Let that roll around in your noodle for a bit: the chosen messenger for Eris, the Goddess of Chaos, is a cockroach. Consider all the biological, metaphysical, and quantum ramifications of this.All done? Good! Well, thank you for coming, I'll see you all next week, and don't forget the potluck on Tuesday...
Beg pardon?
You have no idea what I'm talking about?
Oh. Well then, let me enlighten you.
1. The fact that Eris chose a cockroach as her chief messenger speaks to the enduring nature of the Gospel of Discord, for a cockroach can survive such environmental extremes that it will be one of the few species to thrive in the event of global catastrophe, up to and including nuclear war. As long as the messenger survives, so does the message.
2. Messages are quantum in nature, specifically, Heisenbergian in nature. To whit: just as the act of observing a quantum state changes it, so does the receipt of a message change the recipient. Change. Transformation. Metamorphosis. What was Kafka's The Metamorphosis about? A man who is turned into a cockroach. Receipt of Eris' message changes you into one of her messages.
3. Want to know something weird? I meant to type "one of her messengers" but "messages" came out instead. I'm keeping it that way. Hail Eris.
4. A roach is the unburnt end of a joint of marijuana that remains after smoking it. A cockroach can survive for days without its head. A head shop is a place where you can buy roach clips. I don't know where I'm going with this but it's all very deep.
5. Is a cockroach without a head alive? It possesses qualities of both the living (moving around) and the dead (it doesn't have a goddamn head). Thus it is both alive and dead, and therefore (according to Schrödinger) it exists in a superposition of eigenstates. If an undead cockroach that may or may not also be a cat inside a box isn't a perfect messenger for Discordianism, I don't know what is.
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Oh dear. I'm up far too late for this.
ReplyDeleteThen again, maybe I'm not. I'm in a bit of a Schrodinger state of sleep. I haven't been observed by anyone for the past three hours, so I may or may not actually be here. Go figure.
I love the idea of a cockroach as a messenger. Also explains why Eris is not the dominant diety in the world today, as most people are not enlightened (myself included) enough to overcome the initial urge of squishing the beloved herald of Eris flat upon first seeing it.
Fortuna knows that St Gulik would have a rough shake in my house, as I regularly find unmarked roach corpses mere feet from the newly-bored countenances of my own residing messengers, my cats. I think Bast is waging a silent war on Eris, to be honest. That's the only explanation I can think of. Any way you can think of to bring these two to the table, as I'd really like to hear what St Gulik has to say..
I'm not sure quite why, but the idea of an undead cockroach disturbs me greatly. I'll have to sleep on this and perhaps figure out why this is so....
ReplyDeleteA message can come in a variety of ways and when it is often posed to a person, the message gets reinforced. The cats have come upon the divine mesenger and have dispatched the meessenger and absorbed he message. I prefer not to see it as a war between Bast and Eris, but a partnership, maybe a communion.
ReplyDeleteAfter all, cats are known for creating their own chaos time-to-time so the message from the original messenger has just been passed on, and may pass on a little further after the digestive tract finishes absorbing more of the message.
Another way of guarenteeing a message is to repeat many times, and most everyplace I have seen graced with St. Gulik always has about twenty others you don't see, thus guarenteeing the messgae is not lost completely.
A third point is the message is delivered a myriad of ways, the messenger falling out of a cereal box as you pour some for breakfast has to be one of the most effective (and rather disturbing) ways to deliver a message I've seen, and honestly would prefer not to receive again.
JD hit it right on the head, Salem: the message isn't for you. It's for your cats.
ReplyDeleteYou should be very, very afraid.
Bollocks. I trust my cats implicitly.
ReplyDeleteWell, one of them, at any rate. The other one's got shifty eyes.
Cats are easy to trust. Just trust that they'll do whatever it is that they want to do, whenever they want to do it, no matter how inconvenient you might find it.
ReplyDeleteCats will always act in the best interest of themselves =)
Oh and it's over 20 hours later and I still find the idea of undead cockroaches very disturbing =)
ReplyDeleteno messages for me or any nearby cats, I've never seen a cockroach except in a zoo or on TV.
ReplyDelete