Orsday Programming October 1 2024

Picnic, Shadows, Spiders, Barley-Malt

After service I accepted an invitation to join a sister for a picnic—the young one whose face had half frozen from a stroke. She was otherwise pretty, and prettier for the marring that ran through her and mucked her up (I’d never tell her this, but I think of her as wabi-sabi pottery, and it would embarrass me immensely if I told her that and needed to explain it).

She mentioned to me that she missed food up in the Jewish neighborhoods in Newark and had tried to prepare herself some of her favorites, “sloppy joes, but how they make it at the delis is with pastrami and slaw and swiss,” she told me, and despite the mention I asked “what is this?” when I saw the sloppy joe, because it did not make me think anything of a sloppy joe (a hot, warm, messy thing; this was cold and compacted). She made a side of vegetable dumplings, “Special K loaf,” and a personal can of “tender bits” that she ate out of with a fork and did not offer to share.

We ate and talked, and it was pleasant; the hurricane had been a few days removed and the weather still had a chill as cold ocean air pulled itself over the town towards the passing hurricane. Rye crumbs stuck to her teeth as she chewed and spoke, and she told me her thoughts on the spirit. She said (I stared at her teeth and the crumbs) she imagines us left-handeds as being this clump of very long legged and very black spiders, and we all are being sent this same inaudible programming to make webs, and we spend our lives trying to untangle our legs from each-other and to scurry about the earth creating art and patterns without a single intelligent thought truly passing through our heads. She laughed good-naturedly at the last part, and said thoughts are what nearly did her in. I covered my mouth and smiled at her, not wanting her to see the crumbs in my teeth.

She continued on, and related how for so long she mistook “her little intelligence” that spoke with her for her entire life (even now, she added) as being her. She referenced what the pastor had said earlier, and added that we are the absences. We are the pit in Christ’s side, I said. She swallowed a bite loudly and nodded and m’hm’d: right, but even more simple than that, she said.

She didn’t know why the spider makes webs, why it eats the insects, why they always seem alone, and why their legs sometimes still move when dead.

She said that she sometimes wakes up at night and is troubled by the stroke, and how unlikely it was that she should still be alive—and that maybe she did not survive, maybe she is like the movements of a dead spider pretending at life when some snotty kid pokes at it with a stick. She held a hand up to me and clenched her fingers, and wiggled them, and went ‘bzzzzt!’ and smiled again.

We finished our sloppy joes, and she pulled a book from her ministry bag, and flipped to a noted few pages while addressing me as, “you know, I’d had some thoughts about the church that I wanted to share with you,” and found the noted few pages, pressing a finger down center and asking me to look these over, and spake that “this is a young church, and we need to secure a future for it, and to keep innovating and planning, and to bring in a new generation willing to adopt a chiral culture,”

the pages she wanted me to look at were crude drawings of a church, or school; she explained that a non-confused culture will need infrastructure that supports both hands, and incorporates both. One of her plans for a cross-chiral building was a square structure with a right-hand wing cut-out from the bulk in an L shape.

The other plan had a large right-hand tower rising up towards the heaven, and under that building was an inverted sunken right-handed tower. She detailed how the population between the hands would always be around 10:1, and roughly the buildings are meant to address that.

I told her I do not understand architecture or engineering, and I said if she did the second one here in Florida the water-table would drown everyone.

It doesn’t have to be in Florida, it can be anywhere, she said. And, she said, you do not need to understand architecture or engineering, that part that understands is not you and is not the pit; we’re the dumb spiders that somehow make webs without a single little intelligence passing truly through us.

I flipped through some of the papers she had in a stack.

“Is that Galactus?”

“I get bored during the sermons sometimes. He’s my favorite by Kirby, just now he drifts around and is a big dumb colossus out in the void in glitzy pink machine armor and all he does is eat. So bizarre how he is with the surfer, too.”

She changed the topic and asked if I had done shadow reading for the verses today, and flipped open her Bible to Isaiah, and her shadow binder to some ratty page scrawled over with notes;

“Isaiah one, verse six: ‘Hear the word of the Lord, ye rulers of Sodom; give ear unto the law of our God, ye people of Gomorrah.’”

