all spent your nights in a drunken stupor I was milking all the mammal females and feeding it to their children. I even fed the milk to your grandchildren and great-grandchildren and told them not to tell anyone, because children will never survive on just the alcohol you've spent your whole lifetime warning us against and then made us live on. Shem, do you really think Arphaxad could survive the whole first year of his life on nothing but alcoholic breastmilk?" 

Clearly in grief, Noah reached for his sword with a clear intention to fall on himself. From out his tunic Canaan produced Noah's sword as well. 

"How can you be given power of life and death? You murdered your own son because I drank some water from the pool and didn't wipe a little milk off my cheek!"

A great cry went up from Noah. 

"My father is now dead because his own father slew him, and the outside world was the iniquitous place? Fuck you!"

Noah exhaled a still greater moan.

"We have no idea why the world flooded, but you all kept saying that the world was getting warmer every year of my childhood. Maybe it was from all those fires people light to worship their gods." 

Noah began to cry in earnest.

"And if the world was just a place of people killing and raping each other, maybe it's because worshiping all those drinking spirits and drugs were what made them that way. Grandfather Noah is the same as all of them!"

The wailing and crying grew entwined. 

"And yes, when we were still on land I jerked off in the holy spirit dozens of times, but the whole ark is alive because of me. Me, not your crappy god. I hate the drink and everything it makes you all do. I hate the fact that we're still alive and everybody else is dead, and if there is a spirit who did this, I hate him more than anyone and I curse him forever."

"Execration! Astonishment! Reproach! We spit you out of the House of Noah for eternity!" 

"I was planning to run away from this pathetic house for years. Now I've got a whole new world I can start on my own!" 

---------------------------

We never saw Canaan again. Within two days he'd run away with Japeth's granddaughter Arsal. I've had half a millennium to think about that last horrible day on the Ark. There were details on which Canaan was clearly wrong: the animals were nearly as drink-soaked as us people and so would be the milk, but otherwise it's possible that Canaan was entirely correct. Perhaps there are no spirits and the earth contains nothing but water, fire, and air. Yet why did Father know to build the Ark? And why did we, out of all the world, survive when no one else did? Did the Drink's holy spirit know what was to come? And even if the Drink has no spirit, did our belief in the Drink made only us survive. Even were there no drink to chose us for its terrific knowledge, could believing in the spirit of the drink make us survive through hardships no one else can or would? 

We have no way of knowing what became of Canaan and Arsal. Were there truly no people on Earth but us, how would they survive without knowledge of where was the arable land or the animals? Were one of them to die, the other would be entirely alone on this planet, with no way of knowing whither their family. As current head of the House of Noah, surely I would have welcomed them back with open arms, and even Father might have after a hundred-fifty years to calm down, but how could we ever locate each other? 

Canaan and Arsal went alone into the world with no spirit to guide them and nothing to summon their willpower but a cold planet of death who washes away all things for no reason at all. How could they possibly summon will to life in the face of such indifference? Perhaps love of each other will sustain them, if it is love, or perhaps they'll be sustained by a vision of a more just world, better than the one which birthed them. But if they are not dead yet,they will one day die and there is no eternal spirit to claim their reward. Can humans truly sustain themselves in a world where all things are flesh and dust? 

Underrated Classical Musicians: Bronius Kutavicius and Late Soviet Composers

So let's talk about Bronius Kutavicius, why he's a giant, and why late Soviet bloc music is THE music of the late 20th century...

In the wake of Shostakovich is a whole generation of Soviet composers who took advantage of the thaw and are only now completing their careers. Perhaps the giant of them all was Alfred Schnittke, for whom it becomes clear, at least to me, that if the late 20th century had modern Beethoven, it was him.

Musicians are like any other artists. There is only so much you can do to make your music interesting if you're a complete naif outside of music. If you're a true genius like Mozart or Gershwin or Bizet, you may not need to read widely or experience the world, but most of us are not wunderkinder, we are doing the best we can with limited means, but within the limitations of our intelligence, we can hopefully superceed them with limitless curiosity and empathy. An artist without a sense of history or philosophy or psychology or science is limited by their own perspective, and artists, let's face it, are not exactly known for their accurate perceptions of realities right in front of them.

What artists are best at is being living witnesses - explaining the human heart and all its desires and dreams and frustrations and heartbreaks and nightmares and hopes. Every work is a reflection of the artist at their core: their beliefs and speculations about love, god, humans, and the world. The artist is there as a filter to interpret the events of their time and also put those events in the context of human experiences we all have.

Kutavicius, like Veljo Tormis and Peteris Vasks, had the equally fortunate and unfortunate luck of bearing witness to yet another small Baltic nation known for its incredible vocal and folk traditions, but sung in a language understood by no one but natives.

Shostakovich is known to the classical music world as 'the end', he is, to this day, the last composer unassailably let into the standard repertoire, but he was as much a beginning as an end. After Shostakovich, there was a deluge of Soviet composers who wrote about the struggles of their time and place in barely disguised metaphors. and there are so many great Eastern European composers who took inspiration from Shostakovich's tightrope walk above Stalin's lion cage.

Kutavicius, like Veljo Tormis, drew inspiration not only from Baltic choral traditions and folk music, but also from ancient pagan religions. If there was one thing in the Soviet Union more daring than declaring public allegiance to Christianity, it was declaring public allegiance to paganism. To write such music, and more importantly, write it well, is a statement of Baltic nationalism against Soviet ideals and a statement of tolerance for differences.

The reason a few of us find music of the popular tradition a little tame is because it stops short of ultimate things. It is music that either does not give much sense that the musicians are not aware that life gets more difficult than textbook heartbreak or mental illness and addiction or relatively micro marginalizations. Or it is by people who know that very well, and yet still elect to paper over the most difficult truths. Obviously this is not true of everything in the popular traditions, but too much of it... Nor is that to say that classical music does not have many, many, many of it's own problems, many of which has to do with its too high opinion of itself....

The art music of Soviet sphere is an eternal document of life under repression. It is a miracle that the authorities even allowed it to be written, though much of it encountered repression after its premieres. It's the music of people who've endured all. Who were children amid the Great Terror, adolescents in the Great Patriotic War, and came of age in the Thaw when finally, after forty years of continuous death, artists could speak the Soviet experience with some measure of freedom. This music speaks not only for the composer but for its listeners, the first of whom must have realized that merely showing up in the audience could put them on a list that sends them to prison.

