Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

21. THE TEREBINTH OF MAMRE :

HALF-NOTES ON THE TEREBINTH ITSELF-
A Terebinth (you see) is a sacred grove of great tall trees and beneath such groves and sacred places we have tales of myth and tales of pagan worship and divine intercession and these groves were used as homes for the most holy of the endowed with prescience and vision and they live on - after myth - in things such as the ‘sacred oak’ of the Celts and many of the tales and stories of special places and in Genesis itself is to be seen the proper use of these groves as they were called in various places by name – as in the ‘Terebinth of Mamre’ early on in Genesis 13 and just a bit before that too (Genesis 6) are the tales of the great Nephilim giants who once populated Earth and propagated their half-man half-God species through the most beautiful Earth-women as they found them and in today’s modern world present-day myopic and ignorant society all of this is glossed over and ignored because (as I tell you) any reading by today’s people of today’s Bible is flat-out and ignorantly wrong for it is read instead as fable and image and symbol and NO meaning is given to truth but if one DOES READ carefully in and between everything it all can be seen - so that as once even I called it a cesspool of doubt a ‘great book for those in the hole’ I see it now differently and so can listen forever for it is all AFTER ALL timeless and ripe and seen as without persuasion and inkling of error BUT we can argue this together all day to no end - so then if you see it as you see than that’s got to be good enough for you and you alone AND I HOPE YOU LIVE BY AND DIE BY IT for myself (however) I shall hie to the sacred groves of meaning and the vaporous wonders of the Word which lives and I’ll leave you flat if I must I'll tramp upon you in the dust behind me but without looking back I’ll know that you are gone - ‘for the devil swears its own to fealty and the rock-hard of the stupid and the sullen together go willingly into black jungles of night and illusion’ and (probably) that’s where I’ll find you.

20. THRENODY OF THE ROTOGRAVURE:

Nothing makes me sadder than disembodied voices on a phone and just hearing them is a painful betrayal of every philosophy that ever was so I turn away - aghast and shaking my head - at what I see or what I witness and the cutting down of trees is just as awful a murder as slicing that man's throat (him over there with the bright red tie and the cufflink in his mouth before the mirror) for the preening bunch is the first to go - or should be - and yet before the crowd even begins lining up they've taken pictures of the crime scene or the Pope's last breakfast or Johnny Waldo's Oldsmobile Toronado 'the very car in which he died' and the rotogravure is often apt to overcolor any scene it gets ('everything looks worse in black and white') and that's the essence then of what we live : the ghost of material witnesses and all their third-hand stories told over again with slightly different variations every time yet because of that there are trends to doubt and doubts to be refined into negative components of someone else's poor reality and I doubt there's ever been a trend I didn't doubt.