Of course the battle between the materialist rationalists and the anti-materialist irrationalists is long over, and the anti-materialist irrationalists lost, and we await our UFOs and our flying balconies to come and bear us away.
The chorus in Seneca’s Thyestes asks: “Will the last days come in our time?” And I would say, Yes, absolutely. I mean, the last days might very well come during this reading tonight. I think my mom mentioned before that the floodwaters are rising, right? And assassins, onryōs (vengeful spirits), first-person shooters…mall shooters, whatever you want to call them…are all wandering around, floating around. And I don’t think any of this should especially disturb anyone. I don’t think it’s anything to get all bummed out about. I think it should actually make everyone feel really good. Oprah said to Lindsay Lohan: “Vultures are waiting to pick your bones…that should liberate you.” Someone in the video game Total War: Shogun 2 says something to the effect of: “a samurai should not scandalize his name by holding his one and only life too dear.” In other words, the true samurai enters the battle with no thought of return. And I really think that’s how you have to look at it when you do a nonfiction reading, when you really commit to only presenting empirically verifiable material, when you’re really deadly serious about that. And I bring up the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima now, not because he was a sickly, pale, pampered introvert of a child who grew up to become obsessed with bodybuilding and who, as an adult, when his mother complained that “Mommy’s foot hurts,” proceeded to lick the sore area in front of friends and family, but because he gave, on November 25, 1970, one of the best nonfiction readings ever given when he stepped out onto a balcony (not the flying balcony of the Palazzo Venezia, but a balcony nonetheless) and declaimed a prepared manifesto to several hundred soldiers gathered below who mocked and jeered him (and who, by the way, weren’t officially “there for the reading” either), returned inside, disemboweled himself, and was then beheaded by a member of his private militia. I’m qualifying this by calling it one of the best nonfiction readings ever given. It could have been one of the great nonfiction readings ever given if Mishima’s mother, Shizue Hiraoka, had been there, but she wasn’t (although she did attend his funeral). I mean, you’d have to say — and I think this is so obvious given the fact that being mocked, jeered at, and martyred in the presence of one’s mom is the key, the key ingredient here — that Christ on the Cross (in the presence, of course, of his mother, the Virgin Mary) gave one of the greatest nonfiction readings ever given.
Now, I just want to fast-forward six hours or so in the Gospel narrative to make a small point. The Virgin Mary was not a Ferbering mother. And though the lifeless body of Christ did not literally cry out for her, the exigencies of Christian doctrine surely did. And unlike my mom on those unfortunate nights alluded to earlier, Mary did respond, and unlike my mom, Mary cradled her son in her arms…and hence the enormously popular, endlessly reproduced, and invariably eroticized image of the Pietà. Now, in all fairness, we can’t underestimate the influence on young mothers — and my mom was only, what, barely twenty at that time? — we can’t underestimate the…the enormous influence of pro-Ferbering authorities like Dr. Spock who, when it came to children’s sleep problems — and this may surprise you guys — was more draconian than even Ferber himself. (The PANDA EXPRESS WORKER and the SBARRO WORKER are paying absolutely no attention to anything MARK is saying.)
MARK
But the simple truth of it is that if you take a certain type of boy with an extremely delicate temperament and you turn his bedroom into a dark, terrifying sort of prison cell (even if it’s only for a couple of nights), a significant amount of self-radicalization is going to occur with that type of child in that type of environment. I still suffer, to this day, from an intractable compulsion to fold things into thirds instead of halves, which I believe is directly attributable to the Ferbering.
Okay, you guys might be thinking to yourselves, how does Christ on the Cross constitute a nonfiction reading? The Seven Statements from the Cross (“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do,” “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with Me in paradise,” “Woman, behold your son. Son, behold your mother,” etc.) were extemporaneous utterances, they were not recited from any kind of pre-prepared text, so how is that a reading? To which I would say, very simply, that for a divine being like Jesus Christ, all of history — from the beginning (“word one”) through eternity — has already been inscribed. All of it has already been written. To a divine being, it’s all already a book, or a script, whatever. So, anything a divinity says, any seemingly spontaneous utterance He or She might make, constitutes a reading.