Re: (Prussia-centric) hell's a fable; 1
anonymous
December 28 2009, 18:46:47 UTC
"I think hell's a fable," Prussia says, the remark caught in his throat, greased out by mucus and facetiousness. "That's redundant. If you're in possession of a fact, then state it. You don't hear me with 'the fact of the matter is' and 'I must draw attention to.'" "Hell is a fable," Prussia tries again with a rigid jaw and an arched tongue that bitterly presses unto the curved edifices behind his front teeth, holding the equally bitter aspersions back. "'Think so still, 'til experience changes your mind,'" he smiles slyly, with just a whiff of sulfur. "Is that what that bloody tart said?" "Marlowe." "I prefer Shakespeare. It's always, the, the talented ones who end up in hell, because they've pined for the wrong organ. Digressions!" smug amusement at having caught himself. "I suppose that's why -- you see, don't you? -- I was never any good at confronting Michael - not that that brat understands the formalities of conversation - but, oh, these digressions. I inherited none of His succinctness and restraint. You can see why, no? His lying by omission, His coated, muffled secrecy, His unreadable book of Creation.. and who is He but the greatest perpretrator of this crime of treachery and deceit that I am so accused of having. Along with my, what, unbearable pride." "'Father of Lies?'" Prussia responds. "Marlowe knew what he was talking about, though.. Too many people butcher up the tale in favor of redemption or love or shit. Not so with him, he has it all end with me dragging my precious share down to hell." Prussia isn't listening, because he has heard of the German folktale so often; and his rendition of choice isn't Marlowe's. It's Goethe's. There was that, he strains to remember, that pernicious chicanery of love, bellicose and disgusting, that had become so beautiful and terrible. Faust had been a fraud, corrupted that poor innocent lady, and, she, she had... "'The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.'" "Milton. Oily lyricism. Me, blasphemer in formal dress, depicted as tragic and perversely heroic." He hums and tuts, "His hell, though. Not so much." "What is hell, then? Paved with good intentions? Walled and roofed with them?" "Charming." An inky smirk is returned, "None of that fire and brimstone business, if you must know. Disemboweled landscapes busy with suffering, incessant heat, permanent scarlet twilight, a swirling snowfall of ash, the stink of pain, and the din of... If only. Hell is only two things, the abs- What do you want to hear? Dante's hierarchy and his 'intellectual fulfillment' buggery, or whatever common misconceptions and slander the Church still spreads these days? I think I had this same conversation with that Spanish conquistador of yours, except, of course," and his eyes look Prussia up and down for a moment, "his hands were guilty of much more blood." ".. Antonio."
Re: (Prussia-centric) hell's a fable; 1
anonymous
December 28 2009, 18:48:21 UTC
"How much of that run was me. You know what noses Him off? When it's so merged, brutality and civility. Crime and a system. The Catholic Church, their greed, their lies, their lust, their politics, and me, oiling the gears off." ".. The Spanish Inquisition." "I had the squirt half-convinced he was right by the end. Crazy, isn't it? What people will believe in, what you men delude yourselves into." "You're wrong." "I know. But I suppose you don't mean Wrong as opposed to Right; you mean lower-case w and lower-case r, hm?" "You weren't responsible for any of that. I'm sure if we could take those wheels, your so proclaimed greased wheels, and examine those fingerprints, it would all just be, just, us. It was all ever, just, us. People. Lonely people. Goddamn lonely people, all in their own miserable battles," Prussia replies bitterly. The twentieth century has, of late, wherefore he knows not had him at a rope, as if somehow "'The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.' I'm good at that, too. Getting the world stripped down to determinism and plithy existentialism," he shrugs. The mild doubt Prussia holds in the twentieth century, he has none of, but, instead, excitement, as if the years are a sound of a triumphal trumpet. "It's a deal," Prussia relents, wanting to throw his arms up in exasperation. "Humans are so deaf and blind to their own language's ambiguities, they concoct their wishes in terms so permeable that I can grant them in a way they never imagined. Your arbitrary entendres. Only the sneaky, lying bastards, full of scum, ever make deals foolproof. And then, only to make themselves even sneakier scum-coated bastards." "You like to prattle on, don't you?" "Think so? The conversation in hell's delightful. Everything is relevant, even these pathetic digressions. Forget Twain, screaming souls don't exactly make for interesting syllogisms. I'll remind you when you're scr- enjoying your complimentary cocktail in the vestibule." Prussia doesn't like arbitrary conversation. and he hasn't drunken enough to permit talk like this, "Is there a paper I need to sign?" "And what is this? The eighteenth century? And what are we? Diplomats? Paper and ink only exist in the material world," and at this, he grasps the inside nook of Prussia's elbow, "but blood, that's the binding seal, lovey." Prussia rolls his uniform's Titian blue canvas sleeve up his arm, letting