theology

Audiovision: Truth vs Power

So a wise man, or a man who was at least passing for wise, started talking about truth. And the first thing he did, the clever bastard, was admit that nobody has the first clue what it is. We’re all just monkeys with car keys, little fizzing bundles of electricity piloting meat-suits around the planet, and we haven’t even figured out what the fizz is. Consciousness? Human thought? We don’t know what’s running the projector, but good lord, the movie is colorful, brief, and loud.

And yet…

Out there in the great electronic shrieking festival… pow! slap! kick! BOOM! you’ve got no shortage of bloviators, of sidewalk saviors and cable news prophets with shellacked hair, their faces glowing in the 4k pixel bath, absolutely convinced they’ve got the universe on a leash. They are selling Truth like it’s a used car, a timeless, irrefutable, low-mileage beauty that can be yours for the low, low price of your own brain. And the loudest dealership on the whole cosmic car lot is, of course, religion. These fanatics, these apostolic holy rollers with their eyes spun back in their skulls, insist their particular brand of Truth is the only one that gets you to the bliss of heaven. Just have a little faith, they say. Which is a five-dollar word for blind credulity. 

And so on…

Sometimes, you see, you have to do more than just believe. Sometimes you have to get up from the couch and move your feet. Take Vlad Dracul III. There was a man who put his convictions on a stick. A very long, sharp stick. He wasn’t playing around with faith and hope. He was a man of action, a walking thunderhead of revenge. Why? Was it because the Ottoman Turks read the wrong magic book? Nope. It was because his own father traded him and his brother like hockey cards to the Sultan, who was not a nice man. It was because while Vlad III was learning to hate in a Turkish dungeon, his father and brother were being tortured and murdered by his own people.

This sort of thing can change a boy’s outlook…

Vlad’s truth wasn’t a holy whisper in his ear; it was the hot, screaming fact of betrayal, and his answer was a field outside Târgoviște decorated with two thousand screaming, writhing, shish-kabobbed exclamation points aimed at a merciless sky. 

That was his dark sermon… that was his truth…

Now, let’s rewind history to Simon the Zealot, a different cat altogether. For him, the truth was a revolutionary tinderbox just waiting for a match. He saw this Jesus fellow, this Nazarene miracle man, and his synapses started to crackle with visions of Roman eagles falling out of the sky. He saw the critical mass, the juice, and he wanted to turn the power of popularity into a revolutionary battle-cry. He was trying to shove a prophet shaped like a question mark into a political hole shaped like a sword. This, you might imagine, made the local authorities a little jumpy. While Simon was trying to crown a savior king, the Romans were sharpening their nails. Was Judas the real betrayer? Or was it the man who tried to turn a movement about turning the other cheek into a bar fight with an empire? As a wise old Chinaman is supposed to have said, “If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.” Simon may have changed his tactics, but his all too mortal king wound up in the same place as Vlad’s unfortunate enemies: pinned to a piece of wood, proving a point about the interaction of truth and power.

Vlad
Simon

Undeniable truth? Not so fast. It’s a road, not a motel. Anyone who tells you they’ve checked in and unpacked is either running a con or they’re so lost they think the lobby is the entire universe. The best we can do is what that magnificent, gloomy German filmmaker suggests: you can actually stare into the void until misty clouds of undifferentiated nothingness take shape and stare back. Who knows? You might find something interesting in there. Mostly, you’ll just see yourself, your own egocentric story reflected in a million broken pieces. But if you can lose yourself, as the poet from Detroit once said, you might stumble over a shard of something real. Something inspiring. Just be wary the winds of power can short circuit your heartfelt illusions. 

Mr. Herzog
God

For now, until we actually begin to understand the wellspring of consciousness, could we please interrupt the merry-go-round of inherited cruelty, this endless cycle of pain passed down by people who were taught to be main characters in a story written by a mysterious, all-powerful Sky-CEO who actually cares to keep a running tab on every thought, every misdemeanor, every everything. The horror show starts when these people realize… and they usually do… that the Sky-CEO, in fact, isn’t watching and doesn’t care. 

