January 23 - Saint Denis of Enlightened Largesse, Poetic Journalism and Encyclopedic Acceptance

Intelligent, ardent, effusive, eloquent, never at home, always abroad; or if it happened that he received others at his home and amid his own ideas, then he was the most open-hearted, the most hospitable of mortals, the most friendly to all men and to everything, and gave to all his circle, readers no less than authors or artists, not a lesson but a fête.  He taught us three things:  the hope for posthumous fame in this world to replace the promised immortality which theology had located in the next; the chaotic irreducible relation between all objects and concepts; that ideas must be released from their mental chains to swarm in the natural freedom of the body.

In Langres France in the eighteenth century, a girl craved knowledge.  She fell asleep praying for it.  Then she would dream, night after night, of squawking screeching birds—some eagles, some vultures; others sparrows, ostriches—spiraling up a great column to an unseen canopy in Paradise.  She’d wake in ferocious sweats, and doves and songbirds would sit on her shoulder and sing to her and comfort her.   During one especially virulent dream, as birds thicker than death were shrieking on her tomb, the girl's cranium opened, exposing her throbbing brain, and an eagle of truth dropped a significant steaming turd into it.

Other birds noisily joined--the Berlepsch's Tinamou, Rufous-bellied Chachalaca, Vanuatu Scrubfowl, Handsome Francolin, Chinese Bamboo-Partridge, Satyr Tragopan, Moustached Puffbird, Cayenne Nightjar, Reunion Solitaire, Boat-billed Tody-Bully, Crested Shrike-wit, Hairy-backed Bulbul, Scaly-breasted Illadopsis-Babbler, Palawan Flowerpecker, Uluguru Violet-backed Sunbird, Donaldson Smith’s Social-Weaver, Slut-faced Hemispingus, Violaceous-rumped Euphonia, Pyrrhuloxia, and Giant Cowbird-Bobolink--all these and thousands more deposited their avian waste into her open skull.  Nine months later, on October 5 1713, she delivered a babbling Saint Denis from her brain.

While usually journalism is antithetical to sainthood—journalists being the boors and pedants of creation—St. Denis elevated curiosity and truth-seeking to aesthetic heights and embodied philosophy for a future age.  On July 31 1784, just outside Le Coude Fou on rue du Bourg-Tibourg, while telling nested stories to passersby and plotting a revenge, St. Denis was changed to a pillar of merde and brought by Persephone Herself down to Hades, where he was placed by the most polluted section of the Styx, where he still stands.

The Council of I elevated St. Denis to sainthood on July 26 2000 after two centuries of unbroken futile debate, not through consensus but exhaustion.  We honor him today because on this day in 1797 his daughter, Angélique de Vandeul, became a fatalist, as was written up above.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.

Reveries and Prayers: Attributes and Principles of the Child of God

Attributes of the Child of God:

1. Doesn’t care for society
2. Is an exile in the world, given to another world that doesn’t exist to exist most fully in this world
3. Follows his heart without regard for consequence
4. Is animated by and animates everything around him
5. Never urinates standing up
6. Longs for worldly success but will never once deviate from these attributes and principles to achieve his longing
7. Knows that love is the dead and yet-to-be children of God chatting across time and space
8. Lives for love
9. Stays vulnerable—emotionally, financially, intellectually, socially—all the time
10. Is both the wind (a wind) and an object in the wind

Principles of the Child of God:

1. Most humans are more animal than animals
2. Children are the most human, all of life’s a crawling back
3. Myth, as the abiding truth, is constantly more real than history
4. Gas is the superior, pure, and noble state, liquid is imperfect, solids are evil
5. There’s only one day
6. The only masters are the clouds, the only slaves are those who answer their phones
7. Time weeps, but myth laughs
8. Beauty isn’t the only truth, it’s the only fiction
9. Farts are less transient than God’s children
10. If work isn’t play, it isn’t worth doing

Reveries and Prayers

Xavier Xavier de Xavier was a Vergobret crucified in Belgica Prima by his Council for taking certain Druidic practices beyond what was deemed acceptable by the tribe.  While he was dying—and the Guinness World Tortures lists his CDT (crucifixion death time) as the longest in civilization, clocking in at a whopping 21 years, 9 months, 12 days, 3 hours, 17 minutes, and 51 seconds—he dictated Reveries and Prayers to a local supporter.  While only fragments remain, it seems apparent that Xavier’s work consists of 81 pieces, radically different in form and orientation, direct utterances of the convulsing spirit, ecstatic and dolorous on the ridge between life and death.  The Secular Sadoo is pleased to bring, under impulse, the more-or-less comprehensible fragments to its readership and likewise thanks Google Translate for translating from Gaulish to English.