the fabric buckle at his elbow, and offers him his skin. Smooth, unmarked. It goes unacknowledged. Instead, he grabs at Prussia's iron cross, and Prussia feels the snap of the chain go at the back of his neck. He holds it with his thumb and forefinger, absorbing its warm remnants for a fragmental lapse of a second before placing it in the square of Prussia's palm. Here, skin is scarred, rough, and calloused. He envelops his hand around Prussia's, forcing the fingers to close on the iron cross. Prussia feels the harsh edges at his fingers' junctures, the points of metal pressing somewhere on tendons, somewhere on rubbery wrappings of cartilage between joints of his bones, like the barbaric memorial of where a gun should be. He bleeds, the red streams run down the curves of his outstretched hand, and he feels the blood, warm and foreign and familiar and violent and impulsive and disgusting and welcoming, like a map of a violent new continent. His skin breathes under the blood's course, opening and closing, he imagines, as they do when he sweats from a day's browed labor in the sun. Steel, guns, (iron cross) and blood, violence (his own). His history. Prussia feels the other man - is that it? a man? an angel? a fallen one? - 's hand steadying his own, and it's remarkably old. It has antiquity and history entrenched, clinging, and it's seen so much more than his.
Re: (Prussia-centric) hell's a fable; 3
anonymous
December 28 2009, 18:49:52 UTC
whoops, i totally know how to count. previous/parent post to this should be part 2, not 1 -- He lets go, smearing the stains of Prussia's blood in his own hand, and he smiles while Prussia glazes over the symmetrical plan, the traces of his iron cross, its dimensions landscaping the torn points of flesh on his hand. He stares at the iron cross, and he feels vaguely nautious, nostalgic, queasy and only slightly frightened at his relationship to something so remote, so "Flesh wounds, hmm. They're prettiest on the hands and in thorn-crowned cavities of the chest, the heart, aren't they?" so remote, so - not absent - but, there and not. His stomach knots and he feels small, little, windswept and sunburnt, with the Teutonic Knights, and, well, he's never been one for religious fervor, but, it's, it's never been gone, absent, never abandoned nor deserted, only treasured from afar like a fair maiden as if he was a chivalrous knight clad in cantankerous armor, and he feels disgusted, almost, ashamed, almost, almost, that he has just abandoned Him and he's forcing himself, almost like exploring, viciously, the loose holes in the gum where a tooth has fallen out, perversely titillating, tongue devouring the emptiness, the unbearable pathos of losing something dear, something now so remote, so "My dear-" "None of this 'my dear' business," Prussia wheezes. "This isn't some post-coital chat. We didn't fuck, and I'm still too sober for this bullshit." so small and lonesome; a bit of him invariably slipped from his wet grasp, gone sailing up into the vast and lonely distance; nauseated, dizzy and afraid "Buyer's remorse? Bit off more than you could chew?" "Michael's last words to you?" He laughs, "You're lucky you weren't a saint even in the old day, and that we're old pals." "Fuck." "Hmm, you know what they say about love? The pagans?" Prussia isn't one for vicarious chitchat, but he gives him the courtesy of open conversation, "The Greeks or the Romans-" "Both, any. That Cupid shit? Cupid was an annoying cunt. Flying around - blindfolded - shooting arrows of love. The rascal. Ruining arranged marriages and fucking everyone over with unpredictability and whim - and with such ease, mortals swoon at first sight for complete strangers." Prussia listens. He continues, "Love. I've seen the state it puts humans into. Big foreheads and low brows suddenly transformed into smoldering cheeks and heavy eyes. The Romans hated it, because it wasn't practical. It wasn't efficient. It got in the way of duty to the state." "Your point is..?" "Nevermind, I love romances. Transcends the beauty of you lot, doesn't it? The beauty of ugliness! The ugliness of beauty! Makes that little bit of Him inside of you apparent, doesn't it? Besides, it looks good on you." "You've never gotten over the fact that conversation isn't just someone making unattended to noises while you think up your next line of monologue, have you?" "Again with the 'the fact that,'" he smirked. "In the end, I still get your soul. I just hope having that dick up your ass was worth it." but not that, no. To love another person is to see the face of God. God incarnate, how funny. How terribly human, terribly painful, how, Christ. The suffering, the. "Fuck off." "Thinking brevity? Anyways, before you get too riled up, I wasn't kidding about that brutality-civility thing. He can forgive the animal in you for dragging you down to the trough. He can't forgive you for inviting the animal up for afternoon tea." Prussia turns, ready, for him to slink back into his minx coat of hell and, just, be gone when "Oh, and don't forget. Fourteen years later when I collect my due, and you come whining to me about how the system petered out, how the death camps were liberated - how the fucking Nazis lost; I'll respond, 'Of course they lost. Their victory wasn't my goal - obviously, it was theirs - the bastards. And that wasn't our deal.'" Prussia shrugged. "Be seeing you, toots."
