Saturday, November 25, 2006

“ATANDO CABLES TÍO....SWEEP THE MEAT....ATANDO CABLES........."



Mr John Doe casts no shadow, is just not there and Pete knows it.

He was not on the bus sat next to The Born Again Priest, nor was he lurking at the bus station, contrary to what some might have you believe, or do you believe everything you are told?

“Atando cables tío, atando cables.”

He lives not in the church or outside the church hall, neither lives he in the next street nor behind those grey clouds or just out of vision keeping his beady eyes on you from round the next corner. Or in another universe, or another dimension come to that.

No, he lives not in any of these places. Mr John Doe lives solely in fear and guilt. The hoards of Priests and self-appointed representatives have done their jobs to perfection.

“Atando cables tío, atando cables, cables............Sweep the meat from the street............”

THE STORY OF BUG EYED PETER JOHNSON, THE SUNDAY SCHOOL OUTCAST.

"Bug Eyed Peter", his Sunday School classmates called him, because he stared, not a blink to be registered. His eyes insisted on following everything and everyone everywhere, but he didn’t say much of anything, which meant he listened a lot and understood a lot more. But they weren’t to know that, were they?

The wooden folding chairs were painful and made dry cracking sounds if you fidgeted.

You could march to the hymns. Onwards! Oh christian soldiers.

The teachers, stiffly smiling and acting all friendly, had whitish, recently shaved and scrubbed, parchment skin and exuded a dry heavy smell of age and the burning wisdom of submission, ashes and dust, ritual and rules.

You could see deep blue veins in their cheeks. They sometimes pulsed ever so slightly in their ivory temples.

The Bibles had felt weighty, fine yellowing paper fingered by previous pious innocents and they exuded a dry heavy smell of age and the burning wisdom of submission, ashes and dust, ritual and rules to be obeyed without hesitation.

Oh, but the girls, the girls............

Bug Eyed Peter the Sunday School kid never got over it, but he knew just what was going down, and didn’t believe a word of it. But they weren’t to know that, were they?

But from those days on, every now and again, Bug Eyed Peter, the ex-Sunday School Outcast, has suffered and suffers butterflies in his belly for what had been sown inside of him so early on. The teachers had carried out their mission and cold shivers of Sunday School guilt and fear for the thoughts in his head bring on hot minutes of sticky sour scented sweat.

Oh, but the girls were cute, so very very cute.


“Atando cables tío, atando cables, atando cables, cables, atando............Sweep the meat from the street, sweep the meat..........”(1) were the murmured nasal sounding words of the litany of The Born Again Priest as he scuttled off grubby black and beetle ugly on another crusade not to leave the Johnsons of this world in peace.

How to speak something into existence? Look for the Priest, The Born Again Priest. How to talk something into truth? Look for the Priest, The Born Again Priest.











(1)"If you take uncovered meat and place it outside on the street and the cats come and eat it, whose fault is it? The cats' or the uncovered meat? The uncovered meat is the problem."

"If she was in her room, in her home, in her higab, no problem would have occurred."

A quote from Australia's most seniour muslim cleric, Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali, another brother of The Born Again Priest I guess, reflecting on the problems faced by a group of muslim men jailed for gang rapes. Just another representative of Mr John Doe I suppose.

Quote taken from the article, "Setting Themselves Apart" by Hirsi Ali. Newsweek, November 27, 2006.

Sunday, November 05, 2006

THE BORN AGAIN PRIEST

It was a grey day, grey like old black and white photographs, grey like the lives of the majority of humans, and I was running towards the bus through the cutting cold grey rain. There it was in front of me, nineteen fifties design, small windows and, to my surprise, a clean cream colour cut in half down the side by a sharp curved maroon slash, rather like that old Coke slash, from the headlight to the rear wheel arch. Some living colour at last I thought as I pushed through the small knot of people saying their goodbyes and thereby obstructing the door, stepped up the three metal rungs, swung right down the aisle to my seat and settled in for the trip, bag under the seat, raincoat on the shelf above my head and newspaper on my lap.

What I imagine to have been quite a while later, the bus pulled up with a screech of tired brakes and I stood up and stretched my legs and walked down to the door and stepped into a ramp similar to those used in the unloading of passengers from aeroplanes, though I didn’t think it at all strange. I noticed that I had cut my finger on a burr of metal on the handrail as I stepped off the bus onto the ramp and I winced a little at the pain as I felt the cut with my thumb and rubbed it dry. Nothing serious. A red spot. Red bleached into white. Naturally, the ramp seemed to fall into the distance and I felt the distinct sensation of the white scenery penetrating my flesh, everything was such a harsh fluorescent white. I kind of felt like a lot of people were bustling, hurrying, pushing around me, but I couldn’t see them because, I reasoned, I was too centred on myself and the thoughts inside my head. Red was on my mind.

Some sounds did intrude on me though. I was aware of the distant sound of a wooden mallet on a wooden chisel handle, or, at least, that’s the association I made, a dry silenced kind of blow, and what sounded like shouts, or screams of hysterical laughter coming from somewhere vaguely over on my right, that hollowly echoed in the distance as I moved on forward down the ramp. Everything surgical white and cold and my fellow passengers had become just ghosts around me, so self absorbed had I turned.

