Missive the Sixty-Second
And the Deal
Will Be Done.
DATELINE: Wednesday, March 7, 2001, at 0245 hours CDT.
Conway, Arkansas, USA
By D. Ebenezer Baldwin Bowles
CornDancer & Company
The daffodils are especially yellow, but the quickening is so fierce upon me that I can't pause to enjoy their color, or the resurrection they proclaim. Can I? Tomorrow I'll make the effort.
Leap into a vehicle, turn on the noise, dash hither 'n yon to do something, be somewhere. Push, or be pushed.
A daffodil cannot be a spring flower; it's gotta be a winter blossom, always emerging before the equinox, blooming when most else is still brown and barren-looking. So? I'm not certain if the daffodils' arrival in the garden signals a herald's paean, or the watchman's direful lament.
I'm so far removed from the natural rhythms of the earth that I'm sickened to admit it. I want to lay down on the soil and merge with something.
What's It to Me that He Turned on Them.
I've tied my stomach into a knot tonight, thinking about events and situations that shouldn't matter. What's it to me that Charles Andrew Williams took his daddy's .22 to school and shot a baker's dozen of classmates and a pair of teachers? If I hadn't turned on the television I'd never have known about it.
So what if the Afghanis dynamite a few statues crafted by the Ancients? Nothing lasts anyway.
I wrote some rant, but excised it. There's blame enough already. I'll settle my blame on evil.
"Man, in contrast to virtually all mammals, is the only primate who can feel intense pleasure in killing and torturing. This destructiveness is neither innate, nor part of 'human nature,' and it is not common to all men," Erich Fromm wrote in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness.
No Grimace, No Remorse
— Just Malignant Blood Lust.
Young murderer Williams, I've heard it reported again and again, hurled his bullets into his classmates "with a smile on his face" — as if his facial expression matters. Would it seem less horrific if he had grimaced? They said he "expressed no remorse" — as if moral anguish and malignant blood lust are links in a natural causal chain.
"We don't know how long it will take to destroy them, but they will be eliminated," Abdul Salam Zaeef, a Taliban diplomat, promised at a press conference in Islamabad. "They" are two massive statues of Buddha, idols on the landscape of the wasteland of Afghanistan.
At first, awash in euphoria, soldiers fired anti-aircraft rounds into the Buddhas, but the stone proved too stout. The destroyers switched tactics and began to use dynamite and cordite.
"The statues are very strong," Ambassador Zaeef said. "We do not want to spend more money or resources to destroy them. That's why we are using explosives."
God Said to Abraham, 'Kill Me a Son.'
The brave Muslim warriors stopped the assault on Monday to celebrate the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha, a four-day Feast of the Sacrifice in honor of Abraham's willingness to stab his son to death in obedience to God. By festival's beginning, the legs and feet had been cut from 'neath the giant Buddhas. The deed was "about twenty-five percent done," the ambassador said.
After feasting on sacrificed beasts, a quarter of each being given to the needy, the brave warriors will resume their jihad against the stone infidels and cut off their idolatrous heads, Ambassador Zaeef pledged.
Two animate classmates, slain by a cruel boy with a small pistol and forty bullets. Two stone Buddhas, felled by holy soldiers with big guns and explosives.
"The motive for these killings does not seem to be hate, but an unbearable sense of boredom and impotence and the need to experience that there is someone who will react, someone on whom one can make a dent, some deed that will make an end of the monotony of daily experience," Mr. Fromm wrote in 1973. "Killing is one way of experiencing that one is and that one can produce an effect on another being."
Humans slaying humans is a commonplace, desperate reaction to ineffectiveness and impotence. A boy doing it at school with his guns a blazin' retains its shock value. Images of multiple casualties strewn about the campus: What drama! What tragedy! The citizens are horrified, saddened, dismayed. Absent, however, is the collective will to stop it. We humans accept violence, destruction, and carnage as the necessary attendant to our passage through the vale.
Who Shall Prevail — Mohammed or Buddha?
Soldiers destroying monuments symbolizes an impotence even more hopeless than the dulled desperation of man dealing his deathblows to other men. The impulse behind the slaying of the Buddha must be the anxious desire of an insecure political culture, manic Islamic theocracy, to eliminate the ruling idea of a supposed rival culture, apolitical Buddhism, a pacific and otherworldly system that somehow threatens the citizenry's willingness to submit to the monotheism of Mohammed and his worldly representatives, the Taliban.
"The Quickening is a term used to describe the acceleration of events in our world in the areas of economics, human behavior, weather, politics, health and environment," Art Bell wrote on his website, Coast to Coast AM.
Are you in a hurry? How much faster is cash flowing through your accounts? Do you suspect that the frequency and destructiveness of tornadoes, hurricanes, and cyclones are on the increase? Can you feel the earthquakes rumbling? How many new diseases and epidemics are brought to light with each passing season? Have you caught one of them? Has the new drug for it reached the pharmacy yet?
From the perspective of Cricket Song, the pace is downright dizzying. Eventually, events will race so fast they'll achieve maximum acceleration. Time for each of us will converge at the junction of the One Moment. On that day, every event will happen all at once — and the deal will be done.
WATCH FOR MISSIVE THE SIXTY-THIRD
on Friday, March 9, 2001 (or thereabouts).
The twice-weekly Letters from Cricket Song
is available by E-mail.
Let us know if you want to receive it.
Please forward your name and email address to
ebenezer@corndancer.com
You're also welcome to add a friend or associate to the list.
Visit the web site at corndancer.com
| ©2001 by David Ebenezer Baldwin Bowles |
| Send
e-mail | 501.450.7989 |