�In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.�
The Apostle John, who – like Harry Heidelberg, Homer, Socrates, Shakespeare and Professor Bunyip today – could simply have been some clever chick with an elegant creative quill, for all anybody really knows.
***
One of the greatest gifts the internet might yet prove to bequeath Humanity is a realistic shot at fisking into permanent oblivion the sacrilegious trinity of Yahweh, Allah and God, an anti-Artistic Celebrity Triple Act which has stunk up the concrete human world for several Millennia now, proving along the way to be the most hateful, destructive, divisive and sub-human fictional triptych ever written by the hand of some genius guy (or, like I said, chick).
Bathsheba was the original trouble-making J-writer, the way Harold Bloom sees it. But then men tend to blame women for everything.
�The West�, which is where I learned to read and write, claims to base its �values� on the Judeo-Christian tradition (which sanctifies firing rockets from helicopter gunships into mosques nowadays – very scripturally helpful of Yahweh and God, I must say, although since Allah equally approves of killing Jews and Christians in their places of worship, I guess we can call Monotheism Thus Far a three-way tie in the satanic self-absolution stakes).
Since we Westerners are all about to head off for some Easter spiritual contemplation, and since Webdiary has been on a pretty wild old Robert Bosler-inspired head trip this week, I thought I�d have a tentative go at the Mother of All Meeja Watches: grappling with The Written Word itself, the human medium which begets all others, including this one here.
For those of you who delight in taking the piss out of twee elitist rhetoric and girly artistic conceit, I guess you�d better sharpen your keyboards now. (By the way, Helen Darville – see Latham tunes us into Iraq � is the hand that signed your anti-intellectual missive itself graced by good honest workers� dirt, these days? If not, don�t patronise Australia�s plumbers and garbos, dear, it�s most unbecoming in an artist. Transparent and tedious, too, cringe, cringe. Artists are special, because they produce art. Hamlet or a flushing dunny? If you need more than a second to choose, you�re a monkey at a typewriter, and I mean no cheap disrespect.)
Bet I�m in trouble with the Webdiary chicks, now.
Margo, hang me some slack here – Helen�s no wimp and with luck she�ll wind up and go me in response. Don�t know quite why, but I�ve been a bit perplexed by the gender stuff this week, as well as being dismayed by the cyber-wide savaging Robert Bosler received, so I�m throwing all caution to the wind myself, too, just to see what this website can do.
In fact as we�d discussed, Margo, I was planning to write a more mundane overview of the media �State of Play�, in particular with a view to predicting how the conservative, fervently pro-invasion press would deal with the worsening situation in Iraq. But as I started plucking all the naughty hidden agendas from the latest columns of writers like Miranda Devine and Chris Pearson and Andrew Bolt, I was overwhelmed by a sense of futility and self-disgust.
Is anyone else at Webdiary – or in the blogosphere for that matter – as bored as I am with constantly trying to have the �last word� in these endless tit-for-tat cyber-battles? Trying to �out-ironise� each new level of knowing irony? I suppose I�ll find out soon enough.
I think that most of us who�ve been writing in cyberspace for a few years now would probably recognise what you could call �Fisking Fatigue�. Since September 11, it�s fair to say that The Written Word has become more of a destructive weapon than a creative tool than ever before.
The betrayed, outraged, scarified post-WW2 impulse to pull words and sentences themselves to bits, in a desperate attempt to find out how the lying bastards duped us into the bloodiest disaster in human history, has now become shackled to this lightning-fast publishing technology, and also been thoroughly democratised, to the disastrous point where any literate person with a modem and a nice line in reactive bitchery can chuck their two bobs� worth into what�s now become the collective paralysation of the creative progress of woMankind.
If Shakespeare was writing now, she wouldn�t even be writing soap opera scripts; she�d be too busy churning out pre-emptive, defensive, ironic �self-reviews� to write actual meaty human drama, with stuff like fresh characters and majestic dreams writ large.
Art can�t be art without the audience�s willing suspension of disbelief on the medium�s intrinsic terms, so if your medium happens to be writing, the internet now makes art impossible, evidently. One single cyber-heckler can prick the bubble for every potential reader on the planet. One cynic can destroy a million idealists.
Or, to burrow back down to those J-Word first principles and return to the Godly theme of this Webdiary suicide run, as Helen Darville could no doubt confirm all it takes is for one determined writer to taint a fellow writer convincingly as anti-Semitic, and they can�t possibly write with quite the same open, creative heart again. What is The Written Word if not the greatest useful legacy of Monotheistic Certitude we humans have at our disposal?
