Threshing Floor: December 2022
🙦 Merry Christmas!
Poems: All is Fleeting unto Never More — Jeremy Abegg; Volta Vulpes — Anonymous; The Tower — Ava Hixson; Ultimate Thule — Creed Thie
Essays: Recognition — Michael Thomas Jones; Screwtape Email #2 — Screwtape (h/t Leslie Taylor)
Stories: Suppercut — Judah Wolff
🙧 Poems 🙦
All is Fleeting unto Never More
All is fleeting unto never more
Drawing curtains to the last good night,
The moon sinking, held by a wire
Down, down by the ocean shore.
Not wild with war doth the world expire
Heavy with men ready to fight
That bend, burn, and break the flower in the fire for
All is fleeting unto never more.
At the ocean’s lips, the late hour is not so dire,
Where good men be cut down with swords bitter bite.
Clouds of wrath be not found roling in heaven higher
Down, down by the ocean shore.
But silence slips softly from fire
And whips the sand till out of sight.
As wind whispers like a sweet lier,
“All is fleeting unto never more.”
World of wonders and deep desire
Betrothed to truth, beauty, and all that is right.
Now ready and waiting for last day’s pyre
Down, down by the ocean shore.
Then the sun will give way to far greater light;
The trumpeter sounding forth with all his might
The prince of heaven his earth will restore, where
All is fleeting unto never more
Until all is made like heaven bright
Which comes to claim the world’s last night,
All is fleeting unto never more
Down, down by the ocean shore.Jeremy Abegg
Volta Vulpes
She is a violent storm, in divergent fashion Fortuitously warm, rampart of compassion Waves, bolts sizzle, crackle, glitter and glimmer Shockingly benign, leaving nothing dimmer Fervent floods, deluges energize the soul Overwhelming, not undoing; animating whole A cunning monarch's pointed countenance veils the gentle queen The enigmatic crown presents a proud, prismatic preen Tresses braid the Stygian strains and splendid beams auroral Deadest soils succor the exemplary and floral
Anonymous
The Tower
This is me in pictures, Pink stripe sconces and fixtures All the walls, mine for hours Scrape me limp from ivory towers Carved with scathing scenes Marbling white and envy green Round face rosied with pearls Cried from crocodiles’ lonely firls Craning with my binoculars Below, willows and poplars Careen me down Remove my crown Cut my hair and leave me blind Take my strength, stab me behind Help me surrender I, the borrower, you the lender Help me be battered My reflection is shattered Take from me this elegant monster Elevated, destroying desponder Dispose in me my dying art Heal my unrepentant, unforgiving heart
Ava Hixson is a busy college student on the palouse, as well as a painter and poet.
Ultima Thule
How long shall I wander before I hear the trees speak once more? How sore shall be my feet before they touch the dust of El Dorado? How wrinkled shall be my hands before they grasp the swordhilt rising from the waters? There is a place of moss on rocks and vermillion mountain-ash whose spirit is this. A lake far away, long and broad, where no road leads. Falling water not chained by the photograph. Great cedars not slain by the saw. Secrets not exposed by the map. Legends not composed by the computer. Some know of parts of it, some write of it, journey to it. You could walk there. But this land is not a slave penned in by letter or language. For it is here that FACT draws close to MYTH, esto perpetua... Only one inspired by its Muse can name its truth! Only the seeker who at last sees God can fathom its purpose! The mountains go on, and on, and on...
Creed Thie
🙧 Essays 🙦
Recognition
Social media transforms the way that we share information and the way that we earn social recognition. I think both of these transformations are harbingers for the death of the academic system as we currently experience it. Or, at least, its total upheaval, long term. Two major purposes of schooling is to transfer information and to earn credentials--degrees being one of the most straightforward pathways of advancing in ethos and recognition in our society today.