“I am listening, Lord.”

She wrote my response into the binder and resumed.

“Verse eleven: ‘To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? saith the Lord: I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he goats.’”

“The left-hand has cleaved off its own digits till there were none to give, then set to cleave splinters of bone till there were none left, then set upon the hems of flesh and tissue cleaved down to particulate till there were none left to feed to the Lord, and the stomach of the Lord was only left empty as Earthy things fed Earthy things.”

“Verse nineteen, and twenty: ‘If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land: But if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured with the sword: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.’”

“I shall abide by my etiquette shewn to me by your Body, your finger from where I have been shed,” I paused to think on the verse and thought I had been stuck over the dichotomy that Lord God presented, and whether the word had been muddled by a righteous hand; the sister patiently stared into her Bible and waited; “I am doomed, Lord; the pit within the Earth will gnash apart spirit and Heaven will be the hot air that fuels the pit underground; I am humble before you, bound by etiquette to exist against confusion, and bound to not bloody the other hand with our trespasses.”

“Verse twenty-one, twenty-two: ‘How is the faithful city become an harlot! it was full of judgment; righteousness lodged in it; but now murderers. Thy silver is become dross, thy wine mixed with water.’”

“I have once belonged to that sullen and murderous hand, fractured infinitely as it had been blasted against the righteous hand it once clasped and dirtied, and now I am the dross having sloughed from silver; I am particulate dregs, pooled at the bottom of thy empty cup.”

She finished writing that response, and flipped through her Bible, “lets do second Peter,” and thought for a moment, “chapter two, verses four and five, ‘For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment; And spared not the old world, but saved Noah the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly.’”

“I am of that broken hand cast into the hells of Earth and bound into the very mud itself, I have been born of a sinful flock and my fate is reserved; the eighth—” I paused, “none of my kind shall be spared, for our own fate casts its own shadow from whence Christ has arisen to save those spared of our earthen taint.”

“Verse twelve, ‘But these, as natural brute beasts, made to be taken and destroyed, speak evil of the things that they understand not; and shall utterly perish in their own corruption.’”

“I am as a beast, my neck laid bare before annihilation, my gizzard pulled out by a Righteous hand and to be fed upon by your sword, and spilt to the ground below.”

She finished writing, closed her binder, and asked if I had done animal butchery before—I hadn’t—and she added they do that with chickens, the throat is pulled out and the blade through it, then reversed and split through the neck, so the feathers do not mix in with the meat.

She asked me to read more of second Peter to properly fill my head up with his grim nonsense, and to think on it more.

“The Word cast a nice shadow through you,” she told me, and asked if I’m healing okay. I was, and I pulled up my sleeve reflexively, and just-as reflexively she reached for my forearm and squeezed and turned it like a doctor.

I had done it this morning, after missing the prior two; I had felt guilty about that and my prayers accordingly had taken on an extremely confessional nature where I begged to lay bare my faults and sins before that Sunken Thing underground; I resented, most of all, my indifference towards my failings to the faith. It had been all too easy to miss those two renewals.

Pastor had said something during the sermon, that you should not base your faith wholly around a long-ago ecstasy or conviction that now is slowly crawling away from you; your faith must be based on the present. It seemed like he was speaking to me directly, then. Still, I had no idea how to use those words to affect myself against my indifference.

Yet I felt refreshed all the same. There felt something important now about my own internal conflict with this indifference and spiritual failings.

I’d never tell my sister here for fear of being off-color, but I thought I had been stricken with a spiritual stroke and now must live and grow instead of holding on-to when my spirit had once been unperturbed; I was a beautiful and indifferent thing, and I was clicking along like a programmed automaton made of hammered steel and pressed dirt.

The sun hung overhead and as we were standing to leave, I told her “look,” and wiggled my fingers in the sunlight casting a creepy-crawly shadow over the picnic blanket, “I’m a spider.”

I think at that moment she thought I was an idiot.

---

this article is part 2 of the [Asmodeus and Glassware] series found on the Concordance