Re: (Prussia-centric) hell's a fable; notes
anonymous
December 28 2009, 19:45:54 UTC
allusions, etc, in order; part 1 -Marlowe's Dr. Faustus; "I think hell's a fable"; "Think so still, 'till experience changes your mind." -Both Marlowe and Shakespeare are believed to have had homosexual encounters. -Lucifer and his rebellious angels revolted against the army of Heaven led by Michael - hence the awkward confrontation between Michael and Lucifer before all heaven breaks loose, where the popular condemnation of Luce's pride occurs, where he's stripped of his title as 'Lucifer; Light Bringer, Son of the Morning Star,' and named 'satan; adversary' (because I love English poets, I relayed this mostly with Milton's Paradise Lost). -'Father of Lies' is just another title for Luce. The 'His' and 'He' refer to God, not Luce. -Marlowe's Dr. Faustus ends with Faustus being dragged to hell. Think the shortened, American version of Burgess's A Clockwork Orange where Alex stays a baaaad boy. -Goethe's Faust ends with Faust returning to the grace of God. While he's partying with Mephistophilis, he basically ruins the life of this innocent, chaste lady. Her love convinces God to let him back into Heaven. -Milton's Paradise Lost; "The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven out of Hell, a Hell of Heaven." Also famous is the, "Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven." This beautiful 17th century piece of work introduced the theme as Satan being a sly tempter with this tragic desire of free-will. Before, as seen with Dante's Inferno, Satan is depicted as being a belligerent monstrosity/ghastly remnants of angellic existence that's condemned to intellectual estrangement. -Milton extensively creates his landscape of Hell (beautifully!) as a kingdom that Satan rules (Pandemonium is its capital; he came up with that word, ohohoho). -Dante's Divine Commedia - Inferno; is just as complex as Milton's Hell from a medieval mindset. It's a perfect crystallization of the Middle Age's scholasticism and intellectual synthesis, because you see him layer it out from sins of incontinence to the last level of treachery/fraud. Also notable is that in Dante's Hell, Satan does not rule a kingdom, but he suffers as well (it's his fall that creates Hell, he's trapped in ice torso-up), because what kind of punishment would it be if God made Luce a king? -Catholic Church rescinded its acknowledgement of Limbo and unbaptized babies. Well.
Re: (Prussia-centric) hell's a fable; notes 2
anonymous
December 28 2009, 19:47:03 UTC
part 2 -Spanish Inquisition. Word up, son. Crazy shit, and it still bewilders me that the Popes were named 'Innocent' and 'Pious.' Irony. -Plato; "Be kind for everyone you meet is finding a hard battle. Everyone is lonely." -Shakespeare's Hamlet; "I have of late, wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, and it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems etc etc..." -The Usual Suspects; "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." Anachronism! -Determinism and existentialism. Apparently if you're human, you must be a humanist. Anyway. -Titian lmao. Titan, Venetian Renaissance artist, is known for his oil paintings with this deep, deep blue color, almost like the title Prussian Blue. -HISTORY. Prussia made its claim to power as the gunpowder empires (Ottoman Empire, Safavid Empire, Mughal Empire) were beginning their waning decline. Also, imperialism, wassup. New World/globalization (trend of 1450-1914-now) begun with loads of guns and violence.
