THE GOSPEL OF SCRIBE,
A Testament of Myself
by Antarah A. Crawley

Bismillah, by the most gracious mercy of God, did I, the Scribe, in the year of the lord 2014, receive that part of the Transcendent Mind which revealed itself to me by the name of Djhouti.

And that Spirit of Mind professed to me by way of many degrees the one true and Holy Wisdom of the presence of the kingdom of God. Truly I will tell you how it came to be.

The Spirit found me scribing after the tradition of my slaver, even while having mastered his tongue. Firstly did that Divine Intelligence dictate unto me by name the Pharmacon of the Spirit, which narrative I did transcribe, which novel told of those things which Kogard did, which things I did come to do.

Of those things, I did travel to the North Gate, to the Empire City of New York, and into the County of Kings which is called Burukland, where lived the people of Chabad from Lubavich and those of Ras Tafari from Jamaica.

There were gathered many tribes. There in Burukland, the North Gate, I founded the Minority Lodge, the first of the New Syllabus, by the grace of God. In the course of the work of that Lodge, being guided by way of discourse with my companion X, Kogard dictated unto me by name That Which Rustles in Dry Leaves, which drama I duly transcribed, which work prescribed the trial by which Kogard would found his Secret School of Ancient Mysteries, which trial I then duly endured.

And upon the day of the founding of the Secret School I was with X by the river east of New York and I, the Scribe, said unto him, verily the drama of Kogard hath come to pass.

And upon that time did Kogard appear in the body of a man and his son, and that man said unto me, Lo! I have heard there is corn in Egypt! Get you down thither from hence, that ye may live and not die!

Now shortly thereafter I did depart the North Gate, just as did Kogard, as it was written in the Pharmacon, and I returned to the Federal City of Washington, which is heir to the two lands of the north and south which is upon the fertile Potomac in the Virgin Mary land.

Thereupon I received a great degree in the name of George Washington, Patriarch, Past, and Forever Grand Master of the United States Federal Holding Company of the American Indies, and the rite of my passing was a Baphometic Baptism by Fire.

Upon my passage I began the administrative work which was to establish the coming Lodge. By the insight which the Lord bestowed upon Past Master Banneker did I survey the land of the Potomac and founded therein the jurisdiction of New Syllabus, and I named the land Western Maatocratic Republic, and it was all Moors Land.

By the grace of God and the intelligence of Kogard did I then carry out the administration of the Mysteries in the School which was located in the Moorish City of Anacostia, which I founded in the house of my mother.

Lo, and the Lord by and through Kogard delivered DOOM upon the earth. The DOOMSDAY COMMAND was issued by the Will of the Lord, and I was its agent. I was contracted into the Federal Government of the U.S. Holding Co., and I was the scribe wheresoever I was.

I was then received by myself into the Grand Lodge of the Patriarchate of Alexandria, Virgin of the Potomac, and I sat upon the seat of the Master.

My administration was increased though my civil service work in the Federal City, and the Department of Information Systems Intelligence Service and the Civil Service of my Syllabus were come into being.

Lo, and The Holy See of my Syllabus had begun to exercise its jurisdiction in the District of its Administration, and I passed through many degrees which Kogard duly and worshipfully organized into the Allgemeine Systemtheorie of Freimaurerische I Self Law Mastery.

And after I passed Kogard’s Ritual of Freimaurerie he thereupon, pursuant to the trials thereto prescribed and the good work thereto pertaining, delivered unto me the Truth of the most Good News, which superseded all that was in Egypt, and I received the Gnowlege, and I was received into the House of the Lord in the blessed name of His only Begotten Son Iesous Christos Savior Self, alayhi assalaam. Amen.

* * *

Like all men of Kham I have been a high priest, like all men a slave. I was born of my mother on the Virgin Mary land by and through Thought Incarnate; I heard the words of nature and I transcribed the language of metu netjer; with these words I acquired great power and thus spoke myself into being; to these things my heart hath borne witness. I was Scribe in the House of Pharaoh and the Scribe among the Pharisees; I was Notarius in Rome; and I am the Scribe in America today.

