Orsday Programming December 28 2024

Celebrate! Cheer! Shout! Dance!

For three days I have been bedridden and managed to pull myself to church despite.

In the wake of Asmodeus dying I thought to visit her parents as some consolation to them—it felt to me as an act that I ought need do; I had nightmares the day prior to church about how loathsome a worm I’d be hiding away in my house and avoiding pastor, church family, and her parents in lieu of self-soothing comfort that would amount to nothing but writhing around in my boredom.

I drove to their house in the afternoon and parked on the shoulder, and peered at the locked gate that led to their property; and I did nothing but stare over my steering wheel and anxious flip through action, and motivation, but did nothing, but stare.

Justification came to me as I drove back away and caught the sunlight as it flickered over me through the canopy; the light reminded me of Asmodeus even-more, how the strong egg light of afternoon bothered her migraine even more but seemed heavy with an enchantment to me, it now smelled of her, it smelled of her blood and mine and of our stinking saliva and the black look she gave me. What I told myself on the drive back: surely her mother and family are reeling and want their time alone and surely I was never close enough to any to want to be invited in, and surely that closed gate was a threshold against the Vampiric force of Our Church that, surely, seemed to be the final thing that sucked the last sup of life out of their little misguided daughter; after all, it was on a moronic mission to Jamaica for church-work when a little bubble burst in her brain.

Death and desire is key to our faith, I reflected in the early morning basking in my migraine; nausea swam up through my spine and gave my whole body a fragile convalescent feeling that at-once made me feel though my bones were a shrimp vein filled with burning feces and that my body otherwise was a tender statue dedicated to Lord God and my very suffering was itself an ecstasy, and clarity.

In migraine my thought always seemed more sharpened than usual; there was an unbearableness to ‘thinking’ while in the throes of migraine, but while resting in darkness and having no stimulation of light or sound sans ambient rain—with my forearm draped and pressed over my eyes, (this soothes me)—there is nothing to do but delve into thoughts a way deeper that nearly seems to open up into dream; yet, awake. I wonder, at times, about Device and-if this state is when Underground or Qlippoth are most readily hearable; death and desire, both keys to us as ‘attainments’ that etiquette leads us towards and what Logic predates upon. The Carcass could be considered a sacred state: bereft of spirit and in a constant rot that pulls the form further into the mud and putridity that of which we are: the many pigs of Legion pulled down to the silt of Gerasene and undergone little transformations into bog princes and princesses hidden as polyp cysts in the riverbank; consider those carcasses as Demons themselves hidden in the circuitry of Underground; consider Underground itself a wide sprawling root-system of circulation belonging to Lord God: that we of the bestial hand are the blood and movers of the body itself and to act without feeling, only transportation and mechanics; leave the life electricity and feeling to the nervous branches of the spirited hand, the heavenly hand—leave the oinking swine to Christ and leave the drowned muck swine sloughing away to stranger muds to us sinister. That carcass state, frees us of desire, of the game of mistaken spirit, of the untranslatable mistake that has confused Left and Right—and, without mistake, all the joys and entertainments of active-being are hooks targeted upon us by Desire to keep us confused and mistakenly translated as Righteous beings. Should, a question, the house of Herod concern itself with love and entertainment and desiring? Should that concern be better served to John the Baptist as he lived before his entrance into Herod’s manse; and should that absence of that concern be better served to the neckless void left behind by the departed John the Baptist as the house partook of him. A beheading, a dis-confusion of tangled nervous head from dull blood body.

From the decapitation came two hands from our singular John; the perfect carcass, and the perfect spirit.

In migraine I thought on that, and realized how wretched and bleak it would be to truly cast aside desire, for it is death—it is simple to lay out that thought as a theological goal though we were each monks trying to free ourselves of desire, but in practice I can not avoid a stinking vibe: that there is some carrion insect underneath that voice chanting ‘avoid desire, become carcass’ like it nibbles at the edges of the brain to hypnotize and kill and devour through despair; despair, and misery, hides itself inside that goal, and likely that carrion insect is true—and may even be underground itself; Device itself may be nothing but the avatar of that carrion insect spreading its dirt through the faxes and emails that have created this little Leesburg church sinister. It is The Word Monstrous; the opposition to The Word, Living.

I’d been reading Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children before the church service and, laying in bed, I kept thinking on the charred character of Henny, Henrietta,

“Henny was beautifully, wholeheartedly vile: she asked no quarter and gave none to the foul world.” And yet, and so, your heart goes out to her, because she is miserably what life has made her, and makes her misery her only real claim on existence.

