Walpurgis Festschrift: Wealth Bondage and The Happy Tutor

05:30 PM Oct 10, 2006

(A poor addition to the Happy Tutor's Festschrift)

I had, once, a literature teacher with an abiding affection for the Christ image -- a fact unspooled when I submitted a paper tracing the Prime Decider's shadow in Hawthorne's Arthur Dimmesdale, a figure under an earlier sort of bondage whose flock was even then diligently belaboring the transmogrification that would replace the hairshirt with the business casual.

Dimmesdale upon his scaffold may be a Passion player, but the Tutor? As someone said there, the Tutor posts pretty well for someone who doesn't blog. Besides, God hates blogs. WWJD? Something that Google might buy, probably.

So we've caught him playing Yorick to his own Melancholy Deign (or else the other way 'round) and not content with the embarrassment, hoisted an eschatology upon this petard. But for all this, the Tutor may be more Master and more Woland (to say nothing of Bezdomny) than he might have once assumed.

The Passion never really is the Passion after all -- not in Gnosis, and especially not in an outside-less, safewordless Bondage, where Sauls of Tarsus ramble in search something to ossify and your drunken harangues live forever on a YouTube that remains stubbornly on your first page of search results. Now that we're sizing him up for transubstantiation with a side of corned hash, I, the Author has rent the partition and started dancing the tune, stalking about like Walpurgis Night tossing flammables on the barbie but never quite showing us the torch.

You must murder your darlings, they say. (Who says? Congress?) They also say not to introduce a gun in the first act unless it will be fired by the third, which must go double for a stake at an auto de fe and triple for respectable sinecures.

Which only leaves repentance and it's a wrap, unless the Fool means to make yokels once again of his public and the Deputy Editor.

(Haven't wallowed in the Dumpster?  Last chance to see.  Maybe.)

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