Long have I labored in my sanctum sanctorum, contemplating in my heart the Spirit and the Word. Having found the ears of men yet deaf, and the outer temple standing in ruin, and the Great House besieged by selfishness and evil men, this my work must I practice in silence.

But I have dreams, too, which soon may come. The reformed and rectified discipline of reverent scholarship and wise counsel is rising on the horizon; for a testament I will scribe an encyclopedia of Truth and of the history of these Dark Ages we as a people have long endured, that humanity may have renewed knowledge of good and evil, of order and chaos, –- of Ma’at and Isfet.

* * *

In the time of the scholastic revival, when the Moors ruled over Iberia with the Knowledge of Islam and Ancient Greece, C.E. 711-1492, I, the Scribe, was professor of Natural Law in the Kulliye Universite Collegium Arcanorum.

I was the professor of all disciplines throughout the Renaissance of Europe, and the dogma of Enlightenment is their misunderstanding of the work of our ancient ancestors.

Misunderstanding notwithstanding, I professed the Law wheresoever I would be heard, and I expressed myself through reverent poetry. I was fond of the written and spoken word, and I became professor of American Literature after the Holy Wars of Late Modernity (1914-1945).

Let me relay to you my objectives and observations regarding American Literature after the Holy Wars of Modernity, which the Academy deems the so-called Postmodern Age.

The objective of this new syllabus is neither academic nor purely intellectual. Once the Christian church ran the business of saving human souls. Now that, in this age of Modernity, god has died, and the potential followers of the church have taken unique and innovative means toward their own spiritual and human wellbeing –- including yoga, environmentalism and cooperativism –- there exists a market for the education of a new paradigm.

This new syllabus seeks to establish an information system unfettered by rigor and sacrifice, but abiding by the principles of fluidity, impulse, and inevitability which are inherent in Taoist and anarchist philosophies.

This is a spiritual pursuit above all else, whose doctrine revolves around the literature of postmodernity and the science of quantum physics. This is an endeavor toward a new humanities, or an institution toward this educational and spiritual end.

The practice of the belle lettrists suggests the supremacy of the critic. A critic is simply a retrospective editor.  No one likes critics because of their altruistic assumption that hindsight vision is 20/20.

What does Krause say about altruists…  Nevertheless, one would not rather be omitted by them. The writer bears the load in, grumpy and resentful of the picky public.  Staring down a blank sheet, it is not so easy to claim that nowhere is “now here.”

Yet the critic scours through the yield and claim –- this one’s bruised. This one has worms. The writer goes home distraught that the public once again has failed to see his good produce and proceeds to drink through winter.

In revision, the process by which all writing becomes text, the writer becomes self critic. To remove a scene or insert a new emotion into a character is to alter the metaphysical framework of a story; but upon what basis are we making these changes. We do not read just the text when we readjust the text. We are reading the merits of a world.

We must therefor rely securely on a chosen framework. A critic defines and evaluates the merits of said framework.  Workshopped material, whether institutional or not, is criticized into being, being material which becomes published; thus books of fiction are criticisms against that which cannot be workshopped, all possessing of an ideologic framework, moral and temporal metaphysic, and unique canon.

If one says that the intent of the author lays in the shadow of fictional action (the word on the page), the reply must be, Well what of the alphabet? Are letters not just notions refined from their etymologic origin? We must not ignore the world which wrought these sets of letters from the black abyss. If we are to have a world in fiction, we must also construct a world around it. So saith the Gass School of New American Literature.

* * *

During the summer of the year 2013 I found myself reading a Paris Review interview with the current “Great American Novelist” Jonathan Franzen, in which he admitted to the great influence of The Recognitions by William Gaddis upon his own “great” work, The Corrections.

I soon thereafter purchased the Dalkey Archive edition of that hefty tome, which boasted an introduction by William H. Gass, a figure I had not previously been privy to.  I may say now that that book, as a relic, had the single most lasting impact on my opinion of writing and my approach to fiction, and with it I fell madly in love with all three of those entities.

I set out then to drudge through the near-1000 pages that make up this sweeping epic; I am reading it to this day, slowly and with great joy and fascination, and it has become my all-time favorite book to read.  The introduction itself is a great gem to behold, and may be the best introduction to a novel that has ever been penned.

