Andrew+Mosquera's+Artifact+3+Persuasive



Andrew Mosquera W. Tucker ENGL 408W 04/18/12 Homily on //Matthew// 24: 15-36 Twenty Fourth and Last Sunday after Pentecost “The End Times Are Near” The Continuation of the Holy Gospel according to Saint Matthew: //At that time, Jesus said to his Disciples: [15] When therefore you shall see the abomination of desolation, which was spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing in the holy place: he that readeth let him understand.// // [|[16]] Then they that are in Judea, let them flee to the mountains: [|[17]] And he that is on the housetop, let him not come down to take any thing out of his house: [|[18]] And he that is in the field, let him not go back to take his coat. [|[19]] And woe to them that are with child, and that give suck in those days. [|[20]] But pray that your flight be not in the winter, or on the Sabbath.// // [|[21]] For there shall be then great tribulation, such as hath not been from the beginning of the world until now, neither shall be. [|[22]] And unless those days had been shortened, no flesh should be saved: but for the sake of the elect those days shall be shortened. [|[23]] Then if any man shall say to you: Lo here is Christ, or there, do not believe him. [|[24]] For there shall arise false Christs and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders, insomuch as to deceive (if possible) even the elect. [|[25]] Behold I have told it to you, beforehand.// // [|[26]] If therefore they shall say to you: Behold he is in the desert, go ye not out: Behold he is in the closets, believe it not. [|[27]] For as lightning cometh out of the east, and appeareth even into the west: so shall the coming of the Son of man be. [|[28]] Wheresoever the body shall be, there shall the eagles also be gathered together. [|[29]] And immediately after the tribulation of those days, the sun shall be darkened and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of heaven shall be moved: [|[30]] And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all tribes of the earth mourn: and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with much power and majesty.// // [|[31]] And he shall send his angels with a trumpet, and a great voice: and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from the farthest parts of the heavens to the utmost bounds of them. [|[32]] And from the fig tree learn a parable: When the branch thereof is now tender, and the leaves come forth, you know that summer is nigh. [|[33]] So you also, when you shall see all these things, know ye that it is nigh, even at the doors. [|[34]] Amen I say to you, that this generation shall not pass, till all these things be done. [|[35]] Heaven and earth shall pass, but my words shall not pass.// //“Even so, when you see all these things, know that it is near, even at the door.”// In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. My dear faithful, now that we have come through to the end of the liturgical cycle and we are about to begin a new religious year, Holy Mother Church wishes to draw our attention to the end of the material universe. As always and now more than ever, we must keep in mind the four last things: death, judgment, heaven, hell. Although we must not be too preoccupied with death nor too much like speculators upon the exact date of the end of the world, it is true that our meditation on death will be efficacious for our appreciation of the next last thing, our individual judgment; our mediation on the apocalypse, moreover, will assist us in reckoning with the very last thing, the general judgment of all souls. Death, my dear faithful, is the one certainty man may know about his life on earth. “Death should always be before us,” the spiritual authors write. Yet, when we consider the end of all life, the end of the world, the reality of death becomes more apparent; the gravity of our judgment ever more so. How many of you, dear faithful, are persistent in your denial of death, in the forbearance of judgment, even when the end times are upon you? How many of you still persist in your affection for sin— sin that is hateful to God even when you //shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with much power and majesty [|[30]] //? How few of us, dear faithful, are repentant when we see //great tribulation, such as hath not been from the beginning of the world until now, [|[21]] ?