Fruits of Pride

On the plinth acquiescent
I showed her the crescent,
as it fell away
diaphanous in grace
we wanted to taste
that which Adam embraced.
Her grin in mine
who could decline.

Can disgust be of medicinal use? From my green vista, I've seen love take the form of the aphrodisiac nature employs to ensure procreation. From this vista, I've seen love in the form of an ever encompassing tide, the break of which cannot be fathomed. Love, willing to spite all for another. Love, to which the sun pales in comparison. Love, that is incomparable to infatuation. Love without vanity. I've seen love designed to fill a cup, the depth and width of which was pre-determined and measured. Love, to which each action exceeds its intended outcome. Love swirling in the maelstrom of disgust, the taste of which is beyond tolerance. I've seen love performed with sarcastic levity, bearing a direct proportion to despair. I've seen the proof of love render it valueless. I've seen love, sputtering perversely in the dark. I've tasted love familiar, love aged to an state unpalatable. Love, the genesis of despair. I've seen love swell on the tide of anguish.

Love cannot coexist with tolerance and it cannot overcome disgust - yet nothing was changed. To love is to submit, to bear all woes - yet nothing was changed. What is the solution to this pointless piece of the self?

The Plum. Pressed magnolia & something. 2023

"This sounds awfully like an argument for solipsism"

"In a way, I suppose. Answer the question, if you were just a brain in a jar being fed inputs, how would you tell?"

"Let me think about it"

I sit in the passenger seat of our eight-hundred-dollar Suzuki Ignis, Moroccan salad in the footwell, suffering through a hangover. Thankfully, I’ll be home soon, where I can recharge with a cup of tea and rebuke myself for my bad behavior last night. I’ll sit in the sun. My best self-deprecation happens under the sun.

“Okay, how’s this: If modifiers are no more than data fed to the mind, and you’re aware - meaning you have a concept of self - then does it really matter if you’re in a jar?”

“But wouldn’t you want to know?”

“I guess so, but would knowing benefit me anything? What does knowing bring me if I can’t alter my situation? What’s the nature of this hypothetical confinement? Is it akin to anesthesia awareness or some kind of Matrix ripoff?”

“Closer to the Matrix, I guess.”

“Then it would be imperceptible to me in any serious way that I am confined to a jar unless shown proof. Anything that deviates from my rational reaction to the world would fall into cracks that my mind would pave over to maintain rationality like déjà vu. What impelled you to ask this?”

“Do you remember that house party BnP played at the Bishop Street flat? You were mashed and explaining the concept to me that night.”

“How do you remember that? My gripe with solipsism is that its failure is akin to an interesting theorem relying on a myopic assumption. If you were the sole progenitor of this world, surely more people would agree with you generally."

“I guess so. Maybe it’s wired that way to give it more credence. If the creation was fawning, it wouldn’t seem as real.”

“Real against what other metric? Where is the mean coming from? That’s another problem with this scenario, why make these particular choices in worldbuilding? Or is the mechanism that keeps your brain alive in the jar meant to be the demi-urge keeping you sane? Qui bono? Who profits from this exchange? What is the-”

“S, look at this.”

Up ahead, some semblance of a human dressed in sweatpants, a wife-beater, and methamphetamine was screaming at a white-haired man sitting at the wheel of an idle red Alto. The mentalist had parked his station wagon across Aylesford Street to ensure his anger was fully appreciated. This being somewhat typical of suburban New Zealand; we slowed down but didn’t intervene.

A third vehicle approached the intersection. Out popped a fifty-something-year-old male with a beer gut and thinning black hair, closely followed by what I assume was his teenage son. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but if I had to hazard a guess: something along the lines of, “Get the fuck out of the way.”

By this point, we’d pulled over and were watching the scene unfold from slightly further along Westminster Street, a few doors down from the mower repair place. The reason we stopped? After that reasonable and articulate interjection, the poster child for domestic violence turned his rage and vitriol on the newcomers.

He returned to his car in that classic ‘tough cunt’ waddle - the one that seemed to say "now you’ve done it” - a walk successfully employed by dipshits the world over. Leaning over the driver’s seat to the passenger side, he returned with a 12-inch knife in a white plastic handle, the kind you’d often see at the butcher’s.

