Encounter With the Fire Marshall
April 2, 1994
Again, Regina and I are seated at her breakfast nook table, when the ghost of Soren Kirkegaard flies in from Denmark to join us. He introduces himself as the Fire Marshall.
“If we would be spiritual explorers,” declares Soren, “we must acknowledge that the karmic road is paved with gravel. And if we accept that we are the adopted brothers and sisters of the God Who Died on the Cross, then we must also accept that we shall have our turns to scream and groan when the slaves get flogged. It’s only those who are too punch-drunk with pain to say no to God, who can win the good race, and gain admission to the House of Lords in Heaven.”
“You are the one who were the bandit,” Regina critiques. “You were the one who frightened the Church and the State by proclaiming that you had been led to establish, not a new theology, but a division of natural science which would examine social parasites!”
“I wished to lead the people of sincere devotion away from the decadent castles of Ludvig, so that they could build the kind of defenses which would be of some actual value in resisting the coming tide of bestiality,” the Fire-Marshal answers. “The masses of so-called Christians will not join me in this effort, because their leaders have too much regard for a fine purse. But when they recognize the nature of the plague which is encroaching, and which is carried by the amiable mediocrity of popular Christianity, the few who are healers shall appreciate my vision of the Vanishing Point. Quite simply, we must be able to look at everything from both unbelief and faith, so that we may develop a hyperbolic relationship to the True and Unattainable Ideal.
“Once we have developed that sort of quiet and inward relationship, we shall be able to appreciate the potential oil wells that lie beneath so many avocado ranches and other small and independent farms. We also shall appreciate that certain resources must remain potential, until the rapacity of certain economic systems have been chastised. You see it every day, but you refuse to look. You say that God takes care of his own, but what happens when the smallholders try to hold back the developers’ bulldozers? Of course, their petit-romanticism is too small for the world, and therefore doomed for failure – but is the more efficient System of the Beast that drives it out, any sort of real improvement?”
Encounter with the Real Peoples' Grandfather
Behold
another voice, whose visible image at the table appears as a scowling
tribal face, a mask carved rather crudely out of a log:
“Before
you go on and on in your discussion of what is or is not appropriate
for a Christian, I believe that I have a right to ask of you one
little question. By a Christian do you mean a Lutheran or a Methodist
– which is to say, one whose life is programmed by the ideological
structions of the mercantile idealism of Europe? Or does being a
“Believer” imply a relationship with the sense of Prophesy which
you recognize in Jesus the Christ, but which so-called primitive
peoples also see in the teachings of Medicine People like Deganiwidah
or the White Buffalo Woman?”
“Ho there!” chuckles the Fire Marshall. “I now see what it is I
longed to seek through travel, but despaired of finding on account of
the thorn in my flesh. That is not a little thing you ask of me. I
know that our Western Civilization is going down, and that on this
account the man of discretion is likely to be the solitary.”
“But
love lurks in the woods,” insists Regina. “Your world is knocked
out of equilibrium, because the weight of large estates and big
crimelord houses puts everything out of balance. You can’t have
love while you are trying to shoot a gatling gun. It is only when you
can begin to appreciate the inspiration in the flowing water, that
love has a chance to survive.”
“In
order to become a people,” grins the crudely carved wooden mask,
“you’ve got to develop traditions of courtesy, which are founded
on the awareness of past inspirations. Or you can act like the Crude
Oil Brothers, who are always bringing in their mercenaries to take
all the valued resources away from the little brown men. It’s just
like your domestic violence problem. Whether it’s gas and oil
rights or the rights to favors in bed – your so-called Christians
have shown the world that they are not to be trusted. Or at least,
not until you have begun to let your women have a chance to civilize
you.”
Spider-Woman and the Smoking Chimney
“Look at the board on which the cruel game is played,” declares The Happy Hunting Ground’s attorney-general. “Look how the rules all have been re-written by the God of Jealousy. You turn everything in life into an all-out struggle, and then, to make sure no one else can win, you change the rules as you go. For this reason, we’re convicting Jealousy of High Treason. Has the Felon Angel anything to plead?”
“I don’t think he has any answer,” witnesses the Fire Marshall, “because Felon Apollyon knows that anything he declares may be used by the prosecution. And, as the Fire Marshal, I have got to take the Prosecutor’s side. I have seen too many instances of arson, and all of the evidence seems to indicate that the Indo-European Gods have not only managed a hostile takeover of Christianity, but that they are using the resulting consortium as a pretext for burning and imprisoning women.”
“Let us examine the scene of the crime from the perspective of the Back Door,” imparts the Crudely Notched Mask. “Then, I believe, you shall see how the Guardian of the Ice and the Oceans would look at what has been coming down ever since Europe’s so-called enlightenment. Ever since the end of the Dark Ages, we have noticed that more and more hot smoke has been rising up from Europe’s chimneys. At first, it was just blacksmiths building fires so they could manufacture swords and armor for the knights.
“The kings in those days thought they owned it all. What they did not understand, as they looked out on their Large Estates from the Manor Houses and Castles they farmed out to their vassals, was that their conquest of the common people was only the first stage in a process of avalanching entropy. The kings will try to develop enough prosperity to satisfy the people, and hope to settle down to a 500 year long Elizabethan Age, where gentlemen from varied nations shall duel upon the Spanish Main.
“The Spider-Woman who spun and wove this fine tapestry died, and was remembered for the next 500 years as a lady who got tired of torturing her boyfriends and became a little old maid. The next kings were to find that Elizabeth’s peace could not last 50 years, let alone 500. For one thing, there were now by far too many chimneys, through which more and more smoke was rising up to disfigure the ozone. Beyond that, the Royal Privateers were becoming Disloyal Rats, and financing their treasonous aims through the most dishonorable sorts of commerce. No Crusader at the walls of Jerusalem has ever smitten a Saracen with such venom, as the Masters of the European Chimneys now inflicted on Africa.
“You-all have studied the Great Bourgeois Rebellions in High School. What your instructors neglected to mention, was that these rebellions were simply the turbulence that was being generated by more and more smoke that was going up more and more chimneys. About the same time that Kings and their loyal retainers started getting their heads chopped off, the chimneys began reaching a critical mass, and chimneys started building chimneys. It wasn’t just the armory blacksmith anymore – now any little hamlet with a mill had to have a chimney too, so that a boiler could be stoked till it produced live steam.
“And now the boilers with their chimneys were starting to walk over the land and across the Great Waters. Wherever these walking chimneys would travel, stationary chimneys would rise up to service the traveling chimneys. We have arrived at the point at which the Chief Engineers will try to stop this proliferation of chimneys, and will find out that they cannot. They will try to spread the alarm that all of the chimneys built since 1980 are united in a Communist conspiracy, and that any new chimney must be licensed by an old chimney – but in the end they will fail. We, who are the Spirits on the Northern Mountains, could have informed them long ago, just what an avalanche is all about – but the Chief Engineers were always too proud to listen.”