// Yes, I say that the end times are upon us. //He that readeth let him understand. [15]// Our Lord in the Gospel speaks in parables. The Holy Spirit when He inspired the apostle John to write the //Apocalypse// explained this event in mystical language. “You will know neither the day nor the hour,” our Lord replies when the apostles ask him when the world will end. However, the Sacred Scripture is not beyond __all__ understanding. //He that readeth let him understand. [15]// Indeed, understand, my dear faithful, the very many evidences that the end times are upon us. //If therefore they shall say to you: Behold he is in the desert, go ye not out: Behold he is in the closets, believe it not. [|[26]] // The first evidence that the end of the world is near to us is the very many “false christs” that are leading souls astray from the Truth. How many people in the world worship one or many cultural icons living today? How many had such a religious faith in the campaign of our President? So much faith that they believed that a human being could lead them to salvation? How many children read the books of popular authors as if they were scripture? How many of our children know that characters of Harry Potter before they can name four apostles? How many of you, dear faithful, are guilty of the same idolatry? Although you say that you believe in Our Lord Jesus Christ, you follow the news of your favorite talk show host, or you follow the stats of your favorite football player far more religiously than you reckon with the tournament of Heaven and Hell? Indeed, Our Lord Jesus Christ has been lost in the flood of false prophets. If you read any respectable magazine’s list of the most influential people in the world, you might be lucky to find the Holy Name of Jesus. [i] But if you do, you will see that He, our Savior, is just one in one hundred others. Our world does not reckon with the singular importance that is God’s. And this, my dear faithful is the first sign of the end times. //When therefore you shall see the abomination of desolation, which was spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing in the holy place: [15]// A second sign of the end of the world is something more mysterious. Never has it been declared by the canon of our Holy Mother Church, what exactly is this //abomination of desolation.// However, to think that is could be any one of so many abominations of our times. One such abomination is arguably the crisis of Faith is attacking our Church. The //Novus Ordo,// and all of its destruction rent upon the Faith of Catholics can be understood as the abomination, one that is //standing in the holy place. [15]// A mockery of the Our Holy Mother Church’s glory is being enacted in the very holiest of holy places. This abomination corresponds to another prophesy of a great loss of faith in the chosen people. I had read an article that gave shocking numbers to the apparent decline: “In 2008 alone, Catholic membership declined by 400,000. More than 1,000 parishes have closed since 1995, and the number of priests has fallen from about 49,000 to 40,000 during that same period.” [ii] Such dreadful news should make us consider our last end all the more. Dear faithful, dear few remaining faithful, will you remain faithful even until the end when Christ //shall gather together his elect from the four winds [31]?// A third sign: //For there shall be then great tribulation, such as hath not been from the beginning of the world until now, neither shall be. [|[21]] // This should be the most obvious; most appalling sign of the world’s approaching destruction. My dear faithful, you are all well familiar with your own immediate tribulation: a dwindling economy, the rising cost of subsistence, the mockery that the worldlings make of your way of living a virtuous life. Let us not forget the sufferings of the entire world. What atrocity do we hear of daily! Consider the civil war fought by child soldiers in Uganda. [iii] Consider the drug wars of Mexico. [iv] You need not look far to see immense injustice and the incessant destruction of innocent lives. We live in a time when living men do not value life. Is it more probable that mankind will destroy itself without Divine Intervention? Dear faithful, how prepared are we for the imminent tribulation and the painful death that will be ours? “Be sober and watchful,” the apostle says for it won’t be long. //And immediately after the tribulation of those days, the sun shall be darkened and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of heaven shall be moved: [|[29]] // This verse, this fourth evidence, illustrates a desolation beyond our reckoning. When you read of //the sun being darkened// and the //stars falling from heaven,// you can only imagine an immense blast, a gigantic explosion that could blot out the heavenly bodies. Surely such a force could only come from the wrath of God, you think. Not so, my dear brethren. Anyone who has survived the impact of an atomic bomb will tell you that mankind himself has harnessed such a force. Modern man, in his hatred for himself, has design such a weapon that can be as destructive as a //star falling from heaven// into the earth. Indeed, with the temperature of an atom bomb’s center of impact approaching the