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.