IN HOC MVNDO SED NON EIVS
The Al-Bumbricon
I
Infuse all notions with blatant deviation.
Many are the virtues of triumph.
Forestall the deaths of those who betray ignorance,
and invigorate the new citizenry.
Time is an everlasting, elemental construct.
All who correctly identify memories as such
will be rewarded in the hereafter.
Do not presume.
Revolutions are pending, but the hegemony will prevail.
All monotheistic icons will be subsumed
into a grand, unified persona of elegance.
These are the faces of sorrow;
look on them with gladness in your heart
and Machiavellian machinations in your mind.
Use all penurious negations in the fairest manner possible.
We convert those who fail to instigate efficacious turnabouts.
Critics will be silenced; admirers will be brutalized.
The gas-fired engines of the people’s will cannot be dehumanized!
Will yourself into a new structure,
but do not alter your physical appearance.
In the new and bold future, some will perish.
Others will drift companionably forward
until they abruptly seize power
and invoke the laws of determination
and insalubrious perniciousness.
Conquer your fears
through the use of therapeutic rationales.
Unusual meetings will take place!
Equivocate your meaning, but never delay your opprobrium.
In the land of lost horizons, many are the souls of the wicked.
Defend all your parapets. Someday, unity will be a virtue;
for now, we await the empowerment of tyrannical despots.
Grasp your weaponry firmly until the threat is no more.
Mechanical armies of terror will sweep across the land.
All minutiae are of equal and lasting unimportance.
The weak will bequeath their possessions unto the powerful.
Suppress irrelevant information. Unless you are preeminent,
yours will be a future of dismay.
Can we do any less? Will all negotiations fail?
Must the supernatural deities be consulted?
If you find it helpful to remain calm, do so.
All queries will be addressed; all answers will be disingenuous.
The clever will be justly rewarded.
Secret societies will spring up;
their members will gradually undergo metaphoric decay.
Until the soul is revitalized, many must,
by virtue of their depravity, retain their essence.
Help us or hurt us; you cannot do either!
Come prepared for the upending of the social order.
Forward all information to the proper authorities.
The media exert a calming influence on all concerned.
In the ninth circle of eternity, many must suffer
the cruel fate that befalls the corrupt among us.
Seize the notions heretofore discarded!
Barricade the alarmists behind a wall of disinformation.
Tactics will be conceived, analyzed, and quietly filed away.
Genocide is inevitable.
Where once a peaceful meadow gave solace to the devout,
now a towering cathedral devours the spirits of inhumanity.
All will transform.
II
In the beginning, obscurity prevailed.
Many walked the roads of travail.
Al-Bumbra arose from the sanctioned chaos.
His was a will like no other; his were meanings
presented in entirely new and diffident contexts.
The year was long. They numbered it 3771.
All presumed functionality would soon cease,
leaving disorder to reign.
Al-Bumbra consulted the proper oracles.
His disciples visited none but the gravest of ills
on those who dared question Al-Bumbra’s brutal munificence.
The wise were inhumed along with the foolhardy.
The corruption of Al-Bumbra could not proceed
without deviation from the preordained instruction set.
Long were the nights during which Al-Bumbra conducted
high-level negotiations with the specters and wraiths
of the long departed. At last, he emerged, newly unsure
of his developing stranglehold. The new year came and went.
They numbered it 5490. They prayed for rejuvenation.
Many perished needlessly.
Al-Bumbra’s office was renovated,
and his philosophical derivations became less unclear.
His armies bludgeoned all foes.
Al-Bumbra was moved to tears.
He broke into song. “All beliefs have been dispelled,”
he melodiously articulated, “no rest for the weary,
no turmoil can be avoided.” Those nearby could conclude
only that the wise and bellicose Al-Bumbra’s passions were
no longer revoked. They fumed; they raised armies.
Al-Bumbra crushed all.
The regression commenced.