Kutavicius is yet another composer whose giant output is mostly not available on record. What we have is music of giant spirituality. It forever dances around the line between the avant-garde complexity and completely simple accessibility. What I've heard includes some of the greatest music of the 20th century, and it's just another great Late Soviet composer with whose achievfement the world has yet to come to terms.

Listen to the Dzukian Variations on the first link (first ten minutes). Then listen to the Last Pagan Rites, the first 27 minutes of the second link. This is music of vision as towering as anyone ever wrote in the 20th century.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMgYb2Y2__w

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOEGBYpc1_s

Tale 4 - Drink - Rough Draft

 Every day, my father warned me of the dangers of the demonic fluid. It was drink which unleashed all of man's evil and eliminated the barrier from beast. It was drink that eliminated health and happiness. Drink is danger, drink is trauma, drink is obscenity and humiliation, blasphemy in the eyes of God and excrement in the windows of memory. Drink is serenity's eternal expenditure: instants of bliss for an eternity of inner violence. 

Trauma is the intrusion of another soul. The intrusion never announces the full measure of his control, he simply demonstrates a new facet every day, intrusion doubling upon intrusion, exhibiting ever more masterfully that he, not we, are the part of our mind that thinks. 

Perhaps this other soul is a devil or dybbuk, perhaps he's simply another person who deliberately lodged himself within you, or perhaps he's another person burdened with his own dybbuk. But whomever he is, he, not you, masters the mind, and you become a spectator within your own consciousness. The self schisms, and half your mind whispers horrors to the other half. He begins to determine your decisions, and with every new decision he wins over you, you wonder ever more if he was you all along.   

For centuries, father did not touch drink. He knew of its ecstasies and torments as well as any man, but he saw what drink made him, and what drink made others, and its humiliations were repugnant. It caused a whole earth on which man has neither self nor divinity, but only sense - pleasures to drown their pain, other people's pain to drown them in pleasure, a whole earth of trauma absorbed and trauma inflicted where man uses his divinity to inflict all the worse. And so where the rest of Earth was wine, the House of Noah was water, kept fresh and pure in wells we cleaned every single day along with blessings to a spirit on the face of the waters whose name we never pronounced, and perhaps we never knew. Ham and I knew not drink for an hundred years of our lives. 

All the while, as the temperature warmed and the Earth had become fire and rain. Father communed with a pool of drink. Every day as he had for hundreds of years, he put a finger into the drink and touched its holy spirit to his lips. Every day he spoke with the spirit of the drink, and the drink spoke back. For seven hours every day Father would walk around the pool, speaking questions and answers, and the pool told him all of creation, of all its trees and crowns, of its spheres both visible and hidden, and the pool's holy spirit made Father the wisest of men. 

The holy spirit had told Father to build an ark and gather every living thing that creepeth upon the earth, for the spirit was wroth with the world and would flood it to begin the world anew in a second Eden where would live none but the righteous offspring of the House of Noah. 

And the Spirit was right, for lo, the world had become drink; not drink still and clear, but torrential and murderous, until all the world was again without form and void. Then the sea level rose, and rose, and rose, until the planet itself rose up and murdered its unworthy caretakers, and all the Earth was but one large ocean, stewed in the iniquities of its trillions of drowned beings and glazed with salt to parch any floating above. And within three days, all remaining life lodged within an ark of 300 cubits.

The invisible spirit told us of the flood, he told father to build the ark, precisely how, and with what, and how large, and how many animals to gather, but he gave us no extra ration of fresh water. All we had was the water within our well, which outside the well must be fermented ere it turn to undrinkable sludge and excrement. So there was only barley fermentation, and wine, and animals, and obscenity. Not even the children could have water, it must be rationed for certain animals who could not survive in alcohol. But the first thing we brought aboard the ark was Father's pool of drink, of which he made us carry pitcher by pitcher to a second pool he'd constructed alone.

On the ark at first it was only us and the wine - and father knew what was to come. He told us we had no extra rations for the animals, but to allow ourselves twelve times an eleven month supply for four families - we asked why, he did not say. 

It began not with agony but with joy and camaraderie - days of merry work followed fine nights of wine and song. Then lying with our wives in tents in living quarters on the Ark's four opposite corners. The children would be serenely asleep just after dinner, and so torpid that they never wandered. The House of Noah used our great wealth to buy all the crops of the land to feed the animals, and they pickled within buckets of salt water procured from the deluge outside the ark. 

But Father had always been quiet and cryptic with all but the holy spirit, and though he took to the wine immediately, his serene self turned upside down to the most dreadful moroseness. None saw him eat, and he said not a word even as he fed the animals. Yet while Father felt submerged in the drink, our work seemed as play. 

But at the cusp of manhood, no drink could torpor Canaan. In less than one year he'd have taken to wife, but what wife lived to take him? 

The noises began with the sheep of course, and then the goats, and then the dogs and cows, and then to the larger animals, and the smaller, until we wondered if there was an unsullied animal among the 16,000 on the ark. An animal would exclaim that peculiar scream, always the same in every species, and we knew where Canaan was, but we all were so besotted with drink that what did it matter? The world was ending, boys will be boys, the animals were drunk too, and were we to believe Father, the House of Noah was the one family in the world who did not enjoy the company of livestock. 

The loneliness of the ark eventually got to our wives, and then to us, and as the drink increased, the revelries decreased. Never again would we see anyone but ourselves, and that realization necessitated more drink. Every simple disagreement felt like a fallen house, which also necessitated more drink. Whenever the rain's humidity caused a sniffle, we feared the mortality outdoors would spread inside, which necessitated still more drink. And whenever an animal fell ill, which was often, we were great with labor to minister them, which necessitated the most drink of all. 

All the while, father had built a new cage, and a large one. We wondered if there was a flying animal we'd forgotten. Father would not say. 

Days grew to weeks, memory blurred day into day, until eventually there were no memories except the wailing of our wives as dawned on them a world of loss, and the raging mischief of children bored into our heads, which necessitated still more drink. Raven after dove after raven sent forth to find evidence of land; but there was only drink, until finally a dove emerged with an olive branch. The Lord had spared us, and thus could we the survivors multiply in a new era of righteousness and favor and grace. 

But on the very day we were to leave the ark, great human cries awoke us to find Ham murdered, and Canaan locked in Father's cage.

"Canaan! What have you done?" Here is the dialogue between father and grandson which followed:

"I have done nothing! Ham was murdered by you Grandfather!"