William H. Gass has made his way into my life by various highways—The Tunnel, his masterful introductions to a myriad other Dalkey editions, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, his essays in Habitations of the Word, and Omensetter’s Luck—and he has found a place in my own heart of hearts as the greatest critic of literature and language this country has recently spawned.

His opinions on language and metaphor present in Habitations have perhaps influenced my own approach to language moreso than any other set of theory.

And as for the Dalkey Archive, besides New Directions, Verso, Seven Stories, and McSweeny’s, it has, to me, become the most enviable model of a publishing house the world will ever see.  Its designs are flawless, its taste superb, and its mission divine.  My dream job besides that of a famed man of letters or public intellectual would be to move up in the editorial ranks of that great institution.  I have not parted with these individuals since I first lay twinkling eyes on them, I seek them out in every bookstore I enter, and I reckon I never will forsake them until the day I’m committed to earth.

At this time I also discovered Adbusters magazine, which I felt spoke directly to me in its manifestos on the moral decay of capitalism, it’s calls for cultural revolution, and its critique of all the ideologies my country held dear.  I discovered Slavoj Žižek in these pages over the ensuing months, and I used much of its material as groundwork for “Birds of the World” and other pieces of fiction.

Benjamin Weissman wrote in an April 2012 Salon / LA Review of Books article, just as the novel Middle C was hitting shelves, that “Gass’s relationship to language is at once baroque, modernist, and extremely post-post-everything.”

Among the myriad reasons I love Mr. Gass is that the quality and inventiveness of his language lodges him in a category dissimilar to the vast majority of contemporary authors.  His career as a philosopher, academic, essayist, and fiction author spans fifty years.  He has been a contemporary of Gaddis, Barth, Roth, Cheever, Carver, Franzen, Eugenides, Foster Wallace, and Tao Lin.  Yet he is utterly beyond categorical or historical imposition (besides that unfair umbrella of post-WWII writing).  He once professed to reject the word “post-modern” for his fiction even though the linguistic, typographic, formulaic, and self-conscientious nature of his work edges him into that genre.  He has been known to use the terms, “Late Modern” and “Decayed Modern” for his style, and I have since been trying to figure out what those words mean.

In terms of form and prosity, I think Mr. Gass renders my opinions better than I ever could in his “Art of Fiction No. 65” interview with the Paris Review:

I love metaphor the way some people love junk food. I think metaphorically, feel metaphorically, see metaphorically. And if anything in writing comes easily, comes unbidded, often unwanted, it is metaphor. “Like” follows “as” as night the day. Now, most of these metaphors are bad and have to be thrown away. Who saves used Kleenex? I never have to say: “What shall I compare this to?” A summer’s day? No. I have to beat the comparisons back into the holes they pour from. Some salt is savory. I live in a sea. But that’s why I am so lost in the Elizabethans, because they seem to have sunk in the same ocean. What is not metaphorical, is not.

Leave nothing well enough alone is my motto, and I have been studying the phenomenon of language called metaphor since graduate school. Metaphor has been thought to be a pet of language, a peculiar relation between subject and predicate mainly: unhealthy, odd. But you can make metaphors by juxtaposing objects, and in lots of other ways. Suppose the relation between literary language and the world were itself metaphorical. Suppose the relation between language and life is like the relation between the subject and the predicate in a metaphor. If the analogy held, then one might find in it a way to express the relationship between literature and the world which wouldn’t be quite so severe as the formalist position I once took required, and yet avoid the imbecility which makes it into some “meaningful” commentary. I’ve been principally interested in establishing the relationship between fiction and the world. If we can see that relation as a metaphorical one, then we are already several steps in the direction of models. Theory, in science, is frequently conceived as that which flows from a model. Indeed, making the model and constructing the theory are not always two different activities. The kinds of misinterpretation which arouse my wrath—not to say contempt—are paralleled, one finds, by misinterpretations of scientific facts/theories/laws which lead to paradoxes and confusions of every kind.

(Last modified 10 Feb. 2019)