And on the Eighth Day ... They Wrote it Down

A subject for a great poet would be God's boredom after the seventh day of creation.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900)

Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror.
D. H. Lawrence (1885 – 1930)

ULTIMATE TRUTHS are those that we reject first of all. It is the Great Lies that one draws to one’s bosom and allows to burn there, a cold confusion, a universal counterfeit currency. I have seen young mothers whispering poisoned verses to their tiny, scarcely-formed children, held up to the crowd: “Tell them you know this [or that] is true.” Sometimes the little boy or little girl struggles and weeps, and refuses to speak, and must be put down to toddle back to its seat. There is wisdom. One hopes that the day or night will come when the child runs outside, stands below the sky, beneath creation, and listens not to its mother, but to all that it observes by eye, ear, taste or touch.

This week it has been reported that the Hubble Space Telescope is studying an enormous green blob in distant outer space. The news reports use words like “mysterious”, “bizarre”, “gigantic” and “strangely alive”, the panic headlines of a 1950s science fiction B-Movie.

The great green blob has a name: Hanny’s Voorwerp. The blob is the size of the Milky Way Galaxy, 650 million light years (each light year is six trillion miles, if you care) away from us, and it is giving birth to new stars as parts of the blob collapse and result in pressure enough to create stars. It’s mostly hydrogen gas swirling about from a close encounter with two galaxies, and is illuminated by a quasar, a bright object full of energy supplied by a black hole.

Ms Hanny van Arkel, a Dutch elementary school teacher, first spotted the phenomenon in 2007 while studying archived photographs. She says that the blob originally appeared to be a blue smudge; now it seems more like a vast green (wait for it!) dancing frog. If that worries you, take a deep breath, Ms Arkel has discovered that the frog not only has limbs, but eyes.

And there it is, creation observed over the past three or four years: A gaseous frog god named Hanny’s Voorwerp spewing stars, lit by a quasar powered by a black hole. If it had not been on the morning and evening news, one might have missed it. Worlds without end (or beginning). Amen.

Let’s talk about sexual creation. Hanny’s Voorwerp is a tale waiting to be told: grand green sex, but it is the business of the religious amongst us to sort that out; I just scribble on Post-it Notes and write a thousand or so words from time to time on what I might have seen or heard in the light or dark. I struggle free from my parent, and run outside in tears having not said: “I know this [or that] is true.”

The Ancient Egyptians were creative and inventive, and wrote things down. Their histories on the walls of their tombs and temples, and on papyrus scrolls that have survived the souvenir-hunting tourists and the uncomfortable, yet looting Victorian explorers, give varying versions of the creation of the Universe.

According to Egyptian tradition, the god Amun [also spelled Amen, Amon and Ammon] existed alone, all alone, in an aqueous sort of world before there were time and times. This First Being was described as an attractively-built, human-like male wearing a crown depicting a goat’s head. Amun’s symbol was the always randy, sexually insatiable ram. The eminent Victorian explorers, scientists and Egyptologists destroyed, damaged and hid references to the Amun creation cult. Here’s why.

Lonesome Amun created the universe sexually. He masturbated and ejaculated into his hand, drank his own semen and so impregnated himself. Following this monotheistic sexual act, Amun spat out Geb, the (male) Earth-God and Nut, the (female) Sky-Goddess, who then copulated heterosexually and produced the rest of the gods and their mortal offspring. That’s the way they saw it.

The Egyptian Pharaohs with their royal wives would re-enact Amun’s creation, the Pharaoh of the day would get inside a hollowed-out statue of Amun, including a hollow penis, and go to it.

You might find, in your research, that the First God was called Atum rather than Amun, and after ejaculating directly into his own mouth he spewed out Shu (male) and Tefnut (female), the rest of the story is the same.

