Today at every university the Gideons are out, with their cardboard boxes of small green paper bibles. Unassuming chaps they ask "do you want a free bible?" They are very compact like decks of cards or candy packets. These are offered to undergraduates all over America during the first month of fall classes in Septembers, to offer a scriptural path afresh.
The cover says "New Testament." What is a testament? Well, a story really. Someone publicly telling their story, a testimony, a person in a place telling a story which is their story. So, a new example of this is a new testament, a new story. And what is a novel? A story. Why is it called a novel, a nouvelle, a new? Because it was a new kind of an idea or a new way of talking about stories and making them into paper form back in the 1700's. So, the novel was a new testament. A new story. The new story. The new new testament story for 1700. In a way the little green new testaments are like stacks of green dollar bills. But they are very humble too like play money or fortune cookies, cheap, free, included with the meal so to speak. Ironically, even to discuss the idea of a new new testament story in vulgar English or German in the year 1000 would get you burned, disemboweled, or interred to rot to death in a muddy stone room with sewerage. To presume you might consider a new story! Why did they have to bring Buddha's scriptures from all over the world, when his scriptures really just said you don't need scriptures, don't use scriptures, attend to your breath and the present moment? Let go of all the bullshit and all the gurus, don't you see what I'm saying for god's sake? You are all going to burn in hell, and already are, he said, before calming down a little. You wonder, how long a new testament can remain new and how long the novel can remain novel. All of this novelty, so much glacial accumulation of unfathomable waste. Stagnant, dead data. You wonder if the novel can become its inverse. Come to think of it, how can it not? It is impossible to conceive that it could do otherwise than become its inverse, and then to accumulate infinitely. Then, once thought, you realize how vastly advanced this stagnation is, how astronomical and absolute it already is, how glacial and total, this incarcerating assemblage of dead data. So, weep, wail? Rend eyes, flesh, hair, garments? Well, after a fashion, yes. Appearances, appurtenances, they are already filthy rags and tatters. Choked cemeteries, filth to the heavens, saturated with plastic pellets so fine they permeate a dragonfly's retina. To rend them is just to ask a simple question, and observe, are they not tatters? Are they not rags? There's nothing even to tear down. So then what is there, is there nothing there? The new green Gideons today are funny though today. They have dots on them, little green dots like in charts of space bent by gravity. They have a new, modern, cyberspace chic for this year, dots of data moving in curvilinear network space. Each little green new testament is also kind of like a dot or particle, all stacked up in their cardboard box, or more like little square sections of a formatted drive or bricks or tarot decks. Then you have roads, railroad tracks, bike paths, satellites overhead and lots of streaming media all about amid concrete and glass. Basically all 100% empty really or infinitely close. To live your own genius however, to experience it as a network, to be truly alive, and alive to the genius of others, without hyper-massive waste programming and cannibalism, that is impossible. For human beings to get it: "oh yes, I am a story, I have a new story every day, my story evolves every day and is born afresh, reborn every day, cycling a new cycle every day, this is so mundane and yet so accurate, I'm so glad for this new story! Such a simple story, my original story, everyone's original story that is fresh and new for them and for me too every day, just being alive is all it is, like Buddha's simple breath, tree, and sitting. What need for all these networks of new scriptures? Goodness they are so strange, these stacked cemeteries that measure by fathoms in every direction and we all live daily buried inside." Because you see, human intelligence is a network. Brains are connected. Words are connected. Different words, different conversations, different brains, different intelligence. A new humanity. It can all be transformed instantly in a single second, by a single all-powerful new testament, new novel, new network; a single syllable, a single breath or email transforming all from death to life.
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