I gave the name “X” to one Judas Iscariot, the one who handed over the Messiah to the authorities, when I was in something of a fevered dream. Or maybe it wasn’t a dream. Whatever it was, I don’t think you’d ever believe it was real. A lot of reality is like that.
There’s another story I got like that, too, when the Great Spirit of the Native Americans looked me over and gave me a name. The name wasn’t “X”. That name was for something else, as I said. I probably have more things like this, but I usually don’t start conversations like this. I mean, nobody starts conversations like this, but wow. I decided to start this like this. And I’m not going to tell you right now what the name was that he gave me, but don’t think there’s really a special reason why I might be doing this… I’m just that nobody. I do these things…
I have not ever thought, not seriously anyway, that I might be crazy. That usually kills the conversation, for one thing. I mean, I can tell some days when I can actually feel my serotonin being on the low side—would that mean I’m crazy or that I’m not? Psychiatry these days, if you didn’t know, is all about drugs. Some are better than others. Depends on how much you feel like zoning out. But you know? If I can make sense of all I see and hear, inside and outside my head, and I can see where the miracle starts, and where the miracle ends, and I’m not breaking any law of physics, nor any law of logic, and I know what is true, and I know what is a lie, just because you don’t see what I see, it’s not crazy if I can see it—it’s not crazy if it makes sense. And it all makes sense to me. Would you think that’s crazy?
See, I had this thought a little while back, just this sudden realization, “Am I the only one who knows what they’re doing?” And I stopped for a second, and yeah. I mean, I know Jesus knows what he’s doing, so I’m not talking about that; of course like all the angels know what they’re doing, but regular people like me? Holy crap, I realized. That was it. I’m the only one who knows what they’re doing, in about the entirety of the whole damn world. Holy shit. That’s crazy.
And just for the record, he prefers “Josh”. Josh of Nazareth. And before you ask, do you know any other Josh of Nazareth?
Something else.
The story of the Rose is not something you have ever heard before. It goes into another name I’ve been given, which was like the name the Great Spirit gave me, but I don’t know if I want to get into that whole mess and around the outer edges of my mind’s eye I can spy some really evil eyes peeking in and checking if I’ve lost it or am going to lose it at any time and going, come on now, you can’t be serious you know what’s going on, because no one does, get it? So it’s like the evil eyes are the ones who can be looked, here, like they’re being the most rational about things. Crazy.
See, it’s the crazy thing that’s making the most sense. Because what’s really going on is something you wouldn’t believe. Unless you were living it, like I am, right now. And even then, I can see just how completely unhinged it can sound, outside my own head, through that mystery called, “now”, into your sensory mechanisms, into the logical processes you also never think about, but you know? This isn’t actually a conversation we’re having. If you’re not me, you don’t actually know what you’re doing. Yes, you have your job or your school or you’re some kind of bum living with your grandma and getting stoned every day and there are times you forget that you don’t know what’s going on because you’re engaged in some sort of intense physical activity or you’re high or you’re having sex or all of the above, but do you really know what you’re doing? Do you really know what’s going on? Because the common wisdom is to let go of that concept, not to try and see if you can figure it all out, just to let go and find the flow or something, releasing control because there’s really no way that you’re going to be able to make sense of it all. Just be happy in your own little corner of cluelessness. Don’t break any of the more major criminal laws. At least try to be nice to people. But if you really think about it, you’ll hit “WTF is going on with everything?” if you really try and step back. From everything. Which no, you really can’t do that, and there are reasons why. Did you know that angels have perfect knowledge? Do you have any idea what that might mean? No, you have no clue.
Holy shit, I’m the only one here who knows what they’re doing. Which, of course, makes as perfect sense as everything else.
Now, the story of the Rose is not about a flower except that that is what the name is referring to, but is about me sort of feeling certain ways about all the women who have come and gone through my life, about me assigning each of them a flower which when I did so made me smack my lips like an Italian and go wunderbar like a German, like “so spot on”, I would go. Starting with a tulip girl whom I didn’t know so well. One of my many unrequited loves. Or lusts. Yeah, more like lusts. There was a daffodil, an oleander, a lotus, then someone which I couldn’t figure out, then an orchid, and that would have done it for me. Orchid. Cool. Ima marry that one. I thought. And nope, just another life lesson, dirtbrain.
