Goryō (御霊)

The Gion Festival (祇園祭, Gion Matsuri) is one of the largest and most famous festivals in Japan, taking place annually during the month of July in Kyoto. Many events take place in central Kyoto and at the Yasaka Shrine, the festival's patron shrine, located in Kyoto's famous Gion district, which gives the festival its name. It is formally a Shinto festival, and its original purposes were purification and pacification of disease-causing entities. There are many ceremonies held during the festival, but it is best known for its two Yamaboko Junkō (山鉾巡行) processions of floats, which take place on July 17 and 24.

 

The three nights leading up to each day of a procession are sequentially called yoiyoiyoiyama (宵々々山), yoiyoiyama (宵々山), and yoiyama (宵山). During these yoiyama evenings, Kyoto's downtown area is reserved for pedestrian traffic, and some traditional private houses near the floats open their entryways to the public, exhibiting family heirlooms in a custom known as the Folding Screen Festival (屏風祭り, Byōbu Matsuri). Additionally, the streets are lined with night stalls selling food such as yakitori (barbecued chicken on skewers), taiyaki, takoyaki (fried octopus balls), okonomiyaki, traditional Japanese sweets, and many other culinary delights. The Gion Festival originated during an epidemic as part of a purification ritual ...

- From the Wikipedia entry on Gion Matsuri

In a broad sense, Goryō (御霊) is an honorific for a spirit, especially one that causes hauntings, and the term is used as a synonym for onryō (怨霊, vengeful Japanese ghosts).

- From the Wikipedia entry on Goryō

The potato was almost too hot to hold in spite of the clean white paper wrapper. It was slit at the top and steam poured out of it, liquifying a huge slab of white butter. Oscar took a leisurely bite of it, allowing the butter to drench his moustache and run across his cheeks and into his beard, savoring everything: the fluffy texture of the baked potato flesh, the salt, and the sweet fat of the churned cream. He waited a moment, chewing, eyes closed and face tilted to the sky, and then took a slow slug of icy golden lager. He wiped the back of his wrist and hand across his mouth to clean off the molten milkfat and looked up. Sanae was watching him, her eyes liquid in the late afternoon light, a smile on her face, shoulders relaxed. It made him happy to see her like this.

They were in Sanae’s homeland of Japan. They arrived slightly over a week ago, to visit her parents, and while they were there, it had been stressful for Sanae; she was constantly translating. Oscar spoke a bit of the language – “enough to get into trouble but not enough to get out,” as he said, and though he managed to make do with body language and his limited vocabulary when he was on his own, there had still been a lot of demands on Sanae. So when the opportunity came along for the two of them to get away, they jumped at it. They had traveled together first to Nara, and then on to Kyoto. Oscar had wanted to see the old temples and palaces, and they had not disappointed – the Golden Pavilion and Kiyo-Mizu Dera in particular were breathtaking.

Now, they had arrived at the Gion Matsuri – an old, old festival in Kyoto. He had been told it originated in the eighth century during an epidemic, and was a ritual to prevent calamities. A cab had dropped them out at the festival grounds, and they walked past barriers meant to keep cars away and onto a street where the festival was being held. People milled about and food vendors here and there were setting up their stalls or hawking their wares. Sanae bought a few dumplings, but Oscar’s nose had caught something else that smelled absolutely wonderful to him. He hadn’t realized how much dairy he ate until he arrived here – her family had a fairly traditional Japanese diet. The food had been good – miso soup and vegetables and rice that the family grew themselves, incredibly fresh and delicious – but he didn’t care very much for seafood generally. He wished that were different – it would have made life with Sanae simpler, certainly. And he thought Japanese seafood was beautiful. But he just didn’t like the taste of it very much, and so, though he always found something he could eat, he hadn’t felt truly satiated since they arrived. And now the smell of butter wafted through the air and it made him salivate. They tracked the smell to a vendor who was selling jagabata – grilled potato and rich butter from Hokkaido – and Oscar bought one along with a bottle of beer and dove in.

It was, at that moment, one of the best things he had ever tasted. The beer, too, went down smoothly and tasted wonderful. There was something to be said for the pleasure of drinking like this, having a cold beer in the dwindling light of an incredibly hot and humid Kyoto afternoon, as others did the same, everyone in a celebratory mood. Sanae ate her dumpling and he ate his potato and they lost themselves in the simple joy of being. I wish this moment could go on forever, he thought, maybe heaven is a place where nothing ever changes.

He took in his surroundings. More and more people were arriving to the festival. About a block ahead, at an intersection, Oscar could see a massive float sitting on the pavement, the gold and red of it blazing in the setting sun. It dwarfed the people surrounding it, gleaming with ornate gilded woodwork and colorful decorations.

“If we get separated, meet me back here at the base of that float,” he said, gesturing towards it.

