Eso’s Chronicles 258/ Act 3
Addend 18—Adam Adammovich
Act 3
© Eso A.B.

Adam: Ra-zhannychka, go ask your mothers,

if the priest Tiresias is among those

who have come for me?

Tell your mothers to lay away the knives,

and ask the high priest to come and

speak with me by himself.

Ra-zhannychka: Yes, father,

I know him, I saw him.

He comes dressed with a ‘thing’ four feet long.

Adam: Ra-zhannychka, that is unusual,

Is it not?

Ra-zhannychka: Yes, father,

he’s already told,

he’s come to see you without yours.

Adam: That is curious. Why?

Has someone told him what ails me?

Ra-zhannychka, be so good,

Bring me my three-foot long one,

It hangs on the peg behind the door,

and bring your handkerchief.

And tell your mothers to prepare

us a lethal dose of cocaine.

And, Ra-zhannychka,

Something else ….

Ra-zhannychka: Yes, father.

Adam: Ra-zhannychka,

I want you to do as I ask,

and when you are done,

steal yourself away and run

to your grandmothers and hide among them.

Do not come back to this house,

until you bear us a son.

He will be of you, your mothers, and me,

whoever the father be.

Chorus: (aside) My son, he, like me

must have four wives

and a girl like you, Razhannyk, to carry on the fight

in the event that he like we lose it.

Now, go! And bring with you your handkerchief!

(Ra-zhannychka exits…)

Story Teller: Well, I have said it before: there works within us a greater intelligence, a genee with a memory that is more enduring than our own. The French were the first to take notice of it and called it longue duree http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernand_Braudel . Perhaps this is because the French were called, at an earlier time, Franks; and the Franks came from an area now known as Romania. The Franks changed their name, because they could not bear the thought of their defeat at the hands of the Turkic tribes. Yet the Franks within them continued to live on, and their memories did not die as quickly as we now presume.

When the Franks were near defeat a second time,this time by the English (that was only six hundred years ago), and their would-be king (dauphin) was not king because of timidity and lack of conviction, there came from the midst of the Franks one Joan of Arc http://www.biography.com/people/joan-of-arc-9354756 , also called the Maid or Pucelle, the last which may mean boy-girl. This name has its own longue duree history: puika means boy in Estonian (of a Uralic language group http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_language ), and puishele (boy-girl) may be the equivalent of ‘pucelle’. How this came to be, I do not know. In any event, the role of Joan is like that of Ismene. Ismene was the only survivor of the court of Oedipus the King, who (no one said a word about it) did not have the nerve to slaughter enough Turks to keep Byzantium for Byzantines, but succumbed to the attacks of the Tartars as the Turks were then known. Ismene was the only one to survive, but disappeared from the stage of history as if she never was.

Perhaps it was meant to be, so that today, she may reincarnate herself as Ra-zhannychka. Having lived her young life in incest with her mothers and father, she grew up as a boy-girl. Like the Earth-Mother of the Aztecs, Coatlicue, Lady of the Serpents Skirt, who lived on Snake Mountain, and swept the floor of her temple until a feather drifted into her lap bearing the Sun’s own seed, Ra-zhannychka was sent after her father’s three foot Other-self, which men of the day—they wore no pants—hung from their belts and carried between their legs, to community events. Of course, I have made this up, but it fits the story.

Incidentally, one does not have to be an anthropologist to think or speak about ancient myths.

(Ra-zhannychka reenters…)

Ra-zhannychka:  Everything is alright, father.

Mothers are entertaining our guests.

Dressed in socks to their thighs

And gloves to their armpits,

they are all running naked through our field of nettles.

If you listen, you can hear them scream

(She laughs:)

Here’s your thing.

and my handkerchief.

Adam: Thanks, Ra-zhannyk.

Now turn your back while I get dressed.

(Ra-zhannychka turns her back to her father, while Adam puts the ‘thing’ between his legs, straps on the belt, and hooks the ‘thing’ to it. He does so in full view of the audience. When done, he takes the handkerchief and places it over the head of the penis. The lights on stage dim slowly.)

Adam: Ra-zhannychka , When I am done,

do not forget to put the kerchief into your zhanka.

 

Eso’s Chronicles 178
How War Ends (2)
© Eso A.B.