Never found a rose though. The answer, of course, was in front of my face the whole time, I mean for most of my freakin’ life I had known this, and only so, so far in did I go, oh, yeah. The completely obvious is slapping me in the face, over and over and over, and all I can think is, what are you trying to tell me, universe? I already brushed my teeth! And Kurt Vonnegut, you know, wrote, “So it goes” only when somebody had just died. But I am not Kurt Vonnegut. So it goes.
Then there is this idea I had, which I have called, metasynchronicity. (Gesundheit!) When last we tuned in, true believers, we understood the concept of synchronicity as something Carl Jung came up with, an acausal connecting principle, that of a meaningful coincidence. I’m (88%) sure that you’ve experienced this sometime in your own lives. Like you’re ranting about Taylor Swift on your blog and Taylor Swift comes on the radio (and then you’re like, this is an all death metal radio station, what the?). But I’m using it as a form of alchemy. Like, how was it that a lot of great ideas seem to come around in multiples? Calculus by both Leibniz and Newton. The invention of the telephone (there’s a whole drama there, you should google it or something). Charles Darwin was also handed a paper by someone who had written about the fundamentals of evolution while he was still working on his own book about it. So if it seems to happen anyway, why not leverage this seemingly omnipresent principle?
Yes, I used the word “alchemy”. Isaac Newton was an alchemist, and that’s not quite common knowledge. You of course have heard about the seeking of making lead into gold, right? That ol’ alchemist schtick. But really, I’m using the term to describe that which is not quite science, and not quite magic. Utilizing the forces that seem to be prevalent in the world—but not completely understood—to obtain some goal. And mine is about iron into gold, not lead. I will elaborate on this distinction a bit later, but basically, if I work out the details of something, would it then perhaps be carried, too, by some cosmic winds, into other minds as well? That’s the idea at any rate. Metasynchronicity.
And the thing? EUTOPIA. The story of the Rose makes me believe in eternity, in infinity, in Heaven, and in true love. Where God did not call to anyone at all out there, not like before, but I went into Their house and stood at the altar and proclaimed, “Here am I,” as if there was a job opening for two very un/fortunate people out there, I mean it was written at any rate, and I was applying by knocking on Their kitchen window with my resume in my hand, which I called the Book of Love (the only page), and it was blank but had been crumpled into a ball and then flattened and then crumpled again and then flattened until there was no flat surface any larger than a micron on the whole sheet, because This Is Me, to a T, so how about it? God? Hello?
Thou answerest them only with Spring. Such is nature. Not having realized that I had already been recruited, enlisted, drafted even. Back when I was thinking that strange thought, “How does one kill God?” Which the Rose would never even think of thinking to ask.
The story of the Rose is a story that has never been told, but it is as common as the love that the world has for everyone. Do you not believe this? That there is so much love in the world? People are born into filth, people die in slow agony, and yet people will say, “God is love.” Kierkegaard was wrong, in thinking that the absurdity of the universe was to behold the Son of God killed. St. Paul thought as he, as well. It is, in fact, instead, the fact of the statement: “God is love.” That is the true stumbling block to belief, to faith. One of the faithful’s valid responses to the Holocaust (yes, faithful Jew—Christians should be so holy) was, “It is too much. I can no longer believe.” Where was God? How could God let that happen?
Then what is it that is written in the “New” Testament? “God is love.” Yet there is still so much injustice in the world. “God is everywhere.” Where was God when… do you not have one of these thoughts, your own self? Where was God when…? And yet if you peek into the next world, something wondrous. As eternity unfolds like a rose beginning to bloom, which will bloom forever, you hear some things.
There is a guy whose name begins with “H” and was responsible for the Holocaust. You know of whom I speak. I will only refer to him as “The Dead One”. Upon hearing of some of the ideas of how he would pay for the evil that he had caused, when it became clear the scope of such punishments: no, there is no eternal Hell, but there is a Lake of Fire in which they, the damned, die… if it were of the scope of perhaps to feel one tenth of the pain he had caused the world while he was yet alive… I heard cries of pleading from the rabbis… “No, it is too cruel! We just wanted him to feel how one of us suffered and died!” They just wanted him to understand. For surely, no man will have suffered more. This is how The Dead One dies. For this is the Second Death.
