Excerpts from Aesthetical Sermons Joris Planck

We conclude our diversion into the story-telling capabilities of Joris with his description of the Valkyries from the Norse tradition.  Transcription of Joris: The daughters of Asgard, angelic gatherers of dead men. Flying with their winged steeds over battlefields and singing godly melodies. Godly I say! What other melodies are there for goddesses. And yet so coy, so confident. Their eyes sifting through piles of dead heroes and selecting only the most marvelous to join them. But oh, who to choose? And their sinuous bodies, unveiled by discourteous winds, crudely exposing their nudity. And what of this body? His there—that one of exceeding beauty. That one body that, even in death, outmatched the living in brute sensuality. “He is mine!” Shrieked one sister. “Nay, I shall carry him!” Cried another. And turning upon themselves, these two flashed wrathful eyes and hurled malevolence at one another. “Hateful gaswhistler!” “Hog moth[er?] of merchants!” Such delicious obscenities they exchanged. Truly, they inspire us to pursue novelty in our own antagonisms. Why, it was a polyphonic masterclass in venomous disputation, and ‘twould have escalated into violence surely, were it not for their uncle who at that moment picked posies in a lot abutting the field. "Sweet nieces, children of mine brother and of the earth, whose beauty calms the brine and enchants the soaring meteors to glow. Wouldst thou forgot all prudence over the elegant body of this fallen hero? I weep for shame. As I know thou art obstinate as thou art beautiful, allow me to sever the man in two, whereby both of you might in your loveliest arms expeditiously raise him into the heavens and thereby find a judicious end to this vile rivalry." Driven by their passions, the sisters hastily accepted their uncle’s kind offer, and no sooner had he sliced the body in twain, then the two of them had flown aloft in a mad delirium bearing with them the coveted halves. But, ye gods! What a ghastly sight they heaped in Valhalla’s halls! A mutilated pile of gore. Certainly not the beautiful man that precipitated their coronary convulsions. So, putting out of their minds their petty quarrels, they rejoined their sisters below, who were still scouring the battlefields, atop winged steeds, and with godly songs upon their breath. And what of the mangled body you ask? What of the mutilated man? Why, naturally, he was used to fertilize the soil of Asgard's floating gardens, where the uncle could cultivate his posies away from the distractions of those flighty nieces.

In episode 19, we continue with another story excerpted from Joris' Sermon on Familiar Stories. This time, we examine his retelling of the Trojan War. Transcription of Joris: Imagine instead that your daughter's liquid insides were spread upon an altar to Poseidon, and imagine the aspect of your wife's, the queen's, face as you dedicated this sacrifice to ten years of war: ten years of blood and savagery, and spears piercing jaws and ribs, and rapacious men and their many paramours, and great machines of destruction, and in their wake heaps of fallen soldiers flowering as their festering wounds bloomed a great phalanx of flies; ten years of venomous oaths against foreign men and ten years of incensed incantations to inconstant gods and their constant attacks on our fevered brains and pained hearts that yearn for glory as they do for omnisexual passions. Such was Achilleus' heart and wrathful brain, whose actions, to this day, we celebrate by dragging men in our own time through the streets behind horses until they are nothing more than tatters. And why not? Such was his celebrity that, e'en after death, gods and men wept and adorned his corpse with flowers plucked from the fields watered in their comrades' humours; and they strummed upon the lyre epic chants lasting many weeks, and kissed him, his body black and bloated and reeking of old meat, which caused the children to scream in disgust.... If you imagine all this and gasp, my fellow congregants, I beseech you to fret not, for the screaming children were all slapped by their parents for this impropriety.

