More Than Melchisedech
Page 67
Casey was unique, and it may be that a person who is really unique is not required to be anything else. He was, however, several other things. As to that state in which he presently finds himself, may he rest in peace (except for that one hour out of every twenty-four which he held to be special).
Demetrio Glauch
All Souls Day, Chicago
1984
RED SKY IN THE MORNING
And now a posse's up and got
And ‘nobly losts’ are found.
I think he should be rescued not.
I think he should be drowned.
So long as there's a sordid lot
That writhes unseemly low,
I think that God sometimes forgot
The things he used to know.
I fear the blade that skinked and shined,
I fear the lopped-off head.
I think that God is colour-blind
To certain shades of red.
There is nothing so ineffective as half-way denigration. It just makes nothing worthwhile. What is the fun of running a needle into a balloon with all the air already let out of it? How will you get a noise from an empty balloon?
Where is the worth in confronting a ‘Great Ethical Teacher’? What is so misfired as ‘Jesus the Incendiary’? What is so revolting as ‘Jesus the Revolutionary’? What could be duller than ‘A Hippie named Jesus’? What could be wronger than ‘Teacher of Righteousness’? Judas Priest, how would the ‘Christ of the Essenes’ be worth blaspheming? How could any of these emptinesses be held responsible for anything? And I do want to hold someone responsible.
I believe there is a time for absolute stubbornness against either the prevailing order or disorder, but anyhow against whatever prevails. There is an absolute wrong that has the duty to contradict the absolute right. Absolutes must be pierced and deflated. If everything goes well in the universe, then I have the duty to see that something goes ill with me. There cannot ever be one absolute statement anywhere, if even one person contradicts it. Only the bottom of the well knows just how deep the well is. I will be the bottom of the world. If I suspect that there is something lower, then I will go lower. There is no one so vile that he should not have an advocate. If anyone ever is placed below salvation, then salvation should be rejected by all.
There is always the question of whether I am vile enough to do my chosen task successfully. It is necessary that, if I am to fill the role rightly, I must be the most vile person in the world. I work at it often, but I am not able to be as vile as I would wish. In everything that I do for others, I must do the best that I possibly can. In everything that I do for myself, I must do the worst that I can. If I am not vile enough to do this, then I fail to establish a rule. I have to be refused in everything but the last thing, or it's all lost. Oh pray that I may do badly enough to come to the bottom of all this!
OH LET THE DEVIL GO
Across the bloody rivers and
The smoking rocks, a road that still leads down
Even further
In a blood red glow,
'Tis the Devil burns, incontinent
His stool a sharpened goad that eviscerates and fissurates
With woe, woe, woe!
It's no matter that he knowed this,
When he planted this and growed this.
Oh God Almighty, burn me there,
And let the Devil go.
(Chorus: Oh God Almighty, burn me there,
and let the Devil go!)
The pain it was a screaming that
The eye could only wonder it.
The burning flesh was noisome and
The guilt an over-flow.
The justice and the judgment it
Was boggle it and blunder it.
Oh something cries upon the crags
and something cries below.
Oh let the mountain thunder it
And hide the howler under it.
Oh someone, someone, burn me there,
And let the Devil go!
(Chorus: Oh someone, someone, burn me there,
And let the Devil go!)
The Devil's reprehensible
and that's the gut and guff of it.
He chose it all with open eyes and set himself to crow.
He wasted flesh of innocents
and that's the stinking stuff of it,
He poisoned every spring, and he defiled, but even so
That side is sure the rough of it,
Enough of it, enough of it!
Oh put me in the fiery pit!
Oh let the Devil go!
(Chorus: Oh put me in the fiery pit!
Oh let the Devil go!)
Six lines are stricken out here as too vile to be read.
And then:
Oh let the Devil loose at last
Let Casey go to Hell!
(Chorus: Oh let the Devil loose at last!
Let Casey go to Hell!)
FROM THE COMMENTARY OF CLARENCE SCHRADE:
“Casey's verses are all doggerel… His musical compositions hide a greatness, but they hide it well. His drawings are all comic, but only a few of them are meant to be. Let us consider the drawings on the opposite page:”
(For technical reasons, there is no drawing on the opposite page, but Schrade's description will suffice.)
“This supposed itself to be a drawing of hell, but it is a second-hand drawing of a second-hand hell. We believe that, in most respects, it is authentic. Well then, that means that hell is a second-hand or second-rate place.
“Casey has always wanted to draw, and he has always drawn badly. He tried many times to get his drawings into the ‘Crock’, using false names on them. But I always told him, as long as I was art editor, he was out. He would have to fire me from the ‘Crock’ to get any of his things into it. And then he slipped half a dozen of them in once when I was in the hospital. I was glad they had appeared, for certainly no one else had ever had anything like them.