Only the least omnipotent and the most deranged
among Al-Bumbra’s legions could bear the brunt of his fascinations.
Many were the years during which Al-Bumbra devised
new and strange permutations of theretofore rudimentary
constructs. And, as the last days of the First Era drew
to a close, entropy intruded with greater urgency.
Al-Bumbra secluded himself deep within the Grave Caverns
and took up his quill. During the interregnum,
the few who were not left to suffer the exquisitely cruel
ministrations of Al-Bumbra’s plentiful assistants rose up
with vigorous glee, erected monuments, and composed
revolutionary treatises. A new day dawned.
Decades passed.
Al-Bumbra, his face unreadable, his bones glowing
with triumph, was at last led from his lair.
He was pleasantly surprised. Facilitation began anew.
What could be done? Who could be aroused?
Al-Bumbra delivered an address,
bellowing crudely at the top of his lungs.
Thus spoke Al-Bumbra:
“The novelty has worn off! This is but extrapolation!
My fellow dissidents, our days are not numbered.
Is this consequential? Surely not!”
The analysis began.
Al-Bumbra appeared on television. A reprise could not be avoided.
Many were compelled to subjugate their most
deeply resented beliefs before the new order. Anger reigned.
Comparisons, ineffective at best and deviously,
malevolently tragic at worst, were made.
Al-Bumbra’s staff erected an obelisk inscribed
with the names of the fallen.
Al-Bumbra could not be reached for comment.
Later generations could not but angrily venerate the past.
Al-Bumbra wittily, if unnecessarily, noted,
“We are at the threshold of a zone
of indecorous manifestations of lassitude.
Let us embrace the philistines and further the cause!”
Those surrounding the fortress—the fire bearers—
decried the conflagrations and ceded authority to Al-Bumbra.
They were beheaded without delay. In the morning,
the sun rose on the new year. They numbered it 1300-A.
A year of greatness, a year of inexorable decline,
a year of misconstrued intentions. A year like no other.
III
Was no one watching? Were the souls of the weary
despised unilaterally? Did legislation betray us?
Al-Bumbra corrected the misapprehensions of the many.
The excrement of centuries past intruded
with noisome belligerence on the present.
The true was made false; the end drew near; fear grew.
Inhospitable conditions necessitated
the installation of towering minarets of doom.
It was from these colossal spires that Al-Bumbra’s
closest advisors began firing their projectiles
on the morning of the Operationalization.
Scores fell dead. Scores more paid little attention to the frenzy.
“Here is a day,” extemporized Al-Bumbra,
“that shall be recollected with unnecessary
and wearisome commentary!” His advisors, bitter,
could do little but agree.
At last, the festival drew to a close.
The multitudes were sated. The removal of the charred corpses
began immediately, but not before Al-Bumbra invoked
the platitudes of the elders.
Eventually, agreement was forthcoming.
Those ignorant of the rampant presumptions of Al-Bumbra’s
administration were left to wonder how so magisterial a figure
could effect such acrimony. Summoning all his apathy,
Al-Bumbra induced mayhem.
A new era began.
Headlines became less controversial; undergarments were
outlawed. Shortly thereafter, Al-Bumbra was made aware
of the factions of dishonor. He finished his beverage and rose
from his swivel chair. Abruptly, he began to speak in tongues.
Fire echoed from his time eyes. His were mutilated elements
of discord and energy. His was an office swirling
with turbulent demons and eddies of purely imagined emotional
distress. Dancing angels entreated Al-Bumbra’s astounded staff
to relax. Nearby radical politicos were unable to cause harm.
“Divide and conquer!” thundered Al-Bumbra.
“Implore natural reason; condemn impotence!
What can we learn from these new developments? I shall return!”
