22nd Blues for the Apocalypse

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It has been noted elsewhere that all of Herschel’s writings on the apocalypse have been written in verse. Some may be found in the Book of Irony proper, and others are scattered throughout a variety of marginalia[1]. Here is a representative sample, the 22nd Blues for the Apocalypse.

Just as the summer shall envy the winter,
Just as the sweet shall envy the bitter,
All suicides must, in the end, reconsider the dead.[2]

Just as the losers shall one day be winners,
The ones who are heavy shall one day be thinner;
The ones who stay fat shall be eaten for dinner instead.

So too the social shall envy the lonesome
As the one who owns nothing must envy who owns some,
And the father of wisdom shall not know what’s grown from his head.[3]

In those days the just shall envy the wicked,
the towering redwood shall envy the thicket,
The passenger pigeons shall turn in their tickets,
And the mightiest city shall fold like a rickety shed.

[1]As none of the primary writings of Herschel have ever been conclusively discovered, one might wonder how the later transcriptions came to occupy the margins of other works. In this case, Herschel appears to have been the favored writer of monks who were supposed to have been transcribing other works, primarily Latin and Greek agricultural texts.[4] More problematic are Herschel’s persistent appearances in typedmarginalia.

[2]This verse is sometimes interpreted as an indication that the end-times will be accompanied by the mass-resurrection of suicides. It is correspondingly speculated that the end-times will feature the mass-demise of non-suicides, a claim which is considerably less controversial. The precise timing and degree of overlap between these events is in dispute.

[3]A reference to Zeus, or in some interpretations, Adlai Stevenson.

[4]It may be relied upon that the writing in these texts is not Herschel’s, as throughout his works Herschel displays an almost singular incapacity with even the rudiments of agriculture.

The 101 Elementary Forms of Betrayal

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As has been explained previously, 101 Elementary Forms of Betrayal is by far the most famous of the prophet Herschel’s obscure texts, and of his lost works, it is by far the most complete. The most lost of Herschel’s complete works is also his only foray into musical composition, the Situational Hymnal for Ordinary Time0.

0 Other scholars would suggest Herschel’s primary political work, a moderately lengthy tract entitled Hitting People is the New Non-Violence.

While the context and purpose of the Elementary Forms is hotly debated, much of the list itself has survived, although Herschel’s original ordering, if any, has not. Among the more commonly cited betrayals:

  • Promising to do something, and then not doing it.
  • Promising not to do something, and then doing it anyway.
  • Making a promise which cannot plausibly be expected to be fulfilled, and then fulfilling it, to the consternation and discomfort of those to whom it was promised.1
  • Not performing an action that one has been habitually expected to perform, though no promise has explicitly been made.
  • Dropping a piano from a great height onto a person that one normally would greet in a cordial fashion.
  • Urinating in an unexpected location and/or container.

1 As may be seen, to a greater or lesser extent, among the European powers in the summer of 1914. Additionally, see below:

  • Failing to withdraw from a game of “chicken.”
  • Withdrawing from a game of “chicken.”
  • Castanets2

2 No further explanation of this item has been recovered, but Herschel’s contemporaries (if any) seem to have generally accepted it without complaint. A mistranslation from the original Urdu is strongly suspected, if there is in fact an original, and if it was indeed written in Urdu. If the text was not originally written in Urdu, the translation from Urdu was undoubtedly an even greater source of problems.

  • Achieving greater wealth, professional success, or critical acclaim than a friend who is, by all accounts, more talented and harder-working.
  • Compromise.
  • Failure to compromise.
  • Making a slight mistake in the execution of an elaborate and infrequent social ritual.
  • Ear poison
  • Praising only one of two people with similar attributes while the other is present.3

3 It has been suggested that many of Herschel’s Forms are not really betrayals so much as things which cause people to feel betrayed. These concerns, however have been rendered relatively moot by the present church’s adoption of descriptivist ethics, i.e. “The right thing to do is the thing that people generally do when they say they are doing the right thing.” Some claim this stance may be directly associated with recent revelations about the disorderliness of church finances, but church officials maintain that, as non-members taking an interest in church business, these critics (and law-enforcement officials) are insufficiently disinterested to form an objective viewpoint. On this matter, the church claims to be wholly disinterested in its own existence, and therefore most qualified. In light of this disinterest, it is considered unlikely that the church would have been maintaining any funds in the first place, and the whole controversy must be seen as something of a curiosity. One administrator, when pressed for interview, refused on grounds of reverse solipsism… Carrying on with Herschel’s Forms:

  • Inventing a lie which, though a lie has been expected and is socially decorous to deliver, is sufficiently implausible that the listener is required to take offence.
  • Delivering the truth when a socially-decorous lie would produce better consequences.
  • Standing idly by while an elevator door closes in front of an approaching person.
  • Revealing something which must necessarily have been concealed for an extended period, even if it is not, technically speaking, really anyone’s business.
  • The letter of the law.
  • The spirit of the law.
  • Constructing a mechanism by which one’s eventual betrayal will be seen as morally justified, denying one’s victim even the satisfaction of being betrayed.5
  • Failing to betray a second party in accordance with the expectations of a third, thereby allowing the second to carry out an intended betrayal of the third (betrayal by reverse proxy).
  • Betraying a second party who intended to betray a third, which second had the intention of preventing betrayal of the fourth by the third, thereby ultimately betraying the fourth as well as the second (double betrayal, once removed).
  • The old switcheroo.

The preceding 26 Forms are the most commonly referenced, and presumably also the most canonical. Many of the other recovered Forms are mentioned only in passing, or dismissed as theoretically possible but too esoteric for practical treachery. Whether the betrayal of theory by practice should be counted among the Forms is fiercely disputed among reputable6 scholars.

4 The practice of placing footnotes immediately after their referents in the text is not customary nor, many might argue, remotely productive. The author apologizes for any confusion.

5 The satisfaction of being betrayed recently polled as the 5th most common form of satisfaction among Americans by Harper’s Weekly. It has moved up rapidly since the previous survey in 2006, having edged out “the satisfaction of a job well done” (6th), and having jumped by several places the satisfaction of home-ownership (formerly 3rd, now 12th).

6 This term is not strictly accurate.

Tradeoffs

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The Book of Irony has been accused of encouraging venality, hypocrisy, intellectual dishonesty, petty vindictiveness in the guise of high-minded idealism, shameless opportunism in the guise of pragmatic realism, a preoccupation with the minor flaws of others, pretentiousness, and sodomy. In the face of these criticisms, church officials have maintained that if a holy text is to be of any impact whatsoever, it must speak to the interests of its readers.

The Church of Irony & Questionable Apocrypha

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It will come as no surprise that many chapters of the Book of Irony are apocryphal, especially those sections involving the Prophet Herschel, who has long been a subject of unease among church leaders. Unfortunately for them, Herschel has proven to be almost as popular among editors as the church has been lax in its record-keeping.

This carelessness[1] has frustrated later scholars to no end. Recently, it has come to light that several chapters, popularly attributed to Herschel, have never had their authorship formally questioned except in other disputed sections of the text, and are as such only apocryphally apocryphal.

While the aforementioned chapters are suspected of being dubious, prominent scholars remain doubtful as to whether these suspicions may be confirmed. Furthermore, past investigations have tended to increase the popularity of the chapters under scrutiny. These have been classified as “abundantly apocryphal.” Indeed, many of Herschel’s most famous quotations fall into this category, including such standbys as, “Let him who is without stones cast the first stone.” [3]

The most challenging field for aspiring Herschologists, however, is that of hypothetical apocrypha. Along with the many chapters that have deftly sidled their way into the Book of Irony over time, a great many have trickled out, especially during periods of elevated paper prices. Among these are the mythical Lost Books of Irony, the somewhat less mythical and somewhat rattier Discarded Books of Irony, and the Books of Irony That Aren’t Being Used Right Now But They’ve Been Put in a Box in Case We Need Them Later. None of these should be confused with the Book of Irony’s hastily assembled sequel, Bookin’ II: Eclectic Guru-Fu. [4]

In any case, there is no comprehensive record of Herschel’s writings. As such, it is not known with any certainty which of Herschel’s works have appeared in the Book of Irony, and of those that have, which were actually authored by Herschel, and of those works which may or may not have appeared in the Book as written by Herschel, which may or may not have been changed so drastically over time as to be unrecognizable to a reader of the original, should such an original have existed, presuming that it was read. Many such works exist only as passing references in contemporary commentaries on the Book and on Herschel — and some of these, it is suspected, were ghost-written by Herschel as a platform for taking the piss. [5]

