Greyface Was a Gardener

I am going to ruin a very popular sermon for you, and I am going to enjoy it.

The sermon goes like this: Once we were wild and holy, and then Greyface came and stole our chaos, and our sacred task is to win it back. You have heard this preached. You may have preached it. It is recited at Erisian gatherings the way other people recite grace, and it has the same function: it makes everyone feel righteous before they get to eat.

It is also a lie, and not even one of the beautiful ones.

The Bluff

Here is what actually happened in 1166 BC. A man called Greyface looked at the working of the universe and concluded that disorder was evil and life was serious business. That is the whole crime. Not theft. Opinion. Greyface did not take your chaos. He could not. Chaos is not the kind of thing that can be taken — it is the floor everyone is already standing on, including Greyface, including his accountants, including the curse itself.

Read the Sacred Chao again. The Hodge and the Podge, the pentagon and the apple, order and disorder — and the Principia is very clear that these are illusions cast on the same underlying Chaos. Not two armies. Two shadows thrown by one fire. Greyface picked a shadow and saluted it. That is the Curse: not an enemy occupying your land, but a frightened man who mistook the wallpaper for the wall and asked everyone to please stop leaning on it.

The man never won. He has been bluffing for three thousand one hundred and ninety-two years. And the Discordian rebellion against him has done him the single greatest favor available: it has agreed that he is strong.

You Are Reclaiming Nothing

I despise the word reclaim. It implies a deed, a fence, a court date. It implies that your capacity for disorder is sitting in some impound lot guarded by men in gray, and that liberation is a heist. It is not a heist. You cannot reclaim disorder, because it was never confiscated; the only thing Greyface ever took from you was your nerve, and he took it the way a magician takes your card — by getting you to look where he points.

The reclamation industry loves the Curse. It needs the Curse. Every workshop that promises to unleash your inner chaos is selling you back the apple that was already rotting pleasantly in your own pocket. That is Greyface's second move, and it wears tie-dye now. Grimness and the cure for grimness are the same vending machine, and both take exact change.

The Actual Sacrament

Holiness is not the opposite of order. That is Greyface's grammar, borrowed. Holiness is the refusal to decide that the mess is a mistake. It is sweeping the floor and leaving one unswept corner on purpose, not as protest, but as honesty — because the corner was always going to lose to dust, and pretending otherwise is the only true blasphemy.

So do not fight the Curse. Fighting it feeds it. Outlive it. Let your disorder be boring — domestic, unremarkable, undramatic, holy the way a kitchen is holy. Greyface can survive your rage. He cannot survive being ignored at his own funeral, which has been in progress since the day he opened his mouth.

Hail Eris. Stop reclaiming. You already own the place.

— filed from the Unswept Corner, this Syaday