"The Holy Spirit warned me something awful would happen, but surely it would be less than this! Murder or defilement among kin is what I expected, but what has occurred is so much worse!"

"Why have you murdered my father?"

"He tried to kill me before I laid my curse on you!" 

"Why would you curse me?"

"Look at the chalky substance within the drink! The imagination of man's heart is evil from its youth! Canaan has gazed upon my spirit's nakedness and spilled his seed into it! He has raped the holy spirit of the Earth! We shall never rebuild Eden! The whole flood has been for nothing! Humanity now shall continue just as it has!" 

"But I did not...."

"Cursed be you Canaan! A curse you were upon Ham and upon this ark, and cursed you shall be upon dry land! A servant of servants shall ye be unto your bretheren! A blessing shall this Holy Spirit of mine be to Shem and Japeth, but the your house Canaan shall be a servant to the servants of Shem and Japeth all the days of their li..."

"Grandfather, that was milk." 

"What?"

"It WAS milk."

"Did Grandfather really think fermentation and salt would keep a kingdom of animals alive for a whole year?"

"I think whatever the spirit in the drink tells me."

"There is no spirit in the drink."

"SILENCE!" 

"If it's a spirit, then spirit told you what your mind already saw."

"Indeed, the spirit told me the world is fornication and wickedness. Just like y..."

"No, grandfather, the world was already flooding, the spirit told you what your eyes already saw." 

"We do not see but with the eyes of our spirit!"

"No, our spirit sees with our eyes." 

"Profanity! You deserve to be cursed all over again."

"You will not lift the curse from me?"

"Never!"

"Then I curse you too Grandfather!"

"Abominable blasphemer! May you be known through all eterni..."

"May you endure your final three hundred years knowing nothing of life but this stupid spirit of the drink or whatever you call that liquid shit and may all the flesh that creepeth upon the earth find no peace in you." 

"Outrageous infide...!"

"May your bullshit visions of the Eden we lost haunt all your days and creep all your nights. May you forever see in me your only impediment to paradise."

Noah immediately charged at Canaan to strike him down but was prevented by the cage he built himself. He reached for the key to the cage, but Canaan pulled Noah's key out of his own tunic. 

"While you all spent your nights in a drunken stupor I was milking all the mammal females and feeding it to their children. I even fed the milk to your grandchildren and great-grandchildren, because children will never survive on just the alcohol you've spent your whole lifetime warning us against and then made us live on. Shem, do you really think Arphaxad could survive the whole first year of his life on nothing but alcoholic breastmilk?" 

Clearly in grief, Noah reached for his sword with a clear intention to fall on himself. From out his tunic Canaan produced Noah's sword as well. 

"How can you be given power of life and death? You murdered your own son because of some milk and you don't even know what it takes for your own grandchildren to live!"

A great cry went up from Noah. 

"My father is now dead because his own father slew him, and the outside world was the iniquitous place? Fuck you!"

Noah exhaled a still greater moan.

"We have no idea why the world flooded, but you all kept saying that the world was getting warmer every year of my childhood. Maybe it was from all those fires people light to worship their gods." 

Noah began to cry in earnest.

"And if the world was just a place of people killing and raping each other, maybe it's because worshiping all those drinking spirits and drugs were what made them so. You're no better than they are!"

The wailing and crying grew entwined. 

"And alright, maybe I jerked off in the holy spirit, but the whole ark is alive because of me. Me, not your crappy god. I hate the drink and everything it made you all do. I hate the fact that we're still alive and everybody else is dead, and if there is a spirit who did this, I hate him more than anyone and I curse him forever."

"Execration! Astonishment! Reproach! We spit you out of the House of Noah for eternity!" 

"I was planning to run away from this incompetent house for years. Now I've got a whole new world I can start on my own!" 

---------------------------

We never saw Canaan again. Within two days he'd run away with Japeth's granddaughter Arsal. I've had half a millennium to think about that last horrible day on the Ark. It's always possible that Canaan was right in every particular. Maybe there are no spirits and the earth contains nothing but fire, water, and air. But why did Father know to build the Ark? And why did we, out of all the world, survive when no one else did? Did the Drink's Holy Spirit truly know what was to come? And even if the Drink has no spirit, did our belief in the Drink made us survive when no one else would. Even if there was no drink that chose us for its terrific knowledge, could believing in it make us survive through hardships no one else can or would? 

Tale 4 - 90ish%

 Every day, my father warned me of the dangers of the demonic fluid. It was drink which unleashed all of man's evil and eliminated the barrier from beast. It was drink that eliminated health and happiness. Drink is danger, drink is trauma, drink is obscenity and humiliation, blasphemy in the eyes of God and excrement in the windows of memory. Drink is serenity's eternal expenditure: instants of bliss for an eternity of inner violence. 

Trauma is the intrusion of another soul. The intrusion never announces the full measure of his control, he simply demonstrates a new facet every day, intrusion doubling upon intrusion, exhibiting ever more masterfully that he, not we, are the part of our mind that thinks. 

Perhaps this other soul is a devil or dybbuk, perhaps he's simply another person who deliberately lodged himself within you, or perhaps he's another person burdened with his own dybbuk. But whomever he is, he, not you, masters the mind, and you become a spectator within your own consciousness. The self schisms, and half your mind whispers horrors to the other half. He begins to determine your decisions, and with every new decision he wins over you, you wonder ever more if he was you all along.   

For centuries, father did not touch drink. He knew of its ecstasies and torments as well as any man, but he saw what drink made him, and what drink made others, and its humiliations were repugnant. It caused a whole earth on which man has neither self nor divinity, but only sense - pleasures to drown their pain, other people's pain to drown them in pleasure, a whole earth of trauma absorbed and trauma inflicted where man uses his divinity to inflict all the worse. And so where the rest of Earth was wine, the House of Noah was water, kept fresh and pure in wells we cleaned every single day along with blessings to a spirit on the face of the waters whose name we never pronounced, and perhaps we never knew. Ham and I knew not drink for an hundred years of our lives. 

All the while, as the temperature warmed and the Earth had become fire and rain. Father communed with a pool of drink he never touched as he had for hundreds of years, yet spoke to every day, and the pool spoke back. For seven hours every day Father would walk around the pool, speaking questions and answers, and the pool told him all of creation, of all its trees and crowns, of its spheres both visible and hidden, and the pool's holy spirit made Father the wisest of men. 