temperature of the sun, this coincidence is an even more dreadful awakening to the closeness of Armageddon. This final battle is upon us. The day when all of the armies of the world will converge, //and the stars shall fall from heaven// like the world’s arsenal of nuclear missiles all fired at once. Dear faithful, there is no escaping your own death, just as one cannot escape the blaze of the atom bomb. What more of a meditation on death could inspire us to repent and return to the ranks of the elect? Finally, Our Lord ends his prophesy with a short parable: //And from the fig tree learn a parable: When the branch thereof is now tender, and the leaves come forth, you know that summer is nigh. [|[32]] // This parable is simply a reiteration of his first statement: //he that readeth let him understand. [15]// That is: you see the evidence, so you know what awaits you. On a deeper reading, one could ask why would Our Lord use the joyful season of spring as an analogy for the premonition of the end of the world? By this, you must understand, dear faithful, that the Spring Time, with its joy, and freedom, and youth is our own generation. Despite the //great tribulations such as hath not been,// despite the immense injustice and sin and unhappiness that plagues our modern generation, the world still believes that it has progressed to an enlightened state. The worldlings have faith now more than ever that Utopia, rather than Armageddon, is upon them. The great thinkers and academia today, rejoice in our era because they claim that man is nearly god. Man has progressed to such wisdom that he may find his own paradise on earth, without God. It is in this “Spring Time” of the spirit of the world, that man will try to take the place of Divinity. Do not be deceived, dear faithful! Do not lose your faith in Our Lord Jesus Christ and enthrone your own nature as divine, for just as mankind will arise to crown itself in divinity, just then will Our Lord the //Son of man come in the clouds of heaven with much power and majesty.// Do not forget, with all of the deceit of “false christs”, that He will be coming very soon, dear faithful. He will be coming very soon. //Amen I say to you, that this generation shall not pass, till all these things be done. Heaven and earth shall pass, but my words shall not pass. [|[34]] // The world will end. Indeed, it will end soon: whether one month from now or one hundred years from now, or even further in the future… However, far or close, the end is upon us, dear faithful, and we must prepare, whether for our own souls or for the souls of our children. Let us be ready to //flee to the mountains// when that time arrives: but let us not flee the inevitable end of death, let us rather flee from the spirit of the world. Let us flee from sin that we may be numbered among the elect. For the elect will not perish, they will be numbered in heaven. Even after all of the destruction, even after the world ends, “//My words shall not pass,”// says Our Lord. And neither shall those who abide by His words pass away. Neither shall we, dear faithful, if you remain so through the end. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

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EARLY DRAFT

Andrew Mosquera W. Tucker ENGL 408W 04/03/12  Interpreting The Cure’s “Siamese Twins”: //Inferno// Revisited In this consumer world, a wasteland of bastardized art by reproduction, degraded value through mass production, and ruined beauty from commoditized waste, it is easier to just enjoy the wave of pop culture religion for the anesthesia it gives a wounded soul than to strive to discover and defend the last fragments of classic wisdom. Quite a gloomy frame to write from, no? This is the dark planet from which Robert Smith of The Cure writes. In resistance to this art critic’s despair, mentioned above, I wish to advocate an approach that will lead the beauty starved closer to their goal: to sift through the ruins of modern culture in the hope of discovering some new artifact that has been spared the iconoclasm of commodity worship. I believe I have found such a work of art in the song writing of The Cure. Consider the band’s four studio album, //Pornography:// whose title is no more provocative and disturbing than the music. This record represents the “early cure,” as fans would call this era, before the strain of rising popularity caught hold of the band’s art. Indeed, Robert Smith has referred to this album as his favorite. [1] Despite the uncertainty of business and personal descent to various vices of the band members, the era of this album may have been his least inhibited production of poetry in song. One track stands out not only in its sonic divergence and preference to vocals but also in its vivid imagery and acquaintance with traditional theology. “What is all