Tag: writing

At times the post-quake man must forcibly defend his life and property and is thus compelled to dictate the fate of others. For the principles we must follow we need not look any further than Aquinas. We live in a world where libraries have burned to the ground and many of the old texts are gone forever. Here I will spare the reader of this treatise that tragedy and sum up Aquinas’ principle of double effect. Aquinas wrote that in defense of one’s self and property, one is justified in the killing of one’s assailant if and only if the killing of the assailant is necessary to the survival of one’s self. The killing of the assailant can only occur if the intention is to save one’s own life (or the life of his or her immediate community or property), and the amount of violence used against the assailant was the necessary amount and nothing more.

Based upon Aquinas’ principle, killing another as a means of self-defense isn’t necessarily prohibited. But the killing of another for reasons other than stated above is unlawful and unethical. The health of the social apparatus depends on this. Certainly it is obvious that warfare contains its own rules and codes that fall outside of the principle of double effect, though the principle of double effect does still, and always must, apply.

And the child’s first year in its new home continued primarily in this regard, with celebration and solidarity among the people of the village and the child began to walk of its own power, its plump and shaky legs moving deftly from the rearing mother and her arms outstretched to other women in the candlelight of the hut, for the child hardly left its abode, it was brought to it all essentials including food and drinking water as well as gifts from the people in the village, gifts piled up in its hut as signs of respect and offerings not only to the child but whom the people of the village trusted as the child’s true father, the everlasting, and so the child hadn’t too much room to maneuver upon its quivering legs, but maneuver it did, smiling at the odd sensation of muscle and bone and other tissue at work in its small body. As was customary in the village the rearing mother would cradle the child in her arms and feed the child milk from her breast until the child’s constitution was mature enough to eat solid foods and the rearing mother did this well into the child’s second year, and also customary among these people was to settle the child during lamplight by softly rubbing the child’s genitals, a gentle massage that the rearing mother found arduous, for not only was their holy child dually equipped but as it continued to grow its genitalia grew and matured along with it, the penis in particular which seemed at times to the rearing mother to be obscenely large and dangerous, especially as it reacted to the mother’s soft stroking and stimulation of it, for the penis secretly frightened her in many ways, not only for its sheer size and virile nature, its unspeakable power, but also because she knew it would continue to grow as the child grew in years and it would doubtlessly become a product of gossip among the young women in the village and ultimately the focus of their licentious weakness, just as she was afraid the same might happen to herself, for she could not admit in all honesty that she massaged the child’s erection simply out of motherly love alone.

The living people of the Earth, they’re lost without their swords, their giant shears sticky with the dried blood of enemies and hunt, and how do they sharpen those swords if not on the bones of the next dead? How could they conceivably lose something so valuable to them, something that, though the nature of the tool appears to be destruction or protection, is more or less a chisel or paintbrush, for it helps them render their lives into the fashion they desire? The living people of the Earth, the truth is that they are nothing without their minds, for their swords and stones are tools and nothing more, while their minds are the true weapons continuously at their disposal… 

For the stone throwers and the sword wielders are as primitive as their ancestors and the ancestors of their ancestors, toiling in seas of blood and upon rolling hills of flesh to remain alive, to survive, which is their ultimate state-of-being, their highest conceivable honor, an achievement, but ultimately, their most enduring failure. Man is a mortal creature; this is one of the few things we can actually attest to knowing. So while the stone throwers and the sword wielders ache and kill and burn the people of the world as well as the world itself, the thinking men resurrect the spirits that came before and had also failed, the spirits with blood on their shadow-hands and in the ducts of their eyes, blood in the hair and caked upon their faces, blood forever adrift in their guts, for they as killers and hunters were largely unable to translate into language the narrative of those innumerable hunts and kills, their bloody and authentic histories, their failures, and so those spirits must now rely on posterity to conjure them back into the realm of the living so as to pass on their bequests to equally indifferent hunters and killers and the few enlightened souls who must transcribe for them. 

When we dance the sky opens up virginal to our mountain of climbing flames and we beat drum skins, we sing primordial chants, reckless, born again and finally alive beneath our celestial cypher. Our bodies painted up reverently with the blood of today’s hunt and the women gyrate hips and shoulders, backs twisted beautifully, arms and legs pierced, braceleted, serpentine, both their bodies and ours primed for bestial contact, the fragrant spell of carnal delight. I am an animal. Mother moon culled us from the Earth or the spirit of the very Earth upon which we dance and now here we are, immersed in her elegant mystery and decay. Can we not live forever, O mother, at least for this one night?

Nietzsche came to my door the other night. He approached it from the inside, all but drenched in darkness. I asked him, I said, Hey, man. From whence have you come?

He walked slowly to the kitchen and the dim light there. I could see he was wet with sweat and his eyes were mad. Why, the mountain, of course, he said.

I watched as he poured himself a glass of water from the tap and drank it.

Please, I said. Will you show me the way?

He placed the glass in the sink and turned to me, his eyes shining. He said, But you already know the way.

Then I laughed, and he laughed.

They roam this sogged landscape through heavy mist burdened with guns and swords and rods, many of them pushing or pulling carts laden with their lives or whatever remains. Some of them ride the backs of bloated horses, the eyes of both man and beast dulled by fatigue and sickness. You hear them before you see them rise up out of the fog like wraiths, clothes wasted and faces caked in mud. And maybe they are wraiths up from some unspeakable depth or maybe you’re the ghost they stare at walking slowly past, gun drawn. Women with long hair carrying alien babies hatched in some far off land and these people have seen hell, their eyes betray giant serpents and beheadings, rivers of blood. You feel guilty and damned just looking at them. A scream from far off and you can’t discern its direction nor its origin. The fog is a spider web on your skin, the ground warm vomit. Gray world without end.