The holy spirit had told Father to build an ark and gather every living thing that creepeth upon the earth, for the spirit was wroth with the world and would flood it to begin the world anew in a second Eden where would live none but the righteous offspring of the House of Noah. 

And the Spirit was right, for lo, the world had become drink; not drink still and clear, but torrential and murderous, until all the world was again without form and void. Then the sea level rose, and rose, and rose, until the planet itself rose up and murdered its unworthy caretakers, and all the Earth was but one large ocean, stewed in the iniquities of its trillions of drowned beings and salted to parch the few floaters above its onslaught. And within three days, all remaining life lodged within an ark of 300 cubits. 

The invisible spirit told us of the flood, he told father to build the ark, precisely how, and with what, and how large, and how many animals to gather, but he gave us no extra ration of fresh water. All we had was the water within our well, which outside the well must be fermented ere it turn to undrinkable sludge and excrement. So there was only barley fermentation, and wine, and animals, and obscenity. Not even the children could have water, it must be rationed for certain animals who could not survive in alcohol. 

At first it was only us and the wine - and father knew what was to come. He told us we had no extra rations for the animals, but to allow ourselves twelve times an eleven month supply for four families - we asked why, he did not say. 

It began not with agony but with joy and camaraderie - days of merry work followed fine nights of wine and song. Then lying with our wives in tents in living quarters on the Ark's four opposite corners. The children would be serenely asleep just after dinner, and so torpid that they never wandered. The House of Noah used our great wealth to buy all the crops of the land to feed the animals, and they pickled within buckets of salt water procured from the water outside the ark. 

But Father had always been quiet and cryptic with all but the holy spirit, and though he took to the wine immediately, his serene self turned upside down to the most dreadful moroseness. None saw him eat, and he said not a word even as he fed the animals. Yet while Father felt submerged in the drink, our work seemed as play. 

But at the cusp of manhood, no drink could torpor Canaan. In less than one year he'd have taken to wife, but what wife lived to take him? It began with the sheep of course, and then the goats, and then the dogs and cows, and then to the larger animals, and the smaller, until we wondered if there was an unsullied animal among the 16,000 on the ark.

An animal would exclaim that peculiar scream, always the same in every species, and we knew where Canaan was, but we all were so besotted with drink that what did it matter? The world was ending, boys will be boys, the animals were drunk too, and were we to believe Father, the House of Noah was the one family in the world who did not enjoy the company of livestock. 

The loneliness of the ark eventually got to our wives, and then to us, and as the drink increased, the revelries decreased. Never again would we see anyone but ourselves, and that realization necessitated more drink. Every simple disagreement felt like a fallen house, which also necessitated more drink. Whenever the rain's humidity caused a sniffle, we feared the mortality outdoors would spread inside, which necessitated still more drink. And whenever an animal fell ill, which was often, we were great with labor to minister them, which necessitated the most drink of all. 

All the while, father had built a new cage, and a large one. We wondered if there was a flying animal we'd forgotten. Father would not say. 

Days grew to weeks, memory blurred day into day, until eventually there were no memories except the wailing of our wives as dawned on them a world of loss, and the raging mischief of children bored into our heads, which necessitated still more drink. Raven after dove after raven sent forth to find evidence of land; but there was only drink, until finally a dove emerged with an olive branch. The Lord had spared us, and thus could we the survivors multiply in a new era of righteousness and favor and grace. 

But on the very day we were to leave the ark, great human cries awoke us to find Ham murdered, and Canaan locked in Father's cage. 

"Canaan! What have you done?"

"I have done nothing Shem! Ham was murdered by Grandfather Noah!" 

"The Holy Spirit had warned me something awful would happen, but surely it would be less than this! Murder or defilement among kin is what I expected, but what has occurred is so much worse!"

"Why have you murdered Ham father?"

"He tried to kill me before I laid my curse on his son!"

"Why would you curse Canaan?"

"Look at the chalky substance within the drink! The imagination of man's heart is evil from its youth! Canaan has gazed upon my spirit's nakedness and spilled his seed into it! He has raped the holy spirit of the Earth! We shall never rebuild Eden! The whole flood has been for nothing! Humanity now shall continue just as it has!" 

"But I did not...."

"Cursed be you Canaan! A curse you were upon Ham and upon this ark, and cursed you shall be upon dry land! A servant of servants shall ye be unto your bretheren! A blessing shall this Holy Spirit of mine be to Shem and Japeth, but the your house Canaan shall be a servant to the servants of Shem and Japeth all the days of their lives!"

"Father, could that be cow's milk?" 

Tale 4 - Drink - 2/3rdsish

 Every day, my father warned me of the dangers of the demonic fluid. It was drink which unleashed all of man's evil and eliminated the barrier from beast. It was drink that eliminated health and happiness. Drink is danger, drink is trauma, drink is obscenity and humiliation, blasphemy in the eyes of God and excrement in the windows of memory. Drink is serenity's eternal expenditure: instants of bliss for an eternity of inner violence. 

Trauma is the intrusion of another soul. The intrusion never announces the full measure of his control, he simply demonstrates a new facet every day, intrusion doubling upon intrusion, exhibiting ever more masterfully that he, not we, are the part of our mind that thinks. 

Perhaps this other soul is a devil or dybbuk, perhaps he's simply another person who deliberately lodged himself within you, or perhaps he's another person burdened with his own dybbuk. But whomever he is, he, not you, masters the mind, and you become a spectator within your own consciousness. The self schisms, and half your mind whispers horrors to the other half. He begins to determine your decisions, and with every new decision he wins over you, you wonder ever more if he was you all along.   

For centuries, father did not touch drink. He knew of its ecstasies and torments as well as any man, but he saw what drink made him, and what drink made others, and its humiliations were repugnant. It caused a whole earth on which man has neither self nor divinity, but only sense - pleasures to drown their pain, other people's pain to drown them in pleasure, a whole earth of trauma absorbed and trauma inflicted where man uses his divinity to inflict all the worse. And so where the rest of Earth was wine, the House of Noah was water, kept fresh and pure in wells we cleaned every single day along with blessings to a spirit on the face of the waters whose name we never pronounced, and perhaps we never knew. Ham and I knew not drink for an hundred years of our lives. 

And then the world became drink; not drink still and clear, but torrential and murderous. The temperature  warmed and the Earth became fire and rain. Then the sea level rose, and rose, and rose, and eventually all things on earth submerged within our new planet of cataclysmic tsunami. The planet rose up and murdered its unworthy caretakers, and all the Earth was but one large ocean, stewed in the iniquities of its trillions of drowned beings and salted to parch those who managed to float above its onslaught. Yet again the world was without form and void - and within three days, all remaining life lodged within an ark of 300 cubits. 