“Oscar, if we get separated, get a cab and get back to the hotel,” Sanae replied, a little more sharply than was necessary, Oscar thought. But he wasn’t about to let that ruin the moment. He and Sanae strolled through the crowd towards the float. Now and then she would stop and look at a vendor’s wares while Oscar watched the people around him. It had become quite busy, with people all over the place as they arrived at the intersection where the float stood.  As he scanned the corridors made by the buildings he could see more floats, many more floats, all of them very much like the one they stood at the foot of, an endless number of them in every direction excepting the one they had come from. The floats stood at each and every intersection as far as he could see, disappearing into the distance.

He appreciated why she had told him to get a cab and get back to the hotel if they got separated.

It really was becoming crowded now as the sun set. People milled about, young women in fabulous and colorful yukatas, one a pale pink with bright red chrysanthemums and a dark blue sash, one night blue with pink plum blooms and a bright yellow obi, one royal blue with white cherry blossoms and a grass green belt. All of them accompanied by giggling friends wearing equally brilliant patterns, or escorted by young men in more masculine robes, jagged sea blue stripes on a grey background shot with geometric tessellations in pale green foam, or a textured charcoal yukata with a white belt that looked as though it had been touched with a calligrapher’s brush, another wearing azure, dragons outlined in white wrapped around his body from head to toe.  And there were people in western wear and more formal kimono as well, all of them swirling around him and Sanae as they moved through the maze of humanity. He gripped her hand tightly as she led him through the throng and glanced around.

It was then he got his first glimpse of the monster.

He saw it through the crowd, and it truly was just a glimpse, gone almost before he registered it was there. It had appeared out of a profusion of floats and bodies, a riot of colors and sounds and textures surrounding it, and was swallowed almost instantly by the multitudes. For that one moment, he saw it clearly and was absolutely transfixed by the sight of it, his blood seeming to stop suddenly in his veins as he experienced an instant of almost pure terror and confusion.

It brought to mind pictures he had seen that were supposed to simulate having a stroke, where everything was almost, but not quite, recognizable. You would get the impression of a kitchen, perhaps, though there certainly wasn’t anything you could identify as a kitchen in the picture. This bit of the photo looked like it should be a curtain partially covering a window, perhaps, and this bit looked as though it should be a clear jar filled perhaps with coffee beans or some sort of spice. The problem was, even though that’s what you wanted to see, the picture didn’t actually show those things. What was truly there was a meaningless glob of colors and shapes that made no sense at all, information that was completely un-processible. So as much as your eye wanted to see a flower or maybe a rooster’s head with its comb, what was actually in front of you was incomprehensible.

That’s what looking at the monster was like. Only, instead of getting the impression of a kitchen, Oscar’s eye gave him the impression of a human being. But past that, he couldn’t actually identify anything – there were parts that looked almost like eyes, and a nose, and something that looked very nearly like hair, and the overall shapes and colors were close – but nothing was right, in the end it was meaningless almost-patterns of skin and tissue and things that looked like they might be clothes but absolutely, in the final analysis, weren’t. And in that moment, his mind screamed at him: “It’s a monster! Oh my god, it is a monster, a real monster!”

The thing was swallowed by the bodies of the crowd and a moment later he was no longer certain just what he had seen. Maybe I just saw a bunch of people together and got confused, he thought. But it was difficult to convince himself, and he was left with a nagging sensation that he had seen something secret and terrible.

Finally, he made up his mind that it must be someone with some kind of awful birth defect, or someone who had been in a fire or had some kind of industrial accident, and he told himself he had no right to feel horrified by them the way he had. If anything, it was sad. The person must be lonely, he thought, but in spite of this internal monologue, he didn’t feel sad.  He had seen something that repelled him, and felt a deep loathing and repugnance that mingled with the perverse desire to see it again, to confirm just how hideous it was. And yet, he was afraid to see it again as well, though he did not know why, only that the sight was upsetting in a way that he could not articulate. In turn, this feeling led to a kind of shame – he had been raised with the idea that all human beings deserved understanding and compassion and had taken that to heart. In his work in the burn unit he had seen plenty of people who had been through terrible things, some of whom were injured beyond the capacity for speech. One lady in particular came to mind, a woman who had been trapped in her car after an accident, who had to wait, ensnared, as the hungry fire came to devour her, eating her fingers, eyes, lips, tongue and nose as it worked its way across her body.  She was terrible to look upon, but he felt compassion for her. But for some reason he could not identify, he was unable to summon any compassion whatsoever for the thing he had seen through the crowd. He hated it, and though he was ashamed of his hate, it would not go away.

He had decided to stop ruminating on it and put the thing out of his mind when he realized he had lost Sanae. She was no longer with him. He spun about, looking for her wildly. When had she let go of his hand? he wondered. Was it when they stopped momentarily to look at the takoyaki seller’s wares? He seized on this idea and turned around to make his way through the horde to the vendor, who was shouting at the top of his lungs. “Irasshaimase! Irasshaimase! Irasshaimase!”

But as he got to the stall he realized it was not the same stall they had approached earlier, not the same man shouting, and as he listened to the peddler hawking his goods, he realized he could hear at least three other people over the din of the mob shouting the same thing: “Irasshaimase! Irasshaimase! Irasshaimase!”  Which one of them did we stop at? he wondered, the icy fingers of panic beginning to tickle his bowels.