Nearly seemed to be all the light that poured out of this sunken little church of ours, and the congregates; we are not the righteous and we are not the saved: we are the annihilate ones, and the gnashed ones, the chaff collected; the little pale face locust preachers from Dark Souls could even be smiling at me in the blacks of my eyelids—miserly things themselves as large dark hoppers with white little human faces bearing all the sympathy of what it means to be human and all their true desire is to foster humanity a-fore them to be nibbled upon (sometimes I imagine including this in to my binder submission and imagine the Device reading this, and laughing, and debating whether to include it in the Concordance; our profane scrapbook including my moron reference to a videogame). The church could be set alight in a loud, sudden, conflagration that would cook through every frail little idiot within our congregation and would they sound like grasshoppers screaming and popping in the heat. Their shadows baking against the windows cast not as our timid left-handed neighborhood brothers and sisters but long-legged spindly bugs frying thing and bursting.

My head beat horribly; I did go to church, as I lay and look deeper into the migraine there is peace but lately Asmodeus grew out of the depth of phosphenes; her body, dead, pouring itself out of a hole I never knew.

The service was a miserable one that I bore through only by sitting and writing. The pastor referenced more ‘logistics’ ordered by Device that seemed to relate to installing a new baptismal pool that would have a heated element laid under the bottom with which will sterilize sands imported from some-where; there needed to be funding raised for this and an engineering effort to actually install the pool—and, more readily apparent: the back wall had been partially deconstructed and reconstructed, “to be a future canvas for our future mural,” and where our pastor usually stood now sprawled plastic tarps covered in glitty dirt and debris.

I had arrived late and were made later with Bluebottle taking my hands in her with utmost warmth and staring at me with genuine care; she wanted to sit with me in the room sometimes used for children, and we sat face-to-face in childrens chairs (knees tucked up near us, which felt silly and too gave a sense of great intimacy to our discussion) and talked about Asmodeus.

She touched my knee and smiled and scrunched away oncoming sadness that pressed itself against her composure, and we talked of the general niceties about losing a loved one—a member of the church family; “I knew you two were close,” she had said.

A phrase canned and typical but made my heart tighten with suspicion, that there were some accusation under that; a breach of etiquette against my marriage to the shitty Thing Underground that us sisters are wed to.

I shook my head and smiled and said yea, she was like a sister to me. I’ve been missing her dearly; I wasn’t sure to even come to church today.

Bluebottle let out an exasperated sigh and lowered her gaze. I’ve been feeling the same way, you know. Each day feels a little harder than the next and, when you get to be my age, it starts to feel like all the goodness of the world starts to run a little farther away from you. God, the Righteous God, takes some of them out of sight. Eventually maybe I’ll slip out of sight myself, she said.

I took her hand in my best measure of warmth and squeezed it with my best pressure. You will, sister. That’s the mystery that awaits all of us, and its our lot to observe that mystery, I said.

She shook her head and say yea, yes I know it is. How have you been doing otherwise, how was your holiday? she asked.

We spoke about that; I had been mostly sick for Christmas and the holiday was a quiet one between me and my mother sitting to ourselves from morning till night; I made a casserole and bread, she made a lemon pie from our tree, and neither of us ate much of either. I walked at night and saw some of the lights and decorations—and that was mostly it.

As Etiquette, much joy or surprises from Christmas boiled away to scorch-point with applied disconnection; no one to send gifts, none letters—just my mother and my church family I strayed from.

Bluebottle mentioned it was somewhat good I had come so late to service; “the mom,” (Asmodeus) showed up a few minutes before service officially started and stared at the few early-arrivers as bitterness seemed to gather up inside her, and she started on a tirade about how she lost her girl, to something so stupid, and couldn’t go on any further with talking, and left.

I sympathized; Asmodeus may have hit the scorching point, too, maybe charred by our church or maybe well-before.

My vows that evening I returned to the church to do; I had the blessing of the church to do this and was trusted with a key. The worship hall had a new ‘sacredity’ in the dusk that I had never seen before in service—not even the black-out curtains pulled over the green, blue, yellow glass windows gave it this teeming darkness that seemed alive with Spirit, Nostalgia; I turned to a niche and curled to my knees as normal, and prepared to anoint the instrument as normal, when the sickness of migraine and the privacy of Dusk just bade me otherwise to lay down on my back, and fold my hands over my chest like some coffin princess.

I prayed, and prayed my prayers of wishing to just suffer at each and every moment for this life might best be served through a slave’s religion, that each little joyous desire might be stripped from me and stolen and with it every boredom filling absences between service; that this misery might only be worsened with more active work, and more active love, and further active disconnection, until every single thought escapes and all-that remains is a steel flea ticking away its functions. I laughed at my own prayer; and prayed just-as earnestly that myself could not believe my own sincerity; I wanted to do nothing, I wanted to eat ice-cream and be left alone and rot; I wanted a friend, too; and I wanted to be taught better.

I vowed myself clay for my masters hand and to be wed again, and consummated the relationship between artwork and artist.

In the darkness of my prayer, Asmodeus gained depth from another hole I hadn’t seen.

From the same book,

She shut drawers on her fingers and doors on her hands, bumped her nose on the wall, and many a time felt like banging her head against the wall in order to reach oblivion and get out of all this strange place in time where she was a square peg in a round hole.

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this article is part 11 of the [Asmodeus and Glassware] series found on the Concordance