We'll try to begin tomorrow with our first fragment, before returning on January 23rd to the Proper of Saints, on which we celebrate the Feast Day of Diderot.

January 19 - Saint William, Mythmonger, Silliman, Poet

Far, far away, a long time ago, in a hut made of potatoes overlooking the shelly Sligeach, lived a bitter sentimental woman with her 23 children and drunken husband.  The last of the litter, an ethereal runt who survived only because he began eating the walls, was named not by dad, who was long past being able to name anything, nor by mom, who only called him tuilli cac, but by a pleasant gathering of … well …

Sometime before he was named or numbered, when the sky was lightly leaping through a pack of clouds and the sun was chomping on a distant rainbow, Táin Bó Cúailnge felt herself desiring a child.  Lithe as love she was, and just as wily.  She gathered her friends, Old Yellow Lecan and Druimm Snechta, and said, We cannot breed the way humans do, which is good, because who would want a man anyway?  And the three cackled lightly, to the detriment of a few nearby stars and roses.  Which is bad, because it means when we want a shiny cutsie baby to play catch with, or to pitch through an eclipse to see it shatter, we don’t have one.

We have the dindshenchas, said Druimm Snechta.  And Old Yellow Lecan said, Yea Yo Yeah Ya Yui.

It’s true.  But the dindshenchas only assume human form and only pretend to explode.  If they don’t feel like screaming, they don’t, because they’re not really scared of us.  They’re only good in certain moods and times and rhythms and lights and feels and wants and airs.  Plus … and here she paused to allow the darkness to take form and wrap itself around her … we cannot send the dindshenchas back to earth stuffed with the magic to upset and the silliness to confuse.

And so Táin Bó Cúailnge’s true intent became obvious, which delighted her companions.  They ordered a flock of flaming meteors and took off their bright fashions and danced until their little feet sizzled with naughtiness.

And who would have guessed that on their earthbabe hunt they flitted up Sligeach disguised as snails?  And who could have known that they found a babe so undecided between life and death that they almost thought it was their own?

They returned with the wraith-boy to their wimsy kingdom.  Táin Bó Cúailnge stood on Venus and Druimm Snechta on Jupiter and Old Yellow Lecan on Pluto, and they tossed the human faster than light between themselves.  They threw him hard through galactic eclipses and he exploded the way an earthboy should.  I haven’t had so much fun in moonbeans, said Táin Bó Cúailnge.  He’s better than the dindshenchas, he screams, said Druimm Snechta.  Yea Yo Yeah Ya Yui, said Old Yellow Lecan.

But when the time came that the boy started growing hair where there was once only smoothness, that his voice started clambering down the ladder of sin, Táin Bó Cúailnge said, He is becoming a man.  And they sang the Ugh Ugh Song and got to work.  They replaced his soul with Lebor Gabála Érenn, his heart with Tir na nOg, his genitals with Lebor na Nuachongbála and his brain with Oidheadh Clainne Lir.  They filled his veins with monkeypiss and gave him three extra toes as a joke.  St. William he was named, and the number 0 he was given, and he was sent back to the rational planet, escorted by Hy Many, Ballymote, and Fermoy, to make sure he didn’t escape.  He landed on June 13 1865 in the home of John and Susan, where he was fed properly and exposed to the blue and mannered order of the world.

Now I would like to ask you something, biped.  I want you to judge between the heavens and the earth.  Who could have done more to form a poet than the faeries?  Wherefore, when I look on earth for swooning sounds, does it bring forth only clunks?  I will tell you what I will do to poets who think rocks make good poems:  I’ll fill them with rocks and send them to neveretherland for pixies to dance on.  I will command the world to praise them for a second and forget them forever.  For the people of earth look for animation, but—only tedium; for inspiration, but—journalism.

St. William’s life was chaotic, his art metered.  His life was messy, his art pure.  His life looked to the future, his art the past.  His life was silly, his art serious.  His body was owned by the earth, his soul by the cackling creatures who named him.  After his mortal death on January 28 1939, a few strange wailers slunk to Sligo, singing,

Earth to earth and dust to dust

The beauty the beauty the beauty of it all.

Birth to birth and lust to lust

The beauty the booty the duty of it all.

Yea Yo Yeah Ya Yui.

After his mortal death, the faeries died and Romance swooned before her lover cold.  Ireland grew weak and Unity divorced Fantasy and Venus was just Venus and Leda was no swan.

After his mortal death, the Council of I deliberated the question of elevation—who could elevate this saint since he never really descended?—and finally concluded on April 27 1953 that, while he couldn’t be elevated, he could be left where he was, bouncing on the soft heather of the milky heights.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.