Desperate now, he pushed his way through the mass to the other vendors, looking wildly about for Sanae. But he didn’t see her, and none of the vendors looked familiar. He made his way along in the general direction they had been going, wondering if he could perhaps find something to stand on so he could see over the heads of the crowd. But he feared even if he did so, he wouldn’t be able to identify her. The sun had truly set while he had been casting about for her, and now the festival was lit only by street signs in wild neon kana, glowing festival lanterns, and the fires of the food vendors. It was rapidly becoming too dark to pick faces from the masses.

Resigned, he decided it would be best to follow her advice, and make his way out of the section of Kyoto set aside for the festival and to try to get a cab back to the hotel. He reassured himself with the idea that she would be waiting in their room, and would scold him for being so careless when he got back. He wasn’t certain which way they had come from, and scanning the skyline he couldn’t see Kyoto Tower, which he had been using to orient himself.  He resolved to walk in one direction until he was out of the festival and set out to what he thought was the west. He had a vague idea that their hotel was in that direction. The lights and yukatas and decorated floats had lost their charm for him at this point and he put his head down, his shoulders up, and bulled and pushed his way through the crowd. After a length of time he looked up and for a split second he thought he saw the monster again, off in the distance through the partying rabble, a shape that should make sense but simply didn’t.

Then a teenager walking with his friends stumbled into him and would have fallen if Oscar hadn’t caught him. On pure instinct, Oscar grabbed at his robe as the kid fell, and managed to seize the cloth of a sleeve in his fist. Helpless in the inertia of his fall, the teenager would have tumbled face first into the ground if not for Oscar. He mumbled something at Oscar as he swayed back to his feet, only to overbalance and go spinning back towards his friends, who tittered at his drunkenness. The group moved on and as they made their way into the night he shuddered and glanced back in the direction of the monster, but instead of the horrible thing, he saw Sanae.

Relief flooded him. She was walking away from him, but it was her, undoubtedly and absolutely her. He recognized the clothing – not a yukata, but western-style clothes, jeans and a black camisole top – and her purse, a handbag made of soft, fine inden-ya, deerskin dyed black with a red lacquered dragonfly pattern covering it. But more than either of those he recognized her walk: the short, hesitant steps, the ever-so-slightly pigeon-toed gait that carried her slender, delicate frame.

“Sanae!” he called out. But she didn’t seem to hear him. He started after her, and called her name again, loud enough that heads swung his way as she turned a corner and slipped from view.

He really was pushing people out of the way now as he fought through the horde. He turned the corner and found that the crowd began to thin out here. He saw her ahead, perhaps two blocks away. This time she turned right, down an alley that ran at a diagonal to the avenue they were on. It was still a little too crowded to run, but he figured he had finally made it to the outskirts of the fairground. He began to jog, moving as quickly as he could towards the alley.

He followed the path she had taken and as he rounded the next corner in pursuit of her, he glanced ahead and saw her silhouette in an open doorway filled with dim light. Then the door slid shut, plunging the area into shadow.

He stopped short. What is going on? he wondered. He took in his surroundings and as he did, he became more confused and concerned. This was an empty, winding alley. He seemed to have left the crowd behind completely and that worried him. He didn’t see a single soul here, just the black shapes of buildings blocking the starlight. After the lanterns and the fires and neon signs, it seemed almost desolate here, and quite dark, and he wondered what she was thinking, coming down here.

He walked along towards the door, casting about for anything that might explain her behavior, and he realized suddenly how silent it was here, and how oppressive the shadows truly were. He could barely make any details out as he stumbled along, and as he neared the door he had seen Sanae go into, he stopped again, unsure.

What on earth is she doing here? he wondered, spiders of apprehension crawling around his belly.

It seemed so incredibly out of character for her. Sanae was the kind of person that was always where she said she was going to be when she said she was going to be there. It was very odd that she would visit some home in Kyoto instead of just getting a cab and heading to the hotel to meet him. At least he assumed it was a home. Then he recalled being told about the Folding Screen Festival, a part of the Gion Matsuri where people opened their homes and displayed family heirlooms.  Perhaps this is part of that? he wondered. But everything felt off, wrong. 

He looked at the door again. His heart began to beat faster. Perhaps I should just get back to the hotel.  Maybe it's not her, he thought. But he knew it was her. He was confident about that, if nothing else. He knocked at the door and waited, then knocked again, harder.

No answer.

Finally he tried the handle, and finding the door unlocked, he slid it to the side. It was even darker inside than it was out, everything cast in impenetrable gloom save a small circle of starlight that shone through the door. It revealed a pair of strappy black sandals. Sanae's sandals. He recognized them.

He stepped inside, leaving the door open behind him and called out, “Konbanwa? Sumimasen...”

There was no reply but he had the sense of something moving very stealthily in the interior darkness.  

