is the thing. I’ve been thinking about it ever since I saw the HBO special on QAnon. It is clear that QAnon — whoever he is — is a poet, and his poetry is the writing of the future. One of the wonderful things about QAnon (if you are Russian agent of chaos) is that there is no ‘party line’ in the sense that no one knows exactly what it represents, because the spectral prophetic musings of the poet who is QAnon are impenetrable and must be deciphered — they descend from on high much like the Ten Commandments or the Gospel According to St. Matthew, offering the possibility of endless, all-consuming exegesis. This is a Godsend in COVID19 times — we all need something to do; better yet something to obsess about. (We used to be obsessed with the ‘real’ world — sadly, no more.) QAnon is undoubtedly a religion, but it is one step ahead of the Woke Folk’s creed. In the Woke World there are rules, they are the modern puritans. The puritans read The Bible for content and insisted that ‘spilling your seed on the ground’ meant one thing and one thing only. The punishment for such a transgression was swift and clear. I don’t know what religion will appear next, it is abundantly evident that human beings need one, and that it did not work, ultimately, for Nietzche to claim that God was dead. People need God or Gods, they need fantasy (hence Harry Potter, comic books, the endless science fiction and mystical/religious TV shows). We know intuitively that real truth is mysterious, and anything that we feel gives access to the truth is not only attractive but addictive. I learned all this from my studies of Shakespeare and Renaissance England (I have expanded my studies somewhat and I’m now trying to make my way through Spenser, tough slogging, let me tell you, I will never love Spenser, but it is all too engrossing a mystery.) The early modern English writers wrote in code, and there was a good reason for it. Shakespeare, on the one hand, chose that his work be only about deception. And he is the wisest of all the Renaissance Brits, because he became obsessed with one key thing; how do we know what truth is? It’s an unanswerable question certainly, but absolutely rewarding. These early moderns wrote in code because they had to, England was a hotbed of spies and sedition; Catholicism was banned, the monasteries pillaged, it behooved you to practice Catholicism in private. If you did it in public you were in danger of being locked in The Tower or torn apart by horses. We live in a similar atmosphere today. Being cancelled on social media is apparently something akin to being torn apart by horses — at least I hear — when I was cancelled I had no access to social media, or at least I didn’t want any — so I don’t know. What’s lovely for QAnon is that outside of a few truisms (Trump is God) they argue quite endlesslessly — like Hasidic Jews — over the meaning of the prophets and the existence of angels. In contrast we all know all too clearly what the Woke Folk think, and as they are the young, and the young are where the money is, the business wing of the digital world (which is taking over the web) — wants to be on their side. So we now have creeping censorship on Youtube, Amazon, Google, etc.. (It’s no use saying the web is not government — and that what the web censors is not censored —frankly what is on our computers is all we have these days.) Sure, much of what is censored is, actually, 'hate speech,’ and I’m sure it is somehow connected with the endless human suffering that we we now experience daily. (It does seem to be more endless than usual, doesn’t it? Or is that just the media? Or is it just me?) I believe lots of speech is hateful -- but that no speech or thought should be illegal. It’s not about the deceptive manipulative phrases that come out of our mouths, words are instantly and ultimately deformed (as Plato said of all poetry) and separated from ‘reality’ at the moment of conception. Forget censorship; all that matters is the human heart. True, that’s hard to get at, but religions work hard to gain access. What we call reason is a failed project; human beings are not reasonable and do not want to be, and reason has it’s own manipulations (you can prove anything). But as the digital world polices what is ‘hateful’ and what is not — it becomes necessary for the true writer to write in code. For instance; one could not at this time seriously critique the COVID-19 elephant that is racing around the room— and I don’t mean the illness, I mean the social imperatives that accompany it — isolation, the rise of the rich, mass depression, dependence on drugs and digital media etc — one dare not challenge the COVID-19 orthodoxy. So…the answer is poetry. I highly recommend it. I try and practice it here, but rarely achieve it. One can look to Shakespeare — though I know that for some, he is just another old guy. However exploring ‘truth’ in the den of lions that was England under Elizabeth was good for him as a writer. Everything is a boat to float, all is fantasy, we are the stuff that dreams are made on, lies are truth, and the most fantastical the better — the more resonant the better. There is — Shakespeare knew it — a way of speaking -- nay dancing -- through veils and fog; the artist will find it. So many years ago Kyle Rae the eminent Toronto gay city councilor (where is he now? I do hope he’s lost some weight) said of my column in Eye magazine ‘everything Sky writes is fiction’ So true; it is my saving grace. I’m really not sure what I am writing here, at this point in the blog the words just carry me away. There is a wind in the willows, and toad is overeating, and Craig’s Cookie's is doing very well on Church Street right now. I really wish Craig’s Cookies had a dark room to have sex in. But that is impossible; at Craig's Cookies, you may only buy cookies. That is what ‘gay liberation’ has come to. But remember; cookies are dangerous. Oh, sorry that’s only on your computer. It’s all so confusing. I wish you contentment I really do. But you will find it in fantasy, only. If you can wade your way through it - to the real.
