once upon a day
two women lay on the grass growing from a land which was used as a burial ground for 1085 men taken under by the black death in 1710, rolling rolling papers. two romanians, a father and a son, drive by slowly on the grass with their bicycles, searching for empty cans and bottles. at the sight of the two on the ground, they stop to plea for a cigarette for the son of twelve or fourteen. the women collaborate to roll him a ciggie without a proper filter as the kid with his few word vocabulary of finnish and english gets to know that one of them shares a name with sara-la-kali. baffled by the moment, he lays his bike clumsily on the ground and lights the ciggie he is given.
after summoning just a hint of courage from the smoke he leans to whisper into the ear of the one sharing the name of a saint three peculiar words of gratitude,
“I love you.”
a memory of a sentence read some time ago reaches the mind of the other woman as they walk away from the park, a sentence bearing words from a fictional character called gail wynand. as always, anything tangible in her immediate reality takes hold of greater ideas, and the memory speaks like this,
“do you know what you're actually in love with? integrity. the impossible. the clean, consistent, reasonable, self-faithful, the all-of-one-style, like a work of art. that's the only field where it can be found - art. but you want it in the flesh. you're in love with it.”
in the corner of annankatu and iso-roobertinkatu the two see a bunch of young men with eyes shining emptily into the ten pm twilight. amused, they stop to receive free coffee and after a short chitchat about angels and whatnot two of the jesus boys feel the need to share their church squeezed between buildings bearing clubs and bars and kebab joints. that need might stem from a deep craving for acceptance from the eyes of the one who knows how to put life into words,
“what about saint peter's? it just happens to be the greatest building I have ever walked into. and I have walked into some of the most prestigious churches in europe - notre dame, sacré-coeur, saint vitus, saint isaac's. but saint peter's basilica. some time ago I lived close enough to reach it in just a half an hour walk in a park over the rooftops of rome. I have never entered anything so grand - and think. it is made by men who lived five hundred years ago.”
the church now entered into smells like fresh paint, having been recently renovated for the first time in decades. built in the early 1900s it served originally as a movie theater. for some of the past decades it has been owned by pentecostalists.
in the dim backroom of the church the four, two women and two men, go on speaking about god. the intense hidden irony in the air becomes condensed in between them in the form of deep, deep mindfucking.
“two thousand years ago we already had them men who did pretty much what we would today call documenting. they wrote about events and social movements taking place, also around the mediterranean sea. from the documents that have remained some historians of more resent times have been able to find around three hundred recorded cases of people who had a following, meaning that they've been considered messianic by their fellow men. among these three hundred, there is not a single such man who could be identified to be what we have been taught to know as the person of jesus of nazareth.
if you understand how literature and such functions, you'll understand that in order to record vast realities into writing one needs to do a lot of condensing. the best way to do this in respect to our cognitive capacities is to write stories. we have a natural understanding of stories that sometimes cuts even deeper than we consciously know.
think about the bible in this light. isn't it possible that it is a condensed work made to document a more or less underground social movement into words that would resonate far beyond time and space? the societies people lived in back then were hideous and oppressive enough to have possibly triggered a philosophy shared by many who wanted to possess the understanding of their inherent divinity and live by it.
the key sentence, and one of the only worth pulling out from the bibles that have been corrupted by the power machines of our western civilization is the one that speaks about god creating man in his image. what happened there? oh he created? and man can do what?
so anyway, how do you relate yourselves to god and jesus?”
“eh, we believe that god made a perfect being without sin who is jesus, and we are in such a relation to him that we as beings of eternal sin can be brought to light through his salvation.”
“you believe in a personal jesus?”
“yes we believe jesus existed as a person, a perfect person.”
“if I am correct and there was never any supernatural being, but many men who dropped out of the oppressive jewish and roman systems into hanging out mindlfully among cripples and hookers and such, then wouldn't the words I just quoted mean that every single man is capable of realizing the nature of something that possesses the capacity to create within him? and isn't that the greatest power any man has ever had? isn't that the very power that has led us to be able to build, to write, to speak? and isn't that power something that can be driven towards greater and greater perfection?”