God writes, therefore He is. Here I stand, with the emphasis on the masculine �I�, except that the true amplifying trick of �The Written Word� as a creative tool, rather than a destructive weapon, is to keep in mind that for all Harry Heidelberg knows, that priapic �I� I just wrote might well in fact have been tapped into my keyboard by the tender hands of a fourteen year school-girl.
Anyone can post a fake picture on his Webdiary column. Margo�s met me, of course, but then how do you know I haven�t been employing an actor all along, M?
Anyway, the original point that somehow got lost in there was that a WOMAN artist composed the original Word of God, guys. That�s right, a chick. Probably. Maybe. Or – who knows? But someone did � someone sat down and wrote out the sentence �God commanded: Thou Shalt Not Kill� for the first time in human history, and it wasn�t God, it was just some Jewish hack. Great message in itself, but think about the fact that � just like every word Shakespeare ever wrote � that writer took huge care to ensure that, hundreds of years down the track, there�d be no way for readers ever to know for sure who (s)he was.
There-in lies the true ironic power of the Written Word � and it�s creative, not destructive. �In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was God�. Well – no it wasn�t, that sentence was some writers� recorded sentient thought, and idea, a cunning, cunning plan. But the fact that (s)he kept themself deliberately anonymous is both an indication of a) why the Judaic �One God� riff took off (then spawned two competing franchises, bit like the way Dan Brown�s da Vinci Code has launched a thousand clones all deconstructing how religions work, including this one here), and also b) a fair hint that the J-writer who invented God probably was indeed a chick. (Men generally want to be SEEN to be changing world even if they�re not, while women prefer to stay off the Celebrity Radar, the better to Get Shit Done behind the scenes.)
One God as The Written Word � how brilliantly slick a marketing trick is that? And how fertile, how creative, how damned interesting it is, to think that 3, 000 odd years ago somebody took the trouble to set up that fictional lever as a new tool for the expression of our infinite capacity for Human grace and majesty and wit and sheer joi de vivre?
Conversely, what – over and above (yet fundamental to) the unprecedented industrial butchery of the passing epoch – was the Holocaust, if not the closest Humans have yet come to rendering that same grand Judaic legacy permanently sterile? The ironic sentence �Arbeicht Macht Frei� didn�t in the end destroy World Jewry, but if Third Millennium writers don�t get back their angry confidence in the power of expressed abstraction to provoke and inspire and determine our real world actions (just like written scripts tell actors what to do), and get it back soon – before Generation Y or Z forgets forever that destructive irony isn�t the only kind that words can carry – then it might as well have.
In the beginning was The Hand That Wrote The Words �The Hand That Signed The Paper�, and it was connected to an artistic sensibility that took the creative risk of trying to get inside the head of a real character in history who, if he�d had his way in that real world, might have destroyed forever the creative wellspring of precisely the curious human impulse that did, eventually, inspire Helen Demidenko to try to backtrack over time and fictionally humanise him.
It would have been just as artistically self-defeating for Helen Darville to contemplate embracing that fictional conceit as it would have been for the writer who wrote �This is the Word of God� to then sign it with her name. The difference is that Darville got sprung, and any hope of THTSTP remaining a live fiction was lost. The truth is � and it�s one we�ve lost sight of in this age of celebrity � that the more ambitious is the fictional theme you want to create believably, the more anonymous your own authorial presence must be.
I think it�s a great pity that Helen Darville was blown so ruthlessly out of the fictional game by her HTSTP experience, and only hope that she�s long since bodged up a new fictional shop front, and kept it off the public scope since. �J.K Rowling� is a very nice thought, and there�d be a lot of justice in that, too.
Then again, Helen could be Harry Heidelberg for all I know. And Robert Bosler, too.
***
I think it�s time the Written Word overcame the profound artistic caution that is the still-lingering legacy of the Destruction of the European Jews.
The long-term impact of the tenaciously fashionable anti-creativity inherent in Helen�s current day stamp of ironic mistrust – of ideas and art – is a kind of universal triumph of the mediocre.
It�s not dumbing-down, but the precise opposite: these days we�re all far too smart to be smart enough to be stupid enough to believe in our own fiercely hopeful fictions as we weave them � much less to believe them so long and so hard that they become true, like our stories of Yahweh and God and Allah have done over the centuries.
