Get your own Free Homepage
Sliding in slime, oozed along by muscles, massaged along through the dark, Mosca abruptly found hirself in a large, empty chamber, dimly lit by emanations fluorescing from dripping fleshly walls.
Flight by commercial airline, Mosca observed, is even more ignoble than she had previously believed.
Where are the instructions for emergencies? How can one find the toilets? Who would serve as flight attendant? At least, she thought, me, Mosca, I won't miss the salted peanuts.
From somewhere in the walls the crow's voice announced: "We'll cruise at two-thousand feet until we reach the Sierras."
"Are you from the CIA?" "No, I'm agent for a much stronger power."
"Who?"
"Santa Sebastiana."
"Who the fuck is that?"
"You may find out, you may not,"
"Where we going?"
"You'll know when we get there."
'When will that be?"
"Our ETA is the morning of Maundy Thursday, four days hence."
"Wake me when we arrive." Our favorite borl found a comfortable, dry spot, and closed hir eyes, all of them. Time to think things over. This airplane steeps me in the fragrance of burp and belch and this cabin should be air conditioned to prevent breath cancer. I'll need all the help I can get in fulfilling my mission. If I have but a measure of success, that could make things worse than ever. Mankind might escalate his war against Nature. Mankind urged on by his fierce, paranoiac male war-God---- tyrannizer of Jew, Christian, and Moslem alike, God of submission and sin, salvation and damnation, good and evil, jealous and cruel, helped these days by p.r. flacks, Bilderburgers and Trilats---- Mankind, the portion of Humanity He favors, might well by my attempts be goaded into intensifying His efforts to correct and pacify Nature, or even into destroying Her utterly, this mother, our mother whom He, Mankind, had raped s0 long ago, and whose guilt ever mixes with the milk He still sucks from Her tortured tit. He, whose guilty dependence demands Her utter eradication, yearns for the end of the world, for the prelude to Judgment Day, that dream day at the end of history when all matter vanishes and all humans but no animals rapture up into the Kingdom of Heaven to be reunited with their ghostly bodies and judged by the record of their lives on earth as fit for the eternal euphoria of Paradise, or deserving of endless torment in the sulphuria of Hell.
"Precisely stated," said the crow voice. "S0mething must indeed be done."
And s0, because a failed revolt of the lesser forms of life against Man-kind could produce such drastic catastrophic results, first, perhaps, to begin with, we should try to slaughter that vicious Skygod, as he manifests both without and within, and return the conduct of cosmic affairs to Her and Her-kind.
"We crows will help!"
"We could get all the winged creatures of the air, and the birds and bugs and animals of the trees and of the ground to join together, and, acting as one, bring about the Restoration, the return of our Mother to Her ancient powers."
Her, the source of all of us but me, Mosca.
The CIA is my mother and father.
Oh, yes yes cried the crow, who soon proved to be both prolix and garrulous, a big-beaked bore, a bird-brained enthusiast on the wing. This altruistic idealistic dream can only come true if life stops feeding on life and begins taking its energy directly from the sun. Thus thought Mosca whilst riding high in that wing-borne womb. Thus felt Mosca, invaded now by gloom, dense and intense. But yes, why not? Let Mankind murder himself! I'll cause CIA to develop a virus to invade His immune system, one consecrated to certain death, a virus addicted not to the liquidation of undesirable elements as CIA intends, but to the extirpation of those in whom the Skygod is incarnate. "Oh, how brilliant you are! How perspicacious of Santa Sebastiana to send for you!"
I shall conduct my own MJSIMSOR program.
I shall control the mind of my motherfather.
"You have been summoned for Maundy Thursday, Holy Thursday, because that's the day of the Penitente Picnic."
"The what?"
This simple question inspired Crow to babble along for the rest of the night. As Mosca remembers it, the substance of what Crow said, elaborated somewhat by further study, goes like this:
Once upon a time, long long ago, when Christians were devout and their religion personal, as atonement for their sins, or as fulfillment
of their vows, they often shared in the final suffering of Jesus. They wore crowns of thorns, they dragged heavy crosses, and, as the central act of penitential self-torture, they whipped themselves bloody. These acts of contrition were common in old Spain where penitential brotherhoods flourished, where sharing Christ's agony became the premier act of devotion, one rising to crescendo during Holy Week. On Holy Thursday of 1598, upon finding a river flowing through the parched wilderness, Juan de Oñate, chief of the first party of colonists to enter New Mexico, ordered the erection of a chapel. Of this, in a report to the king, prepared by Gaspar Perez de Villagrá, one reads that in the center of the chapel "we placed a representation of the Holy Sepulcher. A special guard of honor stood watch the entire day and night. Here in the evening the priests and all the officers and men came and devoutly, on their knees, with tears in their eyes, begged forgiveness for their sins. They prayed to our blessed Lord that He, who walked with safety upon the waters, He who led the children of Israel through the trackless deserts, would have mercy and compassion on them and lead them safely across the arid plains through which they wandered. They asked Him to guard over them and aid them to carry His holy faith to the remote regions of New Mexico.