However, social media represents a new--and potentially more substantial--way for ambitious people to earn recognition. And I don't mean that merely in the sense of follower counts. A social media profile is a carefully curated display of identity and can provide far more detailed information about someone than a degree or a resume can. The influencer-follower relationship also introduces complex dynamics in communication that couldn't exist as fluidly under previous limitations. For example, in past generations you had to actually go to a Marxist meeting to hear what they were talking about. Or buy books. Now at a click of a button you can hear them argue amongst themselves about their plans to overthrow their parents. The same applies to any other epistemic community. What are the Platonists up to? The Anglicans? The Neopagans? Trans furries? The Black Hebrew Israelites? With twitter and facebook and substack it is now extremely easy to weave in and out of different schools of thought and keep track of what they are discussing. And you can watch them snipe at each other in real time.
This might not mean a lot to the average person who doesn't spend a lot of time reading the internet and is mostly thinking about sports, memes, weed, their work, who they're trying to sleep with, etc. But for the 12% of people who actually read (who I like to call the priestly class) this is crazy.
Recognition among readers, writers, and scholars used to be more carefully calibrated through the school system. An individual's credibility and importance, their ability to speak with authority to a large audience, was severely gatekept by a very select few. Anyone else was just a television huckster or cult leader.
But now anyone can be a cult leader.
With the way alternative pathways of persuasion are accelerating, we may be hitting an unprecedented degree of epistemic fragmentation and uncertainty among the reading class.
Who do I trust? Who do I respect? Who is cool? Who should I follow? Who should I copy?
The answers are murkier than ever. For some, it inspires radicalism. For others, doubt and decision paralysis. But in either case, it lowers the credibility of the established school system and severely weakens its usefulness.
The means by which we all get on the same page has been totally shifted. Political revolutions will continue to unfold, I think.
But on a more personal level, it’s a revolution in identity. It opens up horrifying new ways to show ourselves to the world. And the means by which we prove that we are better than other people are mutating as well in this new ecosystem. I foresee an increasing portion of talented, ambitious people - especially for those with a bit of showmanship - starting to route more of their energies to building an online profile than pursuing "education."
Michael Thomas Jones
Screwtape Email #2
My Dear Wormwood,
I hope you’ve taken my advice and studied the Enemy’s design for human behavior. One area that I can tell you need a lot of pointed advice is in the interaction between the sexes. The better you understand how the Enemy designed the man to be the provider and protector and the one who bears responsibility for the overall health of the family, the more you can see the value in distracting him with video games, news, sports, and shows. The more you understand how the woman was designed to be a nurturer and beautifier of the home, the more you can focus your attention on giving her goals, aspirations, and ambitions outside of that realm. This will be a much easier trap for her as she contemplates the laidback, passive, indulgent, and lackadaisical men you have created.
Because your subject imagines himself a follower of the Enemy, your best strategy here is to convince him that the real reason he is so passive about not actively pursuing a well-paying career, owning a home, and actively looking for a wife is because he is so spiritual, and that doing nothing is how he “trusts” the Enemy. As soon as he gets the urge to turn off the video game and hotly pursue a well-paying career, warn him about the dangers of worldliness that could come with money and that he’s not trusting the Enemy if he’s working hard. Tell him that spiritual men don’t bother about such earthly things as money and houses. When your subject sees a man who is excelling in his career and making a good living, whisper in your subject’s ear that he is more spiritual than that man because he has no money in the bank. If you’ve done a really great job, your subject will even feel pride that he has a great amount of debt because this debt shows that he’s not one of the oppressive, dominant males. If a woman ever does happen onto his path, she will feel compelled to be the breadwinner in the marriage. Since it’s much more difficult to convince women that trusting the Enemy looks passive, don’t waste your time.
You are better off encouraging them to act like how the men would act had we not deceived them. Today, women all over the nation have rolled up their sleeves and taken over for all these wonderfully-pathetic men our Father Below has so strategically influenced.
But you must make sure your man doesn’t get off his couch and make a manful pursuit of any woman. Convince your subject that if he really loves the Enemy like he claims to, he will trust the Enemy to simply drop the right woman onto his lap in time. It’s true the Enemy does at times appear to do this, although he normally wants a man to learn to pursue. But any examples you can find where it can be contrived that the Enemy simply did something for a man because he was passive, play up that story as much as you can.