“Spend a little time on the picture. It will haunt you as a better picture would not. The deforming element that is in all of Casey's art rings true here. He is rendering objectively deformed things. The four men he burlesques in this, Dali, Dore, Bosch, Finnegan, all knew hell. All portrayed it authentically, but with a light touch. This gives a queer contrast between the hellscapes done authentically but lightly and the burlesques of them done with clumsy humour and heaviness.
“In mystical writings we come on the phrase ‘The Iron Meadows of Hell’ so frequently as to lead us to believe that there is objective validity to this idea. The iron meadows are in this picture by Casey, and they have the characteristic of being everywhere blurred and doublelined.”
TO FRANCIS THOMPSON
If yet one field remains beflooden,
One unforgiving not set right,
For all you say to dawn ‘Be Sudden!’
More sudden yet will be the night.
About those pinions, friend, my Francis,
That beat at these clay-shuttered doors
With sparkles yet, with light, with dances,
Aye, beat those wings at mine, or yours?
For lost compassion, sold or bought her,
Or traded her for broken midge, —
And lo, Christ walking on the water
Forgets the troll beneath the bridge.
Now the troll beneath the bridge, the subject of my sermon of this day, is the Devil. The bridge-keeper, the Pontiff, the Vicar, has the care of only the top side of the bridge. What goes on under the bridge is out of sight and out of mind, and yet it's an interesting life under the bridge. Sometimes a body will float by, and it may have some slight money in the pocket or gold in the teeth. And then the sub-pontine people have always been overly interested in bodies.
THE LIFE OF CASEY
The morning isn't ever neat,
Prae-prandium is seldom stately.
The dawn, they say, has golden feet:
But have you looked at them quite late
ly?
The spirit sags, the clock is fleet:
Oh what a world in which to waken!
Oh why should I stale crusties eat
When Casey has both eggs and bacon?
There is an evil in the land
That lurks, and cheats at easy-acey.
Oh why can all not upright stand
And live the life of Goodman Casey?
It is always a pleasure to be envied and to be looked up to.
I have always had an affection for witches. I met or conjured my first one when I was five years old, the summer before I started school. I read a story about a witch (I was precocious and I read early), and it contained the formula for conjuring a witch. At midnight you stand on the darkest corner in town, really a wide stretch of heath (but I didn't have any heath), and you say —
“I stand beside a blood filled ditch
Where dead men hang in trees to guide me.
I conjure you, Oh Wonder Witch,
Come from the moon and stand beside me!”
She did. It worked, and it will work every time. That particular witch still drops in to see me sometimes when she comes to Chicago. Her name is Tshowax.
The gallows always smells of rope,
I don't know why it shouldn't.
A gassing chamber smells of soap,
Though I'd have bet it wouldn't.
If time is pressing, take your love
Out like a kite and fly it,
For benison is from above,
And fate is low. Defy it!
FROM THE COMMENTARY OF ELENA O'HIGGINS
“I disapproved very much of the advertisement that Casey once ran in the ‘Crock’: ‘Genuine consecrated hosts $1.00 each, sent postpaid by defrocked priest who still has the power of consecration. Use for fun or experiment, or for special rites. Prodigies sometimes occur during their use.’ A box number was given to send to. I do not know how much response there was to that ad, but it ran in at least three issues of the ‘Crock’…
“Notice the musical score by Casey on the facing page. It is the only portion of the scoring for the organ that I was able to salvage before he destroyed a very great work. What looks like charring around the edges of the musical sheet is indeed that.”
(For technical reasons, there is no musical score on the facing page, but the description of Elena O'Higgins will suffice.)
“This is consecrated music that Casey has written here. Oh try it, play the fragment, and think what the whole might have been! But what he substituted for it after destroying it was supposed to be used for fun or for experiment or for special liturgy. ‘You can go to hell for such special liturgies, Casey,’ I told him. ‘That's the idea, Elena, that's the idea,’ he said.
“The substitute piece is not scored for organ or any sacred instrument. It is now scored for the kazoo, for the peewee guitar, and for the musical saw, for God's sake! They use it at St. Cristina's Church where they're working hard to be the most trendy parish in Chicago.”
FROM THE COMMENTARY OF TONY APOSTOLO
“I have been a newspaper reporter and editor and feature-writer for enough years to have a matching story for everything. If an Angel out of Heaven should come down this evening bringing the text of the Fifth Gospel, I could take him to old files and show him that I had done the Angel-out-of-Heaven-with-the-Text-of-the-Fifth-Gospel story seven years ago. And if the living Hitler should walk through that door right now, I would be able to tell him ‘This is not so exclusive as you might think.’ I have the record here of seven different reporters to whom seven different Hitlers have made appearances. It isn't enough for a living Hitler merely to appear and tell his story. He has to be able to do something else if he's going to put together any sort of act at all. Can you sing? Can you do imitations? Can you play the mouth-organ?