"That night was one of prayer and penance for all. The women and children came barefoot to pray at the holy shrine. Each soldier, with cruel scourge, beat his back unmercifully until the camp ran crimson with blood. The humble Franciscan friars, barefoot and clothed in the pain of thorny girdles, devoutly chanted doleful laments, praying forgiveness for their sins.
"Don Juan, unknown to anyone except me, went to a secluded spot where he cruelly scourged himself, mingling bitter tears with the blood which flowed from his many wounds. This continued throughout the camp till early morn.
"It might be stated here that in enterprises such as this, wisdom and learning are not always the most important virtues. When faith is to be taught to distant and barbarous tribes, it is more important to entrust such matters to good and God-fearing men."
When Crow finished his allocution, he settled in a tree near Porterville to get some sleep. Mosca told him this tale of self-torture-for-Christ had fortified hopes of inducing Mankind to kill Himself. One need only maximize an existing tendency. The next three days of their flight toward the rising sun carried them across Death Valley, Las Vegas, Lake Meade, and the Painted Desert. Crow spent most of his time complaining about the cold and the headwinds and of how, quite against his nature, he'd been ordered to take this long trip. Passing over Los Alamos, the atom bomb city, which Crow described in detail, Mosca concluded the nations of the world have all become Penitential Brotherhoods, and, s0, it's almost inevitable Mankind will destroy Himself and take Woe-man kind along with Him. But, if instead of germs, or guns, He opts for atoms, He'll take the rest of life along with him too. Progress! Civilization! What is a Penitente procession of flagellants compared to Verdun or Hiroshima or Stalingrad or Dresden or Desert Storm?
"What, indeed?" replied Crow. "In my considered opinion, you'll have your answer soon enough, or, in all truth, it's not improbable such added insight will not manifest with sufficient dispatch. You will, I daresay, find it interesting to note that the general synthesis of the comparisons and contrasts of the penitential folkways and mores, customs and traits, habits and conventions, to which s0 many take exception, and which it will soon be your privilege to observe and interpret and, perhaps, experience may, indeed, be striking. In other w0rds, to form an almost pure dichotomy, the opposite central locus, the other pole---- there are but two---- is to be found in the Philippines, while similar, more spontaneous ceremonies may be observed from time to time in Mexico, or, at least, s0 it is said, for I only have that on hearsay. I, myself, have never been to either place. It's my propensity
to stay close to home. We crows have a saying: As well-traveled as a Mallard duck. Flight to foreign climes in which they indulge to escape themselves is a gross folly we crows eschew."
Excitement swelled through Mosca. Yes! Manipulate the CIA's war germ experiments a bit, touch them here and there, a subtle twist or two, and create a plague to carry off all of Skygod's children. Loose his fourth equestrian on the human race. He's mounted on a pale green horse, and his name is Pestilence, and he cries out to Mankind, "Come." And I saw and beheld all the devils of Hell following behind, and his visage was that of Death himself.
Fucking A!
And call out the others, too!
I invoke the first, and here he comes, astride a white horse, and his name is Nations, and he holds a rocket, and I send him out to burn and blast, poison and plunder, torture and murder, destroy and kill. "Come!" cry I, and I manifest Strife, and out of the archetype canters forth another horse, lacerated and bleeding red, and on his back I see and behold his rider brandishing an Uzi, bursting rounds into the air, and his name is Fear, and he trots into the world to serve multinationals and dictators and thereby create insurrection and civil war.
Once more I beckon. Famine rises from the mist. And I see and behold a bony black horse, and posting on his back a man in a silk suit whose name is Money, and from whose hand, held aloft, streams ticker tape from stock exchanges and boards of trade.
And with my fifth summons I draw forth from the ancient lore a golden horse aglitter with jewels and upon its back it bears a robed figure, a living creature crying "Come," and this creature is called Church, and in the name of tribal righteousness, of purity and the salvation of the heathen, He gallops to the fore to lead the other apparitions, those whom He created, in a perpetual onslaught against all life. And, lo! I see and behold following behind a multitude of those who have been slain for the Word of the Skygod, and for the witness that they bore. And they cry out in loud voice, saying, "How long, O Lord, most holy and true, dost thou refrain from judging and avenging our blood on those who dwell on earth?" And the Skygod commands them tarry until the number of their fellow servants and their brethren who are to be slain, even as they have been, is complete.
You and I, dear reader, we shall pause and relish what manifests here. But no! We cannot linger. No. We must press on with this chronicle of small beginnings and tremendous ends.
"We have arrived at our destination," said Crow. "The weather is clear and sunny and the temperature is fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit, thirteen degrees Celsius."
"How do I deplane?"
"I'll regurgitate you. Then follow me."
Our favorite borl plunged into the entry tube, and felt hirself being propelled upward. And then, even as old Mother Zeppelin once launched her brood of airplanes, Flight Captain Crow blew his passenger out into the sunshine.
Get your own Free Homepage