I went down to the shops for a loo roll and came back with half a sack of coal and a mandolin.
Life is random.
And barring emergencies, loo rolls can wait.
Too much order gets oppressive.
I know this because I’ve done Oppression to the max..
and carried a big gun…
and drove around in armoured trucks…
with big wheels..
and 4mm bullet proof glass over tiny little teensy weensy windows with a metal flap on a hinge you could lower over it for your additional comfort and security.
Martial law prevails. You are the law. You are the Warrior king.
And all you have to do to have all that power, is to oppress the creative spirit inside you that might come home with a mandolin.
You will be well compensated.
There will be no horror or regret…
afterwards..
and you know that sharing badges is greater than music and dancing…
but you will need a population of the not-so-special…
upon which to vent your hard on.
and shoulder any feelings of inferiority, of not being wanted…
any… niggles you might have…
We’re shown how to do this in a quaint rail spike of a story from the Old Testament, the story of Sodom and Gomorah. Its not just the prurient morality involved or the titillated fantasy more interested in what those people were up to exactly.
Nor is it the problem that Lot and his missus were allowed to escape simply on the basis of being family to Abraham who was negotiating the whole thing with God. Even though they were as guilty as those left behind to horribly die.
Nor even the dubious justice rendered on Lot’s wife who was killed as dead for an innocent glance as the rest for their supposed orgies of anal delight.
No, what gets me is Abraham’s lack of creative solutions. He doesn’t opt to be the one good man. Man and God are both just going through the motions of trying to be fair, sending Abraham off on tours of fiendish scum he’s already decided to deal with in a very particular way once the PR visit is over and the cameramen gone home.
It’s a done deal..
just enough time for his sinful nephew and family to escape justice.
In order for Abraham to participate in the dark numen of the Warrior King he has to give up his mandolin, the creative inspiration that might save the day…
truth is, he prefers burning places down.
or, perhaps just watching.
And if he’d been some obscure, inconsequential chieftan in Outer Patagonia or some remote Pacific Island rather than the father of both Israel and Palestine I might not feel compelled to place some much needed context on a war that has been raging one way or another since that ancient time.
because his sons Isaac and Ishmael hated each other.
And it was his fault.
Over a hundred generations and their grandsons’ grandsons are ready for fresh bouts of fraternal vengeance.
Three thousand years on…
Which makes Abraham’s lack of creative solutions a big deal.
The truth is he has a vested interest in Isaac and Ishmael being at each other’s throats.
His possession by the archetype of the Warrior King is inflating. He’s all the more prone to it because his ego has been weakened by the opportunity to regress by Yahweh. He has to undermine any alliance or friendship between the boys because he hasn’t sufficient faith in his own natural authority or belief that his sons would be loyal till death.
Abraham’s willingness to slit Isaac’s throat at Yahweh’s say so sends both boys a message about where they stand..
you can be slaughtered without notice at any time.
An’ Yahweh knows all about how Abraham is using his sons and fuelling their enmity for one another. How he keeps alive feelings of unworthiness that even the passage of centuries fail to heal so that his own unworthiness in amongst their effects can pass un-noticed.
An Yahweh say nuffin’.
And Yahweh sees Abraham put aside the spiritually motivated possibility of being ‘the one good man’ for Sodom and Gomorah, prefering instead unconsciousness and infant raging.
An Yahweh say nuffin’.
Because Abraham’s failings are in His Name.
A man who has not failed to notice that God can be manipulated..
and all it would cost him is his mandolin.
Everyone suffers.
Abe’s collusive relationship with God has a number of repercussions. He has to participate in the unconscious life of Yahweh who refuses to talk about his ex..
DON’T MENTION HER NAME..
… who was split into three and cast out. So it comes to him as fate instead in the shape of three wives who are divided by rank, age and cast.
destroying the containment of the women’s tent, of childhood and the rules of succession..
so that doubt and envy might pre-occupy the boys rather than their father’s crown.
Each believing that the other has their father’s love, that there must be some failing in themselves, somehow, yet still run through with hateful jealousy of that which has to exist…
and therefor must be in the other’s filthy possession.
And what Isaac and Ishmael don’t realise is that they have both been manipulated and short changed.
Because anyone who can burn down a town rather than go live in it and bring out its best doesn’t have much time for kids.
When Agammenon sacrifices his daughter, Iphigenia, to Artemis for favourable winds to Troy, History gasps in horror at the loss of soul a man must suffer to be so possessed by the archetype of the Warrior King, to kill his own child for plunder.
And yet we’re quite happy to have as the prototypical king of our own marvellous civilisation someone who likes to watch towns burn and would slit his child’s throat…
for the plunder of God’s favour.
Today he would be incarcerated in deep lock up before you could say ‘satanic abuse…’
and yet he is our great prophet..
and theirs..
We faithful children of the Warrior King.