Re: (Prussia-centric) hell's a fable; notes 3
anonymous
December 28 2009, 19:50:30 UTC
part 3 -Flesh wounds; crucifixion. -Headcanon/canoncanon, Prussia began as the Teutonic Knights. Religious. They rose to prominence during the Crusades (which, uh, even more blood and pillaging and rape). -Code of Chivalry. Middle Ages. Knights and ladies and stuff. -Cupid was an annoying cunt. Blindfolded. Greeks were more forgiving. Romans hated him, because Romans didn't care for hippy talking about the true nature of the universe; they're too busy conquering shit. Arguably, every empire afterwards (European empire, European empire) has only wanted to mimick the success of the Roman Empire and lay claim to this idea of a Second/Third/whatever Rome: Byzantine Empire, Holy Roman Empire, Russian Empire, Napoleonic Empire, ...Hitler's Germany. Also, Roman Empire and Prussia have in common that intense adherence to military and duties of the state. (Schrotter's 'Prussia was not a country with an army, but an army with a country.') -Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, "To love another person is to see the face of God." (okay, really, this is from the musical, but that's because it says with more fluency what the novel is trying to convey). To love another person makes God apparent, if we're going with that whole 'everyone-has-a-bit-of-God-in-him-ohohohoh.' Ironically, God incarnate = Jesus Christ. Love and suffering abounds. Bottoms up. Cheers. -Duncan's I, Lucifer; "He can forgive the animal in you for dragging you down to the trough. He can't forgive you for inviting the animal up for afternoon tea." Himmler tried to bring focus (in one of his speeches) to the dichotomy of, well, their dilemna. This whole, keeping civility while committing mass genocide, etc. Was of some concern to the Third Reich, because you can't have crazies. Yeah, anachronism, whatever. Luce can see in the future. Or something. -The Nazis did lose. -most of the other unmentioned italicized quotes are from Glen Duncan's I Lucifer. That book is awesome. -- Once again, sorry op for making this more about lucifer than about prussia, germany, or hitler. sorry. i saw an interesting parallel, and i couldn't resist. i failed, obviously. but, uh. well. (also, forgot to mention, i'm not any of the other anon commenters who were interested in filling, so giving credits to the anon who mentioned faust, bc that punched me with inspiration)
"That's redundant. If you're in possession of a fact, then state it. You don't hear me with 'the fact of the matter is' and 'I must draw attention to.'"
"Hell is a fable," Prussia tries again with a rigid jaw and an arched tongue that bitterly presses unto the curved edifices behind his front teeth, holding the equally bitter aspersions back.
"'Think so still, 'til experience changes your mind,'" he smiles slyly, with just a whiff of sulfur. "Is that what that bloody tart said?"
"Marlowe."
"I prefer Shakespeare. It's always, the, the talented ones who end up in hell, because they've pined for the wrong organ. Digressions!" smug amusement at having caught himself. "I suppose that's why -- you see, don't you? -- I was never any good at confronting Michael - not that that brat understands the formalities of conversation - but, oh, these digressions. I inherited none of His succinctness and restraint. You can see why, no? His lying by omission, His coated, muffled secrecy, His unreadable book of Creation.. and who is He but the greatest perpretrator of this crime of treachery and deceit that I am so accused of having. Along with my, what, unbearable pride."
"'Father of Lies?'" Prussia responds.
"Marlowe knew what he was talking about, though.. Too many people butcher up the tale in favor of redemption or love or shit. Not so with him, he has it all end with me dragging my precious share down to hell."
Prussia isn't listening, because he has heard of the German folktale so often; and his rendition of choice isn't Marlowe's. It's Goethe's. There was that, he strains to remember, that pernicious chicanery of love, bellicose and disgusting, that had become so beautiful and terrible. Faust had been a fraud, corrupted that poor innocent lady, and, she, she had... "'The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.'"
"Milton. Oily lyricism. Me, blasphemer in formal dress, depicted as tragic and perversely heroic." He hums and tuts, "His hell, though. Not so much."
