The Green Lady 🗽NYC
Twilight of the Idols
On the Evil of Statues
Curtus Rufius didn’t know what to make of the evil parodies that masqueraded as fact. He wished they would stop writing these things. The pen is for beauty and luxuriance, not for these crazy games.
The pen was mightier than the sword, but it must be used wisely, and under strict guidance. Pens were beautiful things, in the right hands. They were long, slender things, full of powerful liquid, ready to flow at a moment’s squeeze. But the hand must be sure, must have authority. Yet how can there be authority when there’s no clear author, or when the author’s saying one thing and meaning another? Or perhaps he’s only partly meaning another, or oscillating back and forth, making the reader decide what on earth he’s trying to say. In any case, the acolyte is left standing, with the pen dangling between his legs, not knowing what to do with himself. This is why Curtus hated literature.
Historians dealt with facts and clarified intents. These writers, on the other hand, openly confessed saying one thing and meaning another. This was the very definition of two-faced. This was the very image of Janus, the false idol!
Head of Janus, Vatican museum, Rome, by Loudon dodd, from Wikimedia Commons (cropped by RYC)
The worst of it was that Curtus couldn’t tell which direction the writer was really facing. Surely the writers of satire aren’t suggesting that we can face in two directions at once! Yet this was only the beginning of Curtus Rufius’ problems with his own statue metaphor. How he hated metaphor, and wished that people could write without them! The other day he even saw in Albertine Books an abomination that went by the title, Seven Types of Ambiguity. It gave him the shivers. He imagined some horrid Oriental god, facing in a dozen directions, like a blue weather-vane spinning the fiery seasons of Time.
Tibetan thangka of the Blue Tara, 19th century, Private collection, Anonymous (from Wikimedia Commons)
He suspected that all of this foreign artistry was some elaborate hoax designed to make people like him feel stupid. He yearned for the simplicity of sculpted rhyme, of neat columns like the stripes on the pants of his secretary Phyllis, and for the forbidden fruit that Eros plucked every time.
Curtus looked out into the streets and saw angry mobs of Africans and lesbians and other anarchists tearing down statues and burning police cars. Another day on Fifth Avenue, USA.
But it wasn’t just in New York. He read about angry antifascists and postcolonial thugs operating on every corner of the earth. They were intent on tearing down everything that reminded them of the things they didn't like. It reminded Curtus of the giant statues of Buddha in Bamyan, Afghanistan, toppled by the Taliban. It was a children's rhyme gone mad. Apparently, nothing was sacred anymore.
Just this morning he read a blog article that was titled, “Statues of Moses and Other Phallocrats Brought Down by Vatican.” It sounded like that awful piece by Jonathan Swift, where he argued that we should eat Irish children! And yet some maintained that Swift actually meant something else. Why couldn't these writers learn from the historians, their betters, and just say what they mean?
The article was written with what one commenter called "a saucy disregard for dates or locations." The commenter also said it was spiced with "a goulash of indeterminacy." Curtus had no idea what that meant. He feared that the commenter might have been right, however, for it all seemed to signal what he called "the end of meaning" and "the demise of the signified." Just as Curtus was starting to catch on to his meaning, the commenter threw at him a nihilistic maxim: words that signal meaning can't really signal anything at all, since there is no signified.
It was as if a sage came down from a holy mountain with empty tablets and told the waiting crowd, Meaning is dead, and then some sarcastic teenager said to the sage, Your words don't mean a thing.
Curtus suspected that the comments were more confusing than the piece itself, so he may as well just read the damn thing.
Statues of Moses and Other Phallocrats
Brought Down by Vatican
In a surge of #UsToo sentiment, Vatican officials joined the mobs in the streets and started toppling misogynist works of art.
The Swiss Guard used small sticks of dynamite to destroy icons of the now-disgraced male saints, repeating that they operated within a corrupt male phallocracy, rife with systemic violence toward women, gays, transexuals, and others whose genders were yet to be determined.
A team of Franciscan monks used tractors to topple the offensive statues of Moses, Abraham, Jacob, Jesus, Jupiter, Buddha, Ahura-Mazda, and God.
One friar, who refused to be identified by what he called the Others, said that only the Mother Church should be left standing. He then corrected himself when he realized that even She was complicit in the sinning patriarchy and must come down in rubble like the rest of them. The Franciscan also told the interviewer not to listen to him because he was a product of the Powers That Be and ought to be neutered. His model was Origen. Yet still, he believed in the greater #We’reGuiltyToo movement, and vowed to keep bringing down statues until Saint Peter’s looked like a Calvinist church.
The Franciscan’s eyes clouded over as he spoke about rejecting the things of this world — Possessions, Money, Power, Art — and returning the Church to its spiritual roots. He vowed that he wouldn’t stop burning and sledge-hammering until nuns were admitted as priests, a dyke became the Supreme Pontiff, and the Church itself resembled Augustine’s great City of God, floating in the sky, far above the violence of men.
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