This misapplication of trust is one of Our Father Below’s most powerful strategies because it flies in the face of the creation mandate the Enemy gave to the vermin humans. The Enemy wants men to manfully subdue the creation, to be go-getters, to be pursuers, to be transformers. Wormwood, you must really understand the Enemy’s design so you can convince your subject to do the opposite. Tell your subject constantly that trusting the Enemy is always passive. Tell him that subduing creation is materialistic. Tell him that pursuing a wife is worldly (and if you’ve followed my advice about keeping him watching soft porn, he will be less tempted to pursue her to fulfill his sexual desires). Don’t ever let him suspect that the reason he’s not pursuing a strong career, a house, a wife, and children is because those things come at a sacrifice to himself. Otherwise, he may repent. No, you must give him false, spiritual-sounding reasons for his laziness, such that he thinks himself a great hero while he is all the while reveling in self-indulgence. Tell him that spiritual men know that things “just happen” when the time is right. Vague, pseudo-spiritual phrases are very useful here because of how they confuse. Tell him to “let go and let God” every time he gets it into his head to do anything really fruitful.
If he is suddenly determined to pursue spiritual disciplines such as prayer and Bible reading, whisper to him how legalistic he is becoming. Make him think that any hard spiritual work must mean he is trying to earn his salvation and he needs to give it up immediately. Make him so afraid of the sins prevalent in other ages, such as legalism, (which is today rarely seen), that he thinks that trusting God means doing absolutely nothing. But make him feel ashamed of what he could accomplish theoretically if he wanted to, because other races or sexes theoretically don’t have as many opportunities—better to let them do it then.
The best possible place you could have him is thinking that being completely fruitless and passive is the ultimate spiritual state because he owns nothing for others to envy, has no wife for others to envy, has no influence on anything so no one can ever call him domineering—he will then be our slave while imaging himself as the most spiritual man who follows the Enemy.
I’d rather have him in this state than have him with wealth and power. Although wealth and power are opportunities for true temptations that some devils have to settle with tempting their patients with, the man truly in our power is the man who believes he has nothing to repent of because he does nothing and risks nothing. He plays it safe while he “trusts.” Don’t even let him near the teaching that true trust in the Enemy is active, risky, and dangerous. I expect to hear back from you next week about how you were effectively able to keep your subject from doing absolutely anything while imagining himself exceptionally spiritual.
Your affectionate uncle,
Screwtape
🙧 Stories 🙦
SUPPERCUT
I didn’t mean to strike my rival down with such force. I didn’t mean for him to slump his unconscious face into Deborah’s crock pot of broccoli-cheddar soup, horribly burning his face and causing his lactose intolerant body to go defcon 2 in his permanent-pressed gray slacks. I didn’t mean to make him knock over Chandler’s father’s urn that was on the table for reasons no one but Chandler can understand, spilling cremation powder all over the royal blue shag carpet and Gretchen’s corgi, Frank. I didn’t really want Frank to dive through a sliding glass door in a fit of ash-induced panic that much. I DID mean to protect my stately station as the best dinner party conversationalist this side of both the Mississippi and Mason-Dixon. The table’s laughter at his joke had pushed me over the edge.
You see, I took great pride in my dinner party socializing skills. My sentences were smithed of sumptuous syllables and my paragraphs were punctuated with penultimate periods. This was my territory. I was the one keeping things from getting too political. I was the one asking how people’s days had been. I WAS A CONVERSATION WIZARD, AND THE OTHER GUESTS WERE UNDER MY SPECIAL FRIEND-MAGIC. But there was a new member of the dinner party circuit of the Sleepy Elms gated community. A short, somewhat stocky man from Vancouver. And this young, pale Canadian was stepping onto my turf. He had begun talking up anyone and everyone that would come within a few feet of his reddish beard.
But it didn’t stop there. He started cutting me off. He started retelling my clever puns and astute quips to people who hadn’t had the chance to hear them from my well-versed lips. He started emasculating and humiliating me in front of everyone about how little I knew about NFTs and Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter.
This could not happen. I refused to stand by and let him dismantle everything I had built. And so I schemed. I decided to take things to his front door.
