So. First things first; apologies for not posting in a while. I’ve been contemplating a number of things while in absentia, and I haven’t felt a compulsion to force out a post.
That kind of grind is creatively and intellectually corrosive; you don’t reflect on life according to schedule. But still, I could have kept touch.
What have I been up to?
Recently I went back and had another watching of/listening to Xasthur’s Walker of Dissonant Worlds. There’s a placard in the film clip that’s held by a homeless man in a wheelchair that reads “Christ’s Wounds are NOTHING compared to MINE!!!” It got me thinking.
Comparatively speaking, the alleged son of God didn’t really go through the worst of horrors. Anyone who’s worked with refugees at length, or had to prosecute war crimes, is going to be able to conjure up images of far worse. Hell, Steven King can and has; on a logarithmic scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is hangnail, 5 is the experience of Paul Sheldon in Misery, and 10 is unspeakable, Jay-Cee’s time at Calvary earns maybe a 4.
Not a great holiday experience, but quite incapable of encapsulating the full breadth of human suffering. Sexed-up as it has been, it’s a bit of an insult to anyone who’s been through worse and survived.
And of course, Jay-Cee did survive. After a long-weekend cooldown, he just auto-self-resurrected and went on his merry.
Another song comes to mind. Pulp’s Common People.
If he called his Dad, He could stop it all. And eventually He did, although not before the younger divinity had a bit of a moan.
I don’t expect the story of Jesus to be some kind of lurid, sadistic tale of pain and ultimate humiliation. It is a story after all, and if it were told that way it’d be a bad one. But if Jesus’s experience is going to fall short of what can and has been experienced by too many humans, what was needed was for the story to not mock human misery. Sadly, that it did. All it had to do was not caterwaul or pretend the maximal of human suffering, nor the apex of sacrifice, but alas.
What we got was Jesus the Cosmic Class Tourist.
It doesn’t really say much to me about Jesus though, this story. It reads more like a tale of how ordinary people should frame their drudgery and pain as written by people somewhat fortuitous enough to be insulated from much of that experience – it says more about the authors. If Jesus was a man, I don’t think think he was divine, and I don’t trust scripture to describe him.
Maybe he was a class act. His biographers haven’t painted him that way is all.
Some immortal dude in the sky with power and privilege beyond anything we lowly humans could imagine, deigns to transubstantiate as one of us, then tell us how it is as if we hadn’t the experience? It couldn’t have been worse if he’d transubstantiated to the hood to use karate lessons to reach troubled youth.
And yet some will complain that they don’t understand why others don’t find this appealing.
~ Bruce
Circling The Abyss 