He pointed the blade at the old codger and screamed, “Now I’ll fuck you up!” along with some other gibberish I couldn’t quite catch through the threads of spittle falling from his foaming mouth.

It was at this point our third-party family made their fatal error. Mr. Fifty-Something began edging closer behind the berserker, clearly thinking he might punch the fucker in the back of the head. A lightning bolt of clarity stopped him about two meters away, task incomplete. Unfortunately, the thunder of stupidity followed, and he launched a plastic water bottle at the aggressor instead. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever been hit by a bottle one-third full of water, but it didn’t do a damn thing except piss off the beast. He spins around, acquiring his new target, takes five paces, and swings the machete in a wide arc. It takes a chunk of skin down to the scalp, briefly exposing bone before the mash of mangled flesh and hair becomes a torrent of red. The second strike lands across the left side of the man’s face at the exact moment I start yelling from my position down the road. Mr. Fifty-Something puts his hand to his face and feels a wide parting from his left temple to his nose - somehow missing the eye completely. He stumbles backward and collapses against his car. The screams of his child mingle with my increasingly urgent calls for the beast to “calm the fuck down.” I’d somehow learned from the mistake I’d just witnessed, only to repeat it in its entirety.

Up came the machete. The mentalist started sprinting toward me, a feral look in his eyes, with nothing registering behind them.

My lack of judgment quickly dawned on me. I turned and bolted down Westminster toward the park, but he caught up pretty damn quickly (I now understand why Nazis on the front lines imbibed meth so prodigally). As I turned to face him, the blade painted a gash into my left forearm, just below the wrist. Luckily, due to the angle, the cut flashy but superficial, leaving me with a somewhat operable hand.

As the blade struck, my right arm swept in with what could loosely be described as a hook, with my full weight behind it. The beast jerked his face back, and my swing hit his blade hand, knocking the weapon to the ground. My momentum slammed my body into his, countering his momentum. He falls backward, winded, and smacks the back of his head on the road. That fall is what saved me.

I leapt onto the mad, wheezing fucker while he scrambled to gather his marbles. Straddling him, I tried to pin both arms and legs, but my left hand was slick with red - restraining him is like trying to grip an eel.

“Boys, give me a hand!” I yelled to the old man and the teenage son of a fresh coma victim. To their endless credit, they helped me keep the monster down, who by now was covered in my red, screaming gibberish and rage, bucking like a ewe caught between a fence and gate.

“Hold his head and his arms,” I asked my capable but overwhelmed assistants. Whether out of shock or exhaustion, they didn’t object and did as asked.

By this time, my fiancée had her phone to her ear, relaying our location to dispatch. In her left hand was the knife. I extended my right arm and made a grabbing gesture. My severely pregnant fiancée placed the white plastic handle into my palm and returned to summoning a service I never thought I’d need.

“Let’s get biblical,” I muttered to myself and the wiggling lump of meth beneath me.

Lucidity quickly returns to his eyes as he sees the tip of the machete enter his left one. I’d never heard such an unpleasant, guttural sound, and I doubted I ever would. But I was wrong - because the sound he made as I pressed the tip into his right eye was somehow worse.

Just some classic Kiwi road rage.

(I'm not sure if I like this story. Something about it feels off. Maybe it's too rigid or just poorly written. The first version had a sci-fi ending where it turns out the road rage incident is a failsafe programme designed to deter discussion about brains in vats & briefly cuts to an endless platform of brains but I thought its inclusion worse than removal)

Pressed magnolia & something. 2025

On a whim, I added sliced pear to my fried rice. It was fine, but I haven't done it since. On a fancy, I've chosen to dislike someone for no fault other than their existence. On an urge, I've asked a question I already know the answer to, just to hear the response. On impulse, I made God.

Marboela.

I assume Marboela originated in corners of the globe where humans practice intergenerational indifference, spite for the sake of it, and no desire to worship. You can surmise the location based on your own preconceptions. She's the back-pocket - with a hole in it - on the pants of the Pantheon. A god who asks for nothing, expects nothing, provides nothing, but on occasion will tip a scale in a direction. She expects pageantry without substance, existence by existence, to create and destroy on a whim. To decide. The modern panacea for a disease that is yet to be diagnosed(1). A god who sees life as an orderly decay of energy states with the purpose of life being life itself.