“Hello?” he called, squeezing the word out of a throat that suddenly seemed like it wanted to close shut. The sweat that had cooled him in the humid Kyoto night now felt cold and clammy on his body, and his heart was beating like a triphammer. He could actually feel the blood pulse in his temples and pounding through his chest. He thought briefly of the monster in the crowd. There was a bang from the back of the room and the shadows shifted as he jumped and spun towards the noise. Then there was a whirring, clicking sound. Something about the size of a cat was approaching him. He braced himself, all his senses telling him to turn and run, to flee this place and never return.

The thing slid smoothly into the light and he gasped.  It was a tiny man.  He held a plate with a teacup on it. The little man neared him and halted just a few inches from his legs, then suddenly bowed his head and raised his tray with a jerk, offering him the teacup. Oscar nearly screamed, but realized just as he began that this wasn't a man at all.  It was a robot. A karakuri robot – an automata from the 17th century or so made to move with whalebone springs and strings, something like an old wind up toy, only much, much more sophisticated. It had its hair styled with a topknot, like an old fashioned nobleman, and it wore a hakama and a tiny man's kimono.  The deep blue and grey of the cloth and the black hair made the white paint on its wooden face seem very pale in the small ring of light.

He laughed in relief. This must be part of the Folding Screen Festival. Sanae was having a bit of fun with him, that was all. He bent down to take the cup in both hands, and lifting it from the tray triggered the karakuri to start up again. It slowly turned around and headed back into the darkness from which it came. His eyes followed it to a slim, feminine form in the shadows that he had not been able to pick out of the darkness earlier. Thank goodness, he thought, it's her.

“Sanae?” he called. “Honey?”

“I am here, my dear one,” came a voice as hard as the slamming of a coffin lid and as cold as the air in an emptied grave. Oscar’s breath caught in his throat as the lights came on and he could see everything for the first time.

“Oh God!” he shrieked, “Oh God! Oh God!”

The Den of Lions

I. Mene: I have numbered the days of your reign and brought it to an end.


You,

Who perpetuated black science upon the human heart, the omphalos luminous

Who strides in the zephyrs that caress tresses and the gale that lashes ash trees

Who aroused me and aroused in me the desire for the numinous

Who hears prayers and petitions of others but only when delivered from their knees

Who resides in electromagnetic storms and ley lines over the kingdom of death  

Who swallows every single inhaled and every exhaled breath

Who is avalanche master, total devourer, dead reckoner, great annihilator

Who murdered three year olds with shotguns in Chicago

Who is the lord of all, killer on the dim path, lightfucker, vivid dictator

Who is the hole in everything and the reason nothing is whole



I cut the head from the granite figure of the Christ

To the chime of steel striking stone. Each blow brought sparks and light.

Then I climbed to the roof of the monastery

And pissed upon your virgin Mary.



I, Rebel angel

Maw of the wolf

Leafless tree

Black branch

Claw of hell



I who dwelt amongst dangerous angels

Who yearned for years and desired annihilation at your hands

Who begged you to strike me. I made plans

And goaded you with headless son and piss soaked bride

Who incanted atrocities that smelled of purple Columbine

Who lusted for your touch, even should it destroy

Who heard others address you familiarly

and knew the bitter hemlock taste of envy



What must I do, lord? I hear your voice sometimes and it says,

“Kill her while she sleeps. Take her breath in your hands and kill her.

Squeeze the last wisps of air from her with your fists. This is my touch.

The icy grey waters are my touch, submerge thyself.

The children are dead at Uvalde, this is my touch.

The bombs of the Liberator your grandfather flew during the first daylight raid on Berlin fell on babies, this is my touch.

The hole at the center of everything, the hole at your center, this is my touch."



I cut

Down

your son

Down

and looked

Down

his granite eyes stared back from the ground

in the parking lot in front of St. Cletus

I murdered again the Risen Jesus.

If this were but a human head I might feel

His soul flee to the great wheel

And see his eyes go cold like bloom on grapes,

Becoming monstrous, vapid shapes.

We mocked the ones who took your vows.

You were silent then. You are silent now.



We who became willing slaves to the annihilation of I

Sought your caress in the ecstasy of oblivion

The syringe is a cross and it is a nail

and it is cock and balls and it is Spear of Longinus

We who hoped in driving spike through arm and spear through side

We might be as loved as he who died



Lo, You touched my mother instead of me and gave her stigmata

Lo, I walked amongst rebel angels gathering army and armada

Lo, The dark rivulets of blood welled from the inside of her arms rather than her hands

Lo, I am a witness to sympathetic wounds inflicted by the lamb

Lo, A miracle made from blood and love's spiteful power

Lo, The lions did not devour me though I wished to be devoured.



Not even when I pissed on your bride, your virgin whore, did you answer

The evrso many prayers or strike me down so I shall strike you down so you strike me down

I want your lions to tear me apart. I want the flame to burn me.

Do you not understand this? Have you forgotten me?