The Egyptian priestly class was not the only one to act out the Creation Story. I myself have attended a session in a Mormon temple [in St George, Utah, if you care] which featured snakes and altars; Adamic-language chants; really strange, mysterious, bizarre clothing; signs and symbols (Mormon temples have been called the International House of Handshakes); lights and mirrors, washings and anointings. There are suns, moons and stars and many gods. This is called “Temple Work” and is considered to be surrogacy. One of the Mormon Holy Scriptures, The Book of Abraham from The Pearl of Great Price, was [Joseph Smith said] a translation from an Egyptian papyrus retrieved from the wrapping around a mummy in a travelling road-show. The Mormon Temple Ceremony is not quite as interesting as the Amun offerings would have been, but you are just as knackered after two hours of it.

We have scientists that postulate a creation from a Big Bang. From nothing to everything in almost no time at all (there being no time). This is akin to Amun, is it not? There are many religious folks who consider any form of science to be sinful. In fact, they consider anything outside the Christian Bible to be the work of the Devil. Never mind the Bible is convoluted, confused, contradictory and badly constructed. The latest translations have even destroyed the glorious language of the King James Version. Christian sects are at war with one another. A preacher threatens: “Tell them you know this [or that] is true. Or it’s hell for you!”

Run outside, boys and girls, and take your parents and grandparents. There are tadpoles falling from the heavens, and the sap is rising.

Warwick Camp

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness ... So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth ... And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
Genesis 1: 26-28, 31

Well, we all shine on,

Everyone, c'mon.

Instant Karma's gonna get you.

John Lennon (Instant Karma)

ONE REMEMBERS THE ODDEST THINGS. I cannot recall the obvious things. If I go to the minimart without a shopping list thinking to get Fairy original, chances are I’ll come home with Strawberry Ribena and will rediscover I am out of dishwashing liquid when it comes time to rinse out my glass. As I did just yesterday.

When I was almost fourteen, September 1963, all the boys in my form, the Lower Fifth, were drafted into the school’s Cadet Corps. I was a bit younger than most of my male classmates as I’d skipped a few forms during years of some brilliance. The bright lights had dimmed in my head, and there I was with lads of fourteen and even fifteen hearing that we had to gather on the next Wednesday afternoon, when regular classes had finished for the day, to go up to Warwick Camp to be outfitted in our military uniforms.

Next Wednesday came, and an open truck with wooden benches in its bed was waiting below the Assembly Hall. The new recruits and the boys who had been co-opted the year before (they were in their uniforms distributed in September 1962, and had nearly all grown out of those khaki shirts, shorts, knee-socks and puttees, and boots, and were to be given new clothing that would fit for a while) piled into the back of the truck, and sat wherever we could. There must have been nearly thirty of us. Health & Safety would not permit such transport in 2010.

I remember the truck passing Warwick Pond and an elderly woman walking on the side of the road. A number of the boys in our truck yelled obscenities at the poor creature. Vile obscenities, things I may have been hearing for the first time. Rough lot, the military.

At Warwick Camp, the headquarters of the Bermuda Regiment, Bermuda’s real soldiery made up of young males drafted as they finished normal schooling (it is still maintained under those conditions, females need not serve their country), the thirty or so boys from Warwick Academy queued outside a building with a hatch in the wall. As each boy reached the window, a full-time soldier took quick measurements of the boy’s chest, waist and inside leg. Asked what their shoe size might be, I imagine few of us could have answered truthfully. (In 2010 I still do not have an exact shoe size: style, material and comfort dictate anything from 7½ to 8½.) We were given boots to try on over our ordinary school uniform socks, which would prove to be thinner than the military issue we’d wear with the boots when on parade.

After a time, each boy had a bag loaded up with not just the summer's khaki gear, but the Cadet Corps’ winter uniform. Itchy, solid-green shirt with long sleeves, matching solid-green trousers. We had a beret with a badge, and a leather belt with peculiar silvery fastening devices, beret and belt to be used in summer and winter.

It was almost 1964: I was just getting turned on to British rock and roll. I had seen a few lads with long hair and had thought: That’s for me! I was discovering clothes that were not at all like my school uniform, and, God knows, light years removed from the Cadet Corps’ hideous outfits.

