The Second Coming

by Hosho McCreesh

originally appeared in installments over at Upright

Part One: The Second Coming*

*(see Yeats)

Shame on us. Shame on all of us. From the humble beginnings of man, be them miraculous & divine or primordial & oozing, this is what we've done with it. We gave up painting cave walls and instead picked up a splintered femur & re-invented murder. We learned to hunt & trap animals, learned where the best tasting berries grew, learned how to stay out of the elements, how to keep warm...& since then we've become positively BORED with ourselves. Do we even do anything we want to anymore? Do we ever do anything we're proud of? Shame on almost the entire rotting stinking lot of us.

I am sick of people who believe things.

Listen, I believe things...some of them deep-rooted, powerful ideals...for me. But let's be clear about this: Just because I believe it doesn't make it so, doesn't make me right, doesn't make people who disagree with me wrong, or people who agree with me my friends. What I do is wander through the world that I perceive through my own eyes, reacting to what I encounter, & within me exists my own belief structure which may be well-calibrated or may be completely out of whack, but whatever the case, it's mine, & it's how I get through what's difficult, how I enjoy what's wonderful, how I find the "story in the suicide," & how I decide what to do next. Beliefs? Convictions? Ideals? What in the hell are they? They are little more than tools used to work through this agony & ecstasy, our way to make sense of the misguided majesty of living. Ours. Not others. & certainly not everyone's.

Carefully now, so there's no confusion: this is not to say that we should abandon all that we think we know & compromise our hearts--no no no. This is instead an indictment of any & all belief structures that harbor, in their fetid bowels, any hypocrisy, any judgment, any exemptions from their own unbreakable rules. I myself must refuse to allow my own stupid head to convince me that I know everything...or that I even know anything. Human ignorance has only begat more human ignorance, & it has done so for centuries, will do so for centuries. Humans invented their gods. Humans invented their governments. Humans invented the imaginary lines drawn on maps that humans sketched, supposedly separating us one from the other. None of these things are as simple as a sunflower & yet these ideas, these concepts, have drowned this planet in the black-caked blood of centuries, of millennia. This hurtling goddamned rock is blood-logged. How can we forgive what has been done in the name of god & country & government? What continues to be done? The horrors perpetrated? All of it based on imaginary notions made real by a deluded zealotry that has poisoned the human race. Our hearts know this. The sad truth is we humans have invented our own misery. Our hearts also know this.

I write poems. I paint. That entitles me to nothing. I live in America, but no gods favor me over their other countless creations, other planets, & most definitely not over fellow humans...no matter where they reside, how they look, or how they think. I am simply one of the many animate beings, a slave to my own capricious biochemicals & perceptions, misperceptions...we all are. We pretend at the divine while wallowing in the carnival of our own man-made damnation.

We'll have to dig deep holes to save all these meaningless trinkets we've hoarded, hide them from the hellfire doom we've wrought. There will be no revolution until we're forced to pack our intestines with gravel to simply remember what it's like to feel full; until we abandon all our vengeful & exclusionary gods & our bumbling countries & castrated governments & replace them with something that works...for us, something our hearts know as righteous, just, true. Beliefs? They are but a falcon, loosed like a plague on the unchaperoned heavens, they split the sky like from a womb. The seed embeds; grows fat; forms man--imperfect & inventive, this misfit. We began by learning one thing, then another & soon we were bored by all we knew & conjured up wacky things to believe in: gods, maps, borders, ways of thinking, ways of of ruling, ideals, judgments. The misfit then Balkanized Eden & reinvented murder. The march of time lands us here, now, with a globe overrun by knee-jerk reactionaries & still we do precious little to spare our atherosclerotic hearts, all gone aplump on the back-fat cuttings of each other. What sense is there to make of a world convinced that whatever they think is righteous, justified, true? Liquid & convenient, these random & foolishly taprooted ideals, invented to justify our murderous & self-serving hearts. Ours is a green god writhing, a golden calf without its neck slit, a false idol. We have only our foolish selves to blame now that sin has usurped virtue. Doom!--my unborn cousins, sisters, brothers, it begs purchase in the radioactive, blistered, weathered crags of the America womb! & thundercrack the skulls of too-soon-dead patriots, splintered, ground down to bonemeal 'neath the thunder of 2 billion feet marching bloody, red as Mao*, forming ranks & advancing, bent on the dusty end. Pitiless & blank, we the Sphinx churn our stoney thighs & trample what's left of Eden...& the worst need no reasons, no evidence, no proof, while the best know less tomorrow than they did today...

At least that's what I think...

Part Two: And Good Luck Outrunning Our Primal Selves!