The most famous of these obscure texts is Herschel’s 101 Elementary Modes of Betrayal. First (presumably) published sometime in the late Cenozoic era, it has been a subject of controversy ever since (and possibly before). Much of the contemporary analysis disputes the composition of the list, but it is unclear whether it was intended to be exhaustive. In his letters, Pliny the Younger[6] proposes that the 102nd mode of betrayal consists of “implicitly obscuring the existence of the 102nd mode of betrayal, so as to spring it upon one’s friends unawares.” Pliny the Elder, though also critical of Herschel’s work, refers to this notion as “bull-pucky.”

There is no clear indication as to the structure of the work, though several contemporaries snidely suggest that it is a “how-to” book.

[1] Many years, the church has elected to redirect its entire archival budget into the purchase of new vestments, based on “considerations of the ephemeral nature of truth.” [2]
[3] The church is divided on the exact significance of this statement, which makes it all the more versatile in conversation. It has been interpreted variously: as a paradoxical injunction against stoning; as an advisement that all executioners should be eunuchs; and as a paradoxical statement in favor of stoning, but only if one does so with restraint (i.e., if one initially has only a single stone, one may cast that stone and consequently be without stones, but the stockpiling of stones is considered a sign of bad faith). It is sometimes also seen as supporting another famous Herschel-ism: “To whom little is given, from him much will be taken away.”
[4] Released in 1977, it was promptly recaptured and returned to the solitary confinement wing of the National Archives.
[5] Piss-taking platforms were popular in Central Europe for much of the 17th century, but were ultimately abandoned as a threat to public health.
[6] This is by far the most difficult challenge for scholars believing Herschel to be from modern Milwaukee. Conversely, Herschel’s (alleged) response to Pliny the Younger was recently discovered in a spiral-ring notebook dated to 1988. The notebook itself was found in the innermost chamber of an Olmec burial site in the Yucatan, and was written in, according to forensic analysis, with a quill pen from the extinct Tahitian Sandpiper. At the time of this writing, all the leading theories on the Pliny-Herschel dialogue include both fraud and time travel.
[2] At least, in so far as one may trust the budgetary records, which have been historically dubious and serve chiefly as a conspicuously precise testament of the low wages paid to the church’s accountants.

The Book of Irony: Parable of the Cabbage

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Herschel was walking in the fields one day when a group of local farmers approached him. “O Herschel, the men of the bus station tell us you are a wise man, but all you say to us is nonsense. Are we not worthy of enlightenment? Why do you refuse us your wisdom?”

“But I have been telling you all that I know,” said Herschel. He paused, and began again, “I tell you then that the truth is like a cabbage. If you have a cabbage, and one by one you peel away the leaves, when you remove the last leaf, what do you have?”

“Why, nothing!” answered one.

“No,” replied Herschel. “You still have the very same cabbage. It is only arranged differently.”

The farmers looked at one another, and gradually they nodded their assent.

“But,” continued Herschel, “the truth is not like a cabbage in that way…”

Like most of the prophet Herschel’s teachings, this passage is in dispute. For many years both the Herschel-as-Urdu scholars and the Herschel-as-from-Milwaukee scholars claimed this passage as the definitive proof for their interpretation. The Milwaukee-ists note that the cabbage was unknown in ancient central Asia. The Urdu-ists, though somewhat flummoxed on this point, counter that it is equally preposterous that the residents of Milwaukee would show any familiarity with vegetables. After much debate, the two sides have reached an uneasy truce on this issue; they have agreed that the cabbage is only a metaphor.

The Church of Irony and Missing Myths

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The Book of Irony contains a great many things, including recipes, advice columns, actuarial tables, and even a striking watercolor rendition of a kitchen sink. It is considered an exceptional source, especially, for polemics, philippics, jeremiads, tirades, diatribes, rants, reproach, incitement, indictment, and hortatory injunctions of all kinds — not to mention manifestos. It is perhaps the single largest collection of manifestos ever assembled. This has been the natural result of the church’s bylaws and tendency towards schism. According to article VII, section “flarf”1, each of the church’s (belligerent and numerous) subsects “shall be permitted, at the time of its departure, to contribute one (1) manifesto to scripture, making the case for the assumption of their views into orthodoxy, howsoever deviant they may be.”2
1 no relation.
2 The origins of this peculiar convention are lost to the mists of time, as all records of the church’s foundation have been mysteriously misplaced. It is widely assumed that the church’s founders were shameless opportunists, ready to scatter at the first sign of trouble, but also eager for free publicity.