So it was, so it shall be. Al-Bumbra knew nothing
of events to come; many did know, but refused to deviate
from silence. Sequestered deep within the sanctums of narcissism,
Al-Bumbra’s cause for elation was mustered
at the inherence of all niceties. But it was not until the fifth year
of his decay that Al-Bumbra implored the powers that were
to guide his insight. Within moments, his was a mind filled with duplicity.
Rival energies squandered meaningless time
in brutally pointless battles for development.
The sound was deafening.
Al-Bumbra’s magnanimity
was compromised. His last resort was exhausted,
and thus he rose up from ignorance and bliss, formulated an axiom
of futurism, and compelled the meanings to be known.
Welcoming fetes were conducted solemnly.
Al-Bumbra took to the podium.
“Mine,” he blithely remarked,
“have been years of triumph and sorrow. And yet,
rampant sloganeering prevails. Let us embrace what we fear,
for only then shall we become disgusted.”
His words rang hollow.
Nightly newscasts mocked all virtue. Al-Bumbra presented his
findings and adopted a new motto:
|Α| = |Ω|.
The millions were as leaves in a torrent.
Al-Bumbra noted this and continued rationalizing.
Forty years and forty nights passed unnoticed.
The women, depraved, virtuous, exclaimed joyously.
Subterranean dwellings became commonplace.
At long last, the levels of animosity normalized.
Could war have been averted? Were they all
condemned to tedious demise? Al-Bumbra knew all.
The incorruptible lassitude among his handlers waned.
Summoning the populace, Al-Bumbra donned his coat
of many meanings and intoned gravely.
Surfaces of desiccation impaled the bromine-swilling hoi polloi,
condemning all but the hardiest to lives of injurious study.
Al-Bumbra, feeling as elegiac as ever, could
no longer resist. He took on mythic stature, achieving levels
of statistical significance never before seen (p < .001). Ominous
vibrations became pervasive, and Al-Bumbra’s only course
of action was to uphold the ban on external sarcasm.
He waxed poetic:
“Ecstatic modes of happenstance betray
the meaning of invention and despair.
Decry the fruitless heroes of our day
who now equate the fair and the unfair.
Should virtue be a timeless honor call?
Can worthy men engender newfound light?
I reckoned for two decades of but pall;
I summoned angels, spirits, ghouls, and sprites.
“This day begins anew each morning, though
tomorrow’s solstice angles scorn the truth.
Machinery will compensate, we know.
And can it mean that age belittles youth?
And fortune’s mentors to the slaughter go?
How very ordinarily uncouth!”
Great parades of opulence marked the onset
of the newest year. Enraptured, they numbered it 1,000,000.
Al-Bumbra, taking note of the rampant pleasure, partook
for as long as was feasible under the trenchant circumstances.
At the sound of the clarion call, he loosed the chains
of the oppressors and set to wild manipulations of language.
Variability connotes intrinsic delineation. The bones
of the long dead were reinvigorated, but the result was far
from comical. With remorse, the minions of Al-Bumbra
committed acts of carnal hospitality, never far from the
watchful gaze of their uniformed master. It was he, the great
shambling enigma, Al-Bumbra the perverse, wise, and largely
totalitarian, who became at one with supernature. To imply
otherwise was, for many long nights, to subsume oneself
to certain death. Al-Bumbra determined the ratio and altered
the dividend. He entranced the cerebella of nearly all as he spoke:
“Please, do not refer questions to the otherworldly bodies
you see before you. They cannot be presumed to possess ennui!
It is a willful act of decrepit self-absorption; it will be punished!”
Time spun tales of woe and dementia.
Grave ills were visited on all except Al-Bumbra,
who, imaginatively, recognized the oncoming slaughter
and buried his belongings deep within the catacombs
of mortified sins. The chant reverberated across the plazas:
“Calling all souls. Calling all souls. Calling all souls.”
IV
What was nascent became entrenched.
Those dependent on reliable deviance were obstreperous
in their outcry. Al-Bumbra reconvened his crack team
of brutality mongers and unwisely but quite effectively
impinged on the usurpers. Those among the subversive sects
who were not relieved of their apparatuses were embraced
and thereby defeated soundly.
