Two Romes, and: Man-without-a-Moon

Two Romes

As the story goes, the Roman emperor Honorius (395–423 CE) owned a parrot named Rome.

Honorius loved his astonishing bird, whose vibrant colors were like those of some divine, mythic fresco (provenance unknown). The symbolism of the bird's colors overwhelmed Honorius; each color was like a separate being, all of which united in the Chief Being of the parrot.

The emperor taught his bird Latin and spoke of the abstract, transcendent world of Beauty.

In the Temple of Jupiter, Honorius sacrificed bulls for his magnificent pet. He ordered bronze and marble sculptures depicting himself as emperor, his parrot perched on his right hand synthesizing in one small entity all of Honorius's mysterious, authoritarian heraldries. He even wrote hexametric poems to this supreme, beloved bird.

The emperor tended toward the metaphysical; he came to believe that all of reality was contained inside his feathered friend.

Honorius knew that his predecessor, Caligula, had made his horse a Roman senator. Honorius, a bit more modest, had simply turned his parrot into Rome itself.

Everything else seemed random, meaningless: the wars, the marching, the bronze helmets, the flags emblazoned with eagles, the geography and amphitheaters, the bridges, streets, and aqueducts, the philosophers' parchments, the Sibylline Oracles, the attacking Goths.

One day the emperor's secretary told Honorius gravely, "My emperor, Rome is dying."

"What? He's dead? How?"

"Calm down, my emperor. That Rome is fine. He's happy, chattering, even singing. Meanwhile, poor Rome is slowly being reduced to nothing."

"But what difference is there between one Rome and the other?" the emperor replied.

Man-without-a-Moon

Everyone sees the moon. But the moon does not exist.

There is no moon! — though astronomers accurately mark it on their sky charts; crazy poets consider it a totem; cameras have, I'm told, filmed the landing of astronauts on the moon's surface.

The nonexistent moon governs everything.

The moon explains the high and low tides of the great waters. Heraldries containing the moon are everywhere, adorning our imaginations, our dreams, our nightmares and desires, our instincts and orgasms, our lives and deaths.

________

There is no moon, but the moon is there.

All of humanity should simply be called Humanity with Moon.

________

Everyone sees the moon — because people were born from the very beginning with the tissue of the moon's hallucination planted inside them.

This hallucination is like those of God and money. Who can deny it? Reality itself is nothing more than the collectivity of our hallucinations passed down through the millennia.

________

Once, however, a man was born whose body, because of a tissue defect, did not possess the moon's hallucination. Unlike everyone else — unlike all exhausted and complacent humanity — this man didn't see the moon for the simple and obvious reason that the moon wasn't there. Thus, he was called Man-without-a-Moon.¹

Man-without-a-Moon was exceptional; consequently, he was a monster. Everyone hated him: the poets and theologians, the bankers and generals, the paparazzi and psychiatrists, the prostitutes and fortunetellers and astronomers — and especially the great and relentless utopians.

But Man-without-a-Moon was steadfast. He was a great idealist — his singularity came from his fathomless doubt. He made his arguments from the very core of his opposition. It almost goes without saying that he was considered an infuriating heretic, an impudent, prideful person, just as contrarian as those whose thoughts excluded him — and thus we can imagine all the inevitable clashes that were to come.

If philosophers eventually erased the distance between physics and the mind, this renegade did the opposite. He both adored and hated devout Berkley, who claimed the world was created by our senses. Man-without-a-Moon was an atheist — at least in relation to the anthropomorphic gods. Or at least from the perspective of theosophists for whom gods are like the moon — that is, for whom gods exist because they do not exist, for whom gods aren't worshipped as reality but as...