"What is hell, then? Paved with good intentions? Walled and roofed with them?"
"Charming." An inky smirk is returned, "None of that fire and brimstone business, if you must know. Disemboweled landscapes busy with suffering, incessant heat, permanent scarlet twilight, a swirling snowfall of ash, the stink of pain, and the din of... If only. Hell is only two things, the abs- What do you want to hear? Dante's hierarchy and his 'intellectual fulfillment' buggery, or whatever common misconceptions and slander the Church still spreads these days? I think I had this same conversation with that Spanish conquistador of yours, except, of course," and his eyes look Prussia up and down for a moment, "his hands were guilty of much more blood."
".. Antonio."
Reply
".. The Spanish Inquisition."
"I had the squirt half-convinced he was right by the end. Crazy, isn't it? What people will believe in, what you men delude yourselves into."
"You're wrong."
"I know. But I suppose you don't mean Wrong as opposed to Right; you mean lower-case w and lower-case r, hm?"
"You weren't responsible for any of that. I'm sure if we could take those wheels, your so proclaimed greased wheels, and examine those fingerprints, it would all just be, just, us. It was all ever, just, us. People. Lonely people. Goddamn lonely people, all in their own miserable battles," Prussia replies bitterly. The twentieth century has, of late, wherefore he knows not had him at a rope, as if somehow
"'The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.' I'm good at that, too. Getting the world stripped down to determinism and plithy existentialism," he shrugs. The mild doubt Prussia holds in the twentieth century, he has none of, but, instead, excitement, as if the years are a sound of a triumphal trumpet.
"It's a deal," Prussia relents, wanting to throw his arms up in exasperation.
"Humans are so deaf and blind to their own language's ambiguities, they concoct their wishes in terms so permeable that I can grant them in a way they never imagined. Your arbitrary entendres. Only the sneaky, lying bastards, full of scum, ever make deals foolproof. And then, only to make themselves even sneakier scum-coated bastards."
"You like to prattle on, don't you?"
"Think so? The conversation in hell's delightful. Everything is relevant, even these pathetic digressions. Forget Twain, screaming souls don't exactly make for interesting syllogisms. I'll remind you when you're scr- enjoying your complimentary cocktail in the vestibule."
Prussia doesn't like arbitrary conversation. and he hasn't drunken enough to permit talk like this, "Is there a paper I need to sign?"
"And what is this? The eighteenth century? And what are we? Diplomats? Paper and ink only exist in the material world," and at this, he grasps the inside nook of Prussia's elbow, "but blood, that's the binding seal, lovey."
Prussia rolls his uniform's Titian blue canvas sleeve up his arm, letting the fabric buckle at his elbow, and offers him his skin. Smooth, unmarked. It goes unacknowledged.
Instead, he grabs at Prussia's iron cross, and Prussia feels the snap of the chain go at the back of his neck. He holds it with his thumb and forefinger, absorbing its warm remnants for a fragmental lapse of a second before placing it in the square of Prussia's palm. Here, skin is scarred, rough, and calloused. He envelops his hand around Prussia's, forcing the fingers to close on the iron cross. Prussia feels the harsh edges at his fingers' junctures, the points of metal pressing somewhere on tendons, somewhere on rubbery wrappings of cartilage between joints of his bones, like the barbaric memorial of where a gun should be. He bleeds, the red streams run down the curves of his outstretched hand, and he feels the blood, warm and foreign and familiar and violent and impulsive and disgusting and welcoming, like a map of a violent new continent. His skin breathes under the blood's course, opening and closing, he imagines, as they do when he sweats from a day's browed labor in the sun. Steel, guns, (iron cross) and blood, violence (his own). His history. Prussia feels the other man - is that it? a man? an angel? a fallen one? - 's hand steadying his own, and it's remarkably old. It has antiquity and history entrenched, clinging, and it's seen so much more than his.