The Rose from this world, this life, died horribly, too. She’s never complained about it. So, yes, there is a next world. It’s also not like you think. For example, in one of my visits outside our plane of existence, I was in what has been called the Black Iron Prison. Why I would mention this, there are a couple three reasons. Firstly, and most importantly, the ’Prison was Hell. I mean, everything you would want to think about what an actual Hell, place of damnation, place of “abandon all hope”, darkness, evil, all of the above and more—yeah, I was there. In fact, in my first visit, I literally thought I had died and was in Hell, and that was it. Finito. And I remember one weird thing about it, that when I was there, I was not allowed to think that word. Hell. But that was definitely where I was. And I want to tell you further, that there is no Hell. You see, the alchemy: iron into gold. That’s the second thing.
There has been the idea that the Black Iron Prison was in fact what the world at large, what you and me see in the everyday, that was its true structure. Do you see where I’m going with this? There’s a reason why Tolkien used the term, Middle Earth. The same reason the Norsemen called this place Midgard. The place in the middle of Heaven and Hell. But if the alchemy works, if the time is right, what we are doing is to make this iron into gold. Of Hell to Heaven, of this middle kingdom. From the Prison to Eutopia. The “good land”, not “Utopia”, which means “nowhere”. The new world struggles to be born: the time of monsters. Like The Dead One. You see? The Beginning Is Near.
The third thing: there was War in Heaven.
I could describe what I believe happened in the War, but to tell you the truth, it’s sort of fragmentary, my knowledge of it. I saw what was technically the end of it, the black mass of Satan being cast from the above, and I have something of a joke about its beginning. Basically, it was Lucifer and Michael, and Michael says to Lucifer, “So. You think you’re more metal than God?” Heh. I’m serious though, heavy metal is no indication that one is evil. Not even when you hail Satan. It’s those who do the opposite, who proclaim themselves “Christians”, and you know who I mean.
But the main thing about the War: God did not invent pain. Before anyone knew anything of what error might be, there was a Heaven where nobody ever did anything wrong. You see, it was Lucifer who sought to do something that God could not do. For this was a limit for obvious reason: God could not perform an act of stupidity. You see, that’s what evil really is, capeesh? Evil is to stupidity as sin is to error. If you have read your Bible (which you should, if only to piss off those “Christians” above), you know of the idea that the Devil was a murderer from the beginning. The meaning of this is in another part of the “New” Testament, where it speaks of the Lamb who is slain upon the foundation of the world. And there is only one Agnus Dei, one Lamb of God, and there is only one place where it is the foundation of the world, where he is slain. The Cross. (That’s his superhero name. Josh’s. Josh of Nazareth.)
So the question I had back when was not on point, really, “How does one kill God?” Turns out he’ll let you. The real question is, “What happens if you kill God?”
(parenthetically twice there was this one prophet who said that GOD was to be found in the trash layer of the universe and a lot of people thought wow that really makes sense for some reason and don’t think about it any further of why would GOD be found there and then they don’t seem to have eyes to see the thing they see like every day of their waking lives where on the cross THERE IS GOD AND WE HAVE THROWN HIM OUT)
You see, there is that notion of, if God stopped thinking about us, the universe both as we know it and beyond would cease to exist. What fucking idiot was going to test that out?
And now you know why Satan will never repent. Because that would mean to admit that what he did, that incredibly stupendous new thing he found, the thing that not even God could do, was, simply, stupidity. Itself. The source of all error. And error manifests itself most cruelly in pain. Next time you feel it, think about how ugly and harsh it is. No, it is not of God. Never.
What that meant was a crack in the Godhead. A crisis in existence itself. Michael and his angels fought against the Dragon, and the Dragon fought, and his angels, and prevailed not: neither was their place found anymore in Heaven. There’s one thing you must understand now: nothing of the now can be undone that was done. Pain exists in the very fabric of the material world. How could this be? I remember reading an unbeliever’s mocking of how an infinite God had some problem with an itty-bitty finite archangel like Lucifer. Behold, the power of such a light gone awry: the very heavens and earth groan from the stab of so dark a blade, who tests the very limits of their God given potential in its strike, enough to alter the structure of destiny itself.
“How could God let this happen?” seems so valid a question, as if it were all Their fault. But when you look at God, it’s not like They spared Themselves from the pain of this world, nor was pain Their cause. The Cross is where it is reconciled: this is the picture of a God who is love.
…I have not seen any of the fields where the Rose once strolled, not smelled any of the soil which her hands touched. Yet I believe that she is here, sometimes, when I dream while I am awake, or at least, that is how I describe the motions of my mind when they are driven by the heart. I just have the one poem where she always will dwell, a brief impression:
there she was
the tip of eternity
in a kiss
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