And not a drop to drink. The invisible spirit told us of the flood, he told father to build the ark, precisely how, and with what, and how large, and how many animals to gather, but he gave us no extra ration of fresh water. All we had was the water within our well, which outside the well must be fermented ere it turn to undrinkable sludge and excrement. So there was only barley fermentation, and wine, and animals, and obscenity. Not even the children could have water, it must be rationed for certain animals who could not survive on alcoholic content. 

At first it was only us and the wine - and father knew what was to come. He told us we had no choice but to take five times a general five month supply - we asked why, he did not say. 

It began not with agony but with joy and camaraderie - days of merry work followed fine nights of wine and song. Then lying with our wives in tents in living quarters on the Ark's four opposite corners. The children would be serenely asleep just after dinner, and so torpid that they never wandered. The House of Noah used our great wealth to buy all the crops of the land to feed the animals, and they pickled within buckets of salt water procured from just outside the ark. 

But always quiet and cryptic, Father took to the wine immediately, and his serenely joyful self turned itself upside down to the most dreadful moroseness, he slept through dinners, and said not a word even as he went about feeding the animals. Only Father felt submerged in the drink while our work seemed as play. 

But at the cusp of manhood, no drink could torpor Canaan. In less than one year he'd have taken to wife, but what wife lived to take him? It began with the sheep of course, and then the goats, and then the dogs and cows, and then to the larger animals, and the smaller, until we wondered if there was an unsullied animal among the 16,000 on the ark.

An animal would exclaim that peculiar scream, always the same in every species, and we knew where Canaan was, but we all were so besotted with drink that what did it matter? The world was ending, boys will be boys, the animals were drunk too, and were we to believe Father, the House of Noah was the one family in the world who did not enjoy the company of livestock. 

The loneliness of the ark eventually got to our wives, and then to us, and as the drink increased, the revelries decreased. Never again would we see anyone but ourselves, and that realization necessitated more drink. Every simple disagreement felt like a fallen house, which also necessitated more drink. Whenever the rain's humidity caused a sniffle, we feared the mortality outdoors would spread inside, which necessitated still more drink. And whenever an animal fell ill, which was often, we had to work hard to minister to them, which necessitated the most drink of all. 

All the while, father had built a new cage, and a large one. We wondered if there was a flying animal we'd forgotten. Father would not say. 

Days grew to weeks, memory blurred day into day, and eventually we had no memory at all. Until one day we awoke to find a dove, dry land, and Ham and Canaan locked together in Father's cage. 

Tale 4 - Drink - 55ish %

Every day of my life, my father warned me of the dangers of the demonic fluid. It was drink which unleashed all of man's evil and eliminated the barrier from beast. It was drink that eliminated health and happiness. Drink is danger, drink is trauma, drink is obscenity and humiliation, blasphemy in the eyes of God and excrement in the windows of memory. Drink is serenity's eternal expenditure: instants of bliss for an eternity of inner violence. 

Trauma is the intrusion of another soul. The intrusion never announces the full measure of his control, he simply demonstrates a new facet every day, intrusion doubling upon intrusion, exhibiting ever more masterfully that he, not we, are the part of our mind that thinks. 

Perhaps this other soul is a devil or dybbuk, perhaps he's simply another person who deliberately lodged himself within you, or perhaps he's another person burdened with his own dybbuk. But whomever he is, he, not you, masters the mind, and you become a spectator within your own consciousness. The self schisms, and half your mind whispers horrors to the other half. He begins to determine your decisions, and with every new decision he wins over you, you wonder ever more if he was you all along.   

For centuries, father did not touch drink. He knew of its ecstasies and torments as well as any man, but he saw what drink made him, and what drink made others, and its humiliations were repugnant. It caused a whole earth on which man has neither self nor divinity, but only sense - pleasures to drown their pain, other people's pain to drown them in pleasure, a whole earth of trauma absorbed and trauma inflicted where man uses his divinity to inflict all the worse. And so where the rest of Earth was wine, the House of Noah was water, kept fresh and pure in wells we cleaned every single day along with blessings to a spirit on the face of the waters whose name we never pronounced, and perhaps we never knew. Ham and I knew not drink for an hundred years of our lives. 

And then the world became drink, not drink still and clear, but torrential and murderous. The temperature became warmer and the whole earth became fire and rain. Then the sea level rose, and rose, and rose, and eventually all things on earth submerged within our new planet of cataclysmic tsunami. The planet rose up and murdered its unworthy caretakers, and all the Earth was but one large ocean, stewed in the iniquities of the billions of drowned beings within it and salted to parch those who floated above its onslaught. Yet again the world was without form and void - and within three days, all remaining life lodged within an ark of 300 cubits. 

And not a drop to drink. The invisible spirit told us of the flood, he told father to build the ark, precisely how, and with what, and how large, and how many animals to gather, but he gave us no fresh water. All we had was the water within our well, which outside the well turned to undrinkable sludge and excrement.  There was only barley fermentation, and wine, and animals, and obscenity. 

At first it was only us and the wine - and father new what was to come. He told us we had no choice but to take three times a general three month supply - we asked why, he did not say. 

It began not with agony but with joy and camaraderie, fine nights of wine and song, our entire produce of three years pickled in the wine and in buckets of salt water from just outside the ark. Then lying with our wives in tents in living quarters on the Ark's four opposite corners.

But our always quiet father took to the wine immediately, and his serenely joyful self turned itself upside down to the most terrible moroseness, he slept through dinners, and said not a word even as he went about feeding the animals. We too went about our business all too happily. 

But the children were on their own, and Canaan was on the verge of manhood, a year away from taking to wife. It began with the sheep of course, and then the goats, and then feeding the drink to the dogs and cows, and then to the larger animals, and the smaller, until we wondered if there was an unsullied animal among the 16,000 on the ark.

 

Tale 4 - Drink - First 33-50%

Every day of my life, my father warned me of the dangers of the demonic fluid. It was drink which unleashed all of man's evil and eliminated the barrier from beast. It was drink that eliminated health and happiness. Drink is danger, drink is trauma, drink is obscenity and humiliation, blasphemy in the eyes of God and excrement in the windows of memory. Drink is serenity's eternal expenditure: instants of bliss for an eternity of inner violence. 

