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The sermon for Tuesday, Apr. 09, 2002 is: A Gospel of Unfortunate Events, Book 4: The Crappy Crucifixion 1:24 a.m.
Dammit; I'd just spent an hour writing, forgive my vanity Diary, but a fuckin' beautiful love letter to Diaryland and all the people I love in Diaryland and even some of the people I hate: a brilliant piece of writing, I daresay, juducious yet passionate, funny yet sad, brilliant yet Forgive my outburst, dear Diary. But what I had done (and oh how wearying it is to go over this again) was: - or - but since Mr. Snicket is busy enough playing God with the pitiable Baudelaire children, I thought And So I did. But before I wrote my brilliant Gospel, I felt I had to write a quick pr�cis about why I was writing this, which meant that I had to describe everything I've just written now. So I wrote: ...I was reading this diary, which is a long litany... and suddenly I started writing about all the diaries I love here on Diaryland, and all the diaries I really despise. And jesus, I weep for the generations who will never see the masterpiece I had written, poetic, magisterial, an epic, lambasting diarists obsessed with recording their number of sexual diseases transmitted and gleefully recounting anecdotes of date rape. The diaries I love, I wrote, though never forgetting that these are for public reading, these diaries I love and read burn and hum with the urgency and awkward beauty that despite life's insistent immediacy, manage somehow to gracefully memorialise, and transform, the experience of this rather melancholy life. Anyway. So that's I wrote, except in far, far more beautifully wrought prose-- and THE SHIT DISAPPEARED. All my writing went POOF. It went BYE-BYE. FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK! And now all I have is this clumsy simulacrum of my original masterpiece, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh! Like I tell my teachers, there's a reason I don't write a second draught! WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH I wish you could see what I had written. Though maybe it's better in that beautiful realm of the disappeared. Perhaps my masterpiece, like my imaginary lovers and all my other masterpieces, was simply just too beautiful for this world.Oh well, I can try to re-construct my Lemony Snicket story. Ahem. Chapter 1. Would it surprise you to find out that I'm on an a Berlin Airlift-sized amount of drugs just now? Anyway, here's the stupid bit that I had originally wanted to put in here. It was in response to something Allie had said, which I don't really remember right now but I kinda sorta believe it had something to do with her vagina. She had written, "Email's not an appropriate place to write about this." I wrote this in response. I was on drugs. A great percentage of what we speak about is not appropriate for email, nor really for non-academic circles, nor for academic circles, nor for public radio, and definitely not for Twelve-Step Meetings. Indeed, one finds oneself hard-pressed to imagine an appropriate venue for our dialogues. One imagines a underwater psychiatric session, scheduled for the deep bowels of the night. Or a picnic spread across the limbs of a tree. Okay, I'm abandoning surrealism now. Um, hey. I went yesterday to the Getty Center-- have you been? It put me in a reflective state of mind. For one thing, the actual viewing of paintings -- Van Gogh's "Irises," El Greco's "Crucifixion," Degas' "Waiting," and Marie-Elizabeth LeBrun's portraits come to mind -- is a kind of aesthetic praxis I've little experience of, like nearly everyone else in America. I think Walter Benjamin probably goes into this in his discussiosn of "aura," but I was struck -- especially when viweing the van Gogh -- by the almost uncomfortable _presence_ of the artist. I think mechanically-reproduced images, such as photographs and movies, eo ipso partake of a species of Platonic Idealism, but paintings -- these paintings, at least -- present a more intimate, personal drama. This probably is making no sense to you, so I'll move on the the next nonsensical thing. The other paintings that struck me were the Spanish and Flemish Crucifixions -- 15th and 16th century Good Friday pieces which detail, with an obsession that verges on the grotesque, Christ's painfully painful pain on the cross. There was one painting, for example, where I noted that Christ's stomach was bloated with the gases of decomposition, and that his extremities and genitals had become swollen and purple-black. Fun, no? I know that these paintings are _supposed_ to inspire these morbid thoughts of Christ's torture, but I just wondered, why? This reminded me of when my parents were all annoyed at me this last Good Friday: they had called to make sure I had gone to Mass and [a] heard me playing loud music and [b] watching TV which meant [c] I wasn't at Mass. Nor did my admission that I was [d] eating Burger King on Good Friday endear me to their arch-Catholic hearts. They hissed at my sacrilege, my impious disrespect, and I just cackled, "Hey, that's _your_ Christ, this has nothing to do with _mine_." What did I mean by that? Leaving the Getty, it struck me about how much of Catholic Christianity was centred around Good Friday, around a relatively short period of relative inactivity in Jesus Christ's works and days. God died; so? God dies all the time. I've never understood why Catholicism never simply accepted that fact and moved on, rather than wailing in guilty gratitude about the Paschal sacrifice and wallowing in death. Christ's miracle wasn't his degradation into mortal death but his reconciliation of the afterlife, the life that goes on after we die; it's the miracle we all share. Our stomachs will bloat and our eyes will burst, and so what: once upon a time we were alive.  
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