Faust is Real, or Mephistopheelin’ Groovy

Content Warnings: Satan, God, Religion, Sexism, Violence, the Occult, the one link to youtube is NSFW audio, some image links are a bit gory or lurid Renaissance style.

Alright, I haven’t done a deep dive into the hard facts on this, but based on some shallow research, it looks like Faust – the guy who sold his soul to The DevilTM – was an actual historical figure.  Christ’s miracles weren’t attested to in any writing that survives from within his own life, but the misdeeds of Faust were already being fictionalized within his own.  Like the historicity of Jesus, Faust’s existence isn’t important.  It’s just fun to say.

I did a Faust once.  I was having a lonely time in life, feeling melodramatic on my way home from work, or maybe it was on the way home from the dive bar I went to on my 21st birthday.  A wide busy suburban street without proper sidewalks, just two feet of grass and garbage against a short chain link fence.  I might have ducked into an unlit side street overgrown with short, untrimmed trees.  I recall it was darker than the headlights and taillights of randos driving by would have allowed.

I went to my knees and I said something like, “Satan, I give you my soul forever if you appear to me and show me that anything magical exists in this world.”  At the time I was working for Pizza Hut, where all of my pay raises over the years were erased by increases to the minimum wage, and I was already half bald and still a virgin, so forgive my melodrama.  I later realized based on the way I phrased it, Satan could let me live to a hundred a philosophical materialist, then show up on my deathbed and snatch me up.  Well, it was going to happen anyway.  Might make dying a little more interesting.

distorted goat head pentagram

The first version of Faust I read was Goethe’s play, which was surely inspired by Marlowe’s much earlier play, which was an adaptation of a then very recent translation of the quite fictionalized but not long posthumous German biography of Faust himself.  A little merry-go-round between those cultures.  I’ve been reading the Marlowe play Doctor Faustus at the moment, from this 2005 edition.  From what I’ve read in the foreword, editions can be extremely varied.

This is the frustrating thing for anyone who seeks authenticity in antique texts.  Marlowe’s play survived in a small number of iterations from within a few years of when he died young.  Which was closest to the original was argued extensively one way, then the other.  What we can know with certainty is it was changed in subtle but significant ways within just a few years of his passing.

Before Marlowe there were pamphlet-style legends about Faust, oral legends, and these influenced each other, and by the time the full-length (24 pages or less) German Faust book was printed, how much did it include or omit?  What was lost?  But it’s a mistake to try to wonder after those kind of answers in the first place, as the legends were much inspired by stories that preceded Faust’s birth, which in turn surely had cultural cross-pollination and roots reaching before written history.  It was bullshit all the way down.  But my modern mind, trained by late twentieth century copyright culture (Disney propaganda), is always trying to find that original.

…I return to this draft having read most of Doctor Faustus.  It’s a slim little play.  While it would take more effort to perform than to read, it would still be a very short show.  No intermission.  It’s also not very deep.  It’s just japes and foolery and some token religiosity to keep the censors off the playwright’s back.  I’m a fan of badassery in fiction, and there’s a truly macho quote in here, but it’s wasted in the mouth of a toss-off character that never appears again:

“I am Wrath.  I had neither father nor mother: I lept out of a lion’s mouth when I was scarce half an hour old, and ever since I have run up and down the world with this case of rapiers, wounding myself when I had nobody to fight withal.  I was born in Hell; and look to it, for some of you shall be my father.”

That line alone moves me, more than the scene where Faustus is turned invisible so he can box the pope’s ears.  But then, speeches about being PO’d tend to be rousing – like that Russell Crowe bullshit in Gladiator, the dueling taunts in Romeo and Juliet, or the opening line of The Cask of Amontillado.  It does contrast starkly with the featherweight treatment of the supposedly heavy material in the play – rejecting jeezy, throwing your soul away – and makes me wish that I was reading something with more heft.  Heft like a case of rapiers.

Speaking of badassery, my favorite detail from the wikipedia page on a possible historical Faust is this:  He allegedly died in an explosion, an alchemical experiment in a hotel room.  His mangled body was reported to have the mystical property of always facing away from heaven.  His neck was broken such that however you turned the body, it would face the ground.  Bad ass.