What the book does not contain, however, is a creation myth. This may be surprising to consumers of more conventional religious texts3, but they may rest assured that this exclusion was unintentional. Indeed, church officials were shocked to discover this when, in 1872, they finally sat down to read the whole thing straight through. This was a turbulent period for the church, as its leadership subsequently announced that the church was, in fact, againstslavery, and had always been, but that they had been holding the relevant scriptures upside-down the whole time, and wasn’t that the darnedest thing. At this point there is some discontinuity in the records, as the church hierarchy was shaken up by an equally-coincidental series of near-lynchings.
3 Convention is of course dependent on context. Readers raised in religions without creation myths will find the preceding perfectly conventional. Rest assured though, they will find the following(a) highly unorthodox.
(a) Notions of precedent and succession are also, unfortunately, dependent on context. The author regrets that his use of footnotes has made this post nondeterministic, and that it is no longer possible to be certain what the reader will find unorthodox.

However, rather than violate the integrity4 and spirit of the original, it was determined that the church’s account of creation would be published as a companion piece and, as was the style at the time, in serial format. As a result, Creation Now! has been published continuously in tri-weekly installments for over a century, beginning with

In the beginning there was the beginning and so it began. Soon the beginning came to an end and at the end of the beginning there was a new beginning, and the beginning was before the beginning and the end shall follow after the end. In the beginning there was nothing, and what followed was quite similar. In the beginning there may have been quantum gravitational effects…

And so forth in that manner. Astute readers may have noticed that the above text is rather vague, and not particularly ironic. If you are such, your concerns have been addressed, and the various errata for Vol. I are available in Vols. XVII, XXXVIII, 0×475, and C. It now reads

First there was nothing, but there was nowhere for nothing to be. And all that nothing with nowhere to go, that was really something.

4 This term is not strictly accurate
5 The church switched briefly to hexadecimal notation during the Second World War, for fear that Roman numerals were giving aid and comfort to the fascists.

Unfortunately, despite extravagant attention to detail, the publication has become increasingly difficult to sustain, as the church’s mythography has remained roughly chronological. Despite efforts to the contrary, by 1937 the creation myth had absorbed the entire American Colonial period (during which process Henry Hudson was accidentally canonized) and appeared to be gaining speed. In a move that has been generally regarded as disastrous, the church kicked off 1981 with an in-depth summary of the 1980 election. Shortly thereafter it arrived at its current form, which is comprised largely of weather forecasts, horoscopes, and speculative fiction, though it also provides space for the still-plentiful corrections, scholarly clarifications, and wild-eyed jabbering regarding the extant myths.

In a 2009 bid to undercut the church’s competitors, Creation Now! devoted an entire issue to eschatology, and proposed that the end times would arrive sometime in the Autumn of 2011, if not sooner. This produced a devastating decline in the publication’s subscription rate, and the date of the apocalypse was quickly rescinded and placed “at least several several fiscal years from now.”

The Church of Irony’s Seven Deadliest Sins 2009

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In accordance with the provisional nature of truth, or perhaps due to a profound misunderstanding of the nature of sin*, the church of irony releases an annual list of what it deems to be the seven deadliest sins. The perennial favorite, taking the top spot in the 68 of the the past 97 years, has been “genocide,”** though in recent years “drunk driving” has also been a strong contender. Still, the criteria used are complex and multi-dimensional, which has led to such surprises as the 1948 victory for “talking in the theater”, as well as a strong #3 finish for “mid-air adultery” in 1997. Less surprisingly, “Vodka shots on the job” jumped to the top of the list in 1986.

The theological implications of this list are somewhat sparse. The church faithful*** are cautioned to avoid sin, unless it will make for an interesting story later on. In so far as many of the top contenders have become clichéd, the church encourages turnover in the list (which is to say, the faithful are encouraged to sin originally). The official church teaching on sin is that there is no such thing as sin, which makes the whole affair somewhat perplexing.