A major right wing ‘Revolutions in Reverse’ occurred during the 12^th-14^th centuries. This is when former sacred king’s of Europe and leaders of the ‘wandering tribes’ realized that their coming up against the Atlantic Ocean and the lack of transport to cross it, meant the end to nomadic life and the arrival of the age of forced sedentirization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedentism . After they no longer could move about freely, people felt insecure and believed themselves to be living within the nexus of an Apocalypse. The latter half of the 15^th century was full of expectations about its arrival http://www.ptm.org/99PT/JanFeb/Apocalypse1500.htm .

At about the 14^th and 15^th centuries the Europeans did, of course, get to cross the ocean and bring havoc to the people on the other side of it. They destroyed the Indian nomads completely (they now blame it on the ‘Americans’, but the Americans of those days were the spitting image of ‘Europeans’). The Europeans brought even greater havoc to those American tribes whose early experiments with sedentism, though abandoning teomiqui, or ‘dying like a god dies’, was nevertheless closely bound with the concept of self-sacrifice, with which Catholicism was not at all bound.

In short, had the latent and apparently newer completely quiescent Revolutionary fires against the Aztec elites by the peoples of Mexico (they constituted most of the troops of Cortez’s army) not been so culturally naïve as to believe that the European mindset was like their own, the Revolutionary fires released by Cortez’s arrival may well have reinstituted teomiqui (possible cognates: teomike, teomort, teomir) as a principle of leadership.

Instead, Cortez subverted the victorious Revolutionaries and poisoned native notions of justice by exposing them to the advantages of  ‘accusational violence’ developed by the Inquisition. In  the name of a religion of ‘love’ that had already brought death to so many European ‘heretics’, the uniquely European verbal combination of a ‘love-lie’ took advantage of Aztec perversion of human sacrifice and annihilated the native Indian theology in toto. Had the native Mexican Revolutionaries been left to their own traditions, the nature of ‘religion’ today could be very different indeed.

In Europe a similar pattern of revolt had occurred, but with tribal movements arrested and no previous experience with sedentism, the tribes soon became aggressive, when the sacred king’s former barons, grabbed land wherever it was unsecured or where occupation by violence was not yet all that costly in human lives. The Scandinavian Vikings were especially prone to learn and adopt the customs of European princes. Given the custom of the subculture of European elites, re ‘every man is a thief’ (just where and how such behavior got its toehold requires greater and more concentrated study by anthropologists), the Vikings disseminated this sub-culture over the entire face of Europe. The result was that the office of self-sacrificial sacred king lost its bonding charisma and to a culture of cynics became absurd.

The later evolving ‘democratic’ government, though a concession to peace seeking human nature, took the shape of a pyramid in the abstract, while in the concrete it became a proto-democratic vassalage http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vassal . This was an unstable political structure, because the foundation, though extensive in breadth, stood over a psychological zone prone to frequent earthquakes.

As sacred kings lost their charisma and found they were no longer not only NOT sacred, but despised, the charisma that had once existed as a bonding force over a society they had led—expired. Right along with the disappearance of self-sacrifice, kings began to be thought of as autocrats and dictators. The more powerful councilors of the king’s Council began to conspire for power that was at least equal to what they imagined as the king’s own. These former councilors never gave a thought to having to offer themselves in self-sacrifice for the community.

It took a poor shepherd girl, Joan of Arc to know and show what France had lost. As kings contested for power among themselves and the piles of human sacrifices on the battle field grew ever larger, the councilors sought ever more power for themselves. It did not take long to discover that the form of government that best suited the elite collective of princes and barons, short of total power by coup d’état, was parliamentary democracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliament. The principles of this ‘democracy’ were best expressed by Machiavelli’s book, full of distrust and contempt for humans https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IGBKu6qM7Y, “The Prince”.

The social order, which emerged from top echelon parliamentarianism and coexists with it to this day emerged from the discreditation of sacred kingship—and continued to evolve until it emerged as our acquisitive neo-capitalist ‘democracy’. The final impetus for the evolution of this ‘democracy’ was given by the Industrial Age.

The Industrial Age is of course itself an outgrowth of government created by politicians who arrive at their decisions by consensus, which unfailingly promises the electorate more than it can deliver (which is why a transparent government is a self-contradiction and impossibility), then pretends to deliver by plundering our planet of its organic and inorganic resources.