…Having read a bit more, oh my GAWD Faustus is a flip-flopping inconstant binch!  Behold:

OLD MAN:
I see an angel hovers o’er thy head,  And, with a vial full of precious grace,
Offers to pour the same into thy soul:  Then call for mercy, and avoid despair.

FAUSTUS:
Ah, my sweet friend, I feel  Thy words to comfort my distressed soul!
Leave me a while to ponder on my sins…

OLD MAN:
I go, sweet Faustus; but with heavy cheer,  Fearing the ruin of thy hopeless soul.
(Leaves.)

FAUSTUS:
Accursed Faustus, where is mercy now?  I do repent; and yet I do despair:
Hell strives with grace for conquest in my breast:
What shall I do to shun the snares of death?

MEPHISTOPHILIS:
Thou traitor, Faustus, I arrest thy soul
For disobedience to my sovereign lord:
Revolt, or I’ll in piece-meal tear thy flesh.

FAUSTUS:
Sweet Mephistophilis, entreat thy lord  To pardon my unjust presumption,
And with my blood again I will confirm  My former vow I made to Lucifer!

All that shit, loosely translated:

SOME RANDO:
Still doin’ that Satan stuff, huh?  How about…  Jesus?

FAUSTUS:
Oh god, really?!  Yes!  Jesus rocks!  Sign me up!

SOME RANDO:
(Leaves.)

FAUSTUS:
I suck so much, gotta get redeemed ‘n’ shit.

MEPHISTOPHILIS:
What the fuck, bro?  I thought we were cool!

FAUSTUS:
What?  Oh yeah, Hail Satan.  WTF was I thinking LOL.

Goethe’s Faust was a heavy-headed intellectual with grandiose feelings, Marlowe’s was a child that couldn’t decide whether to drink his juice box or take nap time like a good boy.  (Off topic:  Both plays were hugely sexist, Marlowe’s less offensively because it was such a slight and simply written work.)  Either way, I’m not advocating for either of these stories.  A case has been made that Christopher Marlowe was, at least, an atheist.  And gay.  He also was a spy and may have been a brash homicidal asshole, which are not endearing traits.  But the atheist interpretation of Doctor Faustus is fun, and not without merit.

The Faust literature and other stories of sinners, as well as stories of saints such as the contents of the Golden Legend, are full of fantastically morbid and sensual imagery.  They were an imaginative outlet for European people in scary times, when modern medicine hadn’t reduced the frequency of mysterious or horrible deaths around us,  and before global corporate capitalism had pushed the horrors of production onto poorer nations.

You’d never want to be a sinner, oh no.  That’s the worst.  But they’re interesting to watch.  As a moral lesson.  Wouldn’t it be just the worst if somebody turned invisible and punched the pope?  Heaven forfend.  Nothing appealing in any of this, I assure you.  And you don’t want to see the saints suffer do you?  It’s terrible what bad people did to those holy sweet saints.  Throwing them in bondage and scouring their (presumed) fair flesh, oh no.

But now we’re in gentler times, for the “first world.”  We aren’t face to face with death and depredation – not the same as the people dealing with the avarice that props us up and devastates faraway places.  I have personally never seen a person die, except on TV.  The constant wars and plagues of medieval to Renaissance Europe, the immediacy of having your family with you instead of carted off to a big hospital and closed behind doors – these guaranteed most people had some experience of seeing bodies corrupted broken or bereft.  Sci fi and fantasy weren’t off the ground yet, but the fictions of the day – with or without the seal of canon – provided entertainment morbid enough to reflect the world as they knew it.

Maybe that’s getting a bit off topic.  Doctor Faustus was pretty mild in its violence.  But the perversity is there.  The desire to throw off the rigid social order of the day to get what you want, live for yourself.  It’s a shame the idea of achieving freedom is often bound to selfishness – as Ayn Rand’s vile religion demonstrates.  I imagine it’s because when we are indoctrinated to the mores of our cultures, we are told it’s because doing otherwise would be selfish.  We sacrifice what we desire to get the social harmony we all need, per the dogma.  But you can be free without saying “fuck the world.”  If anything, greed enslaves us all.

