Tumescent Moon

Recent events in Norway have, rather than fuelling the fire of this discourse, had the opposite effect of dampening it. I could - I fully intended to - grab my trusty Chainsaw Of Logic and cut the world's religions (most of them anyway) into bleeding chunks but I find myself wondering what the point of it all would be: it's all been said before by more intelligent people than me and, ultimately, I don't really care how absurd anyone's beliefs are as long as they give them some measure of happiness and they don't use them as an excuse to hurt anyone who can't accept them . The problem is not even religion per se but our own accursed and apparently incorrigible habit of mistaking the mental models we make of reality for reality itself. Whatever ideologies we embrace, whatever stories we tell ourselves for the sake of comfort or understanding, whatever scientific or magical structures of thought we build in explanation of the universe and our place in it, are, a...

I’m the child of occasionally church-going parents (an escaped Catholic father and a Presbyterian mother) and between the ages of five and ten I attended a Church of England school (not as the result of any religious conviction on the part of my parents, it was simply the only school in the village). The teachers at the school did do their best to pump us full of Christianity: I’m not sure how successful they were on the whole but I don’t think I can be counted as one of their triumphs in that, looking back, I don't honestly think I ever truly believed in God, or at least not the God they were anxious I should believe in. On the other hand I didn't do much questioning either. Until my mid-teens I went through all the 'right' motions - even attending a weekly Bible class - but in all honesty my motives for doing so were insincere and self-serving. I suppose that I could have continued to pay unreflective, agnostic lip-service to the culturally-approved mythology fore...

I've been promising myself (or somebody, maybe even a Higher Power!) that I'd try to worm my way around the writer's block by producing something - anything - even if it's not fiction. I don't guarantee that any of the parts that form the postamble will be cogent, coherent, comprehensible (or even written in anything that is recognisable as English) but I'll give it a bash. What may (or may not) follow this brief introductory spasm may (or may not) be a series of personal reflections on the greatest misfortune ever to emerge from the muddled thinking and desperate hopes of humankind, i.e. religion. These will probably not be well-reasoned, and for reasons of personal sloth they will certainly not be supported by references, but this will give everyone the opportunity to point out the deficiencies and suggest amendments or corrections, or to pile in and hammer the crap out of me. I'll amble away now and leave you with a quotation from Mark Twain. Take it...

Friday October 31st As Christopher manoeuvred his wheelchair across the bare pine boards of the dining room floor he was startled by a sudden jerk as the right wheel passed over some obstruction, which emitted a loud, protesting squeal. He looked down at the tiny furry object. Another bloody bear! he thought and leaned over to pick it up from the floor. It had once had a pink plastic face, but the passage of the wheelchair had dented and cracked it so that it now resembled an aged and dim-witted Pekinese. He squeezed its belly and it bleated loudly. He didn’t recognise this particular bear but his wife had had so many hundreds of them that it wasn’t really surprising. He made a grimace of disgust. Thought I’d got rid of them all, but they keep turning up! He flung the bear into the open fireplace and watched the flames from the log fire dance over the nylon fur for a moment until he was satisfied that it was well alight. Somewhat mollified, he resumed his progress towards the te...

Low, but insistent, the sound insinuated itself into his ears and pulled him slowly from his bleak dreams. He muttered to himself, winding deeper into the blankets and drawing them over his head. Tappety-tappety-tap! Knuckles rapped against the door of his mind. A fragment of some long-ago-known but now forgotten jazz melody floated over the top of the odd, disjointed rhythm and then was gone. Tappety-tappety-tap! TAP! The coarse blanket scratched the skin of his face. A thick string of saliva wound its way down his chin and pooled in the notch at the base of his neck. He sneezed as stray fibres from the bedclothes tickled the back of his nose. TAP! Some deep part of him panicked briefly at the suffocating closeness and his arms flailed and flung the blanket away from his face. His fingers kneaded his eyes, rubbing the night-grit from their corners. TAP! TAP! TAP! "What?" The sound of his voice startled him, sounding thick and menacing in the gloom of his be...

From the shadows under the trees that grew behind the garden wall at the back of the house - his house - he watched as the last light went out. He coughed and spat some bloody slime from his broken lung: he knew it would be soon. The after-midnight moon brushed with silver the grey fur of a cat stepping daintily along the top of the wall, the light making lamps of its eyes. The cat turned once, twice in its tracks and leapt from light into shade, pursuing some small scurrying animal into the deep darkness beneath the trees. He watched it go, his imagination making them brothers of the hunt. As he waited for the hush of the night and the warm, soothing waves of moist summer air to sink the world into sleep he allowed the memories to fill him once more. The cold fire sang within him, tracing its icy way from the pit of his stomach through muscle and nerve until it filled his head with a pure and cleansing rage that fused his intellect and will into a hard, brilliant crystal of hatred....

Charlie whistled. Incessantly. Charlie had whistled ever since, at the age of five or six, his father had taught him the secret. His was a sunny disposition which no misfortune could ever darken; in him there were no hidden shadows, no bitter memories, no nooks and crannies where sorrow could take residence and grow. He was shallow, but he was happy. And he whistled. His unremitting cheerfulness had won him many friends: everybody loved Charlie, although most people could only take him in small doses. The only person, apart from his parents, who had ever endured more than a day or two of his company - his former wife - had finally exploded one morning and in the grip of a menstrual rage had bellowed at him "Why the fuck can’t you be miserable like everyone else?" before hurling a particularly hideous vase at him (Charlie had bought it as an anniversary present for her the previous year - he had the aesthetic sensibilities of a flatworm) and stomping out, never to return. ...