Eventually the ramp carried me down into an enormous, cavernous, cathedral sized hall, walls, up to the height of about four metres, and floors all white tiled, the rest glossy white paint and enough fluorescent tubes to make you blind if you stared too much. In front of us were three white tiled counters, three metres long each one, ninety centimetres wide with a frieze of tiles illustrating the butcher’s craft in royal blue around the top edge just under the pale creamy marble stone tops. These were the colours of the day, cream, maroon, red and royal blue. About five metres behind each counter was a huge wooden door, rounded at the top, of black stained wood and I thought I could vaguely make out figures in some kind of relief but couldn’t be sure. The idea of church or monastery flickered in my mind , faded away and died.

On the counter to my left I could just make out a piece of meat on its white polystyrene tray bound judiciously in its transparent plastic film. Actually, stuck to the packaging, I could see quite clearly a barcode underlined with its set of numbers, though I couldn’t quite make them out. I looked up a little and thought I saw a figure disappear behind the door and, as this swung closed, I caught the dry silenced sound I’d heard in the distance, but, this time, far more clearly. A muffled bang, a rattling as of metal gates opening and the sound of something softer hitting something a lot harder. A smell of disinfectant, something else slightly sweet.

I looked to my front and on the counter was slapped a hunk of meat that was so obviously fresh because it was so bright. I looked up and just caught a sight of the door as it began to swing shut and I think I just caught a glimpse of a fast retreating butcher’s apron, but I couldn’t be sure, I wasn’t fast enough, but what I did catch was that the screams were not of hysterical laughter, unless the hysterical laughter was an automatic reaction to the proximity of extreme pain. A smell of something sickly sweet too. I sensed it in the back of my throat.

I moved my head slightly to my right and found myself looking straight into the eyes of an ugly, shortish, round faced man with a smile on his face that said he knew exactly what he was doing and he was doing exactly as he was told. His blue and white striped butcher’s apron was pretty much the same colour, at the level of his stomach, and where his hands might hang, as the large cut of meat that he casually dropped, or tossed really, onto the cream marble. As he passed back through the door the high pitched pleading and the shrieks of pain couldn’t distract me from the beauty of the red, cream and blue as a lonely dribble of red ran slowly down one of the scenes of butchery in royal blue. A smell of something sickly sweet in decay, from childhood, stuck in the back of my throat, a sticky taste of a smell and, just as the door closed, I thought I heard the sound of buzzing insects from somewhere. Black flies, white tiles. I looked about me but there were none to be seen. Black flies, black doors.



Obviously, my next thought was that we were being offered something to purchase, to take with us on our onward journey, but I was beginning to feel strange because the ghosts were all slowly coming into focus and another, more perversely exciting idea was beginning to take shape in my head, and it was that we were all being shown what we are and what we were shortly going to be turned into. And my fellow passengers were no longer my fellows.

The ghosts were all in focus and everyone was naked and everyone was beautiful, gorgeous in fact, and I saw myself and I was ugly and the more beauty I saw the more grotesque I saw myself and the more I loathed beauty. So I stared at the animal pens we had been herded into and three more ramps I hadn’t been aware of before that led down behind the doors somewhere, and the horror hit me square in the stomach and I couldn’t for the life of me catch a breath. It was not the horror of the slaughter that had hit me but the horror of the realisation that I was destined to take my part in it, destroy beauty in the cruellest of ways, and not only that, but that I was destined to enjoy the task.

If anybody had been looking they would have seen a smile on my face that said I knew exactly what I was doing and I was doing exactly as I was told as I pushed the beautiful, the gorgeous into the ramps that fed down behind the two doors from where the best pleadings, screams and whimpers escaped to delight me. I was born again.

The horn of the coach sounded. I looked up from my seat in the waiting room. It was a grey day, grey like old black and white photographs, grey like the lives of the majority of humans, and I was running towards the bus through the cutting cold grey rain. There it was in front of me, nineteen fifties design, small windows and, to my surprise, a clean cream colour cut in half down the side by a sharp curved maroon slash, rather like that old Coke slash, from the headlight to the rear wheel arch. Some living colour at last I thought as I pushed through the small knot of people saying their goodbyes, thus obstructing the door, and stepped up the three metal rungs, swung right down the aisle to my seat and settled in for the trip, bag under the seat, rain splattered coat on the shelf above my head and the newspaper on my lap. Sore finger. The driver sounded the horn again, got up from his seat and went to the door where he stared into the rain, perhaps checking for late travellers, more likely thinking that it was just his luck to have to drive in this sick weather.

The horn of the coach sounded. I looked up from my newspaper and my eyes met the same grey day as before. I knew it couldn’t have been a dream because I never remember dreams, perhaps a colour here or there, or an isolated incident like blue flamingos gliding sedately over a sapphire studded lake, but no more than that. Anyway, I looked down the column of the article I’d been reading a moment before and read,-


The draft document establishes that slaughterhouses will have to be designed “so as not to cause the animals unnecessary agitation, pain or suffering”, but it permits exceptions “when the sacrifice follows the specific rituals of churches or religions”.*


That’s alright then I thought, as I settled down for the journey.









* El PAÍS, A Spanish daily newspaper. Friday 3rd of November 2006. From an article about laws to be put in place for the protection and “dignity” of animals.