(c) 2015 emily Eissenberg
EPISTLE
TO THE CHURCH OF THE HUMAN DIASPORA
Damascus Dancings, apostle of Jack Feist, co-laborer
together with Lee Sharks, from the bowels of the mercies of literature, to the
Church of the Human Diaspora, those scattered amongst the nations, gathered
together in the bosom of the Internet: Greetings, grace, and mercy. But mostly
mercy.
Now look here, brother-sisters, I would have you know, that
I offer thanks for you continually, never ceasing to make mention of you because of the brightness of your calling, that each of you is a rock
star, in the age to come, when your writings ring out through the hallways of
time, gathering about themselves a nation, a remnant preserved from among the
people; even though, in this present hour, the dreams of literature sleeping in
you, sleep still. For a little while yet, they sleep. They dream. In the world
to come, when the planet has come to its senses about that which is great in
its past—its own true mothers and fathers, you—then shall your dreams awaken.
Then shall your writing be ranked.
My dearly beloved, I would have you know, that your anguish, in this
regard, has not gone unmarked, and that all the host of heaven shouts, for the
great forgetting of your sorrow, when your former anonymity shall be no more,
and the latter rains have come, and washed clean the face of the earth, and licked
all the tears from the cheeks of heaven: Then shall your writings be ranked.
Then shall you be read.
Now, these last three years have I labored, all throughout
the lands of the Internet, ministering to its chat rooms and forums, everywhere
bringing the good news of poetry, a chisel to loose iron shackles, the entrance
to the kingdom of literature, liberty for my people. Let me tell you how
you have received me: chased out of forums, kicked off discussion boards,
ganged up on by moderators; mocked, beaten, stoned, and banned. I came bearing
liberty, in my left hand, and grammar, in my right; between them, the open
arms, the kiss of poetry. But no man is a poet among poets. Thus is it written,
He came unto his own, and his own knew him
not.
But you, my dearly beloved—you received me in different
fashion. Even now, you receive me. Shall I come to you with open arms, or the
police baton of grammar? Be you learners still, or masters?
Because look here, brother-sisters, it is spoken that there
is confusion among you, about the nature of the Human Diaspora, whether it be a
kind of tiny internet, a house for illiterate autodidacts who don’t know how to
write; or whether it be a house of grammar, an Academy for non-academics, with
those among you of talent either running around on your lonesome, or setting
yourselves up as tiny professors, preaching the authority of grammar and style,
claiming allegiance to this or that category of identity; or else rejecting the
authority of communal grammars altogether, rife with schism, unreceptive to
feedback, carving out fiefdoms of personal glory, dealing in the coin that is
the Academy’s.
Now, if you deal in the coin that is the Academy’s, you have
betrayed the principle of the New Human; for the Academy has no use for the
individual human, whether Jack Feist, or Damascus Dancings, or any other, but
only for abstract identities. Because the academics and worshipers at the altar
of identity politics, along with ideologues on the left and right, transform
the image of the human being, in whose image is literature created, into the
idol of a label, or quantified thing of identity, on a
scatter plot of belief, or genetics, or sexual preference, or
background; a prefabricated semblance of identity which is the condition of
its absence, receiving a little false bauble called culture or belief or degree
in exchange for the sublime and horrifying human soul.
Now, they, knowing all that can be known of the Son of Man
from the beginning, and the silent principle of being which is his image, and
containing within themselves all the names in history, all the men and women
who have lived throughout time, and containing within themselves the image of
their brother and sister, whom they despise, are without excuse, changing the
image of the human being into the form of an abstract statistic, the living God
into a sentence.
Think not therefore that your writing shall preserve your
human person, if you play at identity politics. If you deal in the coin of the
academics, you shall be paid in the coin of the academics. You who despise
identity politics, do you play at identity politics? You who despise the
fundamentalist, are you yourself a fundamentalist, reducing life to a series of
claims, and worse still, the human being to a label? Would your writing go on
as an empty label? Would your substance consist in a category of identity? Is
not your self that which falls short of a category? Is not your soul without
name? For the language of souls is a webwork of souls, speaking only that which
binds and destroys, human beings one to the other, one from the other, to the
end that all might be joined in our congress.