Though our planet is over four billion years old, its plunder was done and finished in two hundred years. All that remains is fiat currency, which after one final use is being flushed down the toilet. This extravagant desire to consume and gorge is what we know as the environmental catastrophe. If anyone survives it, it will leave behind it a Tibetan style temple on an icy mountain with a peripheral peasantry practicing subsistence economy. The good thing is that the wood is likely to revive as it has at quarantined Chernobyl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVv1vsZxV00.

This is not to say that people have stopped seeking a ‘pure democracy’ http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pure%20democracy , a form of government in which leadership is expressed directly through the opinion and will of the people. Indeed, the quest for such a ‘democracy’ is on the increase, because instant communication through links made available by the internet makes it imaginable and possible. Unfortunately, the internet is devoid of any possibility that the results of the vote will make better critical judgment than the politicians of parliamentary ‘democracy’.

Given the absence of the wood and its replacement with the desert of the city, the impossibility of ‘pure democracy’ in the latter environment is, nevertheless, reflected in what we call ‘individualism’, ‘human rights’, and ‘consumerism’. These three hubristic possibilities realize ‘pure democracy’ as a ruling principle in that all three reflect the complete breakdown of community, responsibility, and generosity toward the spontaneous gifts of nature.

As our ‘democratic’ civilization slides toward extinction, the ever good news of ‘democratic’ politics is replaced by another ‘unspeakable’ truth. One thoughtful man defines it as: “an evil whose depth and deceit seem to go beyond the capacity of words to describe.”   http://www.infowars.com/why-was-jfk-murdered/

So, where does the evil hide? As all things well hidden, it hides before our eyes. Which is to say, the ‘unspeakable’ is listened to with unbelievable intensity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKCkWUOm-b0, and the violence of the “unspeakable”, too, is on open display, because it is not murderous violence as that of a terrorist destroying himself and as many as round about by a cataclysmic explosion, but by what historian David Nirenberg calls “accusational and judicial violence” http://www.studymode.com/essays/Communities-Of-Violence-428868.html . If ‘unspeakable’ violence went for the jugular of the late President Kennedy a mere fifty years ago, the ‘accusational’ violence of today is going after every inhabitant of our planet.

Today’s governments are very much like those in the Middle Ages, when the neo-Christian Inquisition (a judicial power) used ‘accusational violence’ against everyone it decides is a ‘heretic’, i.e., a ‘terrorist’.

In the Middle Ages the ‘heretics’ [such as Jan Hus (burnt 1415), Joan of Arc (burnt 1431)] were able to fight the accusations brought against them only by surrendering themselves non-violently to state terror and use the horrors of state terror to encourage the renewal of not-violent terror once used by sacred kings toward the rebirth of an organic God and community.

Eso’s Chronicles 155
Joan of Arc, God As Act (4)
© Eso A.B.

The ideology of words and the results it leads to is rather well illustrated by the following clip (if you have the patience to see it through to the end) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WhQ8bSvcHQ . Unfortunately, the subject: “Breaking the Spell - Religion as a Natural Phenomenon” is not persuasive, if only for the reason that the professor does not appear to have ever stepped very far beyond the faculty room.  As the title of the lecture advises us, the professor’s aim is to break the spell over whomever religion has enveloped in its fog and who ever thought or believed that religion is a natural phenomenon. A few minutes into the lecture, he already intimates the hope (expressed in terms of ‘likelihood’) that science will soon dispel any such notion.

Interestingly, ‘scientism’ (if not science) originated with the rigorous (and cruel) interpretation of ecclesiastical law. Joan was burnt by the Burgundians because she wore male clothes http://archive.joan-of-arc.org/joanofarc_male_clothing.html, and strict and dogmatic interpretation of ‘the science of law’ had to be applied to make prevail the ends of materialism. The object-law in the Petri dish on the table for dissection was Deuteronomy 22:25: “A woman must not wear men's clothing, nor a man wear women's clothing, for the LORD your God detests anyone who does this.” A legion of scholastics put their noses to the dish and pronounced that the smell was a natural phenomenon, it smelled of the roast-of-Joan.

If it were only as simple as the professor and the faculty room environment believes. I do not dispute that such a belief is their desert. After all, the thesis of my blogs is that the present-day collapse of ‘virtually everything’ is a triumph of their making. One of the faculty room (Francis Fukuyama), recently went so far as to suggest that among the victories of capitalism was the capture of the future, and that the blood clotted False Flag was hence to flutter the words: “The End of History”.