I just don't see the value in being skull-locked into any brand of dogged, unyielding notion. At this point it would take an entire volley of warheads just to recalibrate the species and god only knows what to dig out the infected roots. Why believe in anything when believing means doing things unbelievable? Why believe in a god when believing means doing things ungodly? Why believe in justice when believing means doing things unjust? Why believe in humanity when believing means doing things that are abjectly inhuman? Better to place your unblinking faith in witchcraft, in voodoo, in genocide, in a final nuclear solution - this graveyard planet littered with only the shadows of its extinct blast-burned on building and boulder. Better the blade "quick and true" than to hear the tireless explanations; better the buckshot than entertain yet another ill-conceived filibuster of convenient intellection; better the rack than suffer case-by-case justifications for actions perpendicular to some quotidian philosopher's so-called personal compass; and better the crucifixion than the rhetorical longshot scenarios which condone hypocrisy and rationalize some phantom delineation between a proverbial inner "magnetic North" and an inner "true North" which the common rube uses to explain away any and all personal liability, excuses these humps use for their temporary dalliances from their otherwise "bedrock core beliefs" as if such extenuations plumb or hold up in the goddamned wash...

Horse.
Fucking.
Shit.

Convictions, rigidly held insist upon rules rigidly held: any room for interpretation is a chasm tailored for doubt - even a hairline fracture wherein seeps condensation, wherein it freezes then expands, melts, re-freezes, eventually breeches the hull. Hence, any belief - any TRUE BELIEF - is blind and cannot allow questions. Nor can it withstand them. They wilt flaccid to rudimentary examination. Any single allowance, any one semantic exception, any sniff that the world is not one of contrasting absolutes and the hypothesis is summarily rebuffed, the lords of ultimatum properly and riotously sacked. To say it another way: a black and white world must always disavow all greys, because the mere existence of any grey illegitimates all blacks and all whites.

So what does the color grey have to do with our primal selves? Only this: Let's quit pretending we're much more, as a species, than Pavlov's dogs, more than a grey, or that we're some sort of black or white. "What? Pavlov's dogs?" you say. I know, I know, pardon you while you scoff. "Man is sublimely evolved, the top of the food chain, supremely intelligent, a sentient being of the highest order," says you, "we're immune to such bestial wailings..." The works of Michelangelo and an honest mechanic or line cook not withstanding, I've seen grown men racing ride-on lawn mowers and other grown men recording this so even more grown men could telecast it for me, a grown man who sat watching the broadcast. This is precisely where we have put ourselves. Pardon me while I scoff back. We are all salivating at the knell of any and all manner of shiny goddamned bell. We're rats gone mad at the feeder bar. Higher functioning rats, perhaps, but rats all the same. Disagree? Then imagine the time-clocks we all punch as feeder bars, and imagine the generations of men that have powdered their knuckles punching them, all for a few meager moneypellets at the end of every other week or so.

Forget the circus of magnanimity, our main concern is of, for and about ourselves. Even our most altruistic philanthropy can be made to serve a primal need to either be hailed, appreciated, or envied. Rarely is it done with a pure heart. Our loins crave moist flesh, our innards meat, our bodies shelter, and our strangled spirits crave meaning. From these cravings - invention, innovation - all man-made and ridiculously imperfect. From all these cravings - conditioned, Pavlovian responses - we've indoctrinated ourselves to never be happy, to always want for more - what madness! We have engineered and manufactured every single ugly desire and ignorant lust, pounded it into each other's bent spines, we loll about in the stink of it like some fetid, putrid green pool. Our primal selves have forgotten how to be content, how to live simply and well, how to eat, drink and just be merry. We've forgotten how to be beautiful. And good luck outrunning our primal selves!

Abandoning just about everything we thought we knew & thought we wanted might be the only way back: lest the entire sky be wasted on us.

Part Three: Pavlov & The Last Laughing Neanderthal

So what of this business of dogs & gods? Just this: even Pavlov’s dogs knew better than we do not to shit where you eat. Salivating wants aside, the gist of what I’m driving at here is this: as with Pavlov & his mutts, any behavior rewarded is one that persists. Conversely, a behavior fades from existence if unrecognized, unheralded. If, for instance, we were to stop taking pictures of Paris Hilton, just you try & guess what would happen...