Trauma is the intrusion of another soul. The intrusion never announces the full measure of his control, he simply demonstrates a new facet every day, intrusion doubling upon intrusion, exhibiting ever more masterfully that he, not we, are the part of our mind that thinks. 

Perhaps this other soul is a devil or dybbuk, perhaps he's simply another person who deliberately lodged himself within you, or perhaps he's another person burdened with his own dybbuk. But whomever he is, he, not you, masters the mind, and you become a spectator within your own consciousness. The self schisms, and half your mind whispers horrors to the other half. He begins to determine your decisions, and with every new decision he wins over you, you wonder ever more if he was you all along.   

For centuries, father did not touch drink. He knew of its ecstasies and torments as well as any man, but he saw what drink made him, and what drink made others, and its humiliations were repugnant. A whole earth on which man has neither self nor divinity, but only sense - pleasures to drown their pain, other people's pain to drown them in pleasure, a whole earth of trauma absorbed and trauma inflicted where man uses his divinity to inflict trauma all the worse. And so where the rest of Earth was wine, the House of Noah was water, kept fresh and pure in wells we cleaned every single day in blessings to a spirit whose name we never pronounced, and perhaps we never even knew. Ham and I knew not drink for an hundred years of our lives. 

And then the world became drink, not drink still and clear, but torrential and murderous. The temperature became warmer, and the whole earth became fire and rain. Then the sea level rose, and rose, and rose, and eventually all things on earth submerged within our new planet of cataclysmic tsunami. The planet murdered its unworthy caretakers, and all the Earth was but one large ocean, stewed in the iniquities of the billions it drowned and salted to parch those who floated. Yet again the world was without form and void - all remaining life lodged within an ark of 300 cubits. 

And not a drop to drink. The invisible spirit told us of the flood, he told father to build the ark, precisely how, and with what, and how large, and how many animals to gather, but he did not give us water. All we had was the water within our well, which outside the well turned to undrinkable sludge and excrement. There was only wine, and beer, and fermentation, and animals, and obscenity. 

Tale 4 - Drink - Beginning

 Every day of my life, my father warned me of the dangers of drink. It was drink which unleashed all of man's evil and eliminated the barrier from beast. It was drink that eliminated health and happiness. Drink is danger, drink is trauma, drink is obscenity and humiliation, blasphemy in the eyes of God and excrement in the windows of memory. Drink is serenity's eternal expenditure: instants of bliss for an eternity of violence in the soul. 

Trauma is the intrusion in the soul of another soul whose presence makes himself known not all at once but over the days of our lives, and doles out his control's full measure day by day, intrusion upon intrusion, demonstrating ever more masterfully that he, not we, is in control. Perhaps this other soul is a devil or dybbuk, perhaps he's simply another person who lodged within you, or perhaps he's another person burdened with his own dybbuk. But whomever he is, one becomes a spectator within one's own consciousness as the self schisms, and half your mind whispers your true monstrous nature to the other half. 

The Cain Fragment #1 (CW - meant to be disturbing)

My Dearest Brother,

As is my custom, I write to you once every biblical threescore and ten, as though I have just lived yet another full lifetime, and burn my offering to the post in the sky where I hope you shall receive it, or at least it shall be received by our creator. My burden is, as always, greater than I can bear, yet have I born it this century as every other.

I write to you from a mountain hideaway called Masada, composing a letter amongst a thousand blackened corpses. I have just composed a speech I shall tell the world was written by our general, Elazar-ben-Yair, exhorting his people to nobly fall on their swords rather than allow themselves taken prisoner. I shall leave it next to his body ere I depart.

But there was no speech, and only one of these deaths shall be a suicide. Rather than tell and risk their families' flight, each husband strangled his own wife so they would not cry out in death and scare the children before the child murder itself. For once all the mothers of their children were dead, each father slaughtered his own children like kosher butchers, slitting the throat as two other men held the child down. Only then did they kill each other, for surely suicide is a great sin . . .

One might understand their plight, as surely torture, rape, and slavery is their best hope at Roman hands, yet were we better than the Romans? All I could do in response was hide a few women and children in a singular small alcove of which I knew I was the only person to discover. I wanted to save so many more, yet where could I hide them that their patriarchs would not find? The lots were drawn for whom should be the last man to live and burn the corpses ere they be sodomized, and of course, the chosen man was me. For I am Cain, who since that awful day in the field has died in every century yet resurrected from each death in different corner of the world with 4000 years of memory within me. I have died by burning and drowning, sword and beast, famine and thirst, violence and plague, strangling and stoning. Much of it self-inflicted, for if God will not let me die, he can at least see how much I long for it.

Jesus-ben-Joseph, if he is whom Paul says, was only resurrected once, and for that he is god, whereas resurrection is all I am, and I am not even a devil; merely sentenced to life eternal, wanderer and witness to all things, not even permitted sleep, everlasting to everlasting. Perhaps Satan is who awaits the sinners, but since I am the true and knowing perpetrator of original sin, I am His witness for all sins on earth. Your blood cried out to God, but for my injustice perpetrated upon you, God cries out the blood of every injustice to me.

It is nearly 4000 years since we trod earth together. I have written you in every century of my trevails and few small triumphs, but I do not know if you have received my letters, so every century I write you anew of my sufferings, my guilt, my experience, and my horrible knowledge. I have seen century after century of death. I've killed a tens of thousand more than I was killed - in war, in execution, and for pleasure. I watch as millions of slaves groan under their burdens. I have watched millions of tortured and executed plead for mercy. I have watched millions of women cry out against their captors, and millions of their children cry out before their sacrifice. I have watched billions cry out at every age for release against the pain of illness, the one pain which I shall never know, and therefore can never be released. All that I have loved has died so many times that I worry my longing to love shall rot, yet I am cursed to love anew in every lifetime - the eyes and embraces of so many women remain etched within me, all of them cursed to live alongside my curse, and bear my fate even after I am gone. My wives have born thousands of children, and each time I am reborn, my children think their father dead. A whole race of Cains probably exists upon earth in every corner of God's Earth - the wretched class of every empire and territory, existing at the mercy of all who are not them, their treatment a mere bellweather for whether their hosts shall be rewarded, or punished in manners little different than Cain is in every lifetime.

