Jezebel Shall Be Like Dung in the Field: A Visualization Exercise On Modern Death

| 16 Feb 2015 | 05:37

Bad as it is (and I think it is mostly pretty awful), you can still learn something from tv. For instance, I saw a docutainment about the death of Marilyn Monroe.

I noticed when I was a boy that Marilyn Monroe was always trying, but never quite succeeding, to let me see her breasts. I mean, I saw parts of her breasts that allowed me to imagine that there was more, but she never managed to contrive a means of allowing me to see the whole, the all-in-all of her breasts. But boy did I want to! I think if she had lived longer she would have gotten there. It really did seem pretty important to her. That thought consoles me to a degree. It is kind of women all over the internet?especially hotcampussbabes?to very quickly get to the point and show me all of their breasts. But there's something sad and insufficient about them. For most North Americans, the infinity of breasts available to them as pornography merely supplements the absence of Marilyn's ultimate breasts. Marilyn's breasts are the ur-breasts, the "raw" breasts, the Genesis of breasts, and hence the only real breasts in all of human history. Even when she leaned way over that famous Academy Award table, laughing, her gown cut low in front, nearly to her ankles, you couldn't quite see. What the hell is the matter with cameras, anyway? Can cameras fail or refuse to see what is revealed? Is it like the snapshot of God that you rush to the 24-hour developer booth only to see that the whole roll is overexposed!? She was never quite able to reveal the "artifice of eternity."

Now, I know that Marilyn had sex with both John and Robert Kennedy. So they surely saw her breasts. Which is the reason they had to die, according to Yahwist sources. It was sort of like when the people of Sodom came to Lot demanding that he let them fuck the Angels of God. This people was so fallen that they not only fucked everybody else (except, apparently, Lot, his wife and daughters?and what was wrong with them?), but they demanded the right to fuck the heavenly beings sent to kill them. It's a funny last wish, no? "We want to fuck those guys!" "But those guys were sent to kill you!" "We don't care about that. Send them out here!"

Brief Inter-Jezebellum Divagation

I hope that the myths about your life "passing before your eyes" in your last moment are not true. No wonder people are afraid of dying! We shouldn't have to go through this stuff twice. I hope that what really happens is that your entire record collection, all of it, rock, jazz and classical, and your favorite Stevens and Yeats poems, get fast-forwarded, or dubbed, or downloaded before you head off for the Great Wringer. 'Cause that's why they put you through the Great Wringer again. It's a machine like those old clothes washers, only a lot bigger. All of that earthly beauty and wisdom gets left behind, enriching infinite space. If heaven is in fact good, this is why: the residue of our happiest experiences of beauty are there. Imagine this accumulation over centuries! Think of all the people who have ever loved Mozart's Requiem, re-hearing that beauty in the Beyond, how subtle and rich (how "faithful," as audiophiles say) that music becomes over the eons.

Which is why TV is evil. It threatens to pollute heaven. When prime-time viewers go through the Great Wringer, a viscous, black, oily substance is left behind. A thick tenacious goo. It's the Exxon Valdez on a cosmic scale. It is an incredibly sad thing for God who has to live up there, after all.

Jezebel Shall Be Like Dung cont.

So, anyway, Marilyn had sex with John and Robert (Bobby). I've seen pornographic movies where a woman blows two men at once. This notion inevitably occurs, but it is really just a distraction. Pay it no heed. I know you've seen the same damned thing, or can imagine having seen the same damned thing, which is the same damned thing, but in this circumstance pay it no heed. It's like in Zen practice where you're supposed to be just breathing. Not thinking. Until you're pure breath. The thought of Marilyn and John and Bobby in a pornographic scenario is just a mean distraction. Don't think about it.

Stop it!

I remember once reading a story in Life magazine about the charmed circle of the Kennedys. The Camelot crapola. And this article reported that one day John F. Kennedy was walking past the White House kitchen and for no reason at all, except his unbelievable kindness, he poked his head in the door (I'll bet it was a swinging door and painted white) and said, "What's the soup, Cookie?"

"What's the soup, Cookie?" he said. Just like that.

He was a "king" who cared about his little people, even the people called Cookie. Life magazine made me love the President with that one narrative aside. Now, however, I'm troubled by the idea that the name "Cookie" was just a generic name for a cook. (And a diminutive at that.) John Kennedy didn't know this person's name. He had never poked his head through this door before. He didn't even know it was the fucking kitchen. He was extemporizing for the reporter. Ad-libbing in his usual inspired way. This is how doubt and cynicism infiltrate and contaminate faith.

We do not know what the soup was on that day. Corn chowder? Something New England, no doubt. It's stupid to speculate. One way or the other, this is a long-gone soup. Nothing of this soup remains, regardless of the skill and care of the chef, Mr. Cookie. Even if there were, say, a photograph of the soup, we could only look at it and say, "Surely, this soup is dead. This is a dead soup."

Marilyn. John. Bobby. This so-called "docutainment" concentrated on the absolute lowest aspects of their drama, making it very difficult to absorb (I think that's the right word) the beauty and wisdom. We are told that she wished to be the First Lady. She would dance around her little house and sing, "I'm the First Lady" to the tune of "I Feel Pretty." Being a celebrity wasn't enough. Being the Goddess of Breasts wasn't enough. When she was First Lady, people would take her "seriously." (Which was a very silly thing to want. As an acolyte to previously mentioned mammary mysteries, I can say that I took her very seriously and there were many more like me, brothers and sisters!) But Jimmy Hoffa began bugging the Peter Lawford home where the Kennedys and Marilyn would meet for their fun and games. Hoffa was gathering evidence that he could one day use against them in order to save racketeering in America. Another noble pursuit.

