Belknap, WRITE CLUB - Sacred

This was a rightfully defeated (by the killacious Jill Summers) piece in need of three more drafts. But as it was not presented with the benefit of three more drafts - I present it here for you to ignore.

The search for the sacred.

Was it not the Buddha that said:

[SNAP FINGERS INSISTENTLY]

HEY! Dickface! Focus up!

Could have been Ghandi. And I might be paraphrasing.

Anyway. Point is – the sacred is elusive.

Like most of us, whenever I close my eyes to reflect on the sacred, I see Oprah’s face. Oprah’s giant, disembodied face. For me, it’s always red carpet Oprah. I never get velour tracksuit Oprah who’s talking about her va-jay-jay. I get the Oprah with the weirdly appealing coppery lipstick.

The hovering, gigantic face of an overfed baby that’s also like your mom who you kind of want to sleep with a little bit. It’s really complicated.

But Oprah’s giant face is only a BOOKMARK for the sacred. It is a MNEMONIC for your soul – like if your inner life had Outlook on it and you get that little alert – BING – that it’s time to reflect. That’s Oprah’s face.

The sacred is at the bottom of a well within you. Oprah’s shiny disembodied head is the boulder you have to roll off to get to it.

After you muscle aside the towering spectral head of Oprah, though, you still gotta break through your religious training – the more you got, the tougher it is. This phase is comparatively easy for me, since I was a practicing Catholic until I was like nine. Then my Dad took off and we quit going to Mass immediately. And I remain un-priest-raped to this day.

So for me, there’s this line of scrimmage with like Jesus and the Pope and a bunch of Cardinals and Bishops. And you juke left around Jesus, whose footwork sucks, and you stiff-arm the Pope, who can’t take a fucking hit, and you got a wide open lane because the Catholic backfield CANNOT READ THE PLAY.

Where was I? Ah. Yes. The sacred.

Seeing as I am secular, I had to really dig for a notion of the sacred I could get behind. Leave it to your old pal the Oxford English Dictionary to do just that:

Blahblahblah “Eucharistic”, blahblahblah “deity”, blahblahblah “laws and teachings of religion”, blahblahblah “venerable” – AH! HERE! Meaning FOUR, Subsection C:

“4.) Regarded with or entitled to respect or reverence similar to that which attaches to holy things. C.) in sarcastic use.”

Listen: nothing is sacred. Nothing. Not your texts. Not your knowledge. Not your amulet. Not your heart. Not your ibis. Not your scrolls. Not your journey. Not your cow. Nothing.

All of it. As far the eye can see. You know what it is? Fair game.

I regard as sacred my right to make fun of anything. ANYTHING.

A lot of you probably hear me say that and go:

REALLY? Anything? Really? Well so, OK, Smarty Pants: what about your OWN stuff? What about your OWN life? Is THAT fair game? Hm? Because I mean that’s where the rubber meets the road, isn’t it?

Two things:

Look: ridicule has value. Scorn has an evolutionary basis – if we are in the same band of hunter-gatherers, and you are a do-nothing shit heel, you will arouse our scorn and we will banish or kill you. Our tribe is made stronger.

Here’s why making fun is sacred to me:

Ridicule – I’m not talking abuse, here, for I am no frat boy – I’m talking about thoughtful, well-intended ridicule. Ridicule – good ridicule, ridicule that is well crafted and is fueled by purpose, matters a great deal and aids human advancement.

And you’re like:

What?

Shut your face and quit interrupting.

Ridicule aids human advancement. Ridicule dismantles assumption. Ridicule chips away at orthodoxy.

Ridicule stands in the forest of ignorance and habit and BURNS THAT FUCKER DOWN. And ridicule torches the woodland creatures of The Popular, for while they may be cute, they are dumb as a bag of socks and destructive. And ridicule sets dynamite in all the cabins of complacency and custom, which may be cozy but are filled with rot. And ridicule bulldozes the ashes of this forest – and here is the value of ridicule. HERE is why ridicule matters and how ridicule aids human advancement.

The entire POINT of ridicule – the thing that renders it sacred – is this:

When you have burned down the forest of convention and have killed the livestock of precedent; once you have detonated the cabins of the zeitgeist, then you must keep going.

You must turn your ridicule inward. You must become your target. You must be merciless. You must root out in yourself all that which you despise in others. You must castigate yourself for your hypocrisy. You must find and eliminate your blind spots and habits of mind. You must level your structures of vanity and appetite. You must jettison the dumb and corrupt. You must crush the stupid and repetitive. 

For it is only by laying waste to the self that any of us can hope to make any kind of progress. And is not the sacrament of ridicule the surest way to lay waste to the self?