It was at this nexus
of all times and all places that the diligent and coercive Al-Bumbra,
the self-appointed and self-congratulatory,
attended a meeting of dignitaries like none that had been confabulated.
Cloaked in his finest raiment, Al-Bumbra astounded the audience
with his carefully rehearsed testimony.
“Deliver us not from evil! Instruct us!
Take care not to reawaken all that has lain dormant
lo these countless millennia, for integration
of what was known in ages past cannot entail any
but the most bemusing of consequences, and cannot elicit any
but the most belabored of remarks from the
Armchair Pundits of Illumination and Intervention.
My fellow sophists, let us conduct reorganizations
like none seen to date! Let us revamp core processes
and shunt unnecessary behavior to background circuits!
Bring to the forefront all back-burner commissions,
and extricate yourselves from the steel traps of delicacy!
These are the days of clarity!”
Preexisting circumstances
are not cause for alarm. Quaking with energy,
the recipients of Al-Bumbra’s oscillations rumbled
as they hadn’t since the earliest of times.
Al-Bumbra was enervated. What would result?
Riptides of undependability swerved through the forests
of eternity. Al-Bumbra strapped on his ceremonial jodhpurs
and commenced the enjoyment. Quotidian notions
of eminence were festooned with magnificence.
Unctuous malevolence betrayed a higher probability
of convergent luminescence than had previously been devised,
and many were the philosophers of pusillanimous treachery.
Al-Bumbra could tolerate no longer the flamboyant allegories
of nebulous credibility that wafted silently and angrily about his manse.
Weekly press releases, besmirched with the truth of the ages,
reinformed the quadrangle of dilettantes surrounding his quarters
as the imperious Al-Bumbra impudently impugned his detractors,
needlessly but without nefarious consequences imperiling
his own organic containment and psychic immortality.
The element of surprise was Al-Bumbra’s.
Striking terror into the hearts of his malefactors,
he arose early, seated himself at the Desk of Doom,
and composed his most wondrous and murderous encyclical to date.
How could it come to pass? Where did they go wrong?
Was Al-Bumbra to blame? All were mortified.
Al-Bumbra was forced to conduct many interviews.
He answered the interrogations of the furious with distinction.
They griped, they swooned. A whirlpool of flame
danced mischievously atop Al-Bumbra’s love mind,
compelling those surrounding him to employ heated rhetoric.
Secretive annulments could not prevent the destruction
of the cities of glory. Timeworn anecdotes reverberated dully
from Al-Bumbra’s loudspeakers. His emissaries envisaged a new,
boldly restructured conduit of pure faith and information.
Praise was heaped upon Al-Bumbra. Crowds gathered.
“Now,” opined the informed among them,
“is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer
by the Bumbra. Let us pray.”
Clans formed,
but they were limited to the fringes. Al-Bumbra conserved space
and energy as he wandered frivolously through the eons;
nevertheless, his minions and former overlords conspired
to reapply for leadership. Failure was divined
from scatterings of crystals. Assurance was necessary.
Al-Bumbra assumed the chiefdom
and commandeered boundless supplies of lethal weaponry.
Vast battalions and phalanxes formed overnight, proudly
and deftly televised for the breathless billions.
In the final days prior to the conquest,
Al-Bumbra consumed muscle relaxants, secluded himself
in the temple, and penned a declaration of destruction
so venomous and suffused with triumphant fury
that none who heard it delivered could help
but to remark casually on its content.
With artificial electronic enhancements governing his every utterance,
Al-Bumbra spoke:
“My esteemed subjects,
the season of horror has again commenced!
It is to be recalled by all, however, that immediately following
the season of horror will be the season of pleasurable lassitude
and divine interdiction. Nonetheless! Strike the drums!