Nonetheless, this year’s list has been made available, for the benefit of all those who are both sinners and not yet dead.

7. Bear-baiting
6. Groundwater contamination
5. Auto-erotic asphyxiation ****
4. Fighting a land war in Asia
3. Presidential slash-fiction
2. Genocide
1. Hubris

In related news, the award for “Best Sin in a Cable Documentary” goes to Jersey Shore.
* The church holds that misunderstanding is the most profound form of understanding.
** There has been much debate whether the church’s related “Seven Deadliest Sinners” list should be based on amortized rates, proportion of population, or raw totals.
*** This term is not strictly accurate.
**** Be aware that the church often blurs the line between “sin” and “clearly not a good idea.”

The Church of Irony and the Afterlife

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The church of irony has no firm notions regarding the afterlife, save that only atheists will go to Heaven.* All others, it is proposed, will be subjected to a Hell of their own choosing. This is sometimes referred to as the miracle of irrational preferences.

Other factions within the church argue that this world isthe afterlife. The meta-spectralites, for example, hold that most (but not all) people are ghosts, and on occasion will gather for an inverse seance to determine which among them are the living. Another sect maintains that this world is intended to be something called “The Hell of Small Objects,” and that therefore the prosperity of the NBA represents a grave miscarriage of cosmic intent.** There is a firm consensus in the church that most things are grave miscarriages of cosmic intent. Another offshoot sect, the pan-sepulchralists, merely believe that most things are graves.*** The pan-sepulchralists, though, have nearly died out, owing to their rather strict commandments regarding the desecration of burial grounds.

* In the words of the prophet Herschel, “Heaven is full of awkward conversations.”

** Their proposal is that the vast majority of us exist only to facilitate the continued discomfort and awkwardness of a few very tall individuals by, e.g. contructing low doorframes and designing airline seats with minimal leg room. The popularity of physical spectacle, however, has allowed many of these individuals to circumvent or at least compensate for such annoyances.

*** In the sense that for most locations on the planet, it is overwhelmingly likely that something has died there, this is literally true. The pan-sepulchralists, however, hold that memorial need not be bound by the limits of memory.

A Reading from the Book of Irony (#2)

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The prophet Herschel was out walking one day when his disciples came to him. “Oh great Herschel, we are concerned. The men who write newspaper columns have been saying you are full of shit.”

Herschel replied, “Perhaps, but at first I was full of rich bread and fine cheese. Would it be better if I were a man of no substance whatsoever?”

This passage is among the more controversial attributed to the prophet Herschel. For one, the Herschel-as-Urdu scholars insist that “newspaper columns” should have been translated instead as “clay tablets”, and that this would make things infinitely clearer. Other scholars contend that this would help not a jot.

Church leaders in general have been fairly ambivalent about the passage, which implies that all earthly wisdom is subject to gradual decay and putrefaction. In consequence, prominent officials have begun to speculate whether the prophet Herschel was not, in fact, a member of the church of irony at all, and have suggested that perhaps he slipped into the volume by way of a clever bit of copy-editing.

With regards to this, it should be noted that one of the prophet Herschel’s few recorded prophecies was his prediction that the church would gradually disown all its prophets. Third-party theologians have gleefully observed that Herschel has got the church in a real pickle with that one.

A Reading from the Book of Irony

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A wise man once came to the prophet Herschel and said, “O Herschel, the men who mumble in the bus station say you are a great thinker. What is the meaning of the life of the spirit?”

The prophet replied, “One thousand years in the barrel of a gun.”

The man thought a while. “Anticipation, yes, but everything depends on the condition of the gun.”

Said the prophet, “Yes, but everything also depends on the one who pulls the trigger.”

The man went away unsatisfied, but later the prophet Herschel received a lucrative television contract.

Church scholars remain divided on the provenance of this passage. Some date it as far back as the first century BC, blaming the obvious anachronisms on an overly loose translation from the original Urdu. This original has not yet been located, but the style, they claim, is distinctly Urdu. A majority of scholars, however, conclude that the passage was adapted from writings in a bathroom stall in a Milwaukee bus terminal, presumably placed there by the prophet himself, and was incorporated into the canonical Book of Irony sometime in late August of 1983.