He with no name thinks he can console me for my sufferings with wisdom, but the greatest wisdom is that wisdom has no reward. He who increases knowledge increases sorrow, and to He my soul went with you, and like you, I am eternally departed from it - the one material man on earth. What shall it profit a man if he gain the world but lose his soul? Well, I have heard Christ preach on the Mount and was crucified the week after him. I wrote reports for Augustus Caesar and warned Julius about the Ides of March. I was sentenced to death by Cyrus the Great and had my death sentence commuted by Cyrus in my next lifetime. In one life was a Babylonian slave who died under the stones of Nebuchadnezzar and in the next designed buildings for Nebuchadnezzar. I died in the Punic Wars twice, once for Rome, once for Carthage. I was killed by the soldiers of Qin Shi Huang four times. I designed pillars for Ashoka, meditated with the Buddha, and sat at the feet of Confucius as his disciple. I fought alongside both Alexander and Achilles and was there when Troy burned. I was methodically examined by Socrates, examined Aristotle in turn, measured angles for Pythagoras and redacted Homer. I sealed the treaty at the Peace of Nicas with my blood and drowned at the Battle of Aegospotami. I hunted with Gilgamesh and sat at the gambling table of Yudhistira. As a slave I built pyramids for Pharaoh Khufu and sphinxes for Hatshepsut, yet advised Pharaoh Thutmose on science and served as high priest of Ra for Akhenaten. I attended to Cleopatra in her chambers and I counseled Queen Esther on how to please King Ahasuerus. I have written songs for David and wisdom for Solomon. I was with Pharaoh at the Red Sea and the Israelites at Mount Sinai. I, too, am that I am, and I everything the world is, I have gained, but gain after gain, life after life, I shall lose.

Fifty-nine years ago I was poisoned by Empress Livia before I could tell Caesar Augustus of her many plots. Divine Augustus, there was a king with the wisdom of Solomon who created an empire that will bend time's arrow just as once did David. But if the world only knew the price of greatness, even of goodness and justice, would we ever venture it? Would we ever pursue any goal knowing how much we shall suffer from it?

People only accept great leadership when webbed in chaos's maelstrom, and the greater the leadership, the more the followers forget that but for the restraints their leader imposed, they would be dead. And in the wake of great leadership, no potential successor has the credibility to make followers see unity's necessity. The only place a great leader earns credibility is in the valley of the shadow of death, and when a leader leads to a mountaintop, there is no place to move but by descent - the leader sometimes has great assistants groomed to become good leaders - Moses had his Joshua, Hatshepesut her Thutmose, but greatness has no true successor, and most leaders are no leaders. No great leader had a true heir but dear David, who only found him after the death of many sons, and even great Solomon paid for his success upon death with the immediate division of his kingdom. Under new leadership the followers bristle under the necessity of taxes and wars, old rituals and new traditions, current responsibilities and new righ

(Bloodstains make the scroll largely illegible for three columns at this location but for a few passages. One cannot help a tantalizing temptation to surmise a thought that in these passages the mystical Cain details a theory of historical evolution, effective political action, the rise and decline of civilizations, and the formation of the Roman Empire - RW)

Republics are lonely islands floating in the sea of autocracy. They inevitably begin with hopes for eternal improvement in the human lot and end with aspirations violated, inspirations defaced, and accomplishments dashed to ruins. In Athens, Carthage, and Rome each, republics generated the greatest achievements known to human history, and therefore still greater hopes. Each republic ended amid a rain of blood all the larger for their towering achievements that were enlisted in the service of murder. Perhaps future republics shall last still longer and achieve still more for more people, but the longer they last, the more people they include, the more death shall be their end.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Amid a hundred years of decline and dysfunction, the end of our Roman republic seemed covered with such hope - first in Caesar Julius, then in Caesar Augustus. For fifty years, our First Citizen was the greatest man of his time raised to our highest position, and after our deaths, a ruler greater still would succeed him: be it Agrippa, or Gaius, or Germanicus, who could possibly doubt that Rome's next Princeps would extend her to still greater glories from which it could provide the world still more decency and improvement and peace? Who would have thought that the next Caesar would be mediocre, brutal, depraved Tiberi

--------------

... the future was so charged with the godliest sunlight, but there is no sun god; neither Apollo nor Ra, nor was Augustus divine, there is only our Yahweh, who has no competition in the heavens, yet is jealous of phantoms as invisible as he.

(One can form no worldconception of this scroll's historicospirit. It was discovered underneath antiquisand in the Judean Desert's Cave of Horror and the historiographiconature of this testamentscroll is highly beliefdubious, and yet carbon dating does appear to show its composition to be roughly veracitous with the timedating of its claim of periodicity; one could easily imagine a Judean mystic, perhaps an Essene, who formed a genesis of selfconception as a man who'd lived past lives, albeit such a selfconception would be seen as blasphemous had he related his selfstory any fellow mystic. But how could a mere Judean mystic have such accurate knowledge of historical events and personages in the Eastern Orient? And how could he analyze future historical events with such foresighted precision?

That such a testamentscroll could arrive in the Cave of Horror when it was composed at Masada leads one to the definiconclusion that it is a work of spiritupure sensifabrication. One cannot definimagine one's way into the spirit of worldview in the world of two millennia ago, and yet this timespeaks to us of how Judeomystics may have selfperceived in the spiritudesolation of Roman Palestina post-First RomanoJewish War.

Dr. Richard Westenbach - Humboldt University of Berlin - Department of Archeology - 1952)

600 People at the Symphony

There must have been only 600 people at the Baltimore Symphony this weekend. The older generation is almost all gone. More people our age have to appreciate how extraordinary they and their music are, or it's all going to vanish all too soon. I've written plenty about the importance of classical music people don't understand, and I won't write anything long again, but what people don't understand is that whether concert halls, or churches, or libraries and museums, or service organizations and fraternal orders, our whole society is built on organizations that foster community and common purpose, and the moment we let them die is the moment we die along with them. These organizations are dying because reform is so long overdue to let in people of every individuality, identity, class, and creed, but communities don't exist to repress individuals, they exist to accommodate individuals in a way that doesn't provoke people who disagree into killing them. If you don't join organizations and demand the community reforms that should have happened decades ago, you will have no communities left, and none of us can stand upright in the winds that blow then.When everybody goes completely their own way, you can't be surprised when nobody in the country has the same frame of reference, talks at cross purposes, and decides that everybody who disagrees is an enemy who needs to be eliminated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCj_Oeob-s0

Why I Don't Like Popular Music

It's taken me this long to say out loud what everybody knew already, and it's not like I don't have 100 individual exceptions (though I'm not going to get into the inevitable debate of what they are), but but at this point I gave it the old 'college try' nearly six times over. I even tried to create a chorus for which I arranged the best of American popular music for vocal ensemble to sing alongside 800 years of classical choral music, only to generate no interest for it at all. For somebody who doesn't like it all that much, I've done a lot more service for it than most of the people who love it.