For a while it may have seemed so. More than one academic, with no better idea about religion than getting his-her hair wet by having a priest’s hen lay a water filled word on it, suggested that religions would soon meld into each other. Nevertheless, there were a few exceptions, who understood that the word was preceded by an act: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNDG7ErY-k4 . As the foregoing remarks by Noam Chomsky’s make clear, not even a linguist can dismiss the fact that the Act is as positive matter to the anti-matter of the Word.

Today hardly anyone has heard that religion originated as a consequence to the creation of communities, and that the reason why religion continues to this day is because while violence may create empires, which are awesome and persuasive models of ‘the deserts of the real’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgBViHeiSKM, they do not create viable communities. In ‘the dessert of the real’ all that is is made of words and derives from words seizing violence. Youngsters today imagine war as entertainment; while the video screens portray the community as populist ‘excrement’ of Earth.

As most of us know, Joan of Arc, once she had initiated a turn for the better for the kingdom of France, was soon betrayed by the same Catholic authorities that used her to save themselves and the kingdom they had trashed. While such accusations were to be expected from the Angles and Burgundians, the same arguments were soon (if not earlier) used by the University of Paris. What especially bothers the elites and the academic ecclesia is that Joan is venerated by the public as a saint even before she has been burnt, and that the public is not much bothered by her male clothes, because it knows that without them, the Maid will be raped.

 

It is difficult, even impossible, to persuade a successful (well to do) neo-liberal community that its members under stressful economic conditions are sure to behave aggressively toward other communities. Indeed, it is the well off neo-liberal community that believes that it is created by God and that God created it to be peace loving. The police are there only to restrain those who suffer from some pathology—like boredom that needs to be overcome by alcohol, indecent exposure, wife swapping, or not paying back money borrowed to pay a bill.

 

How does one become a ‘successful’ neo-liberal community? By not having to suffer from no want. And how does one avoid suffering from want? By becoming a leader of the community and demanding to be paid well.

 

And how does one do that?

 

By threat, power, and violence.

 

How does one do that?

 

By cutting down the forest, creating a desert, leaving no place for one to hide, leaving no fish in the sea, creating a police, and leaving others helpless.

 

It is not that human beings did not try other solutions. After all, the inability of people to get along is legendary. There is an anecdote (I do not remember where I read it) of a meeting of two separate groups of gorillas or chimpanzees. The groups came together without violence, but the males eyed each other apprehensively. There was tension in the air. As humans would say, there was no one around to crack a joke. Instead of a joke two females, one from each group came out into the space that still separated the two groups. As everyone watched, the two began to play with each other, that is, they felt each other up sexually. The males could not be but disarmed. Everyone relaxed, and the two groups blended into each other, and there was peace among them while they remained in each other’s proximity.

 

We may take the above scene a step further. Say, a male from each group began to dispute, because one of the females of an elder gave signs of moving to stay with a younger male of the other group. Male pride was wounded, and a fight began. Elders from each side had to intervene and break up the conflict. Nevertheless, neither of the males immediately involved would calm down, and the elders decided to let them fight it out between themselves. Whatever the outcome, even if one was killed, the other would respect the result.

 

But when one of the opponents was in fact killed, the atmosphere became very tense, and the tension was great enough to suspect that a general conflict might soon break out. This is when one of the elders stepped out of the wood with a mushroom, a green fly agaric http://7song.com/photos/199/191/Aminita-sp.-Fly-agaric.jpg , in one of his paws. Everyone knew that the mushroom was deadly.

 

The elder calmly broke the mushroom in pieces and began to eat it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_of_Arc To save the elder from death by poisoning, both of the ‘lezzy’ females offered to have sex with him. The male did not refuse their offers, but continued to eat the mushroom until he went into convulsions and died.

 

Then an amazing thing happened: both of the groups of gorillas (or chipanzees) continued together, and thereafter become one community.

 

Eso’s Chronicles 154
Joan of Arc, God’s Virgin with Sword (3)
© Eso A.B.

