Unholy Matricide

I was struck by the headline Boy guilty of shooting his mother. There are few things shocking in this world anymore, but matricide is one of them. It still retains the metaphysical shudder that regicide once did. Albert Camus discusses this in the context of the execution of King Louis XVI in L'Homme révolté. Camus remarks how for Saint-Just and his revolutionary coterie, monarchy was "not a crime, but crime itself . . . in other words, absolute profanation. . . . a sin against the ultimate nature of things." The absolute heresy of this notion can be properly situated if we consider kings as once equivalent to how we still see mothers: the necessity of their role was an unspoken assumption. Their legitimacy was beyond the bounds of questioning; the divine right of kings meant that kingship was sacred, even if individual kings were of greater or lesser worth. Although many of us now claim to be beyond sacred and profane, to paraphrase Nietzsche, most of us still have fealty to what we could call the divine right of mothers.

It may seem more natural to draw a parallel between patricide and regicide rather than matricide and regicide, due to a shared paternal role and the tradition of "a man's house is his castle." Yet I would argue sacrality matters more than gender in ultimate significance. The murder of a father by a son is of course an abomination in the eyes of most, but it can more easily be mitigated than murder of a mother. If the father is abusive and incestuous, we can understand if not openly applaud his murder; who would not have some sympathy for the murder by his daughter of that horrible rapist in Austria? Yet even though mothers may be equally abusive and even incestuous, there is still a greater distance that prevents us from accepting the murder of what is quite literally one's point of origin. If we can kill the person who bore us in her womb for nine months, to whom we owe our existence, what are we not capable of doing? Who are we not capable of killing?

After murdering Duncan, Macbeth states: "From this instant there's nothing serious in mortality. All is but toys; renown and grace is dead, The wine of life is drawn." It is part of the unspoken compact of society that we take some essential things seriously, that we hold some essential matters of renown and grace sacred. To kill one's mother is not to just to kill a physical being, a "mere woman": it is to demonstrate one's lack of fealty to the katechon of civilization that holds back the destruction of every value. If one is not bound by loyalty to one's mother, at least bound enough not to kill her, what sort of loyalty is possible? The French revolutionaries established the general will of the people as sacred arbiter in place of the king. Yet the act of matricide seems to suggest an end to all sacred arbiters, as it is the most universal of taboos and shocking even to the most irony-infested and jaded. It is not just a blow against something inviolable; it is a blow against inviolability.

Even criminals in jail discriminate between lesser and greater degrees of criminality. Self-respecting murderers will treat child-rapists as abominable, because they still hold to some standard even if they violate others. Similarly, I would challenge all those who claim to be beyond morality to justify matricide. If this is not a crime, there can be no crime; and if there can be no crime, there can be no law and thus life becomes war of all against all. Come all ye anarchists, relativists, idol-smashers: gaze into the void! Can you be as strong as Louis XVI was on the scaffold and declare, "I shall drink the cup to the last dregs"? If you find something wrong with killing your mother, you are still on the side of society; and if you find something wrong with killing your mother, what of killing other mothers, and fathers and children? The question is no longer one of applying a standard, but the degree to which the standard is applied. And for those who still deny it? The guillotine.

Reducto Ad Absurdism: Truths Of The Punchline

The foolishness of God is wiser than men . . .
- 1 Corinthians 1:25

Certain essential aspects of the world are accessible only to laughter.
- Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World‎

There are things so serious that you can only joke about them.
- Niels Bohr

There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.
- Napoleon Bonaparte

You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it.
- Art Buchwald

In order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd.
- Miguel de Cervantes

Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man.
- G.K. Chesteron, All Things Considered

In a world where everything is ridiculous, nothing can be ridiculed. You cannot unmask a mask.
- G. K. Chesterton, "On the Comic Spirit"

When one has emerged from the circle of errors and illusions within which actions are performed, taking a position is virtually an impossibility. A minimum of silliness is essential for everything, for affirming and even for denying.
- E.M. Cioran

We smile, because no answer is conceivable, because the answer would be even more meaningless than the question.
- E.M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born

Given the choice between folly and sacrament one should always choose folly. Sacrament will not bring you closer to god, but folly just might.
- Erasmus

Being confirmed by others frees me from being responsible for the absurdity of my belief.
- Theodor Geiger

We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning - in other words, of absurdity - the more energetically meaning is sought.
- Václav Havel, Disturbing the Peace

Modern man must descend the spiral of his own absurdity to the lowest point; only then can he look beyond it. It is obviously impossible to get around it, jump over it, or simply avoid it.
- Václav Havel, Disturbing the Peace

The privilege of absurdity; to which no living creature is subject but man only.
- Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

Jurists say that a capital crime submerges all lesser crimes; and so it is with faith. Its absurdity makes all petty difficulties vanish.
- Søren Kierkegaard, The Philosophical Fragments or A Fragment of Philosophy

Reason is a supple nymph, and slippery as a fish by nature. She had as leave give her kiss to an absurdity any day, as to syllogistic truth. The absurdity may turn out truer.
- D.H. Lawrence

It seems absurd, yet is precisely true, that since all reality is nought, illusions are, in this world, the only true and substantial things.
- Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone

It is not in the world of ideas that life is lived. Life is lived for better or worse in life, and to a man in life, his life can be no more absurd than it can be the opposite of absurd, whatever that opposite may be.
- Archibald MacLeish, Riders on the Earth

Man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.
- H.L. Mencken

Bad humor is an evasion of reality; good humor is an acceptance of it.
- Malcolm Muggeridge

In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence . . . and loathing seizes him.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

The irrationality of a thing is no argument against its existence, rather a condition of it.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us.
- Ernest Renan

Why shouldn't things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and they and we go very well together.
- George Santayana

The more absurd life is, the more unsupportable death is.
- Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words

To the fool-king belongs the world.
- Friedrich Schiller, The Maid of Orleans‎

Mankind cannot get on without a certain amount of absurdity.
- Arthur Schopenhauer, Religion: A Dialogue and Other Essays

The life of every individual, viewed as a whole and in general and when only its most significant features are emphasized, is really a tragedy; but gone through in detail, it has the characteristics of a comedy.
- Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation

Suppose the world was only one of God's jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke, instead of a bad one?
- George Bernard Shaw

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
- Mark Twain

And killing time is perhaps the essence of comedy, just as the essence of tragedy is killing eternity.
- Miguel de Unamuno, "Saint Manuel the Good, Martyr"

I always find it necessary to burlesque the mystery of feeling at its source; I must laugh at myself, and if the laugh is 'bitter,' I must laugh at the laugh. The ritual of feeling demands burlesque and, whether the burlesque is successful or not, a laugh. . . .
- Nathanael West, The Dream Life of Balso Snell

Happy Day Of Wrath!

Although I do not celebrate Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthdays or New Year's Eve, today I've finally found a holiday I can get behind. Hamas has declared a 'Day of Wrath' in celebration of the death of one of its leaders. I will mark the occasion by setting off fireworks at my neighbours, dressing up and acting the part of Saruman from Lord of the Rings, speedily ejaculating to Suicide Girls, spilling the liquor (into my mouth), declaring war on Denmark, stretching the neck-hole on my shirts, picking fights with people twice my size and demanding a cease-fire when they hit back, using freedom to protest freedom, rocking the Casbah, dancing in the street and screaming "KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!" until my head explodes.

Shanking "The Shack"

As a standout moment of my high school career, I present a recently uncovered piece of literary criticism for which I received an unprecedented -16% in English class. Its subject is "The Shack" by Canadian author Margaret Laurence, or rather my unbridled contempt for it. Enjoy!

Aporia Of The Extremities

Live like a clenched fist, and your nails will dig into your skin. Live like an extended hand, and they'll stab you in the palm.

Radio Friendly Seasonal Carol Of The Day

"These trees here will survive a long time, and the day will come when this episode will be forgotten, and since mankind seeks an explanation for everything, whether it be true or false, tales and legends will be invented, containing facts to begin with, then moving gradually away from the facts, until they become pure fantasy. Then eventually the trees will die of old age or be cut down to make way for a road, a school, a house, a shopping center, or a military base, the excavators will unearth the skeletons buried for two thousand years, and the anthropologists will appear on the scene, and an expert in anatomy will examine the remains and announce to a shocked world that there is conclusive evidence that men were crucified in those days with their legs bent at the knees."
- José Saramago, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ

*

"There are much worse things to believe in."
- Stephen Colbert and Elvis Costello, "There Are Much Worse Things to Believe in"


Simon Finn - Jerusalem

The smell of newly-cut corn
Came sifting through the palm trees
My eyes they were blinded
By the sun reflecting on the seas
One hundred dozen mermaids smiled
As I passed through the haze
The sound of familiar voices of yonder days

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Jerusalem oh no

Jerusalem was made by a guy
Oh I forget his name*
And Jesus was a drop-out
A king who bore no crown
Only his long hair flowing
And blowing in the wind

And Jesus was a fisherman
That's all he had to say
Oh yeah, said "Now follow me disciples.
Lead your lives a different way."

And he rode into Jerusalem
On a donkey both bedraggled and lame
And his Pharisees cursed his every word
But did not laugh, that made a change

And Jesus was a good guy
Who lived on figs and wine
A political revolutionary
Out to let you have a good time

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Jerusalem oh no

The sun it was rising
Just to christen his cross of fame
Did he imagine at that moment
Two hundred million hypocrites
Would praise his name?

And were he now to come down
Those hypocrites would crucify him again
And through the sweating crowds
Tears streaming down my face
Till I'm going insane
I'm crying

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Jerusalem oh no

The smell of newly-cut corn
Came sifting through the palm trees
My eyes they were blinded
By the sun reflecting on the seas
Well that same sun was rising
Just to christen his cross of fame
Did he imagine at that moment
Two hundred million hypocrites
Would praise his name?

And were he now to come down
Those hypocrites would crucify him again
And through the sweating crowds
Tears streaming down my face
Till I'm going insane
I'm crying

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Jerusalem oh no

They're gonna put him inside
And I'm yelling all I can
Can't you see he's the Christ? oh no no
And they don't understand
A single word I say
But I'm crying just the same

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Jerusalem oh no

Gonna put him inside
I'm yelling all I can
Can't you see he's the Christ

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Jerusalem oh no

* According to Jewish tradition Jerusalem was founded by Shem and Eber, ancestors of Abraham.