 

I am Daniel,

which is you are my judge,  

You made me for prescience, to be the knower of dreams

Exile, veteran of the rebellion

Who knows the taste of dead friends and lovers:

Steven who we watched while he had a heart attack

and lingered in hospice braindead while his wife held hope

so tenderly, like tiny dandelions gifted to her by her daughters

Plum who is irrevocably lost and whose light I no longer

see or feel when I reach out in the Great Dark

Chris who I loved and fought with and who fled and 

Who I saw again only once he had been made ash

And Chris who lay for days in overdose, withered thin,

Shrinking as his muscle rotted beneath his skin.

In his casket he looked so old and so small.

Thus was I made to know the writing on the wall.





II. Tekel: You have been weighed on the scales and found wanting.


And I am lost in the woods, all is a Dionysian blur

And the frenzied maenads come upon me

And they are named: One is Alexandra and One is Galen

And they desire me and their desire saves me from monstrous murder

And they will tear me apart as they would a lost fawn and I will let them

And they poured sticky liquor on their breasts and bade me suck, 

And they said take, this is my Body, take, this is my Blood

And the hips jerk and the Body shudders in pleasure of its own accord, the Body automatic

And no input is needed from the brain at a certain stage once the I is annihilated

And Galen’s irish irises the blue grey of storm clouds reflected in the frigid river

And Alexandra’s greek eyes green like the moss of old ponds and money

And cascade of red curls, and smooth black tresses, and musk of unshaven females and their desire

And marine reek of semen and sugar of liquor

And pale and unmarked flesh, and tanned and supple flesh, and twilit morning

And they exclaim you are so rough but not too rough

And my hands against the core of them, smooth pudenda snowcaps of fat low on the Body

And they writhe in my grip and I writhe in theirs and we will leave a mark

And expressions of total excitement and affirmations chanted and eyes widened in pleasure

And they are like cats in how they luxuriate in my touch and arch their backs

And the greek girl wraps her arms about me and pushes my Body into her Body from behind

And touch and tongue and her arms about my stomach

And nipples graze my back and fingers caressing my throat

And hands on her thighs and ass she holds my wrists as she strokes my face 

And as she grabs my hair and as she kisses me and my love

And they tangle and make love to each other and to me

And the fuck goes on and on forever, world without end, until the annihilation of I

And we speak to each other in the secret language with no words

And there are only moans and the open notes of pure pleasure

And there is no way to say jealousy or hatred or property

And sursum corda, quod amantes amentes

And afterwards the greek girl strokes my arms, scarred and bitten by steel kisses

And my perfect circular scars as if I have spilled drops of hot fat or acid on them

And I show these to the corner boys and they are my pass to the underworld

And the irish girl asks me if I miss it and miss her

And I recall the annihilation of I that was delivered mainline to me through my blood

And I recall my love, my Plum, and her desire for annihilation

And how we have been in each other’s veins and annihilated I

And how we fucked each other while we lay together bleeding and lost

And she has been in my veins and I in hers

And that is a level of intimacy not soon forgotten or put aside

And yet I still exist in the scant moments between sex and dope and wrath

And in her betrayal she cannot meet my gaze and I see her death wish and how she wants to be touched

And it is god’s touch she provokes not mine and we are alike as we provoke the touch of god

And a weapon comes to me through bloodsoaked backstreets

And she will know the hand of the lord is upon her and I am but his proxy and praxis

And I will behead her and hold her head aloft by the hair and make her face me

And watch her eyes cloud over and go frigid

And watch as her light leaves and her fingers go rigid

And I want to be consumed entire and yes I do miss her, I am a coward,

And it matters not whether by poetry or love or wrath or heroin or god I am devoured





III. Upharsin: Your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persian


I encounter Mrs. South at the outer doors

In the insectoid orange of sodium lights

She has lost her keys this night



And she begins to weep and I throw my arms around her

when her grandfather died she wailed in the shower

and I entered the water clothed and held her as she cowered



She only weeps when something is beyond repair

She rocks in agony as we enter the lion’s lair

And she says she has been to the doctor and there



will never be children, no hope for her ovaries, the bulging stomach

pregnant only with tumors that stud her uterus

and we are the abomination of desolation



I see in the ash of prescience the grey days that stray away from us

And the years become the intolerable product of aimlessness

And cats who are but pale replacements



No,

        No weeping and screaming thing at 2AM

No,

        No human heart upon which to perpetuate black science

No,

        No life everlasting           No      vessel of hope to be lost

No,

        No being to love into being

        No being to love into loving

No no never never 

No no never never no no no no

No,

        No sin of fatherhood to put aside

Now,

        There is nowhere left for god to hide.



Maneless lion I,

Withered vine.

Burnt and leafless tree,

Seeker for the sign,

Black branch stripped of bark,

Repeater of the fall,

The kingdom of the lamb is dark.

I write upon heaven’s wall

In the invisible ink of our childless marriage -

(a level of intimacy not soon forgotten or put aside)

In tears torn from my wife’s broken visage:

Ego te absolve - τετέλεσται.