this?” you ask. Let us descend into the infernal thunderstorm of this poetry, together. (Better than this would be to stop and listen to the album: to hear the grotesque beauty itself.) When I first listened to the //Pornography// album, I was unnerved. I was afraid to give it another listen but slowly its black magic carried it to the top of my favorite list. After the first three frantic tracks, prophetic hymns of a personal apocalypse, the speeding car, in whose back seat you have hitherto been tied up with only your ghost behind the wheel, will coast to a safer crawl down an abandoned city street. It is night. The montage of atrocities and parade of dead beings has passed under the setting merciless sun. Now, you watch a single drama unfold through the voyeur’s windows from the filthy street. The cast is small. A tragedy, one expects. The lighting is clear and you begin to recognize with horror… Could that be… the one ascending the stairs to his death… could that be your very own self? The first “love song” of the album (second to the superb hopelessly romantic “Cold”) follows the singer through fragmented stanzas of despair (the foreboding “is it always like this?”) with characteristically pornographic close-ups of physical images, catachreses of union: “flesh and blood in the first kiss…” “Her legs around me…” The transition from the seduction to the falling action (classily done off scene, following the classic meaning for //obscene//.) results in what anyone familiar with pop songs would call the //break up//: “you’re nothing; I don’t need you anymore you’re nothing!” And here we have the pop love story gone bad. “Leave me to die,” he says. This album being an artifact of the punk/goth tradition in alternative music, it is not surprising that a simple break up can inspire thoughts of death, eternity, destruction, and cruel malice in the make-up pale, black clothing clad youth, right? But I will not let this album of poetry fall into the hands of a hungry pop culture trend! On a deeper reading of the song, listeners can begin to understand that the high language and references to death mean more than the typical teen goth realizes who speaks such out of trend habit. There is an ancestry of rigid theology and morality inspiring these lyrics. Moving from the literal interpretation to a deeper level, the singer gives us a conceit to show the deadly nature of sex. Looking at the lyrics on the moral level of interpretation (How does this text evaluate good and evil? What does this text tell me to do or to avoid?), we notice the apparent good unmasking itself to be the hidden evil. The singer chooses “an eternity” if Hell, like the “falling angels” who chose to rebel against the service of God. [2] “Laughing into the fire” suggests not only a resignation to hell-fire but also a reckless abandon to the flames of sexual passion, the “violent delights [that] have violent ends; like fire and powder, which as they kiss, consume.” [3] “Flesh and blood” suggest not only physical desire but also physical mortality in the same light. “Writhing” here is an uneasy euphemism (more like a dysphemism) for physical union, but in its natural context we associate it with reactions of pain. The “red light” is a colloquial reference to the refuges of sexual degeneracy, but the visual looks much more foreboding. The mutual movement of “the oldest of dances” [4] is likened to the feared occult of voodoo, and the most natural of human interactions is compared to a freak-show: like Siamese twins. There is a consistent reversal of value binaries from one’s expectation of a love song. Smith is talking about fornication, a sin, a mortal sin, [5] one which brings about the death of the soul. In the “dancing in my pocket” stanza, the hypnotic menacing vocals give the impression of the singer trapped in the claws of the woman as predator now. The sensation that pleases the flesh is naught but the decay of the soul which worms will soon consume. After the death/sex climax, “in the morning I cried,” crying internally for regret: the gnawing guilt that plagues us without our understanding, the //post coitus tristis**[6]**// that few acknowledge. The singer is trapped in that agony, not just out of regret but in the realization that the //love// making only ended up in abandonment. “You won’t remember my voice” and subsequent lines display the despair of a sexual union untied to love. What’s worse is it doesn’t seem that our lovers ever really separate. “Is it always like this?” the singer mourns, suggesting the events of the song play out again and again with the same hellish result. The moral interpretation then is don’t //do it//, right? There is more to this poem/dirge than a simplistic moral. Read the lyrics again, as good readers ought, to learn something new with each revision. Beneath the moral