(So, think about it. Hoffa may actually have had at least an audio version of our above-speculated pornographic scenario. Think what that would bring at an eBay auction! Interesting but threatening to meditative equipoise.)

One day, the Kennedys began to feel that Marilyn was a potential liability. John quit her. Bobby tried to maintain the relationship (as who wouldn't!), but Marilyn began drinking and drugging. The First Lady fantasy was getting difficult to maintain. She was receiving threatening phone calls (from whom?!) and being shadowed by the mob. Everything she touched felt "bugged." The entire world was one large invasion of her sense of self. She felt contaminated, polluted. She was being raped. By bugs! Only the idea that at least one of the Kennedys still loved her kept alive the hope of some kind of happiness.

"What's the soup, Cookie?"

Well, finally even Bobby had to say enough is enough. So one day when he was in L.A. and didn't want to have to deal with Marilyn, he asked his buddies Lawford and Frank Sinatra to pretty please take her out of town up to Lake Tahoe and the Cal-Neva Lodge, which Sinatra owned. Just keep her out of the way, wouldja? Forty-eight hours. No biggie. She's a grown up, you're her friends, so it's not really kidnapping. (Just like all those bugs weren't really raping her.)

But she wasn't that dumb. She figured out what was going on. She was essentially a prisoner. So she said, "okay, just give me some drugs and I'll get through this weekend or die, which ever comes first." She was fucking disgustingly smashed on pills and booze. Just ask the airplane pilot who took them out there. Bloated. Near unconscious. Probably drooling. To see her breasts in that moment would have ruined everything.

Saturday night they went to dinner to see Frank's show. He was up there singing, "Let's fly away, let's fly let's fly away." Oh fuck that son of a bitch hypocrite! Fly this up your ass, you mob go-for. Then there was Peter Lawford smiling his ass off. Just that smile in itself is something to hold against a guy like that. The world is going to shit (just ask Marilyn; Marilyn?; honey, wake up!) and this joker is smiling. Then there was Lawford's wife, the Kennedy, John and Bobby's sister. Now, really, if we concentrate on this one detail intensely enough?a young woman of the Kennedy family would marry this smiley, vain, celebrity joker?we should see the utter dysfunction of the family, the horror of the future, and the reason why God once got so depressed that he said, "I am sorry that I made them" (Genesis 6:6).

Like why he made the smiley fuck Lawford.

But there are more details here. Sinatra also invited his pal Sam Giancana to this little dinner show. So there you've got the infinitely cynical Sinatra, for whom "friends" are "friends" (never mind that they're Kennedys and Mafia), you've got the sister and the lover of the Attorney General out to break this same Giancana and his mob, and Giancana himself sitting there thinking, "I'm gonna kill your boyfriend. I'm gonna fuck you, movie star. Tits. No, I'm gonna find someone else to fuck you, because I hate drunk women. Even if their boobs are mystical. Hoffa will fuck you. That guy's an animal. He's got a stronger stomach than I do. I'm too delicate. And I'm gonna kill your brother" (he gestures with his little martini glass at Mrs. Lawford née Kennedy) "and any other Kennedy goombah who fucks with me. Then I'll personally fuck you, unless you're more like this blonde bimbo than you seem. But no, you're one of these icy Kennedy babes. That's why you can even sit at this table as I consider the death of your brothers, and the rest of you smiley fucks, especially you, Lawford, who are not only a drunken smiley fuck but talentless as well. As for Frank, well, he's paisan, country, and homestyle. He's the true master of this situation. And that ain't no smile on his face. That's showbiz. That's professional. I respect that. Therefore, he's no smiley fuck who deserves to die. No. In the end, I like Frank. He's the kind of guy who gets to live a long time."

But then Mr. Giancana scowled and looked back at Marilyn in her boozy slump. And his last thought: "Okay, let's see them tits then, you blowsy souse, cuz I'm sick of them Kennedys lording them over me."

No, I don't know that this is what Giancana thought, but he was there (just watch the docutainment that I saw on tv) and he must have had some thoughts and how could he not think of sex and murder while sitting with Marilyn and a Kennedy?

Trust me on this one.

So, one more visualization exercise. This is how we make history real. It has been "Revealed" (faith comes from belief in or confidence in Revelation) that on the night of her death a murderer visited Marilyn. But who? A representative of the Kennedys? (At that moment, Bobby was playing touch football on a hillside to the east of San Francisco. In my opinion, that's trying too hard to be too innocent.) A mob hit man? You choose. But what we have to imagine is the moment in which this murderer inserted a barbiturate suppository in Marilyn's ass. There is a Shakespearean and unimaginable hardness here in the thought of the human being that could be this cruel, this sacrilegious. "I cannot eat oats or pull a cart, but if it is man's work, I'll do it." And off goes the innocent and lovely Cordelia into the Great Wringer and it's still a century before Mozart can offer some comfort. Same thing here. Hoffa says, "Gus, I got a little job for you in L.A." Next thing, ol' Gus has got a gun to Marilyn's head and with his other hand he's sticking an overdose in her ass. God that sounds bad.

I'm sorry, this is a severe thing I'm asking of you, I know, but if you are to realize the truth of this murderous World-Unto-Death you must visualize the bulky fingers, the slippery suppository, the gentle push, now a little harder against the resistance of her sphincter.

See it?

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