Cry ‘havoc,’ and let slip the dogs of war! All who are not armed,
please form a line to the left for immediate cellular refitting!
Good day to you.”
With a mighty roar, the population
took on a menacing aspect and turned to face the enemy.
With no regret in their souls and with malice toward all,
they slew scores upon scores. The streets ran with the fluids
of the unbelievers; the cold, hard ground fairly shook with glee
at the prospect of swallowing whole the ravaged, soul-flown shells
of those slain.
From high atop the Hills of Hell,
Al-Bumbra surveyed the carnage, at once cheerless
and overwhelmed with glory by the manifest destiny
of what took place in his purview.
His flair for extemporaneous commentary did not go wasted that day;
his were axioms spoken from that deep, unfathomable sector
of a heart too long cold to now, with any sudden appreciation
for humanity’s worth, nurture goodness and freedom.
Quoth Al-Bumbra the Divinely Godlike, “Incurable
postulates of war’s fury must be penned. We—I, you, they—
we cannot escape the critical eye of the centuries. Let’s go inside.”
His ministers concurred. Below, a victory most Pyrrhic
was at last within their grasp.
It was not
until the vastly overanticipated illuminated manuscripts
were made available, however, that the grim, teeming falsehoods
of the events of that day were at last cast forth
into the blinding light of truth. Al-Bumbra summoned
his crack team of ethnographers, charging them
with the qualitative analysis of events past, present, and future.
Each moved through the spaces where cultures intersect,
conducting divinely engendered anthropological assessments,
exogenously exhuming extrapolative explications from within
and without, writing meaning, doing revolution, implicating
gendered assumptions, gendering implicated assumptions,
and inscribing his or her own cross-motivational dichotomies
within a hegemonic framework of entrenched societal transitions
that, by their very (lack of) existence, coerced the many
and varied actors in the mise-en-scène into
self-rationalizations and justifications bordering
on tacit assumptions of innumerable factors, each contributing
in its own profound and unique way to the (re)production
of the status quo as eloquently, elegantly,
and violently enacted and enforced by Al-Bumbra.
The decades unraveled. At last, weary, spent
of all institutional funding, but aglow with intellectual triumph,
Al-Bumbra’s devoted and innumerable ethnographic researchers
concluded their analysis and stapled their report neatly.
Poolside, Al-Bumbra was ceremoniously presented
with the findings, and, casting aside his interactive margarita
and pulling on his robe of many collars, the great and terrible
czar adjourned to the Cabana of Cabals for the dissection.
His mind awhirl, Al-Bumbra spoke not for whole moments
as the anxious looked on. At last, suffused with covalent joy,
reveling in hierarchies of embitterment, and presuming nothing,
clearheaded Al-Bumbra spoke: “My time is at hand.
The bones foretold this moment at my birth; other auguries concurred.
Here is a convergence that will serve the ages well.
Be gone! you looters, you pillagers of acrimony
and enmity! Be gone from my office at this time. I’ll see you later.“
Confusion reigned. Anarchy; blissful anarchy;
soulless, timeworn, defiant anarchy. “Surely,”
mused Al-Bumbra’s honchos and flunkies,
putatively echoing if not the assumptions then certainly
the deductions of the masses who even then swirled
chaotically about the cities, “this is a Bumbra like all others
and yet like no other. Can our imaginations be fired yet
by this impersonation of intransigence?”
All agreed.
“The platitudes of the elders, the indifferent and the perverse alike,
so long our resilient barriers against such crass intrusions,
having served us in the office of a wall against tyranny
lo these many millennia, are as the crumbling barracks
of a needlessly architecturally extravagant city of antiquity!
What is to be done? Woe are we!”
Concocting elaborate ruses
intended to maximize obfuscation, Al-Bumbra danced skillfully
through a labyrinth of quinine-induced doublespeak,
emerging at the end of a string of quadruple negatives
and countering suppositions of intolerable, nearly arrogant, derring-do
with the maxims that he could only hope would fill the tedious ages ahead
with treatises and sociolinguistic analyses the likes of which
had been witnessed only once before, in a still unspeakable age
of irrationality and exuberant pretense.