I took up boxing AND Jiu Jitsu lessons. I bought a hunting rifle and tranquilizer bullets to pick off my opponent from afar, and a pair of deadly sai, with which to gouge out his facial features if combat devolved to close quarters. My biceps looked like pale tree trunks with the insane amounts of anabolics I was popping. I could bench 600 pounds. No longer was I the talkative, nerdy suburban husband I had been two weeks ago. I was a suburban Zeus. I was Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Lee rolled into one, but with the speaking ability of Ronald Reagan and the delicate, yet menacing, skin tone of Jesse Eisenberg.
I searched for my rival at buffets and prayer breakfasts, luncheons and brunches, dinners and soup nights. I used my newfound athleticism to pole-vault, long jump, and high-precision backflip around our gated community. And I found nothing. My first thought was that he had heard of my self-bettering ventures, by which I mean preparations to kill him, and barricaded himself in his home. Then, when I eloquently inquired at a barbeque where this rat bastard had slunk off to. “He’s in Canada right now. His mom just died, I think, so he flew back to be with his family. Car crash, I’m pretty sure.” Sandy told me. Ah, so the coward had snuck back to his filthy, crime-ridden home country? Well, I could wait.
My rival didn’t show his sweaty, Canadian face for a full two months after I heard the news. By that time I had lost motivation, my dad-bod paunch had returned and my head no longer seared from the absolutely crazy amount of steroids I had been draining. My rifle was now destroyed, the result of me trying to practice shooting five bullets out of it at a time and my deadly sai had become rusty and dull, as I had left them in buckets of water after using them to hit rocks.
But then, after eight weeks of this waiting game, rumors began surfacing that my ancient foe was back. I didn’t think much of these, until Friday night at the Grayson’s. There he was, his eyes bloodshot and puffy from fake tears, meant to gain gullible diners’ attention. My mind clouded with fury and disgust. My slightly flabby fists clenched into tense balls of pure pain-delivering muscle. I approached him from behind and tapped him on the shoulder.
I gazed deep into his reddened and itchy eyes. This weasel from the north would meet God (or probably definitely the devil) by my hand. My fist, pulsing with pure anger swung up from below my hip and collided with the bottom of his chin like a bowling ball. I felt an awful crunch, the force of his teeth colliding with and pulverizing each other, powdery enamel the only remaining evidence of his pearly whites. If I were to guess, he launched at least four feet into the air, striking his cranium on the popcorn ceiling, knocking plaster and paint loose to shower to the floor. Rotating in the air, he slammed into the maple slab of a table. And that, dear reader, brings this story of righteous fury full circle. But there is yet more to tell, for after about thirty seconds (give or take) my vanquished foe regained consciousness (whether or not he has a conscious is up for debate) and extracted his scalded head from the soup. As he flopped off the table into a chair, something fell heavily from the inside pocket of his jacket and thudded to the blue floor with a deep, metallic clank.
Shifting my gaze from my fluid-coated and still steaming enemy to the object, I grunted (masculinely) in surprise at what I saw. On the shag carpet, resting in a pile of cremation ash, dog hair, and broken glass sat a huge, shiny revolver.
The force of its collision with the ground had caused it to open and eject bullets all over the floor. My eagle-like sight revealed that he had painstakingly carved my name into every single round. I didn’t know what he had been planning to do with that gun, but, high-thinking alpha-male that I am (and well-versed in the art of deduction), I didn’t like it.
I snapped my sightlines back onto my rival and glared hard enough to carve a thanksgiving turkey. Realizing he had been thwarted in doing whatever it was he had planned to, he blushed deep. This was barely noticeable, since his face was already boiled the color of tomatoes soaked in cranberry juice. He stood, woozily, mumbled “thanks for having me, but I have to go home and feed my tortoise” and staggered out the door, falling headfirst down the concrete steps outside. And that is how I once again became the life of every party in the Sleepy Elms mini-municipality.
Judah Wolff is not only owner and operator of the largest golden watch manufacturing plant in Moscow, but a father of seven, 18-time Grammy winning rap artist, and an avid supporter of high-precision backflips. He also owns the (currently bare-bones) website Number One Jerks. To send art, writings (but remember to save the really good stuff for the Threshing Floor), video, etc. for submission to the site, contact him at NumberOneJerks@gmail.com
🙦 Consider making one of your New Year’s Resolutions “I’m going to write every month and send in my work to Threshing Floor…”