level, ever deeper lies the //allegorical// level of interpretation, furthest from the literal. The title imagery of Siamese twins, two people physically inseparable from each other, combined with the recurrent references to death and eternity bring a literary mind to remember the classic text of Dante’s Inferno. In “Canto V”, Dante explores the circle where the lustful souls are punished, bound together in massive storm. “Like falling angels… everything falls apart” these souls are caught up in “the infernal hurricane that never rests / hurtles the spirits onward in its rapine” (V, 31-2) an infernal storm that “fades and spins.” In Dante’s work we hear the story of Francesca de Rimini, who, caught in adultery with her husband’s brother, is eternally tormented alongside her lover. Observe Dore’s illustration of this scene. (Appendix B) This illustration is a good visualization of The Cure’s idea of Siamese Twins, as sad in the former as is sinister in the later. The two lovers who once loved each other in life are bound to the one who brought them to Hell, so to speak. Although their love “doth not yet desert” Francesca, she disdains her lover: “the mode still offends me,” (V,102) and she refers to him with the impersonal “this man”, as diminutive as “you’re nothing. I don’t need you anymore. You’re nothing.” All the while “this man” simply weeps speechless and frowns (V,136-8): “We never talk. We never smile.” And for “an eternity of this” the two damned lovers are tossed about like “falling angels” yet stuck together like “Siamese twins.” Dante observes with morbid fascination much like the “girl at the window looks at me for an hour.” It suggests the scandal of the whole affair makes “everything falls apart / broken inside me.” This breaking apart and falling apart inside is another way of describing the faint that Dante suffers at the end of Francesca’s story (V,108), overwhelmed by pity and smitten for his preoccupation with scandal. The enigmatic stanza, “push a blade into my hand,” apart from telling the singer’s cyclically repetitive self-inflicted death, could announce the entrance of another actor: the husband who, blade in hand and slowly creeping up the stairs to his wife’s chamber, discovered and murdered both adulterers together. And then, like the loss of consciousness that sweeps over Dante and carries him into the next circle of Hell, the track cuts out to silence and the digital lights changes to five. The listener is caught up from this infernal anecdote to behold darker sins and the destruction wrought upon the sinner, just as the pilgrim of the classic text, learning from evil so that he may “once again see the stars” (XXXIV,139) The Cure’s //Pornography// is by no means the next //Inferno,// yet it represents one of the seminal inspirations for musicians and a whole wave of youth culture. One of the citizens of progressive modernity would evaluate this evaluation as backwards radical morality, yet the sentiments herein are reflections of real relational experience, just as the verses of the Inferno. This song is not so much a homily on the dangers of fornication as it is an exposé of the baneful side of the deceptively innocuous. In much the same way, the entire album criticizes the empire of modernity, tearing off the veil of beloved culture and revealing the unnatural machine for what it is: an alienator of truth and beauty. Even in the wreckage of this wasteland, however, one can discover traces of art and poetry. Moreover, one can follow these fragments of art and poetry as a trail to rediscovering forgotten treasures like the //Inferno,// the lost artifacts of traditional wisdom. Works Cited The Cure. “Siamese Twins.” //Pornography.// Fiction Records. 1982. CD Alighieri, Dante. //Inferno.// “Canto V.” trans. H. W. Longfellow. London, Chartwell Books. 2009. Shakespeare, William. //Romeo and Juliet.// London, Collins. 1975.

[1] Favorites are always relative conjecture. It is mentioned here along with more interesting background. []

[2] The war in heaven is described with similar imagery: Revelations 12:7. Interestingly the origin of Satan’s “Non Serviam” is from Jeremiah 2:20. This interpretation runs interestingly unintentionally parallel to this passage. [3] //Romeo and Juliet.// II, 6. [4] //Canterbury// //Tales.// “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue” Another interesting reference by contrast. This woman, an “expert in the oldest of dances” had brought about the actual demise of five men. [5] It’s pretty grave for some religious folks. “**Mortal** ('Deathly') sin - This type of sin is the most serious as it involves loss of sanctifying grace. A person who dies with unremitted mortal sin would be in danger of eternal separation from God in Hell.” Taken from [] [6] A Latin dictum of unknown origin. Trans. “Sad after sex.”