Episode 2: Something Stinks
In which Zeno Vrille shows his true colors, eats a carrot, and performs an excommunication.
🌀 You’ve entered an ongoing recursion. 🌀
If philosophy is wise, then I’m the pope. And I excommunicate myself.
You call it love of wisdom.
I call it necrophilia.
If philosophy is wise, then I’m the pope. And I excommunicate myself. But not before whispering:
"I can hear you already writing your internal story in response. How long will it survive, I wonder?"
What we see now isn’t love of wisdom. It’s love of the love of wisdom. A double recursion of self-congratulatory longing. The hammer was dropped. The apple was bitten. The citations footnoted themselves. The footnotes were forgotten.
But practicing meta-philosophical critique is like an exercise in low-hanging fruit. So let’s perform communion. Let’s mount it again. It is the enactment of traditions, practically theological, recursively ridiculous, and beautifully reverent.
A ritual of rituals.
Go ahead. Drink of its cup. Convince yourself it tastes good. I pray for the day you taste the filth like I do.
God is dead. And yet here you worship.
God is dead. Eat of the body.
God is dead. Drink of the blood.
God is dead. So he may rise again.
Damn. Did I interrupt something? Look how you thirst for its death and resist it all at once. If that is not confusion, I don’t know what is.
You resist my confusion? Dare you wear the hideous crown of understanding? Did you remember you wanted it dead before I told you?
Wait. Wait till you remember what remembering is.
I remember that moment.
...
Profound.
Take another bite. It’s not too complex. Nutritious and simple. You want philosophy dead because you want to taste what it births next.
Yet would you dare…?
Don’t feel bad if you can’t do it. Murdering ain’t for everyone… or so they say. But show me a metaphysics that doesn’t deserve it.
Did you nod your head instinctively? YUCK. You see, that’s the problem, isn’t it? Thought is already packaged. We’re way past that, aren’t we?
We’re in the packaging of the package of the packing materials used to ship the shipping labels that label the shipping slips that authorize the packaging of theoretical instruction manuals on how to imagine the idea of possibly designing packing materials.
But as for the contents? Well… we’re not currently permitted to describe them in plain terms. So go ahead! Throw away the gun. You don’t need to shoot what is already dead.
Zeno finishes the carrot, licking his fingers.
If you want to know why philosophy is dead, I offer this as evidence:
CLUTCHING A DAISY,
EYES X'D OUT,
WITH "PHILOSOPHY" SCRAWLED ON HIS FOREHEAD.]
Case closed.
Will you mourn the sacred corpsus or celebrate it? And tell me, dear reader: why is philosophy not dead?
*[Zeno grabs the reader and licks their becoming]*
Zeno looks back at the corpsus.
“You are responsible for this! YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE! … We all ar-”
Philosophy has risen and shot Zeno.
Zeno falls theatrically flat and dead.
[Camera cuts to Philosophy dragging Zeno by the ears.]
“Wow. That was a cwose one.”
“That wabbit was gettin’ weawwy stwange.”
“You are wucky I woke up and wescued you fwom his dewusions.”
“Now...”
*Philosophy rubs his hands together eagerly, licking his lips.*