The Laws of Violence

The first law of violence is continuity. Once you start using violence, you cannot get away from it. Violence expresses the habit of simplification of situations, political, social, or human. And a habit cannot quickly be broken. Once a man has begun to use violence he will never stop using it, for it is so much easier and more practical than any other method. It simplifies relations with the other completely by denying that the other exists. And once you have repudiated the other, you cannot adopt a new attitude – cannot, for example, start rational dialogue with him. Violence has brought so many clear and visible results; how then go back to a way of acting that certainly looks ineffectual and seems to promise only very doubtful results? So you go on using violence, even if at first you had thought that violence would be only a temporary expedient, even if you have achieved thorough change in your own or the general political situation. […]

The second law of violence is reciprocity. It is stated in Jesus’ famous word “All who take the sword will perish by the sword” (Matthew 26:52). Let me stress two points in connection with this passage. There is the insistence on "all.” There is no distinction between a good and bad use of the sword. The sheer fact of using the sword entails this result. The law of the sword is a total law. Then, Jesus is in no sense making a moral valuation or announcing a divine intervention or a coming judgment; he simply describes the reality of what is happening. He states one of the laws of violence. Violence creates violence, begets and procreates violence. The violence of the colonialists creates the violence of the anticolonialists, which in turn exceeds that of the colonialists. Nor does victory bring any kind of freedom. Always, the victorious side splits up into clans which perpetuate violence. […] 

The man who, in whatever way, uses violence should realize that he is entering into a reciprocal kind of relation capable of being renewed indefinitely. […] The ethic of violence is a truly new ethic, permitting neither peace nor surcease. […] Violence imprisons its practitioners in a circle that cannot be broken by human means. Study of the possible results of violence shows that it will have only one certain result: the reciprocity and the reproduction of violence. Whether any other results are attained – equal rights, legitimate defense, liberation, etc. – is wholly a matter of chance, and all those results, too, are subject to the reciprocity which is one of the laws of violence.

The third law of violence is sameness. Here I shall only say that it is impossible to distinguish between justified and unjustified violence, between violence that enslaves. […] Every violence is identical with every other violence. I maintain that all kinds of violence are the same. And this is true not only of physical violence – the violence of the soldier who kills, the policeman who bludgeons, the rebel who commits arson, the revolutionary who assassinates; it is true also of economic violence – the violence of the privileged proprietor against his workers, of the “haves” against the “have-nots”; the violence done in international economic relations between our own societies and those of the Third World; the violence done through powerful corporations which exploit the resources of a country that is unable to defend itself. […]

Moreover, to say that sameness is one of the laws of violence is to say that, on the one hand, violence has no limits and, on the other, that condoning violence means condoning every kind of violence. Once you choose the way of violence, it is impossible to say, “So far and no further”; for you provoke the victim of your violence to use violence in turn, and that necessarily means using greater violence. We have seen the so-called escalation of war in Vietnam. But, mind, this “escalation” is not a result of chance or of a government’s wickedness; there never are limits to violence. When you begin to employ torture in order to get information, you cannot say: “This bit of torturing is legitimate and not too serious, but I’ll go no further.” The man who starts torturing necessarily goes to the limit; for if he decides to torture in order to get information, that information is very important; and if, having used a “reasonable” kind of torture, he does not get the information he wants, what then? He will use worse torture. The very nature of violence is such that it has no limits. We have seen that it is impossible to set up laws of warfare. Either no war happens to be going on, and then it is easy to make agreements as to the limitations that should be established; or else a war is under way, and then all agreements fall before the imperative of victory. 

Violence is hubris, fury, madness. There are no such things as major and minor violence. Violence is a single thing, and it is always the same. In this respect, too, Jesus saw the reality. He declared that there is no difference between murdering a fellow man and being angry with him or insulting him (Matthew 5:21-22). This passage is no “evangelical counsel for the converted”; it is, purely and simply, a description of the nature of violence.

Now the third aspect of this sameness that characterizes violence: once we consent to use violence ourselves, we have to consent to our adversary’s using it, too. We cannot demand to receive treatment different from that we mete out. We must understand that our own violence necessarily justifies the enemy’s, and we cannot object to his violence. […]

We must recognize, and clearly, that violence begets violence. Does anyone ask, “Who started it?” That is a false question. Since the days of Cain, there has been no beginning of violence, only a continuous process of retaliation. It is childish to suppose that today’s conditions are unprecedented, to say, “There are dangerous communists about, we must be on guard against them,” or, “This government is basely imperialistic and dictatorial, we must overthrow it.” When a man is born, violence is already there, already present in him and around him. […]

Violence begets violence — nothing else. This is the fourth law of violence. Violence is the par excellence method of falsehood. […] Whenever a violent movement has seized power, it has made violence the law of power. The only thing that has changed is the person who exercises violence. […]

Violence can never realize a noble aim, can never create liberty or justice. I repeat once more that the end does not justify the means, that, on the contrary, evil means corrupt good ends. But I repeat also: “Let the man who wants to do violence, do so; let the man who thinks there is no other way, use it; but let him know what he is doing.” That is all the Christian can ask of this man – that he be aware that violence will never establish a just society. Yes, he will get his revenge; yes, he will subdue his “enemy”; yes, he will consummate his hatred. But let him not confuse hate with justice. […]