Reply
--
He lets go, smearing the stains of Prussia's blood in his own hand, and he smiles while Prussia glazes over the symmetrical plan, the traces of his iron cross, its dimensions landscaping the torn points of flesh on his hand. He stares at the iron cross, and he feels vaguely nautious, nostalgic, queasy and only slightly frightened at his relationship to something so remote, so
"Flesh wounds, hmm. They're prettiest on the hands and in thorn-crowned cavities of the chest, the heart, aren't they?"
so remote, so - not absent - but, there and not. His stomach knots and he feels small, little, windswept and sunburnt, with the Teutonic Knights, and, well, he's never been one for religious fervor, but, it's, it's never been gone, absent, never abandoned nor deserted, only treasured from afar like a fair maiden as if he was a chivalrous knight clad in cantankerous armor, and he feels disgusted, almost, ashamed, almost, almost, that he has just abandoned Him and he's forcing himself, almost like exploring, viciously, the loose holes in the gum where a tooth has fallen out, perversely titillating, tongue devouring the emptiness, the unbearable pathos of losing something dear, something now so remote, so
"My dear-"
"None of this 'my dear' business," Prussia wheezes. "This isn't some post-coital chat. We didn't fuck, and I'm still too sober for this bullshit."
so small and lonesome; a bit of him invariably slipped from his wet grasp, gone sailing up into the vast and lonely distance; nauseated, dizzy and afraid
"Buyer's remorse? Bit off more than you could chew?"
"Michael's last words to you?"
He laughs, "You're lucky you weren't a saint even in the old day, and that we're old pals."
"Fuck."
"Hmm, you know what they say about love? The pagans?"
Prussia isn't one for vicarious chitchat, but he gives him the courtesy of open conversation, "The Greeks or the Romans-"
"Both, any. That Cupid shit? Cupid was an annoying cunt. Flying around - blindfolded - shooting arrows of love. The rascal. Ruining arranged marriages and fucking everyone over with unpredictability and whim - and with such ease, mortals swoon at first sight for complete strangers."
Prussia listens.
He continues, "Love. I've seen the state it puts humans into. Big foreheads and low brows suddenly transformed into smoldering cheeks and heavy eyes. The Romans hated it, because it wasn't practical. It wasn't efficient. It got in the way of duty to the state."
"Your point is..?"
"Nevermind, I love romances. Transcends the beauty of you lot, doesn't it? The beauty of ugliness! The ugliness of beauty! Makes that little bit of Him inside of you apparent, doesn't it? Besides, it looks good on you."
"You've never gotten over the fact that conversation isn't just someone making unattended to noises while you think up your next line of monologue, have you?"
"Again with the 'the fact that,'" he smirked. "In the end, I still get your soul. I just hope having that dick up your ass was worth it."
but not that, no. To love another person is to see the face of God. God incarnate, how funny. How terribly human, terribly painful, how, Christ. The suffering, the.
"Fuck off."
"Thinking brevity? Anyways, before you get too riled up, I wasn't kidding about that brutality-civility thing. He can forgive the animal in you for dragging you down to the trough. He can't forgive you for inviting the animal up for afternoon tea."
Prussia turns, ready, for him to slink back into his minx coat of hell and, just, be gone when
"Oh, and don't forget. Fourteen years later when I collect my due, and you come whining to me about how the system petered out, how the death camps were liberated - how the fucking Nazis lost; I'll respond, 'Of course they lost. Their victory wasn't my goal - obviously, it was theirs - the bastards. And that wasn't our deal.'"
Prussia shrugged.
"Be seeing you, toots."
Reply
part 1
-Marlowe's Dr. Faustus; "I think hell's a fable"; "Think so still, 'till experience changes your mind."
-Both Marlowe and Shakespeare are believed to have had homosexual encounters.
-Lucifer and his rebellious angels revolted against the army of Heaven led by Michael - hence the awkward confrontation between Michael and Lucifer before all heaven breaks loose, where the popular condemnation of Luce's pride occurs, where he's stripped of his title as 'Lucifer; Light Bringer, Son of the Morning Star,' and named 'satan; adversary' (because I love English poets, I relayed this mostly with Milton's Paradise Lost).
-'Father of Lies' is just another title for Luce. The 'His' and 'He' refer to God, not Luce.
-Marlowe's Dr. Faustus ends with Faustus being dragged to hell. Think the shortened, American version of Burgess's A Clockwork Orange where Alex stays a baaaad boy.
-Goethe's Faust ends with Faust returning to the grace of God. While he's partying with Mephistophilis, he basically ruins the life of this innocent, chaste lady. Her love convinces God to let him back into Heaven.