The problem with those established religious fictions is that they are now increasingly destructive ones, since the world�s artists and intellectuals copped out of believing in God�s stories long ago, leaving the zealots and power-players unchecked, free to twist them into real world horror stories.
What we need is for more smart people to start believing in God, and if like me you can�t stand any of the Big Three, then you ought to pitch in and help people like Bosler invent a new one, rather than knee-capping his tentative efforts.
The more people who help invent a new belief, the more chance there is that it�ll become believable, and thus useful in more than the abstract world.
Alas, the internet as it stands kills all hope of this gauche game � let�s call it trying to get idealism to fly – as massed cynicism has always eventually done, certainly, given enough time and the inevitable gravitational imperatives of harsh reality.
Only now the destruction of idealism happens almost instantaneously, and we can witness and record this, our own on-going creative-death-by-sophistication, in self-accelerating real time. �Self-accelerating�, in that even writing a sentence like that last one simply digs me deeper into the anti-creative abyss. And that one. And that one. Blah blah blah. Fisk fisk fisk. Yada-yada-yahweh.
God certainly knew what she was doing when she wrote the story about the Tower of Babel.
***
And yet.
We�ve now spent an awfully long time putting the Babel bricks back into place, and with Web-Google-English creeping its way towards some approximate facsimile of linguistic and informational universality, it�s probably time we started asking what the hell kind of hymn we intend singing next time we do get the monolingual chance. Will we use a six billion strong massed choir to fling a harmonious invitation across the galaxies, or just create even more sound and fury, signifying even more nothing?
Me, I vote for a formal cessation of Fisking Hostilities. We all know now that each of us cyber-Human Beings is smarter than the next guy and that each of us, provided we get the last word in, will be able to make a mockery of her next written post.
Let us thus pre-emptively propose a voluntary end to intellectual cyber-dispute and cyber-differentiation. Let�s agree that no writer in history has ever written an article or a story so good that it couldn�t be pulled to pieces by another writer sooner or later, usually a far less capable one.
Let�s agree that the internet revolution has stalled a bit; that as things stand, we�re all of us trapped in a mutual, cyclic purgatory-of-endless-deconstruction.
Maybe it�s the rotten intellectual fruits of the Boomers� premature storming of the artistic and intellectual heights, given that if you make your name, career and fortune by twenty years of age via the brattish act of tearing down every last concrete thing that strays within range of your iconoclastic word weapons, chances are you�ll never really learn either the value or the trick of creating something concrete from said-same words. (Their lifelong Celebrity has a lot to do with the deadness of the work of the top Boomer fiction writers, too.)
But whoever is to blame, what�s been missing from public debate � for decades – is the understanding that, if we all do insist upon a strictly adversarial, stand-off, tear-down approach to the interaction of our individual words, then the expressed totality of abstract Human majesty can only end up being less, not greater, than the sum of all our constituent contributions.
Mark Latham can fisk John Howard in Parliament. John Howard can fisk Mark Latham right back. But they changed the pollies Superannuation rules only by working as an interactive ensemble, making something bigger than the sum of their individual abstract contributions where it counts – in the concrete world (even if it was accidental, and even if I bet they�ll never do it again.)
Our pollies changed the world, and made it better, and for no other reason than that Mark Latham threw out a Bosler-esque crazy idea, John Howard felt moved to respond in kind � rather than sneer it down � and LO! Free. Human. Will. Controlled. Our. OWN. Human. Destiny. Not Yahweh. Not God. Not Allah.
So, Helen D, I thought what Rob wrote was terrific. I liked it. I loved it. I loved it so hard I�m writing in to help keep it believably alive. I want more, Rob. I want better. I want wackier. I want cleverer. I want big words, absurd ideas, pretentious rhetoric and unlimited, arrogant, Godly artistic vision. If we can�t attempt it in words, then we�ll never pull it off in real life.
I think that this Easter (or soon) we Humans need to crucify God and resurrect Art. We need to make ourselves dumb enough to be smart enough to seize the brilliant opportunity presented by the fertile temporary concatenation of global technology, Millennial angst, epistemological anarchy (a new cyber-cosmic soup, if you like), Luddite World power-political uncertainty (or vulnerability) and universal spiritual hunger, and finally figure out a way to transcend the triangulating neutralisation inherent in the Big Three religious narratives.
If we do insist on giving expression to our higher yearnings by way of a �One God� story, then let�s at least bodge one up in cyberspace that everyone can agree upon.