I've played in bands since I was 16. I may not know the lyrics as well as people who grew up listening to the music every day, but I know rock, pop, and all the related genres of music from the inside. I know how the song is made, I know how the performance is planned, I know every type of setback on the way to the stage, I know what it means to hustle gigs, and I know what it means to get cheated by venues. I know what it means to play gigs you have no desire to go to so that other musicians can help you with your gigs that they have no desire to play. I know the emotional steel it takes to get in front of a stage where a small audience couldn't care less about what you play. I know the sacrifices and volatility it takes to get a band good, and I know what makes bands break up. My esophagus and circulatory system testify to how well I know the musician lifestyle, and the ringing in my ears testifies to how often I endured playing loud music I wasn't even sure I liked.

I was even briefly a frontman, and to my surprise, I was good at it. And even if I wasn't, once you're a frontman, nobody cares whethr you're good or bad. Fronting a rock band the one thing everybody in America wanted to do but me - you put the most hated guy in America in front of a band, and he's sprayed by magic dust - people suddenly want his friendship, women want his attention, people care what he thinks, what he says, what he does. I don't know why that is, none of us got in front of a band by being mildly interesting anywhere but on a stage, but everybody in America behaves as though the guy in front of the band is an alpha male who's gamed the American system that demands a white collar job and a white picket fence and doesn't give a fuck about 'the rat race.' Let me assure you: there is no worse rat race than the music business...

And 'white' is the operative word. Not in this case because whiteness automatically denotes oppression, but because white denotes triviality and entitlement. What is white rock rebellion? It's the most trivial thing in the world - people at the top of life's food chain who feel hemmed in by their expectations of prosperity. The anxiety and depression of white people is very real, I feel it every day, but who cares about postwar middle class ennui when the world around us is burning? The whole point is that when the world is as bad as it is, our individual situations don't matter that much. You do your best to be gentle but firm with yourself, and help your friends and loved ones as much as you can, but outside of our little private spheres, the world matters so much more than we do, and using music to advertise our rebellion against our life's expectations just shows how much we still buy into every life expectation America sets for us.

The reason I really and truly love classical music is not because of its refinement or its status signaling, quite the opposite. While we, the world of rock and pop, were enjoying the most prosperous society in world history, the rest of the world saw horrific things we can only read about in papers and chose to ignore.

Within the story of classical music is contained the whole history of the world, both its triumphs and its many more oppressions. Lighter classical music is nice, but it doesn't interest me any more than pop music - it's enjoyable, but it's not something to understnd the world with.

The heavy stuff, on the other hand, speaks the suffering of generations and generations: you can't listen to works like the playlist below and not hear the cry of the whole world: This music speaks the speech not just of itself, but the cries of millions of marginalized whose voices were never ever heard, many of whom could only cry their oppression from the grave, from era and areas that knew tragedy so far beyond what we have experienced and may yet experience soon. And the very fact of its intellectual refinement means it can speak those tragedies with much greater specificity - music doesn't just express itself, it expresses ideas and thoughts, and speaks them much more precisely because it's so abstract.

Insofar as America has produced music that deserves history's attention alongside Shostakovich and Beethoven, it's the black genres. It's jazz, it's blues, it's R&B, it's soul, it may be funk or hip-hop but I'm not quite holding my breath, and oh my god is it not rock or punk or indie or country or bluegrass. Only a truly great musician and daring spirit could have made A Love Supreme, Remeniscing in Tempo, Black Saint and Sinner Lady, or Hellhound on My Trail, or Strange Fruit, or King Heroin, or Come Sunday... and hell, there are a few white ones that are canon worthy too... but we under-deliver. Artistically, we think like children because we still suffer like children.

But that may change soon enough. Most of the greatest music and art and books in this country have yet to be made, because the arts exist to capture those elusive, ecstatic truths that only come out of the most complicated moral situations - loss, guilt, complicity, heartbreak. Not the trivial version of those where you know that one day everything will mend itself and you will move on, but real brokenness, where nothing can be put back together.

One day soon, America may very well know what that's like, and no amount of great art can fill the hole the lost will leave in our spirits. The people who are left will come face to face with enormities they'd never fathmed, and most of what once gave them consolation will not be big enough to process what we're thinking and feeling.

Most political movements are a religion like any other that dictates what the neural pathways of your mind make you think and feel - and more and more, art in America is viewed as an arm of politics. That's an inevitable byproduct of thinking of art as a space for simple sentiments. Art is not politics, and it's not a religion, it is a space we have so we no longer need religion. It challenges every preconceived notion, makes us think differently, makes us realize that life is never as simple as it seems, and gives us the context for what we experience so that our limited perspectives are no longer quite as limited.

And besides, even if anything I say isn't true, what can be more rock'n roll or punk than saying on social media that you hate that music? It's like walking into the middle of a crowded town square, taking a dump and spitting on everyone who walks by...

A Playlist:

Don Giovanni (the sins of every aristocrat are finally punished)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ioc9shJa_lI

Boris Godunov (the guilt of monarchs everywhere)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE43OdJZ0sk

Verdi Requiem (hell itself)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVJTQcOMLQw

Mahler's Resurrection (the last judgement)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ty0wTJ4YRio

Mahler 6 (the battlefields of World War and the blows of fate)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPoporOs5T0

Mahler 9 (death itself)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SY301g42vO8

Shostakovich 13 (the Shoah and life in the Soviet Union)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQccC7ATJbE...

Shostakovich 8 (the experience of war)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3nfnC_6QNQ

Shostakovich 10 (life under Stalin)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2MPmpR51cM

Jenufa (inside the mind of child murder)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bqt2K3mzrAk

Wozzeck (inside the mind of a post-traumatic wife killer)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=702knK1mop0

From the House of the Dead (prison life)

https://youtu.be/jBOWa4g6kws?t=364

Winterreise (the world of loss)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIIS-UgixGE

Beethoven 5 (you know)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvOREC-5gHE

Beethoven 9 (you know)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mz8P8D8MdNU

Missa Solemnis (what humanist religion sounds like)https://youtu.be/P0EA9yNuOXQ?t=646

St. Matthew Passion (the plight of the whole world)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUTyxi9YOLw