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Authors: James Champagne
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continued whacking away at the hapless piñata.
Iridophobia
For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a fear of the sky.” I paused, took a sip from the glass of water that Dr. Roxy had been thoughtful enough to leave on the small wooden end table to the side of my chair, and then continued on with my story. “I have this very distinct memory from childhood where I was hanging out at Vernon Park one day and staring up at this domed hill, and on top of this domed hill there was this one lone tree, and because it was late fall all of the leaves had fallen off this tree, leaving its branches bare. From where I stood, at the bottom of the hill, the tree looked completely black, and juxtaposed as it was with the cloudless blue sky behind it, it seemed almost as if the tree were a crack in the sky itself, and for a brief few seconds the tree/crack seemed to begin to grow before my eyes, and I panicked, visualizing in my mind’s eye the sky itself cracking open and shattering to pieces all around me like big shards of blue glass. The sky as a giant blue Easter egg being smashed against the rim of a frying pan, the rim in this case being the Earth’s horizon. What can I say? As a child, I had quite an imagination. But it wasn’t just the sky itself that scared me. It was also things that came from the sky . One raindrop could have been the precursor to a Biblical flood that would never end. Then there were tornadoes, which scared me witless, even though I’ve yet to ever see one in my life. I often had nightmares of tornadoes, as a child. In these dreams I would often see storm clouds gathering in the sky like the black ships of the Antichrist’s armies and watch in horror as the bottom tips of maturing tornadoes descended from these storm clouds like enormous cobras unsheathing their fangs. Lightning was an electric crack that seemed to shatter the mirror of the sky, and thunder unsettled me. There was this one bad storm I suffered through when I was a child, I may have been maybe 9 or perhaps even 10 at the time, where I was home alone with my father and we were both in the living room of our house, he on his favorite rocker and me on the family sofa, and I guess to try to take my mind off the storm my father was telling jokes, or just making comments that were supposed to be amusing in general. One of these comments (or perhaps observations would be a better word) was that thunder was nothing more than God farting in Heaven. But that comment had the opposite of its intended effect on me: instead of making me laugh, it shocked and even horrified me. It seemed blasphemous to me that he would say such a thing, even though I knew he wasn’t being serious. I looked at my father with a glum face and asked him, in a nervous voice, ‘Dad, will you go to Hell for saying something like that?’ Many years later, during a period of my life in which I found myself studying the Qabalah, I came across a book by William G. Gray entitled Qabalistic Concepts: Living The Tree , that had first been published in 1984. There was this one chapter in the book, chapter 20 I think it was, that was titled ‘Esoteric Excretion,’ in which the author pondered the idea of Man serving as the Microcosm that was made in the likeness of God (and the Macrocosm), and wondered how, if Man has a digestive and excretory system, then does God as well? Or, as the author puts it, ‘does deity produce dung?’ He examined the Qabalistic Tree of Life and came to the conclusion that the Sephira Daath, otherwise known as ‘The Abyss,’ served as a sort of mouth, then conceptualized a second Abyss, in between Yesod and Malkuth at the bottom of the Tree, that served as the anus of God. It’s quite an interesting chapter, really, and reading it one can see how it was a clear influence on Grant Morrison’s The Filth comic book. At the start of the chapter, he wrote how, in the old days, there was a reason why hanging was the preferred method of dealing with
Iridophobia
For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a fear of the sky.” I paused, took a sip from the glass of water that Dr. Roxy had been thoughtful enough to leave on the small wooden end table to the side of my chair, and then continued on with my story. “I have this very distinct memory from childhood where I was hanging out at Vernon Park one day and staring up at this domed hill, and on top of this domed hill there was this one lone tree, and because it was late fall all of the leaves had fallen off this tree, leaving its branches bare. From where I stood, at the bottom of the hill, the tree looked completely black, and juxtaposed as it was with the cloudless blue sky behind it, it seemed almost as if the tree were a crack in the sky itself, and for a brief few seconds the tree/crack seemed to begin to grow before my eyes, and I panicked, visualizing in my mind’s eye the sky itself cracking open and shattering to pieces all around me like big shards of blue glass. The sky as a giant blue Easter egg being smashed against the rim of a frying pan, the rim in this case being the Earth’s horizon. What can I say? As a child, I had quite an imagination. But it wasn’t just the sky itself that scared me. It was also things that came from the sky . One raindrop could have been the precursor to a Biblical flood that would never end. Then there were tornadoes, which scared me witless, even though I’ve yet to ever see one in my life. I often had nightmares of tornadoes, as a child. In these dreams I would often see storm clouds gathering in the sky like the black ships of the Antichrist’s armies and watch in horror as the bottom tips of maturing tornadoes descended from these storm clouds like enormous cobras unsheathing their fangs. Lightning was an electric crack that seemed to shatter the mirror of the sky, and thunder unsettled me. There was this one bad storm I suffered through when I was a child, I may have been maybe 9 or perhaps even 10 at the time, where I was home alone with my father and we were both in the living room of our house, he on his favorite rocker and me on the family sofa, and I guess to try to take my mind off the storm my father was telling jokes, or just making comments that were supposed to be amusing in general. One of these comments (or perhaps observations would be a better word) was that thunder was nothing more than God farting in Heaven. But that comment had the opposite of its intended effect on me: instead of making me laugh, it shocked and even horrified me. It seemed blasphemous to me that he would say such a thing, even though I knew he wasn’t being serious. I looked at my father with a glum face and asked him, in a nervous voice, ‘Dad, will you go to Hell for saying something like that?’ Many years later, during a period of my life in which I found myself studying the Qabalah, I came across a book by William G. Gray entitled Qabalistic Concepts: Living The Tree , that had first been published in 1984. There was this one chapter in the book, chapter 20 I think it was, that was titled ‘Esoteric Excretion,’ in which the author pondered the idea of Man serving as the Microcosm that was made in the likeness of God (and the Macrocosm), and wondered how, if Man has a digestive and excretory system, then does God as well? Or, as the author puts it, ‘does deity produce dung?’ He examined the Qabalistic Tree of Life and came to the conclusion that the Sephira Daath, otherwise known as ‘The Abyss,’ served as a sort of mouth, then conceptualized a second Abyss, in between Yesod and Malkuth at the bottom of the Tree, that served as the anus of God. It’s quite an interesting chapter, really, and reading it one can see how it was a clear influence on Grant Morrison’s The Filth comic book. At the start of the chapter, he wrote how, in the old days, there was a reason why hanging was the preferred method of dealing with
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