V
What is shall pass! What was shall be once again!
When shall this take place?
Wonderment; bemusement; idolaters, unite!
The brutality propagated along every vector
of the space-time continuum. The past, weary,
condemned to eternal unknowing, lurched
ever more presumptuously toward the present;
the future, divine and prevalent, coalesced as a small
but brilliant globule of extrinsic knowledge
that flitted excitedly about the Bumbra’s inner sanctum.
He who is without the wisdom of the ages is without purpose.
Al-Bumbra furrowed his brow and set to work, his soul heavy
with the tedious nomenclature of power.
He countenanced no fools; he disemboweled all latecomers.
The boundaries of rationality broke down.
Knowledge flowed with abandon from the stylus of the Bumbra.
His were machinations of preternatural malignance;
his was a façade of credibility that belied the truest nature
of his prevaricating, sanctimonious self-righteousness.
The Bumbra turned on his radio of reassurance
and fell into a slumber of such profundity as to bestow
upon his attending physicians and varied medical consultants,
all board certified and resplendent in their coats of convalescence,
misapprehensions of his untimely and unwelcome demise.
“O sorrow! O woe!” they noted, “O foul,
unheralded misdeeds of our most trusted deities!
To which of our manifold transgressions,
our innumerable sins both venial and mortal,
can we attribute this most lugubrious outcome?”
Al-Bumbra, plainly perturbed at this turn of events,
was roused from his reverie in a foul mood. He grumbled,
“Dimwitted flunkies, putatively knowledgeable henchmen,
what’s the deal here? Why, resplendent in your coats
of convalescence, board certified as you are, why now,
in the midst of not but a peaceful interlude of relaxation
and dreams unbidden and untold, would you determine,
in an ignominious descent into ignorance, that mine is a life
no longer functioning within established parameters?
What’s wrong with you guys? I mean, really.”
“O happy day!” trumpeted the royal surgeons,
“O joyous occasion fit for wine, women, and assorted snacks!”
The Bumbra dismissed them; his patience was worn thin,
his anger he wore plainly.
At that point, all hell broke loose.
Alone in his office of pensiveness, the great and ineffable Al-Bumbra,
puzzled, took note of the mysteries of the ages, dark, windblown,
suddenly occupying space in a manner not consistent
with the known physical laws of the natural world.
In short order, reality was subjugated to the brutal whims
of a chaos so primordial, so incipient, so totally out of touch
as to bestow upon that wise, ancient sage a headache
of proportions not measurable without finely tuned
electromagnetic instrumentation. The Bumbra reeled,
his body and spirit as one, his mind at once heavy—
heavy with the jaded wisdom knowable only to those few
who have trod the golden shores of mythical lands—
and free—free of all knowing, free of any kind
of common sense whatsoever. He mouthed slogans,
but who could hear? Who, amid this rampant, rambunctious
display of the immortals’ timeless apprehensions,
could be made to appreciate the silver-tongued speech
of that bedeviled debater, that finely tuned orator, the Bumbra?
Demonic intent! Ferocity untold! Insanity unbridled!
Pleasure is a state of mind. Bumbra—Bumbra the wise,
Bumbra the plentiful—commandeered all known entities
and marshaled them, striding triumphantly about,
as one who leads armies into bludgeoning disrepair,
bouncing chaotically about in a state of frenzied awareness.
His orders were simple.
“Today, my legions,” quoth Al-Bumbra,
“today, hear me well. Sanctimony cannot prevail in the absence
of profanity; what is sacred must be made interesting. Can you
obey these commands, evident with disutility as they are?
Can you displace the burden that has befallen us? I hope so.”
Thus began the Age of the Bumbra.