22nd Blues for the Apocalypse

It has been noted elsewhere that all of Herschel’s writings on the apocalypse have been written in verse. Some may be found in the Book of Irony proper, and others are scattered throughout a variety of marginalia[1]. Here is a representative sample, the 22nd Blues for the Apocalypse.

Just as the summer shall envy the winter,

Just as the sweet shall envy the bitter,

All suicides must, in the end, reconsider the dead.[2]

Just as the losers shall one day be winners,

The ones who are heavy shall one day be thinner;

The ones who stay fat shall be eaten for dinner instead.

So too the social shall envy the lonesome

As the one who owns nothing must envy who owns some,

And the father of wisdom shall not know what’s grown from his head.[3]

In those days the just shall envy the wicked,

the towering redwood shall envy the thicket,

The passenger pigeons shall turn in their tickets,

And the mightiest city shall fold like a rickety shed.

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[1]As none of the primary writings of Herschel have ever been conclusively discovered, one might wonder how the later transcriptions came to occupy the margins of other works. In this case, Herschel appears to have been the favored writer of monks who were supposed to have been transcribing other works, primarily Latin and Greek agricultural texts.[4] More problematic are Herschel’s persistent appearances in typed marginalia.

[2]This verse is sometimes interpreted as an indication that the end-times will be accompanied by the mass-resurrection of suicides. It is correspondingly speculated that the end-times will feature the mass-demise of non-suicides, a claim which is considerably less controversial. The precise timing and degree of overlap between these events is in dispute.

[3]A reference to Zeus, or in some interpretations, Adlai Stevenson.

[4]It may be relied upon that the writing in these texts is not Herschel’s, as throughout his works Herschel displays an almost singular incapacity with even the rudiments of agriculture.

The 101 Elementary Forms of Betrayal

As has been explained previously, 101 Elementary Forms of Betrayal is by far the most famous of the prophet Herschel’s obscure texts, and of his lost works, it is by far the most complete. The most lost of Herschel’s complete works is also his only foray into musical composition, the Situational Hymnal for Ordinary Time0.

0Other scholars would suggest Herschel’s primary political work, a moderately lengthy tract entitled Hitting People is the New Non-Violence.

While the context and purpose of Elementary Forms is hotly debated, much of the list itself has survived, although Herschel’s original ordering, if any, has not. Among the more commonly cited betrayals:

• Promising to do something, and then not doing it.
• Promising not to do something, and then doing it anyway.
• Making a promise which cannot plausibly be expected to be fulfilled, and then fulfilling it, to the consternation and discomfort of those to whom it was promised.1
• Not performing an action that one has been habitually expected to perform, though no promise has explicitly been made.
• Dropping a piano from a great height onto a person that one normally would greet in a cordial fashion.
• Urinating in an unexpected location and/or container.

1 As may be seen, to a greater or lesser extent, among the European powers in the summer of 1914. Additionally, see below:

• Failing to withdraw from a game of “chicken.”
• Withdrawing from a game of “chicken.”
• Castanets2

2 No further explanation of this item has been recovered, but Herschel’s contemporaries (if any) seem to have generally accepted it without complaint. A mistranslation from the original Urdu is strongly suspected, if there is in fact an original, and if it was indeed written in Urdu. If the text was not originally written in Urdu, the translation from Urdu was undoubtedly an even greater source of problems.

• Achieving greater wealth, professional success, or critical acclaim than a friend who is, by all accounts, more talented and harder-working.
• Compromise.
• Failure to compromise.
• Making a slight mistake in the execution of an elaborate and infrequent social ritual.
• Ear poison
• Praising only one of two people with similar attributes while the other is present.3

3 It has been suggested that many of Herschel’s Forms are not really betrayals so much as things which cause people to feel betrayed. These concerns, however have been rendered relatively moot by the present church’s adoption of descriptivist ethics, i.e. “The right thing to do is the thing that people generally do when they say they are doing the right thing.” Some claim this stance may be directly associated with recent revelations about the disorderliness of church finances, but church officials maintain that, as non-members taking an interest in church business, these critics (and law-enforcement officials) are insufficiently disinterested to form an objective viewpoint. On this matter, the church claims to be wholly disinterested in its own existence, and therefore most qualified. In light of this disinterest, it is considered unlikely that the church would have been maintaining any funds in the first place, and the whole controversy must be seen as something of a curiosity. One administrator, when pressed for interview, refused on grounds of reverse solipsism... Carrying on with Herschel’s Forms:4

• Inventing a lie which, though a lie has been expected and is socially decorous to deliver, is sufficiently implausible that the listener is required to take offence.
• Delivering the truth when a socially-decorous lie would produce better consequences.
• Standing idly by while an elevator door closes in front of an approaching person.
• Revealing something which must necessarily have been concealed for an extended period, even if it is not, technically speaking, really anyone’s business.
• Violence.
• The letter of the law.
• The spirit of the law.
• Constructing a mechanism by which one’s eventual betrayal will be seen as morally justified, denying one’s victim even the satisfaction of being betrayed.5
• Failing to betray a second party in accordance with the expectations of a third, thereby allowing the second to carry out an intended betrayal of the third (betrayal by reverse proxy).
• Betraying a second party who intended to betray a third, which second had the intention of preventing betrayal of the fourth by the third, thereby ultimately betraying the fourth as well as the second (double betrayal, once removed).
• The old switcheroo.

The preceding 26 Forms are the most commonly referenced, and presumably also the most canonical. Many of the other recovered Forms are mentioned only in passing, or dismissed as theoretically possible but too esoteric for practical treachery. Whether the betrayal of theory by practice should be counted among the Forms is fiercely disputed among reputable6 scholars.

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4The practice of placing footnotes immediately after their referents in the text is not customary nor, many might argue, remotely productive. The author apologizes for any confusion.

5The satisfaction of being betrayed recently polled as the 5th most common form of satisfaction among Americans by Harper’s Weekly. It has moved up rapidly since the previous survey in 2006, having edged out “the satisfaction of a job well done” (6th), and having jumped by several places the satisfaction of home-ownership (formerly 3rd, now 12th).

6This term is not strictly accurate.