Today I bring you Lizst, an impressive specimen from C18th Hungry. This tune is a dedication to Saint Francis of Assisi. Francis was a wild cat. He took to a life of austerity after a fairly affluent upbringing, walking around barefoot not caring if P Diddy had a new watch or diamond bracelet. He managed to persuade the Pope he wasn't chatting shit when his contemporaries would have been burnt for heresy. He even managed to convince a Muslim Sultan to get down with the big JC - no mean feat. But we have a curious suspicion he was lost in a prison of his own device - stigmata my smegma!
We occupy a confusing world. The first thing i'll touch on is human fallibility. The Milgram experiments reveal man as a weak and obedient beast, with the 'innocent' potential to commit the most heinous of crimes. If we cast our eyes over the books of world history, a ruthless and bloody hydra burns amongst its leafs. The history of this country is not exceptional with a string of murders knotting the story together. Indeed many of our most celebrated monarchs have dealt in bloody executions, even Elizabeth I ordered the axe to be brought down upon the neck of her cousin Mary Queen of Scots. Elizabeth's predecessor had earned herself the epithet 'Bloody'. Bloody Mary didn't care too much for Anglicans and requested the burning of more than 300 in short succession - she even put Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to death. Her father Henry VIII had executed two of his wives and, estimated in the contemporaneous Holinshed's Chronicles, ordered the deaths of 72,000 of his countrymen.
Outside the Tudor dynasty violent death further blackens our national consciousness. Edward II's wife ran off with another dude only to return with her new beau to dispose of the king. They achieved this by shoving a red-hot poker up his anus, as to leave no marks on his body. Charles I had his head chopped off and even one of our greatest kings, Henry II had Thomas Beckett shanked. Injustice and human cruelty is unending and it serves little purpose listing more despicable murders, such as the jewish or Rwandan Genocides, for their multitude. You may have been in a relationship that you destroyed only to discover they were the love of your life. You may have walked off a stationary escalator and felt like you were whizzing along the ground. You may have run with ideas that self-harm - you may not be yourself.
Bill Hicks dedicated his life to comedy and the uncovering of corrupt authority. Hicks was right to highlight the one-sided news coverage of drug taking, he was correct in terms of the ATF's appalling behaviour at the Waco siege and his many other grievances. But he was mistaken in his understanding of existence as a simple division between fear and love.
As Colonel Kurtz points out in Apocolypse Now the 'horror' is king. The horror is the only truth. We all have the potential to go mad, basking in the muted incarnadine light. Perhaps the only truth is horror - Horror is truth, truth horror. That is all ye know and all ye need to know. We hereby strip Assisi of his sanctity and call all humanity to kill themselves in honour of martyrdom to horror.
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