January 15 - Saint Wolfgang of the Aphoristic Werthers

It is common for saints, like others, to be bred from the union of male power and female lechery, politics and poetry.  However, in rare cases they are the product of lechery and lechery, a Sapphist extravaganza.  So it was with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, born in Frankfurt am Main to Katherine Elisabeth Textor, an older lady of the cloth, and Ulrike von Levetzow, a younger woman of the flesh.  They met for one night where words and ideas failed on a bed of blooming lemons, after which Ulrike died and Wolfgang was brought forth from his mother's right breast on August 28 1749.  After troubles at school, he received at home an exceptionally wide education. At the age of 16, he began to study law at Leipzig University.

St. Wolfgang was a curious son of chaos, who was not omniscient but knew a lot.  Deciding early to be a hammer not an anvil, he refused to know himself and erred in proportion to his striving.  He received roots and wings from Helen of Troy on his 26^th birthday and subsequently enjoyed what he could and what he had to.  In addition to a tasteful imagination, he never placed things that matter least at the mercy of things that matter most.  Shaped and fashioned by what he loved, his life was simpler than you think and more complex than you imagine.  Widely criticized, he neither protested nor defended himself, but acted in spite of his detractors, who gradually yielded to him.  Part of that Power which always wills evil and always procures good, he attained a happiness which he did not deserve and which he would not have changed with anything in life.  At the end, when he had grasped by art all that he had felt, when he was too old for mere amusement, too young to be without desire, specifically on March 22 1832 in Weimar, Ulrike von Levetzow descended from Heaven, grasped St. Wolfgang between her buttocks and took him to the Lēsvos in the sky.

A Wolfgang of all trades, he was a secular prophet and a pithy generator of wisdom; his very body was the bridge between Enlightenment and Romanticism, his spirit the chasm of modernity.  He loved more than he was loved and was more the text of a zeitgeist than the author of a text.  He paved the aphoristic way to Heaven and foretold and incarnated life's domination over art through his subjugation to the eternal Muse.

We honor the saint today for Gérard de Nerval completed his French translation of Faust on this day in 1828 and experienced his first nervous breakdown on the same day in 1841.  The Council of I elevated him to sainthood on April 20 1889.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh. 

January 13 - Malfeasance of Children

When is the child born, why does the child die?

Is the child born on its mother’s tears?

Does the child die in her secret smile?

The child rose from its bed of play,

saw the shy world hiding, said, Come here,

I’m a princess and you’re a crocodile.

The world said, Sure, I was bored anyway,

but you be the croc and I’ll be a deer;

let’s rickshaw to China then skate on the Nile.

The two friends wandered that day,

ate rabbit delight and elephant ears,

composed a petunia and put broccoli on trial.

It wasn’t as if their mothers or they

hadn’t heard of textbooks, ethics or years,

but that that diet wasn’t their style.

You possibly haven’t or possibly may

have heard of a place where everything’s weird;

it’s not very far--just none or woo miles.

The world said, Well, it’s time to go away.

I’ve got commitments, I need a beer,

my voicemail’s ringing, which makes me feel virile.

The child lay down on a bed of grey,

saw shadows fighting her electric fears,

dreamt that night of God, gold and guile.

The child is born on the wing of a word.

The child dies when it first denies.

January 10 - Saint Thomas and the BCPs

Agnes Hatfield was a virgin of the highest order; with both her biological and spiritual hymens intact, she longed only for the fiery phallus of God to fill her core.  She imagined God’s member as the pillar of fire which led the Israelites by night through the Egyptian desert--8100 cubits high, with the density of a Pharaoh and a temperature that made the sun an ice cube.  One night during Complin, on her knees and filled with thoughts of God, the candle by her bedside grew in wisdom and in stature and spoke to her, saying, Agnes, get thee on thy bed and raise thy petticoats; I shall fill thee with manifold Tongues of Fire.  And Agnes, being pious, obeyed, and the night unfolded according to the candle's counsel.  The substance of her desire was Thomas Cranmer, brought into the world in great pain and peril in 1489.

St. Thomas was educated at Cambridge from the age of 14 and, in 1530, became Archdeacon of Taunton, during which tenure he had a tryst with his lifelong muse, Catherine of Aragon.  He wrote one of three texts that decided the future of a world language and for this primal contribution he suffered agony and anguish in doubts and compromises, he wavered like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed, he reluctantly sacrificed the blood of many lesser Englishmen, he was marched, deathly pale, to the stake outside Balliol College, Oxford, on a wet and blustery Saturday in March 1556.

His text reached forward to an age of English domination and vernacular democracy, reached backward to the cadences of faith, down to the roots of human imperfection, it reached up to the destroying flames of God.  Such is the spirit and substance of all holiness.  We honor the saint today for this is the day of his first conjugal relation with his muse on the windowsill of the Second Turret of the King’s Guard and the dictation of The Order for Copulation; the Council of I elevated him to sainthood on May 22 1980.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.