5:55 pm — shadowmass
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“Why is it important that i get you up at 2:45 AM for Shadow-mass? “
“If The Lord Our God is Light, then we can see His outline by the shadows.”
<Jude is a heavy heavy sleeper sometimes, other times he is on constant vigil, refuses to sleep unless someone swears to wake him in time>
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Jude was actually quite annoying to have in your church, monestary, academy, or committee of action. For one thing, he constantly interrupted services, butted in on conversations, and read your most impius thoughts out loud if they reminded him of something he likes talking about, pausing only for long literal gaps of breath. he contradicted the scripture out loud, he judged anyone who performed ignorance or stupitidy in order to get out of having to understand something subtle or profound or important. “All of this is important.”
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“if i don’t do this <ritual>, the world will end.”
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<Jude is a heavy heavy sleeper sometimes, other times he is on constant vigil, refuses to sleep unless someone swears to wake him in time>
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[Ideas for Conversations Jude has with himself]
Jude is invisible. everyone around him is ignoring him because he is in oculation. he is talking out loud and only the wheelbarrow-bound child he’s pushing can hear him going up and down the hallways, pews, scratching up the wood, slurring mud across the carpet. he’s talking out loud about how he’s going to kill everyone and then raise them from the dead and judge them all and the good one’s he will tap on the head and they will fall down and be dead again, but the bad ones he will tap on the head and they will live their entire life in reverse order, back to their fetus stage, and then meets with their mom and convinces her to have an abortion. this is a tactic used to alter timelines, though science has yet to progress beyond statistically modeling vague and half-hearted hypostuloti
he does this. the kids line up on the chunky, irreal barkchips and close their eyes, bumping and frequently crying out in pain and indignation as they spin out a rough interpretation of his instructions, the toddlers congregating under the the supervision of the middle-aged kindergarteners and first grade girls and the bigger kids liting up the babies who can’t walk and spinning them around in circles until they fall over dramatically but gingerly onto the plastic and canvas trampoline, still under the disintegrating winter tarp. “Spin! Spin!”
they are acting out creation, the establishment of the Light and Spheres and Fields and Waves, the Word and the Silene, the sword/scourge and the blessings, the rod and the yoke and the staff and the breath and the fire and the throne and the Mother of God. the zeal of angels
He appoints some as his angels and avatars, prophets and devils and ghosts and sorcorers, all play-acted by children with exaggerated violence, an overabundance of justice and zeal.
he kills them off and raises them to new commissions, never one to waste material.
the zeal of angels
their favorite are His opponents, the mad pharros and evil princesses and dragons sick with greed, scornful angels and contemptous second sons. These are the ones he loves most, the ones he will plead with and coddle and beat and ignore, but always bring back over and over and over again.
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children at play are fascinating
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The first thing Jude does as soon as he can manage it is blind himself. It’s a political statement of both practice and principle. But mostly he does it at the time because light is unfamiliar to him and over-sensative. he keeps his eyes shut tight and sometimes this is accepted and people get used to him. families where they try to keep his eyes pried open he tries to run away from, and when that fails he will resort to guerilla tactics.
Once he had a parent who blindfolded him as a punishment, a trick of simple reverse psychology, though for the lives of Him He Can’t remember whose psychology was reversed.
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when does jude hate his coincarnates? when? why? for who?
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childhood is endless, patchy, pockety, of different valences and contradictory modes.
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there is a division between the “childlike”=~~~goood~~~~ and the behavior of anyone who has actually been classified as a child, a political category that cancels all independent action and overlooks subjectivity to the point of objectification.
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i’m trying to learn spanish by listening to recognizable hymns. The scrawl of the smoke looks like a graceful kitten
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the parallels between a nerdy street preacher evangelist and a candidate-member of a cadre party sounding out members/newspaper subscriptions, a look at MLM MLMs. Twin brothers?
The cadre member talking about his anarchist phase, disappointment with demonstrations ending in defeat, blames it on adventurism and lack of millitancy, is told to read theory when he expresses his frustrations, doesn’t really fix the problem, moves back to his hometown, gets sober, listens to a RevLeft radio (podcast), reads Rosa Luxembourg on the inadequacy of reform.
a multi-marxist lenin level maoist marketing scheme, multiplying marxists to Lenin-Level Maoist Markets…
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Religions reproduce themselves through a process of socializing children and converts into the belief-practice-sense, a process made up in large part of repetitive use of ritual, virtue plays, modeling habits, singing, dancing, eating together, fasting together, raising children together. If you want to construct a political movement with some of the characteristics of a religion, God-building for example, we should consider as a source of material such practices.
I would like to integrate something representing or connected to the spectre of communism in my home-altar. maybe keep a statue in my box of gods, or do a painting.
I would like to find a community of people i can share my nightmares with. We could form a committee of prophets and forecast the apocalypse.
How do you decide where to build a temple?
A soviet temple. That’s what I want to build.
An altar to Revolution, an anarchist meditation hall, statues representing our gods and saints and angels and martyred ghosts. We float lanterns over our labyrinths to light the way for our ghosts, we leave milk and honey for the gods who live in the hives of cats and the colonies of bees.
“No Saints, No Masters.”
I liked the world building of the religions of ………… City of Saints and Madmen, VanderMeer. Living saints and dead martyrs, feast of the freshwater squid, a socially inherited trauma, mass Rumspringa, a fet de folie
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I was born with my eyes shut tight. The grandmother of the woman who raised me said that until i opened my eyes i had the most serene expression that she has ever seen on any creature, human or animal, icon or idol, living or dead, much less a newborn infant, as if in that moment my spirit still dwelt in part in the serene and austere retreats of paradise, until this transcendent peace was expelled forever under the the stub-fingered prodding of the doctor, for my grandfather insisted that any child born under his roof would come into the world under the educated hands of a doctor, though after the black mare almost died while birthing he humbled himself and allowed the midwife who rescued that animal whom he loved most out of all Gods’ creation from the very pale of death to move her entire family, her children and grandchildren and her children’s nephews and nieces and the baby who arrived by basket from the city in the mail with a handwritten note made out not to her, but to her youngest sister, who was the third child she raised to adolescence and the first to run away, she did not know if the baby was her kin, but this was hardly a critical matter—she fell in love with the baby when she held its ugly little purple faced pursed mouth to her (the infant could not have been more than 24 hours old, and had been nursed by the wife of the mail-carrier for a commission that came with the collect-fee that she repaid with the alms she had set aside on the altar and blessed by the bishop, bearing the certificate of the remote rite hand-delivered by his Left Hand secretary’s first-assistant, hand delivered by angel, and so she had nothing to give for an offering the next morning, for that was Saturday Night. of much more concern to the midwife was whether i had been baptized, for if i hadn’t then my soul risked the fires of Hell, while if I had then she would not know under what name the angels had recorded my salvation in the Hall of the Eternal Throne, so if she had me baptized again then i might be recorded twice under two different names, which if it wasn’t a sin could at least be safely assumed to spell serious paperwork trouble in the Life of The Cosmos to Come.
As it happened, I was baptized 12 times, under 12 different names, and on that we must place no small fraction of the blame for the events that we now know would come to transpire.