Norman Mailer once characterised the Big Three thus: Judaism�s defining strength is its rationality; Islam�s its egalitarianism; and Christianity�s its compassion. Sounds like a pretty hot Holy Cyber-Trinity for the Third Millennium to me, especially if you give it a pastel Green hue and deify nothing more apocalyptic than Good Mum Earth.
Call the Written Word�s new creative lever Konfucionism, say, and you�re giving a sly sequential nod both backwards to the J-writer and forwards to the inevitable, looming Project for the New Chinese Century.
Whatever.
In order to pull something like this off over the next fifty-odd years, we the six billion New New Gospellers, would have to start small, first of all by convincing ourselves � and our kids ad nauseum, since this religion thing always takes many generations to bed in � that we weren�t being supreme existential tossers by even imaging that a convincing and ever-lasting One God really can be bodged up out of nothing more miraculous than The Written Word.
It�s odd that writers would ever doubt this for a second, since �John-the-Apostle� actually makes it explicitly clear with that give-away quote what God really is � three little letters written by a single human hand � but human beings are nothing if not monumentally obtuse.
And, like Meeja Watch writers, we�d much rather believe in Grand & Inexplicable Human Mysteries – conspiracy, miracles, hidden agendas, the man on the grassy knoll � than the bleeding bloody obvious.
Which is:
In the beginning was The Word, and The Word was with Allah, and Allah was Yahweh was God was The Word. Osama bin Laden is God. Adolph Hitler is God. Jack Robertson is God. All Muslims are terrorists. Microsoft, Nike, McDonald�s and Starbucks are solely to blame for every suicide-murder in Gaza. The West deserves to lose the �war on terror�, for we are greedy, arrogant and lacking true pious humility. They want to kill us because they hate our �values�. George Bush is the greatest President the United States has ever had. I admire John Howard for his strength, courage and political conviction.
Abcdefghij lmnopqrstuvwxyz.
The mundane Word on God is and always has been that Human hands can choose to arrange those 26 (or whatever) letters in all and any kombination we like, and as soon as someone clever enough writes the right computer program and cyber-links enough microprocessing power together, we will no doubt do just that.
And then what? When every single Written Word in all human history is down-loaded onto the internet, when ever single possible combination and permutation of letters has been electronically typed out in the ether by the Pentium monkeys, when all God�s possible Names have been printed, when you can Google up a strong, credible, authoritative set of �proofs� for every Human opinion or idea every argued thus far – The Holocaust did happen (208,000 sites and falling); The Holocaust Didn�t Happen (128,000 sites and climbing) � well, then what clever, cynical cyber-words will be left to throw at each other in tit-for-tat turn, my fellow cyber-motormouths? Blah blah blah? Counter-Blah? Counter-counter-blah? Counter-counter-counter-blah? He-said-she-said-he-said-she-said?
Me, I�d rather hear a dumb new creative story than a clever old destructive one any day.
So my advice is that we should all take the next few years� worth of cynical blog-debate �as read�; accept that every last writer in cyberspace is effectively already as clever, sharp, fast, wry, witty, educated, well-informed, eloquent and feisty as the total sum of all Human knowledge written down since the J-writer wrote; acknowledge that Judaism, Islam and Christianity are thus effectively exhausted as creative levers as a result; and set about collectively charging a single New Millennium �necessary fiction� with the kind of interesting creative power that the Torah, Bible and Koran have carried thus far.
We don�t even have to create the new fictional script(ure) ourselves. All we have to do is act it out in the real world, believe in it long and hard enough until it becomes just as true as the wholly-fictional �One God� in whom, in barely discernible but deadly ways, three different kinds of religious zealots all believe so absolutely, after several thousand years of practise, that they are prepared to kill each other in the concrete world to prove it.
Stuff �em. I say let the new Written Word of God go like this:
WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED
to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,
AND FOR THESE ENDS
to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbors, and to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security, and to ensure by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest, and to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples.
HAVE RESOLVED TO COMBINE OUR EFFORTS TO ACCOMPLISH THESE AIMS.
Accordingly, our respective Governments, through representatives assembled in the city of San Francisco, who have exhibited their full powers found to be in good and due form, have agreed to the present Charter of the United Nations and do hereby establish an international organization to be known as the United Nations.
***
No reason why not, is there. They�re just Written Words, too. Probably once again bodged up by some clever chick with an elegant quill, quietly pretending she never existed.�Untold sorrow to MANkind�?
There�s your give-away right there, boys. Clever bitches.