This language is waffling, vague, and predictably Fortean, but that’s how you get religion started. The church, symbols, institutions, relics, and flock come later. First, we need to make sure our vagaries are solid enough to stand up to the more established ones. This is simple: we steal. Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Taoism - they're all stolen homework from the previous generation's vagaries and inconsistencies. Take the meat, leave the element/s you've deemed sacrilegious behind, and voila, you've taken a step. Not necessarily a step forward either. It could be to the side, could be slightly backward. Which page you end up on in the history books will be determined by your successes or failures.

For example, the virgin birth meme/trope isn’t new. It's recorded throughout our written histories (with varying success) to account for childbirth out of wedlock or to excuse infidelity. Dionysus is one such successful example. In short, Dionysus was born in Thebes to Semele and an unknown father, who is suggested to be Zeus. It's possible that there is an intent to validate childbirth in these instances, but were these narratives accepted by the populace due to the unpredictable identification of fatherhood in the days of ancient Greece? Were these fables more readily incorporated into communal lore because of the more personified nature of the ancient Greek gods? Was it a useful handwave to explain away a culturally shameful act? Heuristics for the age.

Why Marboela?

In a nutshell, I wanted someone to blame and something to appeal to. We use religious iconography and symbols in our speech, such as:
"Jesus fucking Christ, you're thick."
"God damn it."
"For heaven's sake."

I'm sick of relying on existing institutions, and I tire of invoking traditional symbols.

It’s much easier to be the prophet of God than to claim you created God personally. It's typically a case of: “The fugue lifted from my mind with the help of: Insert deity here." It wasn’t that I was wrong, but that the divine will was obscured or distorted by an external force, which has now lifted, allowing me to determine truth. I’ve always found this to be a bit of a cop-out.

Moses' laws of warfare are barbaric when viewed through the lens of the 21st century because they cannot be interpreted another way. Here, interpretation is the bane of the critical thinker. If verses are open to opinion, the whole system falls apart. A true believer should take the whole or discard it entirely. A true believer of the Christian Old Testament who put words into practice would end up in a 21st-century jail quite quickly. Most modern Christians would agree slavery is immoral, yet they place their belief in a book that validates and encourages it. Ever heard a Christian say "That's not how I interpret it" when trying to explain a barbaric piece of scripture? Does their interpretation trump the text? Does the word of their god mean so little as to be discarded by a suddenly omnipotent layman? The Quran allows the righteous keeping of sex slaves, so where are yours?

I’ve been told - unironically - by a Christian wearing prescription lenses, that disability is a gift from God, sent to strengthen our faith through hardship and must be endured rather than solved. However, when pressed, they were - unsurprisingly - unwilling to give up the gift of sight their glasses afforded. Try telling someone their faith is built upon a book translated(2) to English from a translation from a translation from another translation - keep going - and then from a translation from Latin, from a translation of Greek, from a translation of Hebrew. It’s not going to go down well, without even mentioning the councils and removed chapters.

Try having a reasonable discussion with someone who is not only actively waiting for the world to end but looking forward to it! As if, in their zeal for suffering, the torments of this world just aren’t enough unless aggravated by the terrors of another. They say their book is one of universal love, but their actions translate to hate. And as they can find neither instruction nor excuse from their book, they search for them in their own minds, which will never eventuate in a loss, for the human mind is inexhaustible in hostility and malignity. They use the name of their book to sanction their actions until their passions become duty, and their worst impulses are hallowed and treated as virtues.

For these reasons, I'd prefer Marboela exist without being rigidly defined. Hard, unquestionable statements that reflect our current moral climate will only stand the test of time if it continues along the same path. The major religions get away with this for the most part as long as you don’t pay too close attention to history.

I want a simple deity. A modern hero cult for the sandal-wearers. A pseudo-Greek cult of personality without definable features. Another vessel for this current age, capable of holding vice, virtue, and the mean.

When discussing Marboela with an old friend, she said to me, "Yeah, and I bet she has big tits." voila, Marboela now has big tits. Religions are built by the people, for the people, and the people are fucked.

Concussion:
I don’t advocate for any organized religion. In fact, the majority of my discussions with people on this topic are from the standpoint that it needs stamping out. I believe the moralistic heuristics that inspired, for example, the Jewish Bible (Old Testament) came from an intrinsic part of man rather than an esoteric or gnostic being.