The Warwick Academy School Cadet Corps was abandoned a year later. I do not know why exactly, but I was certainly a happy camper when I heard that September 1964 would not entail another truck-ride to Warwick Camp for larger uniforms.

I could sit back, now, and wave an arm about, and dismiss my year in the military in a few sentences. At the time, however, it was dreary and I hated it, and rarely tired of saying so. I never managed to figure out how to march, parade or look as if I had a clue as to what I was supposed to be doing. As I was particularly awkward on the parade ground, I appreciated (and prayed for) rainy days. When we were unable to stand outside, we gathered on the balcony in the Assembly Hall and had lectures of a sort. These I did find interesting. We had a little map-reading (I recall plotting an invasion of Weston-super-Mare) and one lesson on how to survive in the Malaysian jungles (clearly something I needed to know aged thirteen).

One afternoon we were each given a Bren light machine gun, with an empty ammunition clip. We had to dismantle the gun, and then put it back together, at speed. I could not do that. (I was never any good at building models from kits, and they came with a step-by-step picture guide.) Fortunately, in 1964, I never had to assemble a Bren gun and march on an English seaside resort.

What particularly curious thing do I remember from my year serving with Her Majesty’s forces (I had left Bermuda when it came time for me to be drafted into the Regiment for three years)? It was something that took place the week following our outfitting with our first uniforms. We were being instructed on how to wear our uniforms. How to wind the puttees, how to polish the black boots and belt (never, ever, use liquid polish ... and I always did and caught hell for it), how to polish the brass cap badge and belt fastening device. (The really cool lads with girlfriends simply had the girls busy with the Brasso at lunchtime, in the Quadrangle, on the days the Cadet Corps was embodied. I wasn’t exactly cool at the time.)

The schoolteacher in charge of the Cadets, Mervyn White, who was a few years later to die of some rare and peculiar disease contracted in the Amazon jungle, held up a belt. One end had a pointy-out bit, the other end a slit.

“This is the male. The piece that sticks out. This is the female. The slot. And the male fits into the female. Like this.”

Mervyn jiggled the bits of brass together, and then pulled the belt out tight. It was securely fastened so long as the pressure was applied. If the belt had not been adjusted and was too loose around one’s waist, the male might slip out of the female, and that would be a problem. The forces on the belt buckle, acting to wrench the ends apart, would not break it open so long as the male piece was in the female correctly.

We did not have sex education classes at Warwick Academy. Our biology textbook had drawings of male and female rabbits' genitals, but not a great deal of information as to what the bunnies do with them. We had no lessons in psychology. We learnt nothing about family happiness, security or mores. For that matter, we heard nothing about contraception, abortion or STDs.

We did have Religious Knowledge classes. The master for that subject was our Cadet Corps commandant, Mervyn White. We spent most of our lesson time following Saint Paul. I disliked Paul from the start, he was too bossy. Of course, our classes covered the Ten Commandments (we had to memorize them, stand by our desks and recite one or more as the teacher demanded). Stephen Fry points out that the Ten Commandments are the hysterical work of desert tribes, and that those people have done nothing but make life (and death) a misery ever since, and to this day. We wandered in Genesis, avoiding Chapter 38 which was a bit much for teenagers. The Creation of Adam and Eve (or was it Lilith?) was, I suppose, another brush with sex education.

Male and female, created he them. Like himself. In his/her very own image. Well, that seemed odd even when I first heard it as a young boy. We knew (having seen the pictures) that God was a man. Where was the female part? Under the long robe? One may, after fifty years, think that the writer of Genesis (Moses?) understood that human males and females each have hormones that are “male” and “female”. God knows, hormones were not to be discussed in Religious Knowledge, or at our uptight school at all.

So, sex education from the Bible, by way of Mervyn White. And from the School Cadet Corps, by way of Mervyn White.

At my age, I still cannot polish brass without thinking of sex. Candlesticks, bowls and knobs. That said, I do like a brass band playing Jerusalem. Freud might like that.