Anyway… what if we tried something else? A little compassion… a little kindness… a pinch of skepticism and doubt. After all, the points of light seen in the dark night are mostly distant clusters of billions of stars and their satellites. That the universe allows for individual micro-particles such as you, me, astrophysicists, theologians, filmmakers, schizophrenics, etc. a glimpse of itself is nothing short of miraculous. What we know (we’ve learned quite a lot over the last couple centuries) amounts to no more than a quark, on a barnacle, attached to a massive seagoing cargo barge. We’re as good as bats experiencing hearing loss, we’re constantly bumping into reality in the barely audible darkness. 

But so what?

Don’t be afraid…
Keep stumbling…
We’ll see you there…
Fishing for ecstatic truth…
…in the gallery of the void.

Hot Springs or Busk: Chapter V (genderpocalypse)

In the chaos of twisted chromosomes and warring hormones, we stumble upon the battleground known as “gender identity.” Picture it, loopers: a cosmic joke played on the fleshy stage of human existence. On one side, we have the cold, hard warriors of science, armed with their microscopes, brain scans, and impenetrable jargon, dissecting the very essence of what it means to be a dude or a chick. Like a swarm of blue ants, they peck away at the X and Y chromosomes… they focus their compound lenses on squishy gray folds of the brain hoping to uncover the secret lair of gender.

On the other side, we’ve got a dubious combination of politics and religion. And like red ants quoting holy scripture confined in a glass jar with the lab-coat wearing blues, all are content to share the space peacefully until someone comes along and shakes the jar. Ideologies and agendas are imposed upon the mix, where gender is leveraged as a weapon, a war cry, a bargaining chip designed to divide in order to conquer. Here, the forces of division speak in tongues, twisting words like “identity” and “expression” into righteous mandibles and impenetrable exoskeleton. They invent fake threats, hurl buzzwords like sugar crystals, and paint the very notion of gender itself as some kind of existential threat against all ant-kind. It’s an artfully designed battle, loopers, where common sense goes to die and the casualties are sanity and nuance… but enough of this ant-jar metaphor.

Caught in the political shitstorm, behold, the ordinary human! A curious creature, armed with little more than a body that feels and a mind that questions. “Who am i?” they wonder, peering into the distorted screen of warring society. “Am i what the textbooks say i am, what my birth certificate proclaims? Or am i something more, something deeper, an echo of feeling that defies the rigid rules of biology?” The scientists, bless their methodical hearts, try to offer answers, mapping out hormonal landscapes and brain circuitry. But what do they really know about being trapped in a body that feels like a prison, or feeling a defiant joy under a label that the world wants to erase?

Meanwhile, politicians bellow and posture. Christian Nationalists, with their faces twisted in apocalyptic fury, see transgender folks as harbingers of societal collapse, demonic agents sent to shatter the sacred order of man, woman, and holy matrimony. They clutch their dog-eared Bibles like shields, shouting verses about abominations as if the wrath of God himself will smite down those who dare to blur the lines. Oh, the irony, loopers, for aren’t those holy books dripping with gender-bending stories? Androgynist angels, prophets who blur the lines of man and woman… all stuff of genderqueer fever dreams!

And let’s not forget the paragons of liberal tolerance, sometimes just as ridged and uncompromising. Armed with academic tomes and social justice battle cries, they paint gender as a fluid, ever-shifting spectrum, where the very act of categorization is an act of violence. For them, biology is a mere suggestion, pronouns a tool of liberation, and self-declaration of the highest law. To question their orthodoxy is to be cast as bigoted troglodytes, clinging to a world that no longer exists, a relic of a less enlightened age… nuance be damned.

So, here we are, loopers, trapped in this absurdist play. The lab-coat wearing blue ants fiddle with their instruments, hoping to find a grand unifying theory of gender, while the red culture-warriors trade barbs and twist reality like cheap balloon animals. Yet, in the end, what does any of this say about the boy who looks in the mirror and sees a girl staring back, or the woman who feels like a stranger in her own skin? It’s the eternal human struggle played out on a new stage… a struggle to simply be, to exist without judgment, to find a sliver of peace in this glorious, messy, and often nonsensical thing Bill Hicks reminds us is “just a ride.”

And where does our fictional alter-ego fit in this absurdist play? Well, Ronnie Hays says he’s a woman trapped in a man’s body, but that woman happens to be a lesbian. So… the deviance is nearly imperceptible because if he’s dating… he’s dating a woman, and since his skin, flesh, and blood is male from the get go… NO ONE notices something amiss.

Cheers… Loopcircus