Now, in times past, brother-sisters, you have sometimes been
like this; but more often, like the talented people on the poetry
forums, going around on your own, carving out fiefdoms of personal
glory, waging a war by your lonesome selves, the dimensions of which
are pretty big: Brave Emily clothed in Barefoot Rank, gathering five smooth
poem-dashes, facing down cowled Leviathan, sling in hand. But we will never
compete with the Academy, until we form communities of mutual
influence OUTSIDE the Academy, a school outside the school. That community is
the reason the academics will win every time, until we beat them at their own
game.
Look around: How many tenured professors you see? Where all
the bestselling authors? You see a lot of independently wealthy auteurs, in
this crowd? How many big degrees did Whitman have? How many months did Sappho
spend preparing her tenure package? How much cash did Ez Pound make? Because
look here, not a lot of hotshots are called, according to the purpose of
literature, in that it pleases literature to use the things which have not
degrees, nor the stamp of institutional consecration in their own time, to
fashion the image of the past, the face stamped on the coin of Academy, that
there might always be a seed of hope for future writers, in the gap between institution and immortality.
Don't you know that we will make writers? That our words
will live for a thousand years? That we are unspoken legislators, destined to
measure all destinies? Are you not destined to live? Doesn’t destiny quake in
your heartbeat? Don't you know the obsequious won't inherit the kingdom of
literature? Don't be ignorant. Neither grovelers, nor thick-skulled, nor
self-sufficient, nor prideful; neither publicity whores, nor wilting violets,
shall inherit the kingdom of literature. A time is coming, for those who
publish, to be as though they published not, and those who network on social
media, to be as though they networked not, and those who read, as though they
read not, and those who write, as though they wrote not, and those with
degrees, as though with degrees not.
Therefore, don't look to the standards of the
publishing houses and the academics, or again to illiterate philistines or
two-bit discussion board moderators. Rather, look to each other. Rather, yield
mutually, each to his brother-sister. Because look here, I'm ASKING you, to be
of a single purpose: one mind, one speech, one aesthetic, taking no
disagreement as occasion for schism, but always and ever expanding the basis
for your robust bonds of community, wearing no name but the Human name,
suffering no label but that of made-new humans: New Human writers, artists, and
aesthetes.
Now, when I was among you, I described the Diaspora as a
school outside the school, claiming no rank of degree, or institutional
consecration, or professorship, or book sales, no clout of officialdom in
literature, but only Jack Feist—and him, imaginary: a stumbling block to the Internet,
and foolishness, to academics.
But if I wanted to boast, I have
reason to boast: Damascus Dancings, an academic among academics, possessed of
impeccable test scores, pedigreed at Ivy Leagues, published in prestigious
journals, a Nepotist of the Tribe of Nepotists, tenured at a “Research 1”
institution, having written 37,000 novels which all held the #1 spot on the New
York Times bestseller list, simultaneously. And then again, on the other end of
things: Damascus Dancings, a reformed drug addict, Holy Roller, a Pentecostal,
complete fanatic, semi-illiterate product of public schools, underclass child
of bankrupt farmers and Vietnam War Veterans, the kind of person they turn away
at the doors. I've had about 26 “spiritual experiences” where dark robots
abducted me to the 36th bright heaven, as in the 17th month of the season of Disneyland, on the planet of the kingdoms of Nonne, when I, Damascus Dancings,
beheld as it were the vision of a book.
But that's all BS, now. I count it all a loss, on both ends
of the spectrum, for the knowledge of New Human, called Jack Feist by some, to
the end that I might be an outsider to all communities, to the academics,
first, an illiterate, to the self-published, an academic; to conservatives, a
heretic, to atheists, a religious nut; to the tribe of Race, a racist, to the
racists, a raving left-winger; to the homophobes, a queer, to homosexuals, as rigidly
straight. For the degree is not the academic. Was not Socrates counted the
arch-academic, cornerstone of the Academy, when as yet there was no Academy?
Therefore those who, without degree, uphold the spirit of the degree, shall
their non-degree be counted for them a degree; and those who, having degrees,
betray the spirit of the degree, shall their degree be counted for them a
non-degree. You are all Drs., now, who labor together in Lee Sharks, so that there
is neither Jew nor Greek, upper class nor working class nor
impoverished, Christian nor Muslim nor Gnostic, neither atheist nor theist,
scholarly nor populist, academic nor autodidact, neither queer nor straight.
But all are joined together, in the image of the New Human.