Finally, the fifth law of violence is this: the man who uses violence always tries to justify both it and himself. Violence is so unappealing that every user of it has produced lengthy apologies to demonstrate to the people that it is just and morally warranted. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Nasser, the guerrillas, the French “paras” of the Algerian war – all tried to vindicate themselves. The plain fact is that violence is never “pure.” Always violence and hatred go together. I spoke above of the rather useless piece of advice once given Christians: that they should make war without hatred. Today it is utterly clear that violence is an expression of hatred, has its source in hatred and signifies hatred. And only a completely heartless person would be capable of simply affirming hatred, without trying to exonerate himself. […]

It is very important to be clear about this persistent longing for justification. I do not say that the practitioner of violence feels uneasy and that therefore he must be experiencing pangs of conscience; but in acting violently he is so unsure of himself that he has to have an ideological construct that will put him at ease intellectually and morally. That is why the person inclined to violence is necessarily the victim propaganda aims at; and, conversely, violence is the theme that above all others lends itself to propaganda. […]

These are the laws of violence, unchanging and inescapable. We must understand them clearly if we are to know what we are doing when we damn violence.

- From Jacques Ellul, Violence: Reflections From a Christian Perspective. New York: The Seabury Press, 1969. Chapter 3: Christian Realism in the Face of Violence.

I encountered a situation in my last game where one of my players said "..well, it's not like we haven't thought about killing babies before.  In fact, we HAVE killed babies before."  And this is true.

It made me think about the nature of violence in RPGs, and in some of my research I stumbled across the above passage, which, though rooted in religious thought, seems like a sound philosophical position to me.  The rebuttal to this position is actually contained within the text above, the idea that, "When a man is born, violence is already there, already present in him [...]"  This is what Cormac McCarthy expresses so artfully through his character of the Judge in Blood Meridian, specifically the passage that begins "Men are made for games."

Speaking of games, it is interesting to me how casually we insert violence into our games, and we do this really from the time we are quite young, before there has been a great deal of socialization.  Even without toy soldiers or guns, there are a lot of games where you might hear one child say to another, "You can't do that!  You're dead!  I killed you!"

The rejection of violence and the notion of grace are really quite new ideas in many ways.  Pre-Christian traditions nearly always had a place for violence in them, and so it is really not surprising that in most of the polytheistic societies we construct in D&D that violence is such a central element - there is nothing to oppose it in most games!  I have not personally played a non-violent RPG, and I would be interested in hearing about any such experiences anyone reading this might have had with such games.  I am also considering inserting a nonviolent mystical tradition in my game to see how my players deal with the notion of someone who is nonviolent but believes utterly that they are morally correct and is determined to carry through on some course detrimental to the PCs.

I think I still have The Book of Exalted Deeds somewhere and that may be worth revisiting.  I do think it would be interesting to run a game where there was a PC or multiple PCs dedicated to the notion of nonviolence in a world where violence is a given.  How might that play out?  It's easy to be cynical and say it ends with the first encounter with footpads the group has, where some thug merrily slits all their throats, but I'm not so sure that has to be true.

Another type of character that has always appealed to me is the "shriven killer."  This is the character who has, at the beginning of the story, recognized all the truths expressed in the passage above and is leading a life of nonviolence, but chooses to return to violence (usually at the climax of the story) with the full philosophical knowledge of what he does.  The dramatic tension and release built in this kind of story is undeniably powerful.  I think of William Munny in Unforgiven, or Nanashi from Sword of the Stranger or Kenshin in Samurai X.  I would be interested to see how this might play out in a game as well, though implementation might be difficult!

There Are Only Good People Here: Musings on Alignment and Sin in D&D, Fiction, and Life

I know this isn’t a new thought, but as I have aged, I have begun to have a hard time with the D&D alignment system. I’ve been trying to think of alternatives. One idea was a graph where you had evil/good and law/chaos axes and you plotted out a graph to determine current and median alignments. I like this idea and the idea that PCs start unaligned – this idea was implemented wonderfully in Planescape: Torment, and I was initially thinking about something like that. But that’s a lot of work. In some ways I’m tempted to ignore alignment altogether but it’s so heavily built into the framework of D&D that it is incredibly difficult to get rid of.

One of the problems that comes up is the use of magic in “detecting” alignments. Of course, you could simply do away with such spells. But this brings me to another thought. What about the pervasive use of detect evil used by communities to keep evil people out? Detect evil is a fairly low level spell in most systems. I tend to like low-magic settings, but even in those, it isn’t impossible that a place might set up some system where they use Detect Evil to determine who is allowed in, who is not, who is exiled, etc. The question then becomes “what constitutes evil?” Are beings inherently evil? Are they born that way? If so, would “evil” babies be left in the wilderness to die ala the Spartans casting children into the chasm at the foot of Mount Taygetus?