-Milton's Paradise Lost; "The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven out of Hell, a Hell of Heaven." Also famous is the, "Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven." This beautiful 17th century piece of work introduced the theme as Satan being a sly tempter with this tragic desire of free-will. Before, as seen with Dante's Inferno, Satan is depicted as being a belligerent monstrosity/ghastly remnants of angellic existence that's condemned to intellectual estrangement.
-Milton extensively creates his landscape of Hell (beautifully!) as a kingdom that Satan rules (Pandemonium is its capital; he came up with that word, ohohoho).
-Dante's Divine Commedia - Inferno; is just as complex as Milton's Hell from a medieval mindset. It's a perfect crystallization of the Middle Age's scholasticism and intellectual synthesis, because you see him layer it out from sins of incontinence to the last level of treachery/fraud. Also notable is that in Dante's Hell, Satan does not rule a kingdom, but he suffers as well (it's his fall that creates Hell, he's trapped in ice torso-up), because what kind of punishment would it be if God made Luce a king?
-Catholic Church rescinded its acknowledgement of Limbo and unbaptized babies. Well.
Reply
-Spanish Inquisition. Word up, son. Crazy shit, and it still bewilders me that the Popes were named 'Innocent' and 'Pious.' Irony.
-Plato; "Be kind for everyone you meet is finding a hard battle. Everyone is lonely."
-Shakespeare's Hamlet; "I have of late, wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, and it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems etc etc..."
-The Usual Suspects; "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." Anachronism!
-Determinism and existentialism. Apparently if you're human, you must be a humanist. Anyway.
-Titian lmao. Titan, Venetian Renaissance artist, is known for his oil paintings with this deep, deep blue color, almost like the title Prussian Blue.
-HISTORY. Prussia made its claim to power as the gunpowder empires (Ottoman Empire, Safavid Empire, Mughal Empire) were beginning their waning decline. Also, imperialism, wassup. New World/globalization (trend of 1450-1914-now) begun with loads of guns and violence.
Reply
-Flesh wounds; crucifixion.
-Headcanon/canoncanon, Prussia began as the Teutonic Knights. Religious. They rose to prominence during the Crusades (which, uh, even more blood and pillaging and rape).
-Code of Chivalry. Middle Ages. Knights and ladies and stuff.
-Cupid was an annoying cunt. Blindfolded. Greeks were more forgiving. Romans hated him, because Romans didn't care for hippy talking about the true nature of the universe; they're too busy conquering shit. Arguably, every empire afterwards (European empire, European empire) has only wanted to mimick the success of the Roman Empire and lay claim to this idea of a Second/Third/whatever Rome: Byzantine Empire, Holy Roman Empire, Russian Empire, Napoleonic Empire, ...Hitler's Germany.
Also, Roman Empire and Prussia have in common that intense adherence to military and duties of the state. (Schrotter's 'Prussia was not a country with an army, but an army with a country.')
-Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, "To love another person is to see the face of God." (okay, really, this is from the musical, but that's because it says with more fluency what the novel is trying to convey). To love another person makes God apparent, if we're going with that whole 'everyone-has-a-bit-of-God-in-him-ohohohoh.' Ironically, God incarnate = Jesus Christ. Love and suffering abounds. Bottoms up. Cheers.
-Duncan's I, Lucifer; "He can forgive the animal in you for dragging you down to the trough. He can't forgive you for inviting the animal up for afternoon tea." Himmler tried to bring focus (in one of his speeches) to the dichotomy of, well, their dilemna. This whole, keeping civility while committing mass genocide, etc. Was of some concern to the Third Reich, because you can't have crazies. Yeah, anachronism, whatever. Luce can see in the future. Or something.
-The Nazis did lose.
-most of the other unmentioned italicized quotes are from Glen Duncan's I Lucifer. That book is awesome.
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Once again, sorry op for making this more about lucifer than about prussia, germany, or hitler. sorry. i saw an interesting parallel, and i couldn't resist. i failed, obviously. but, uh. well. (also, forgot to mention, i'm not any of the other anon commenters who were interested in filling, so giving credits to the anon who mentioned faust, bc that punched me with inspiration)
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a slight nitpicking though, is that it probably would have been a bit easier on the eyes if the sentences are double spaced.
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