So we are to blame. For all we’ve encouraged & for all we’ve let die by the wayside, we are to blame. We are to blame & shame on us. You give me science, you give me gods, you give me technology to blast men into space, chart the fissures of Mars in search of water, or makes a Snicker’s candy bar more damnably delicious–you give me all of these things as proof positive of the undying nature & spirit of man. I give you our laughably repeated histories. I give you centuries of basically pointless & unimaginative wars, starving babies while abundant grains rot in silos & farmers are paid not to farm. I give you impermanent lines we’ve imagined across mountains & floating in rivers & oceans–lines our own generations worth of humans have died defending from ourselves. Not from space-aliens, or the brutal assault of mother nature, or anything wholly outside of us, mind you–but ourselves, only ourselves. We dream up things to believe in, believe so fervently in them that we fashion, of our innocent-of-all-but-disagreeing human counterparts, enemies. & thus we are the architects of human misery. Because at the end of the day almost every human I’ve ever met wants basically the same thing: a sustainable source of food, shelter & clothing from their respective & brutal climes, & a way to worry less. Some want solidarity, some want community, some to be left alone. Most benefit from a sense of purpose. Most flourish beneath the weight of love & family. Most deteriorate under tightly girded lack of freedoms. Most want to be heard in some way, want to matter. Most want to be alive, want to bear witness to the simple majesty of it. Increasingly, many don’t want this current manifestation of the world. Too few have too much; too many not enough. Of all these simple, basic, primal needs, too few are being met, for most. How can we believe in any of that? How can that be right or just? How have we ruined Eden so completely? Is it simply a question of geography? Have we become to wrapped up in the lines & borders we’ve invented to remember that before us there were no lines, before us it was just one hunk of hurtling rock? Have we forgotten that it will be that again when we’re gone? Or do these troubling questions about our own mortality & impermanence just fuel the madness?

If so, for many religion is the source of calm, the thing that quiets the swelling inner fears–fair enough. Use it then, keep it–if there is purpose in it for you. But let’s try to remember that there are different brand names, that it’s not the only thing people fill their days with (some might find as much fulfillment in shopping) & that religions too are man-made (or at least man-manipulated) & therefore imperfect. I’ll even allow that most religions, at the core, encourage the same kinds of tenets: simply put, to do things that make you better tomorrow than you are today. I can even admire the undertaking, the self-examination &courage to try & change. As a journey, it’s one that, in the end, can bring peace & meaning to an unquiet heart. Let’s not forget this very important truth: while not mutually exclusive, religion can be something staggeringly different from spirituality. By way of example I offer this: when you find yourself slathering at the maw for your particular brand of religion, unable to appreciate the fact that others who follow a different text are on just as sacred of a journey as you are, when you find yourself with your high-powered cross-hairs beaded on a fellow human, or you’re diving a plane full of innocent travelers into a skyscraper full of innocent workers, when you’re carpet bombing a village or you’ve got a satchel bomb strapped to yourself in a bus full of people going to get bread & beans at a market–religion might condone that, but spirituality certainly cannot. & in such moments it’s absolutely necessary to question how you’ve strayed to the furthest extremes of what your particular text teaches–often ignoring scripture contrary to such extremities en route–& try to identify what specific little religious hang-up derailed your spiritual journey & took you so far from what you supposedly believed in.

Now, perhaps we are too many. Perhaps humans were meant to roam in much smaller packs, driven together by the wild throes of necessity & uncertainty. Perhaps our distended & decaying souls are truly beyond redemption. Perhaps we’re damned to always succumb to our wanton & childish lusts. Perhaps we were supposed to die off as cavemen, & some last laughing Neanderthal bore witness to a spectacular innovation that saw his tiny pack through to the other side of that planned & certain extinction. Perhaps we can blame him–be him Thag or Adam–& his heavy-browed cronies for damning us to a rotting pile-up of useless millennia. But I can’t quiet escape the fact that he knew better than we do, how to fill his days with meaning. As cautious as he had to step, the way even a turned ankle could be a death sentence, I see no way his days weren’t spent on the electric edge of his own mortality & that, in itself, is far more invigorating than the lifetimes we pass in cubicles, on subways, or crawling along in gridlock. I can’t help but see Thag or Adam cackling at all our useless toil, wondering just what in the fuck we are doing with this human race he handed us, this populace working so diligently to ensure it’s own unhappiness in the short term & demise in the long.

I believe it all makes a pretty convincing case against believing or relying on any of the shitty little gimcracks we’ve dreamed up & manufactured—be them objects, borders, ideas, or gods. I believe there was always supposed to be more to living than anything we currently know; believe we were meant–with our silly little lives–to justify & redeem the energies expended to create us…repay, with our honest & purest efforts, that caustic spark that bore us; believe we should all find our own way to make our time matter, to find some meaning in this...

But who cares what I think? I barely even care what I think. Like I said, I am sick of people who believe things...