Or is it acts that make one evil? And if so, how does the practice of leaving babies to die of exposure impact the alignment of the person that does so? Would such an action make the perpetrators evil? If so, would they be expelled to die in the wilderness as well? What about actions that are unintentional? You intended to rob someone to get just enough food to eat, but as you approached with your dagger, you were so keyed up and scared you weren’t looking where you were putting your feet. You trip over a root and plunge your dagger into someone’s heart. Congrats, you are now a murderer! I have been binge watching true crime shows, and it turns out most murders are totally idiotic. Many of them are exactly this kind of thing, where someone has so much anxiety about what they are about to do that they wind up screwing up and shooting the person they are about to mug, often running away afterwards without actually achieving their aim of taking their victim’s money! Having done such a thing, are you now evil?

How would such a society function, knowing that everyone was good? Would unlimited credit be extended because all knew that the person being extended the credit would do anything they could to pay it back? What if that person wound up stealing (perhaps from someone “evil”) to pay back their debts?

I’ve come to the conclusion that true evil in real life is pretty rare. I think one of the reasons I have always kind of liked Vonnegut's work is because none of his characters are evil. There are no “bad guys.” Even Dwane Hoover in Breakfast of Champions is simply ill, not evil. The human need for archetypes and narrative often makes us think in terms of enemies who are evil. You have but to look around you to see how that has been exploited to drive people apart (I’m in the US and it is especially apparent here right now, but it happens everywhere) so it's interesting to me to read fiction where this need for a "bad guy" is ignored. This leaves us at the mercy of the universe, which is an uncomfortable place to be, and I think it's this which drives that need in the first place.

I think what I may do the next time I run a campaign is use the idea that alignment is acquired, but instead of setting up an axis and gradually plotting alignment to create a spectrum, I’ll do it this way – true good or evil is RARE. I really like this quote (very slightly altered by yours truly from the original, but faithful to the meaning I think) from Arthur Machen’s The White People as a way to explain what I mean:

“...the essence of sin is in… the taking of Heaven by storm… an attempt to penetrate into another and higher sphere in a forbidden manner. There are few, indeed, who wish to penetrate into other spheres, higher or lower, in ways allowed or forbidden. Men, in the mass, are amply content with life as they find it. Therefore there are few saints, and sinners (in the proper sense) are fewer still, and men of genius, who partake sometimes of each character, are rare also. Yes; on the whole, it is, perhaps, harder to be a great sinner than a great saint. The saint endeavors to recover a gift which he has lost; the sinner tries to obtain something which was never his. In brief, he repeats the Fall.”

PCs start unaligned. Most creatures, in fact, have no alignment. It is possible, though rare, to acquire an evil alignment through “repeating the Fall.” This way of doing things feels right to me – something like a lich has “attempted to penetrate into another and higher sphere in a forbidden manner.” In giving himself immortality, something that belongs to the divine and which he never had a right to, he has attempted to take Heaven by force. THIS is the kind of act that could give a creature an alignment. Similarly, you can acquire a good alignment by endeavoring to recover a gift which you have lost. The gift here is not some tawdry physical thing, but rather the kind of innocence in which you are willing to sacrifice yourself for something greater. That is the gift that people lose. Thus, though I don’t think martyrdom is the only way to achieve sainthood, such a thing IS generally reserved for the martyr. I realize that this is a very Christian way to look at evil and sin, but it would be easy enough to modify for a polytheistic society - the main point is that sin is an attempt to take divinity by force.

You could make an argument that the aforementioned hypothetical in which someone goes to rob another person and winds up killing them, or even the very act of robbery, the assertion of one will over another, is taking of something by force, and if you believe that human beings have a spark of the divine, that this in some way repeats "the Fall." However, I’m reminded of another quote, this one from Terry Pratchett’s character Granny Weatherwax, on the nature of sin. From Carpe Jugulum. I love Pratchett because for all the silly humor, there’s a lot of really profound things he says through his characters.

“...Sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”

The character she is talking to begins to answer that he is sure there are worse things, and Granny answers,

“But they starts with thinking about people as things.”

This definition of sin has a lot to recommend it – I think it is one of the best I have ever heard. Certainly I think the confusion of people and things leads to a lot of unhappiness! But in the same passage, Granny (much like Kurt Vonnegut) indicates that there are no bad guys, as such. The priest she is talking to tells her that the issue of sin (and therefore evil) is not as black and white as she makes it out to be, and that there are shades of grey, to which she responds:

“There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby.”

Most of us live somewhere in this state of “grubbiness,” I think, or as Machen puts it, “Men, in the mass, are amply content with life as they find it.” And I think most beings inhabiting a D&D world would live in that state as well. This brings me back to the rarity of the true sinner or saint. “Grubbiness” can be cleaned up. Perhaps through forgiveness, perhaps through acts of atonement, but there are sins with a small s that can be washed away. What Machen is talking about is Sin with a capital S – the truly unforgiveable, which is incredibly rare, something so foul and monstrous that it transforms the being who commits it in the same way that a man is transformed into a saint through the embodiment of pure and good that is as far beyond the mundane as its evil counterpart. An affront to a god rather than a human being.

I rather think that most players who “acquire” an alignment of either the good or evil variety in this world would probably have to be retired... IF they still lived!