"All saints from Mahomet down to Francis Xavier were only a compound on insanity, pride and self-imposition;- the latter would have been of less consequence, but that men always revenge their impositions on themselves, by imposing to the utmost on others" - Charles Maturin's, Melmoth the Wanderer

(1) Something that always perturbed me about proselytizing religions is their attempt to convince you that you're poisoned & that only they can provide a cure. Too Munchausen for me.

(2) I'm referring to the King James Bible from 1611 but could be said of any text after the ecumenical councils in terms of consistency of narrative.

Deconstructed abutilon and remote. 2025

I've fantasised about soup halfway through eating a sandwich. I've lamented the loss of a possession I no longer had need of. I've reminisced for hours over a thirty second interaction. I've let a smile sink into my eyes and twist into requited affection. I've dreamt of Athens in Bologna.

For a long time I've operated under the expectation that the past was ignorable, anything I put into the 'if it's in the past it leaves me alone' basket, remains so - counter to my intuition or any evidence. However, applying this presumption was far easier said than done and I found that no matter how steadily I applied the practice, I could not succeed. Why can I not shake certain memories? I feel physical pain reliving that which I'm choosing to recreate in its entirety, whether it be a mistake or a sudden awareness. If I've already learnt from these scenes, why do I still keep them stored? Why do they persist? Why am I subject to bouts of lingering phantasmagoria.

On the adverse I pull greatly from certain memories, scenes that are uniquely mine. They are a font for my creative endeavors, my muse. Whether it be mourning a departed glory, a requiem for halcyon days or an escape from the trajectory of my current life. My hope swells on a tide of anguish, for one cannot exist without the other.

I believe - in part - that this is because I have no easily defined goals but a desire to move forward, in fact I must move forward. My life has moments of pure bliss that I move on from immediately and then recreate in their entirety lest they are abandoned. Does this artificial practice benefit me anything? Is it right to guide oneself on past principles? Do they not add to my madness? Surely I must accept what the senses are giving me and trust in the noumena that binds myself to my perceivable reality rather than to these fabrications. Feeding into that unknown potential for more, to consume purely to consume. I don't need a reciprocal desire yet seek the validation that comes with it. Our desire to be desired. I don't need inebriation to distract me from the world and yet I drown myself in it. How does one abide and where is the mean?

I have an innate longing. It's sometimes enough that I can fill the cup & don't necessarily have to drink from it. However, on more than one occasion I have stoked the slumbering embers into an excess the like of which cannot be contained. The first strike becomes the reminder, the second my muse, the third my passion, the fourth consumes me utterly and by the fifth I am undone. I am Isis, bringing Osiris back from the brink of death into eternal glory. Why do I unravel when I know myself to be best when sober? Why can't I deny this capacity in me to seek beyond my level of contentment? Why is it never enough? How does this wisdom profit me when I'm abandoning reason to embrace my madness? Why is it only when I'm neck deep that the greatest motivators, regret and grief, wash over me? Surely the memory should be enough.


See Fruit#5

Modern Ophelia - Ōtākaro 2025

Happiness is a state.
One that I can be in,
just not today - or tomorrow

Pressed grape hyacinth, buttercups. 2025

To be pedalstooled,
to be outside reproach,
to be compared against,
to be seen from measured distances,
to add fuel to the fire.

You see,
my mouth is full of earth
and yours is full of love.
There is a place near me,
I have kept for you.

I now stand again
in that dimly lit parlour
and stare at the face I used to know,
siren and maenad intertwined,
my glass filled to the brim.

I reach for the revolver at my side.

Pressed wisteria 2025

Try eating your own assumptions
Before they’re ripe
Standing in my long shadow,
Lost in the figs and twigs

Trying to find some shit in Latin
To tell you what to do,
How to handle it,
How to dull it,
How to repeat those empty questions,
How to get lost trying to find yourself

Standing under me,
In my long shadow,
In the figs,
And the twigs

Tiring of this apathy; he said, 'I want something more'. So I gave him exactly what he wanted: the same as before.

What kind of cancer are you?
Do you keep it inside?
Do you let it seep through?

I'll do what they can't -
diagnose you -
and I'm leaning pancreatic.