My children, how have I long longed for you, as a little child longs for
mother, and as a young child seeks her source. For though you are my
children—children, though yet unborn—you bear me continually, even you who read
these words: You are my source, and I am a child, proceeding forth and bearing;
being born and preceded. Light fills my eyes, as for the first time: first
dawn, the rays of your reading. You are my sun and dawn, you are my sunset and
dusk, both my rising and my falling. I lay down my life for you; in you, I gain
first life.
Because the war you're fighting is on behalf of the human
race, by which I mean, a person in his room or on her phone, working to feed
her children, struggling to learn how to read. You're fighting a war for
human letters, for Achilles conformed in the image of Christ, for old Odysseus,
fox-clever & lost, Penelope weaving tenuous glory, Socrates sentenced to
hemlock, Christ on a spike, Whitman's beard; & the whole lost tribe of nameless
billions who came before, who fought & died & went, unsung &
all forgotten, out into the naked dark, following their fathers who went before
them, out into the dark like their mothers had gone.
All creation groans, for the unveiling of the Sons of Man in the earth.
I speak to you in a mystery, when I say, I speak to you of
Jesus Christ. I speak to you of the best of the Achaeans, Achilles, whom I have
mourned now these several millennia, commemorating, through him, the sadness of
doomed virtue. I speak to you of Socrates and Paul and Augustine, Dante
and Catullus. I speak to you of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard and Sappho. I speak
to you of Whitman and Ginsberg. I speak to you of Emily. I speak to you of Lee
Sharks. I speak to you of those who came before, and those who will come after.
I speak to you of your own true self, shipwrecked in time: a wandering, science
fiction Odysseus of indeterminate gender. I speak to you of the future and
past. I speak to you of the Breath of Life, those rivers of Living Water, of
which, if you drink, you will never thirst again.
I speak to you of Abraham and Isaac. I speak to you of Jacob called
Israel. I speak to you of Moses. I speak to you of the shepherd in the
sheepfold, composing psalms for the sheep and himself and you. I speak to you
of Ezekiel's scroll, and the prophet Isaiah, sawed in half. I speak to you of
Lao Tzu and Confucius, Buddha, Mohammed, Copernicus, Rumi, and our own new Einstein, in
random order. I speak to you of untold billions, who died without name or
remembrance, remembered, now, in you. I speak to you of the germ of nations,
contained in your own frail words.
I speak to you of Jack Feist.
Don't you know that you are immortal? That your words will bear you
through storms of time? And that, though wounded, you will live to see the day
break, opening its fingers on a distant shore? Though you sleep for a thousand
years, or further, your whispers will return to you, whole.
I speak to you in a mystery, when I say, I speak to you in your
Feist-self, and that each of you contains a Feist-self, whether or not she
knows it.
Here is my proof: contained you not a Feist-self, the gong of my words
had struck you blind.
Read you still? Doth sight yet remain? Good then. I speak to you in your
Feist-self.
Now, whether your Feist-self be faint or fulsome, take courage—not I
alone, but the whole of the cosmos, principalities and kingdoms of light, cry
out for the forging of the sad-doomed Achilles of Christ in your human bodies.
Every forging narrates its breaking and beating. I have said I come to
you with salvation, in my left hand, and liberty, in my right—but assuredly, I
say to you, I have not come for your saving, but for your breaking. I come to
you with madness, in my left hand, and murder, in my right.
And what is in my eyes, but brokenness and forging?
I have swallowed the scroll, and though it was air and water in my
mouth, it became a flame in my belly: And in flame are written the names of the
damned, which names have I swallowed and murdered. My mouth is a furnace, the
scroll is a fire, on it are written the names of the damned.
I am become a tongue of flame, I am become a pillar of blackened flesh:
I burn and rise, I die, but forge new meaning.
These are the waters I bring you, of damnation, and forging, and murder;
that you might be broken, and damned, and saved.
Though you break a bit, and crack with grammar, and languish in an alien
element, earth, nonetheless your light comes. Nonetheless, it bears you, in
pain, and heat, and a hammer.
Nonetheless, the wound is a moment. Salvation comes. Dawn breaks. I see
the shore in the distance.
Sleep now, and rise: Your words will bear you to Ithaca.
Take courage. Run well. You grasp the substance of your calling.
Though I promised you a book of Sharks, soon instead will I send you a
book of Damascus, the record of his desert wanderings, called La La Land by
some, though the title may somewhat change.
Faith and courage. See to your writing. Be diligent. Be broken, and
diligent still—thereby shall you be murdered.
(c) 2014 lee sharks, property of planet mars