When Joan of Arc sent (c. 1429) her famous “Lettre aux Anglais” http://www.maisonstclaire.org/resources/documents/lettreauxanglais.html to the English forces in Orleans, writing “…for the third and last time, and I shall write no more,” and did not thereafter dispute the phrase “I will have them all put to death”, for all her heroism and insistence that she had been sent by God, the False Flag event of 1118 in Constantinople (a little more than 300 years before) had already made her an unwitting accomplice in the theological charade in which both the English, French, and the entire West was complicit.

Whether the Maid knew about all that was at stake is doubtful. But there should be no doubt that she knew that France would disappear if she did not Act. While Joan was no more than a shepherdess, a chambermaid, a girl sixteen years old, but old enough to know how to handle horses, the spirit of the ancient sybils http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sibyl  called on her (through now lost or hidden pareidolic channels) with sufficiently loud voice to resemble the voice of God to her.

The ‘charade’ that involved the Maid, is based on a theological change in the Jewish-Christian message from one of ‘Act’ to one of ‘Word’. As the first line of the Bible now reads: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God….” the line once read and should still read: “In the beginning was the Act, and the Act was with God, and the Act was God.”

Such a reading is not given, however, any longer, because the Act has been replaced by the Word which we better know as the Law. As most everyone knows about the Law, it is believed to have first come as the Word of God, which was expressed in the Ten Commandments of Moses http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Commandments. Unfortunately, it was not long after Moses that the first ten Commandments were expanded to a never ending series of Laws and Commandments. If the writer of the first ten laws was Moses, the writers of the other laws were a series of kings and princes, or priests subservient to them. Eventually the priests became lawyers, who today have become bankers, because as lawyers they grew wealthy to become bankers. Today as bankers, they can pay lawyers and dictate what the lawyers (in effect themselves) write. Such is the history of the evolution of the Word.

The first of the Ten Commandments reads: “You shall have no other gods before me”. Thus, if God is Word, you shall not put an Act before the Word, even if everyone knows that acts speak louder than words. It follows that the written Law (whoever writes it, and if it can be enforced) becomes God.

Whoever published the first Bible could have had the order of the Commandments reversed; in effect, the last commandment could have been made to read as the first. If the first commandment had become the last, one could look back to the earlier nine and see what laws God supported. Putting God first is like baptizing a child before the child knows what is happening and what he-she is being committed to.

In short, the Word replaced the Act. If any pundit, psychologist, political analyst, or writer wonders why our civilization today is passive, they need look no further than this decision to make commandment ten read as first. This in one fell stroke denigrated and eliminated any right for the subjective mind to act in its own right.

By the time we reach Joan of Arc in the 16^th century [we cannot really be sure of the dates, because official dating occurred only some time after the Council of Trent (1545-1563)], law making—predating the Hammurbi Code http://www.commonlaw.com/Hammurabi.html—had a long and well established tradition.

Nevertheless, the fact that the Word as God came without a date, it made for uncertainty regarding its past. And if the Word of God was good only in the mouths of priests (early lawyers), their subjective thoughts were still operational and to be taken note of. I.e., even if you and I had no say in any matters and had to await the decisions of authorities before we could make a move, the actual situation could move away from us, that is to say, it could deteriorate. In this way the God of the lawmakers could delay decision making, sometimes with catastrophic results.

One may speculate that the arrival of Joan of Arc to save the kingdom of France and to return the crown of France to King Charles, the rightful king, despite many assertions to the contrary, was eagerly awaited by the Catholic Church. As the initiator of Laws by earlier kings and princes, for lack of dating, it had created a situation (in France, the country of origin for Catholicism which subsequently was responsible for overthrowing  Christianity in the East, where God had continued to prevail as Act) it needed to be rescued from.

The Church had come to its downfall, because if it was to serve power-seeking princes, it also had to replace the Acts of kings (Acting in the name of God) with God as the Word. As they reset the social order, the early and inevitable conflicts with the Christians of the East went undated. The fighting was a hahey or tumult of violent acts, and there were no umpires. Blood flowed freely, and it was said that there was not enough water (sacred to the people of the land) to wash it away.

Ultimately Western or Catholic Christianity—succeeding Moses as the writer of laws—imposed princely and oligarchal authority over the people of the land. Thus, somewhat paradoxically, it undermined the supports of social order by destroying the authority of the ancient sacred king. The consequence was that France become leaderless. Not surprisingly, the English took advantage, and seized France for themselves.

