On scripture

I suppose my views on scripture would be deemed heretical by just about everyone. For example, I would say that A Confederacy of Dunces is God's satire on the second coming of Jesus Christ: "When a true genius arises, you will know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in a confederacy against him." It's actually quite embarrassing to admit just how much I resemble Ignatius Reilly, even the way he treats his poor mother. My mother is a literal saint compared to the rest of you people, but to me she's totally inadequate as a human being. But this is really the fault of her society, not her. No one told her my favorite line from the Bible, "Wisdom is the principal thing, therefore get wisdom, and with all thy getting get understanding." If you follow that one, you'll be all right, and so will I.

As a side note, it was damn hard for God himself to get that Dunces book published. It mocks everything, it even mocks Jews, that was the problem. The manuscript was with at least eight different publishers before the intrepid Louisiana State University Press brought it out, then it was snapped up by Penguin or something when the cat was out of the bag. They gave Toole a posthumous Pulitzer, a lot of good that did him.

I would put Four Quartets as another divine book, it's like a revival of pre-Socratic philosophy, which was always in poetry. It's quite Eastern, and pre-Socratic philosophy came from India. It even begins with a fragment from Heraclitus: "Although logos is common to all, most men live as if they had a wisdom of their own." I thought that would make a good title, A Wisdom of Their Own. It could be ironic or sincere depending on the context. I would put Eliot as the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, he was a poet but a philosophical poet, like the Metaphysical Poets back in the day.

It's also worth mentioning that there were a number of contributors to the Shakespeare First Folio, but the mastermind and final editor was actually Jesus Christ in disguise, Francis Bacon. Born of the virgin queen, Elizabeth, a born king but not of this world, all that stuff. But the Second Folio, in 1632, contains almost 1,700 revisions to the First Folio, often of a highly technical nature, which can only have been performed by the true mastermind. It should be seen as an even more divine book than the First Folio. We can also add Don Quixote and The Anatomy of Melancholy, Bacon wrote those as well. Yes, the establishment is well aware of all this, not the Jesus stuff but the rest of it, they have spent a great deal of money and effort obscuring it and lying about it, because it doesn't suit their designs for the future. Talk about setting yourself above God, what England has done with Shakespeare is just mind-boggling, and it's even more mind-boggling that they've gotten away with it. Joseph Campbell famously said that a doctorate in the humanities is a sign of incompetence, we can knock that down to a bachelor's now. I went to three colleges, and I have to question whether anyone who completes a degree is motivated more by ambition or intelligence. I learned a lot more at AA than I did at three colleges, without exaggeration.

Francis Bacon talked about "divine poesy," writing so good it's divine. This again is partly what we mean by the Holy Spirit. To paraphrase Orwell, all good books are divine, but some are more divine than others.