Again, off topic.  I don’t know what I want to say about Faust, about Doctor Faustus.  Faust in most iterations is, ostensibly, a cautionary tale for xtians.  It can be a cautionary tale for satanic strivers as well – pursue freedom from god, throw off the shackles of the holy.  Hail some Satan.  But be kind, share the fruits of your infernal achievements with others, and you can go to Hell knowing you lived your life well.  And don’t wuss out like our boy Dr. F.  “Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven, That time may cease… That Faustus may repent and save his soul!”  What an embarrassment.

I Need Latin Skills or Google Fu

I’m trying to decipher part of this funky old Italian grimoire – the Fasciculus rerum Geomanticarum – to compare the descriptions of the demons in it to later books.  I haven’t found a transcription that I could feed into google translate, and my lack of familiarity with Latin is bound to make any transcription I do close to useless.

I’ve tried some, it’s bad.  I can gather the names of the demons, their titles and numbers of legions they command, but anything else is real tough.  So I need either a transcription or translation to work from, or I need somebody with boss Latin skills to just rattle off the answers.  Google did help me confirm the demon names via the footnotes in a modern French book about demonology, but I haven’t found anything else.

Anybody wanna show off their Latin or googling skillz in my comments here?  I need the info from pages 611 to 628 of the PDF.

Fuck the DA

Kamala Harris sucks.  She lost out in the primaries specifically because her cruelty corruption and hypocrisy were on easy display for anyone with a marginally lefty social media feed.  Denying trans prisoners medical care, going “tough on crime” which has been a fig leaf for suppressing the black vote since the Clintons were doing it, and trying to repaint herself more softly for the presidential bid.  Gross.  Choosing her was a direct rebuke of Black Lives Matter and progressives in general – it was a canny calculation.

Because Biden wants to present his commitment to centrism as a strong, non-negotiable position.  He wants us to know we can go get fucked, we’re going to vote for him just to stave off the apocalypse for an extra two minutes, and we’ll have to accept more corporate and military welfare and racist oppression and just generally eat the shit directly from blue dog democrat assholes.

He’s right.  I’m going to vote for them.  Anyone who believes individual human lives matter will vote Biden-Harris, unless they’re a delusional asshat or a rethuglican plant.  Because need I remind you?  It doesn’t matter how many people will be directly or indirectly murdered by Biden-Harris governance, the number will be less than it would be under Trump-Pence.

One of that set of assholes will take the presidency.  You have some amount of human lives in your hand on this deal.  Will you save ten thousand people?  Forty-thousand?  A hundred thousand?  The exact numbers are impossible to know.  But it will definitely be a positive number.  I would vote for these fucking pigs to save the lives of ten people.

If you wouldn’t, and you feel the need to either deny that’s what this is, or to say that you wouldn’t, come take a shit in my comment section so I can ban you and delete your comments.  And if the melting codcake and the fucking DA win in November, if you’ll join me in helping them win, then I hope you will also join me in making their fascist little lives hell.

It ain’t over ’til it’s over.  Long live the fighters.

Lissenup, SJW Scumbags!

Today I found out that we’re all supposed to be into critical theory.  If ya ain’t into critical theory, get outta the movement!

Now I know some of you are already using it to do stuff like explain why you can find a parable for a transgender life in Harry Potter, despite our knowledge of authorial intent.  You’re saying how through the critical lens of a trans person it is possible to see the story in a way that isn’t what the author intended, and that it’s valid from said perspective.  Tremendous.

But a lot of you are slacking on this tip.  From now on, whenever you engage with any element of culture, be it a work of fiction or a common aphorism or a commercial product or a philosophical construct, I expect you to justify your opinion of it through thoughtful analysis of your cultural biases and an effort to consider at least a few perspectives other than your own.

If I don’t start to hear better critical analysis of your opinions in my comment section or elsewhere, motherfuckers you are CANCELED.  You dig?