The Catholic Archbishop of Embrun, Jacques Gelu, writes of the time: “There is scarcely anyone left offering obedience to the king”. Professor Deborah A. Fraioli paraphases Gelu: “The rumor spread that whoever could obtain a part of the realm by force could keep it.”*

Obviously, the Catholic Church was disturbed and worried enough to risk entrusting the solution to the inspiration of a sibyl.

Who was this sibyl?

Martin le Franc (1410-1461) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_le_Franc author of a long (24,000 verses) poem Le Champion des Dames (The Champion of Women) has the poem reaach its high point with the deeds of Joan of Arc. Joan is defending God as Act. God’s Act is to send his chosen Maid, Joan, to save France from the English and help restore to her her place among the nations.

The the zeal of the Catholic Church to instate the rule of secular princes led to an Emergency not to say Collapse of government in France. The Word of God took charge of God as Act with a vengeance. Even Jean Dupuy, Dominican theologian and Inquisitor, is ready to put his reputation on line by declaring that Joan of Arc is an event: “…so great, so considerable, and so unheard of that nothing similar seems to have happened since the world began.” Dupuy goes on to destroy the argument that would make God the Word by saying: “…it must be necessarily concluded [that Joan is] from God… and does not proceed from spells….”* Needless to say, the ‘spells’ in question are spells and words issued in the name of God by the Church. Though God saved France through sending Joan of Arc as his Act, the church remains jealous of God as Act and keeps casting spells that put the would be faithful of the entire Christian realm to sleep.

*Deborah A. Fraioli, “Joan of Arc, the Early Debate”, The Boydell Press, p. 90; 150-158. Quotes and paraphrases, though not opinions or interpretations, with regard to Joan of Arc in this blog from foregoing source.

(To be Continued)

Eso’s Chronicles 153
The Thumbsucker’s War for Human Rights (2)
© Eso A.B.

Air Brush

If one is to take seriously what J.D. Salinger wrote and what Mark Chapman read to the court as the statement why he assassinated John Lennon, re: “…I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids….” (see end of previous blog), and if one is to understand the text literally and has ever seen a real field of rye http://static5.depositphotos.com/1003699/523/i/950/depositphotos_5237387-Country-road-through-rye-fieldcountry-road-through-rye-field.jpg , it makes for either an absurd picture or a scene of vandals on the loose.

A farmer coming to a field of trampled rye would swear that the next time he will come with a shotgun to punish the culprits by spraying buckshot at their legs.

If one wishes to take the sentiments of Mark Chapman as signifying more than a literal interpretation of the text, one has to re-imagine that in place of the ‘rye’ there is a wood, and that the wood stands for the Sphinx in Sophocle’s well known play “King Oedipus”. The thousand ‘little kids’ then become the sacrifices the Thebans bring to the wood to appease their near uncontrollable desire to go hedonistically ‘wild’ after spending a life time of living in a city. The pain and suffering caused by the loss of their children to the Sphinx, keeps the City of Thebes a relatively orderly city inspite of everyone being unhappy.

As some readers may already suspect, Prince Oedipus, who is fleeing the home that he has imagined as that of his parents (in the kingdom of Cithaeron), comes to a wood, better, a sacred grove—the maw of the Sphinx, so to speak—and discovers that children are wandering aimlessly and lost until they die of hunger or cold, or fall down a deep chasm that bisects the grove. The chasm is known as the “Cithaeron chasm”.

At the edge of the chasm stands a temple dedicated to the Sphinx (who stands for the mystery of the wood). When any of the lost children happen to come upon the temple, they are greeted by the priest Tiresias. Tiresias offers each child an apple. After the apple has been eaten, Tiresias gives each child two bird feathers, leads them to a platform at the edge of the chasm, stands them close to the edge of the platform, and asks them to start swinging their arms as if they are the wings of a bird. Tiresias also asks the children to close their eyes and imagine that they are flying. When the children do as Tiresias suggests, he gives each child a push, and the child loses balance and falls into the chasm.

It happens that Prince Oedipus (impersonated by Mark Chapman) comes to the wood and the temple at just the right moment. As Chapman walks up the temple path, he sees Tiresias push a child over the edge of the cliff. He hears the child (all are boy children) scream, then he sees Tiresias walk back to the temple, where he is awaited by Mark’s father—John Lennon, a well known entertainer in the city of Thebes.