So the claims made by and for Casey Szymansky do not come to me as new claims. The idea of a man trading souls or trading places with the Devil to liberate him from damnation is a frequent psychological quirk or obsession. Casey is the fourth man I know who believes he has done it. And he is the fifth man I know who believes he is the Anti-Christ. And he is the sixth man I know who believes that he is the Scape Goat for all the sins of the world.”
The Scapegoat takes the rocky road
And never ever wins.
He's goaded by a gimpy goad
And laden with our sins.
FROM THE COMMENTARY OF D'ALESANDRO
“Casey walked into one of my post-graduate classes one afternoon when I was putting several series of trial balloon equations on the blackboard. Casey walked up and changed one value in the ninth equation. Several of my more brilliant students laughed, though I do not know why. One of them then reversed a vector value in my nineteenth equation. And Casey and the more brilliant students laughed still more loudly. I asked what it was.
“ ‘You'll get it after a while,’ Casey said. ‘Some people just aren't as fast as others at things like this.’ (And I am one of the world's leading mathematicians.)
“But I did not get it, not in a day or a week or a year. I asked my most brilliant student John Tweed (who had meanwhile become world-famous) about it. ‘It would spoil it to tell it,’ he said. ‘I don't believe there is any way it could be put verbally anyhow. It is just a couple of mathematical puns, oi, oi, in sort of dialect yet! Some people just don't get inter-discipline mathematical puns very well.’
“I still don't get it.”
The Devil knows the future only in fragments, but he knows the past completely, and he rides right up on the cutting edge to the present. That is where I want to ride. I want to know all the secrets of everybody in the world. I insist on it. And if I have to change into something else to know all the secrets then I will change into something else. I will change into the Casey Machine.
BALLAD OF THE CASEY MACHINE
“Oh friend, Oh my friend, Oh you mouth of a horse,
Oh you the most peachy impeachable source,
Oh tell me the things on the people so coarse,
And who was defamed and defaulted and worse,
Oh tell me what's par on the cheap-shotter course.
Oh tell me perforce.”
“These things, Oh my crumb, are a dollar a line,
Or traded in moistness over strange wine.
They're not for the peasants, they are not for thee.
For God and the Devil and Casey they be,
Or for fee.”
“I look in the windows, I hark at the wall,
I never will ever learn all of it all.
I want to know what's with the wax in the ball,
I want to know when it was last on the house,
I want to know who is behung like a mouse,
I want to know which has the heart of a louse,
I want to find out who's been milking my cowse.
Tell me, grouse.”
“These things, my companion, may none of us see,
But God and the Devil and Casey, those three
Who have it for free.”
“Oh mother, my mother,” the little child said,
“Oh tell me how rotten a life you have led,
The people you ruined from alpha to zed,
And addled poor father until he was dead.
Oh tell me the fellows with-whomish to bed,
On which the forbiddenish fruits you have fed.
Tell me all.”
“Oh child, Oh my child, this is rotten of you.
The damage you'd do if you knew that you knew!
These things, little pretzel are hidden from view,
For God and the Devil and Casey, their due.
Tootle-oo.”
“There's a way, my companion, my bacon and bean,
No matter at bottom it isn't too clean:
'Tis easy to eye and to spy every scene.
Go do like the case on the Casey Machine.
He traded off something that never was keen,
And now he know
s everything lofty and mean.
The Machine!”
The Casey machine, for I will be a machine when I have made the swap, will know all about everyone. That is what I want to do. This will be all the satisfaction that the Casey Machine can ever count on, knowing it all.
You have heard of persons saying they would give their souls to know a certain secret. I am giving my soul to know all the secrets.
FROM THE COMMENTARY OF SILAS AND MAUD WHITERICE
“A cheap and shoddily-done encyclopedia was published here in Chicago last year. The first volume of it (A-C) was given away widely in a grocery-store promotion. Subsequent volumes sold for a dollar each with twenty dollars worth of groceries. About one percent of the copies of Volume One of this encyclopedia have an entry that is not in the other copies of it:
“ ‘ANTICHRIST: born in Chicago, U.S.A. on October 7, 1921, the son of Gabriel Szymansky a pawn broker and antique dealer and his wife Miriam Lessing. The child was Kasmir (Casey) W. Szymansky. His manifestation as the Antichrist was, was, was, organization formed in 1839 to work for the repeal of the English corn laws.’
“The verbal confusion at the end of this short entry is from running the defective ANTICHRIST entry into the following article which in most of the copies is headed ‘ANTI-CORN-LAW LEAGUE’. Could this be a hoax? Anything could be a hoax. The Encyclopedia was published in Chicago, and the elegant Casey often did printing for shoddy promoters. Did Casey himself insert the hoax? Or was it some of the droll kidders who worked for him at the old printery? A hoax it certainly was, but was its information accurate? Yes, the place and the date and the names are right. That is the where and the when and the from-whom of the birth of Casey Szymansky. And that is the where and the when and the from-whom of the birth of the Antichrist.”