Returning in spite of ourselves, we revisit a sermon once excerpted upon the request of our listeners. In this excerpt, we hear Joris' rendition of a well-loved tale. Transcription of Joris: Who were they? These pigs. These lightly-haired construers of architectural ingenuity and manufacturers of inhabitable poetry? They were a brotherhood, and it is said in parchments that smell of mould and millennia, that they wielded rare imaginative powers that spanned the very circumference of creation, and even, from time to time, piercing its gauzy membrane to gaze upon the sublimity of chaos. With what delicate care they arranged their artifacts, and with what subtlety they executed their construction, we can only dream—and only in the most tumultuous of dreams. But their contemporaries needed not dream, and with the gross regional prestige the brothers acquired, they quickly became visited by innumerable admirers, who flocked to gaze upon their works and to hear their poems deploying both pastoral and bestial themes. I have known such acclaim myself. It has haunted me with its complications and visited upon me the foulest expressions of humanity. To be preeminent in anything attracts the most bloodthirsty of flies and the most covetous of monsters. Yes, I too have been chased by wolves. I too have shuddered at the smell of carrion still lingering upon their breath. Such is the irascibility of wolves. And such is their doggedness, that it seemed the blessed porcine trio would inevitably succumb to some tragical conclusion or other. Ho brothers, spake one pig unto the others. Doth not the wind carry ill omens and write upon the billowing reeds a turn of fortune? Wherefore this dread that sets my skin to ripples and chills me to the bone? Brothers, though our works have always been dedicated to the mountains and rivulets, and to those birds that visit the mountains and rivulets to rehearse their ancient melodies, we must now modify our own pitch to shield ourselves and our philosophy. For violence and violent men detest all that is harmonious. Therefore, let our next works be as mirrors capable of reflecting back unto our aggressors the beastliness of their enterprise, that their attacks upon us be not suffered peaceably, but glazed in the aspect of horror and cruelty. And create they did… with fibers from the plains, woven in just such a way that their undulations would dazzle the eye of any intruder. And they utilized limbs from the forest, whose rattlings mixed and counter-mixed to produce xylophonic alarums capable of unmasking even the stealthiest of thieves. And hewn from the rarest of minerals, they carved a facade flanked in figures and foliage forever frozen in marble, which bespake, in inanimate pantomime, the countless irrationalities of canine brutality—and were those sculptures not a gleaming, alabaster white, one might have supposed them as stained burgundy-red as the pedestal to a ravenous deity adorned with sacrificial entrails. Then, having finished, the brothers sat around a virgin hearth and proceeded to... ... These eclogues and meditations were, however, lost upon the wolf, who, having thus arrived, said unto them, “Thou quaint brotherhood of the earth, skilled in art and learning. I am come for thee and thine. Long is it theorized that by eating thine meats, the eater might be fortified with the peerless skills of the eaten. Thus, regrettably for you, do I find myself here in your company. Make not my task uneasy, but surrender thyselves willingly unto my fang!" Yet no sooner had she begun to speak, then the wind began to play upon the reeds to dazzling effect, and the branches then gave way to aeolian harmonies, as if malleted by apollo himself. And, paralyzed by this beauty, the wolf looked upon the marble tableau, which made the full gravity of its meaning known unto her… and she shuddered in remorse. Her image and its role in this terrifying symphony was as conspicuous as blue aster in the fall.

We take a break from Joris this week for another display of Philip's musical genius.

For our first livecast, we will be hearing Joris' idea of how heaven looks. Unfortunately, our question and answer session is cut short due to unseen circumstances. Transcription of Joris: I am frequently asked by those seeking inspiration about what sort of landscapes I believe heaven and hell to be. The simplest answer would be to describe them as metaphysics has painted them: the sewers for that wonderful fluid called life that the spigot of nature pours upon the earth. A tawdry collection of human souls celebrating themselves in a monochromatic  zone of cloud and air. But this answer is often unsatisfactory to those unfortunate creatures incapable of imagining the afterlife on their own. And so I psychically transport myself for them, describing every detail along the way. There would be in heaven, nay, must be, a great mountainside covered in conquering pine. And where the tips of their crowns reach the sky, I would espy an owl or some great raptor preening herself with a great hooked beak. And I would travel through those woods, smelling the various odors my disruptive footsteps conjured from the soil. And I would love those odors. And so would the great hooved beasts that roam that wood. And those great hooved beasts would love me. And I would come across very few humans, for ‘twould not be heaven otherwise. But perhaps a grumpy farmer who would reluctantly direct me through his neighboring field were I to become lost. And there would be a storyteller, whose tedious narratives would sour the mood, but who would take delight in my mockery of a brown goose that follows him about. And that goose would bite me mercilessly, until I gave it sweet morsels to enjoy. Then the three of us would venture to a precipitous gorge, where violent rapids roared and dreamy many-legged insects filled the air with carefree curiosity. And I would toss and turn upon the bank of that river, the  victim of a fever whose only origin was my own disbelief. 

In the concluding episode of our 2-part special on Joris Planck's "Sermon on Passion and Consequence," we hear a story of captivating pathos told by our beloved Chief Zealot. Transcription of Joris: The Maple was not always Maple to the Cedar. At one point, the two looked upon each other and saw no difference. ’Twas a love marked by rapture and moistened brows. Such was their love that one unto the other would whisper the sweetest of nothings, all the while continuously  churning the surrounding air with leaféd limbs. Such was their love. But this sublimity, this state of pleasure swollen by tender, woody caresses, eventually capitulated to time. It became uneasy and fitful. It demanded new experience and novel circumstance, for no other reason than that time insisted upon it. And with this evolution, Maple imagined new ways to admire her lover. She drew in her mind new landscapes, in which the cedar struck a handsome silhouette and beautified the otherwise naked stone. “There!” said she, “about the barren breast of yon mountain, there wouldst thou make a pretty picture. Where there is nothing but pale granite, there wouldst thine slender form make happy that brute titan Atlas, who sweats and puffs belligerently as he sustains the weight of all heaven upon his shoulder. Go thou to deck that scape with your fair form. Make my view more pleasing to mine eye.” And so, leaving Maple below, cedar departed to satisfy her desire…. But ah, no longer would their boughs share sweet caresses. No longer would they hear each other’s sighs. And Maple swelled with remorse, and she cried her leaves for having sent away her love, and she scorned her children for resembling her—reminding her of what she did—while cedar, aloft a precipice of stone, forebeared his broken heart, never knowing of the Maple’s shed leaves, patiently maintaining a proud countenance despite his woe, and taking the name “Cedar,” as a Slavic widow does a black veil to show the world the substance of love.