Lennon is Marks father from a liaison he had as a teenager with a young woman older than he. The young woman was so taken by the teenager’s voice, that after the concert, she invited the young singer to her bedroom.

When the young woman discovered herself pregnant, her young lover was on a concert tour, and though she wrote him several letters, her letters got lost among the fan mail. Because pregnancy was not something the young woman expected, and because she came from a strict Catholic family, she sold the new born infant to a family of gypsies, who were raising children for the purposes of human sacrifice practiced by another religion in a far away kingdom on the other side of a mountain ridge known as Cithaeron Mountains.

All would have gone well, except the young woman gave her young son a name, Mark. She never forgot the name.

There is a strange word about; it is little known; and it is also not wholly understood. The word is known among linguists and artists as ‘pareidolia’. Pareidolic associations are associations most commonly found in words and images http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia . What is not so well known is that pareidolia may also happen as an event or a series of events.

It happened that the young woman was forced by circumstances to earn her living as a prostitute. This is how she met Charles. Charles happened to be the king of France. Charles fell in love with Joan and wished to marry her. Because he was also a Catholic, Charles had to ask the priests of his court what they thought about the idea. When the priests asked Charles why he had to marry this particular young woman, one with a reputation for being a sinner besides, Charles could not think of a good answer.

What King Charles eventually said was: “Because her name is Joan.”

“So, what in the hell makes Joan so different from other such?” the Council of priests wanted to know.

“You see,” answered King Charles, “Joan comes from Arc. It is said that all Frenchmen are descended from the Johns of Arc. Joan says that she knows we are in a civil war with the Burgundian English, who say that their Johns are better than our French Johns. She claims that when the French Johns hear that the Queen of France is called Joan, they all will get a rise, and I, King Charles, will win the war as a result.”

The Catholic priests had a long discussion among themselves. It was not so long ago that they had suppressed the French Johns and driven them from the wood where most of them had resided. The French priests needed to cut down the wood to fire the bricks they needed to build their cathedrals. On the other hand, it was true that the Burgundies (and English) were getting the upper hand in the civil war, and the French would soon have to ask the Germans to come help. The Germans were known to be materialists and would agree to help. But this would cost the French king many of France’s eastern provinces, and the French would be squeezed between the Germans and the English more than ever. In the end, the Catholic priests agreed that king Charles and Joan of Arc could marry.

After she was married to King Charles, Queen Joan found in the royal mail a letter from the kingdom of Cithaeron, which kingdom was on the other side of the Cithaeron Mountains. The letter offered to sell to King Charles a dozen gypsy children for the sacrificial needs of the court. Joan noticed that one of the children had a name. It was—Mark.

Queen Joan of Arc immediately suspected that Mark was her son by John Lennon, who besides being an entertainer, had invested in the lucrative business of selling children for sacrificial purposes. John was an excellent salesman, because most of his songs were not only entertaining (re: “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqXmBy1_qOQ ), but proselytized for peace. Everyone knew there could not be peace without sacrifice of life.

It is a long story of how it all worked out. There remains the story of how Queen Joan persuaded Mark to leave his home at Cithaeron Beach by telling him he was destined to marry his mother and kill his father. A rewritten version of the antique version is at http://oedipusrexrewritten.blogspot.com . However, if we want to learn about the adventures of Mark, we must—without further ado—explain that just as Tiresias was offered a wagonload of smutty children (all of who had been promised a trip to see ‘a sky filled with diamonds’), one of them shouted: “My name is Mark, and I don’t want to die. There are no diamonds in the sky! Those are only stars!”

At that instant, Mark realized that (for some pareidolic reason) he himself could be that boy. Mark instantly went into an attack mode. He managed to shoot Lennon dead in no time. As for Tiresias, Mark tied him up, and ordered him to order the temple staff to find all the children who were wandering lost in the wood. After the children were on the road and marching to Thebes, Mark took a large branch out of the bonfire and stuck and ground the burning end of the branch into both of Tiresias’ eyes.

The story would have ended there and then (as it would have if Joan had not given her son a name), except that Mark did not understand that even though he became a hero to the Thebans for putting an end to child sacrifices, he could stay a hero only if he replaced the sacrifices of children with the sacrifice of himself.