Content Warning: Led Zeppelin

Given that the dudes from Zepp were most likely rapists, and given that even if they weren’t, they literally have songs about impregnating teenage children, it’s fair for anyone to disregard their music, avoid them like the plague.  Certainly I don’t advocate giving them money.  But I would like, if I may, to make a puerile observation about one of their puerile songs, and if possible, keep the tenor of the discourse puerile as well.  That is to say, don’t read this if you don’t want to speak with light-hearted amusement at the horndogging foolery that is Led Zeppelin’s catalog.  Proceeding thusly…

[Read more…]

First Draft of The Septagram, Finished!

Anyone interested in reading a fairly rough draft of my complete new novel The Septagram, have at it.  There aren’t an egregious number of typos and such, just writing that will surely need a lot of care in subsequent drafts.  I have a problem not giving character’s distinctive enough voices.  Not all the time, not every character, but I think it happened here.

It’s a little shorter than a Dean Koontz novel.  This was an attempt to make a horror-themed supernatural adventure story in a style like Hideyuki Kikuchi, who wrote Vampire Hunter D and Wicked City – so take from that what you will.  The content warnings are at the link.  I wasn’t as scrupulous in my anti-ableist language stance as usual, so bear that in mind as well.  Bon appetit!

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, eh?

Remember our atheistical comrade of yore, Douglas Adams, and his cheeky mild-mannered British novels?  Sadly, he is non-living.  But worry not.  The spirit of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is alive and well represented by FtB’s own Abbey St. Brendan in this very professional and amusing little video.  This kind of thing takes waaay more effort than you might imagine, and content creators love positive feedback for that effort.  Enjoy it, and comment at her blog.  Or on the yewchewb, where, as the kids say, you may like comment and subscribe!

 

Germany and Japan

What happens when Germany and Japan get together for artistic anarchy instead of fascist imperialism? A demented good time. Content warnings for butoh dance (looks like physical torment), brief NSFW, noisy audio, and performance so uncomfortable it borders on self harm. Also flashing lights starting at about 5:49:

The eighties were, in some ways, a very good time. Thank you, Einstürzende Neubauten.

Prestigious List of Fragile Assholes

Some celebs from different avenues of the arts and the intelligentsia just signed on a letter in Harper’s whining about cancel culture. Many people on the list you’ll be familiar with, as famous racists, transphobes, and general shitbirds. (List the crimes of the ones you know about in the comments!) Some will have you scratching your temples. Like where and why did they dig up Wynton Marsalis for this?

Among them I notice Salman Rushdie, had the threat of violence and state censorship involved in his rise to fame. I don’t know why he thought people saying we should stop promoting some poorly written overrated kids books because the author is a transphobe would be remotely equivalent, but sure, dude. And we already knew he had shit taste in friends.

I also love the whine about cancel culture costing people their livelihoods. I’m sorry, every last one of these fuckers should lose their prestige lifestyle for at least a year, so they can have half a clue of what it’s like for the rest of us. Even if that did happen, the fact it would be over in a year would offer them hope that I WILL NEVER FUCKING EXPERIENCE. Motherfuck the rich, from here to eternity.

Anyway, every last one of these people is, to some extent, a thoughtless hyper-privileged asshat. Yeah, you too, Noam Chomsky:

Elliot Ackerman
Saladin Ambar, Rutgers University
Martin Amis
Anne Applebaum
Marie Arana, author
Margaret Atwood
John Banville
Mia Bay, historian
Louis Begley, writer
Roger Berkowitz, Bard College
Paul Berman, writer
Sheri Berman, Barnard College
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Neil Blair, agent
David W. Blight, Yale University
Jennifer Finney Boylan, author
David Bromwich
David Brooks, columnist
Ian Buruma, Bard College
Lea Carpenter
Noam Chomsky, MIT (emeritus)
Nicholas A. Christakis, Yale University
Roger Cohen, writer
Ambassador Frances D. Cook, ret.
Drucilla Cornell, Founder, uBuntu Project
Kamel Daoud
Meghan Daum, writer
Gerald Early, Washington University-St. Louis
Jeffrey Eugenides, writer
Dexter Filkins
Federico Finchelstein, The New School
Caitlin Flanagan
Richard T. Ford, Stanford Law School
Kmele Foster
David Frum, journalist
Francis Fukuyama, Stanford University
Atul Gawande, Harvard University
Todd Gitlin, Columbia University
Kim Ghattas
Malcolm Gladwell
Michelle Goldberg, columnist
Rebecca Goldstein, writer
Anthony Grafton, Princeton University
David Greenberg, Rutgers University
Linda Greenhouse
Rinne B. Groff, playwright
Sarah Haider, activist
Jonathan Haidt, NYU-Stern
Roya Hakakian, writer
Shadi Hamid, Brookings Institution
Jeet Heer, The Nation
Katie Herzog, podcast host
Susannah Heschel, Dartmouth College
Adam Hochschild, author
Arlie Russell Hochschild, author
Eva Hoffman, writer
Coleman Hughes, writer/Manhattan Institute
Hussein Ibish, Arab Gulf States Institute
Michael Ignatieff
Zaid Jilani, journalist
Bill T. Jones, New York Live Arts
Wendy Kaminer, writer
Matthew Karp, Princeton University
Garry Kasparov, Renew Democracy Initiative
Daniel Kehlmann, writer
Randall Kennedy
Khaled Khalifa, writer
Parag Khanna, author
Laura Kipnis, Northwestern University
Frances Kissling, Center for Health, Ethics, Social Policy
Enrique Krauze, historian
Anthony Kronman, Yale University
Joy Ladin, Yeshiva University
Nicholas Lemann, Columbia University
Mark Lilla, Columbia University
Susie Linfield, New York University
Damon Linker, writer
Dahlia Lithwick, Slate
Steven Lukes, New York University
John R. MacArthur, publisher, writer
Susan Madrak, writer
Phoebe Maltz Bovy, writer
Greil Marcus
Wynton Marsalis, Jazz at Lincoln Center
Kati Marton, author
Debra Maschek, scholar
Deirdre McCloskey, University of Illinois at Chicago
John McWhorter, Columbia University
Uday Mehta, City University of New York
Andrew Moravcsik, Princeton University
Yascha Mounk, Persuasion
Samuel Moyn, Yale University
Meera Nanda, writer and teacher
Cary Nelson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Olivia Nuzzi, New York Magazine
Mark Oppenheimer, Yale University
Dael Orlandersmith, writer/performer
George Packer
Nell Irvin Painter, Princeton University (emerita)
Greg Pardlo, Rutgers University – Camden
Orlando Patterson, Harvard University
Steven Pinker, Harvard University
Letty Cottin Pogrebin
Katha Pollitt, writer
Claire Bond Potter, The New School
Taufiq Rahim, New America Foundation
Zia Haider Rahman, writer
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, University of Wisconsin
Jonathan Rauch, Brookings Institution/The Atlantic
Neil Roberts, political theorist
Melvin Rogers, Brown University
Kat Rosenfield, writer
Loretta J. Ross, Smith College
J.K. Rowling
Salman Rushdie, New York University
Karim Sadjadpour, Carnegie Endowment
Daryl Michael Scott, Howard University
Diana Senechal, teacher and writer
Jennifer Senior, columnist
Judith Shulevitz, writer
Jesse Singal, journalist
Anne-Marie Slaughter
Andrew Solomon, writer
Deborah Solomon, critic and biographer
Allison Stanger, Middlebury College
Paul Starr, American Prospect/Princeton University
Wendell Steavenson, writer
Gloria Steinem, writer and activist
Nadine Strossen, New York Law School
Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., Harvard Law School
Kian Tajbakhsh, Columbia University
Zephyr Teachout, Fordham University
Cynthia Tucker, University of South Alabama
Adaner Usmani, Harvard University
Chloe Valdary
Lucía Martínez Valdivia, Reed College
Helen Vendler, Harvard University
Judy B. Walzer
Michael Walzer
Eric K. Washington, historian
Caroline Weber, historian
Randi Weingarten, American Federation of Teachers
Bari Weiss
Sean Wilentz, Princeton University
Garry Wills
Thomas Chatterton Williams, writer
Robert F. Worth, journalist and author
Molly Worthen, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Matthew Yglesias
Emily Yoffe, journalist
Cathy Young, journalist
Fareed Zakaria