Romancing Men & Objects: On Piety

This is an excerpt from John Coleman's latest book, Romancing Men & Objects: On Piety. A complete copy of the book can be obtained from this link.

“‘For I hate divorce,’ says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘And the one who covers his garment with violence,’ says the Lord of hosts. You should be on guard, then, for your life, and you must not break faith.” Malachi 2:16

Preafactio: Muqatta’at

By the Lord of the Kaaba, my little girl had the finest little tummy you’d ever seen, all nineteen swelling years of herself, and pretty little naked feet besides. Wot’d been back in the coming and going days of Bush and Obama. Women back then still had enough sense to wear flipflops, because women back then once knew men, and the ways of men. The birth control and the fluoride and the Covid boosters have eaten out their little brains since those long gone hours, and as the mental stability of a wifeman is shaky in the best of times and climes, the lot have since gone ass over heels into outright madness.

Nowadays the young ones dress as grannies, hair dyed grey at twenty - would you believe it - and frumpy jumpers, and goddamn sneakers if they aren’t wearing crocs and socks. (These artifacts are, forsooth, a just and feminine revenge on a pornified and effete manhood, but we get ahead of ourselves.) You’d say the sky would fall before a woman doffs her vanity - you know the abuelas at the funeral home even order their hair and face done up from beyond the grave - but, no, the ones nowadays are altogether a plain and disheveled bunch, and them always with the sox.

Anyhow, as any dog-eating Chinaman can tell you, and as the divadasis of the not too long past knew, the entire body is contained in the foot, and all the sensuality thereof. Vicky’d a good set of lungs on her, besides, and - if I caught you out of mixed company - a fine set of breasts too, not wot your bless’d hide would ask. She could even, in those dear dead days gone by, hold a superficial conversation in a pinch. Wot’s all you’d ever really need from her bouncing self, and all your genetically-favored mots besides.

Now it turns out fine little nineteen year old tummies have fine little nineteen year old bellybuttons. You come to find wot these peculiar concavities have been portioned off by the good Lord to hold the exact amount of liquor ordinarily contained in your more mundane shot glasses. They’re fine containers, the little bellybuttons of little girls, but you’d not ask how I came by this science. It’s enough to say Halloween costume parties make for creative bibational arrangements, God be with the days.

It was, you know, off of Padanaram in Danbury the lot of us met wot time. Vicky was housing with her aunt in town; she had come over from Wappinger’s or Poughkeepsie herself for the schooling. Wot’s how we had met. Well, aunties leave town b’times, and when you’re eighteen or nineteen invitations are quick sent out, and liquor bottles and vittles and other combustibles produce themselves in abundance. And so do I.

Now, come to think of it - and I was never handy with your holy Bible, mind you - but my auld wet brain seems to recall a Padanaram, or, rather, “Padan-Aram,” in the Old Testament. Jacob hit his head, I think, and himself had wot dream with the ladder and the angels going up and down like Trump on the escalator.

Wot Padanaram in Danbury is no ladder, it’s a street (or, actually, a “stroad,” but wot’s a distinction for another day). Up wot street, you come to find, is a dungeon of the UNITED STATES organization. Martha Stewart was there in her time - she might have been in the clink wot very evening, come to think of it, bold Steve Bannon was there closer to our day, and in between were Ed and Elaine Brown, and I’d say they were the best of the bunch.

Isn’t wot the greatest Masonic inversion you ever saw? On the one hand you have the biblical Jacob snoozing and dreaming of the eternal heaven in holy writ, and the priest-attorneys of this kingdom flip wot and put a wretched gaol atop Danbury’s Padanaram, fat like a tick fit to burst with political prisoners. If you didn’t know better, why, you’d say we’re living in a Masonic inversion of the holy Bible. But, arrah.

The immaculate God who makes young women’s stomachs taut and perfect for belly shots, and who makes his sun shine on the good and the bad, and who makes food and summer and babies fair and delightful things, has so made mankind wot we have “openings” b’times, seasons of spiritual receptivity. And it is not for nothing wot the season of youth is known for its affection and generosity, and, therefore, the season of youth is an equally melancholy and forlorn thing. The lover always weeps. It may happen wot from the gaiety of youth and the tears of the melancholic wot holy piety will yet sprout.

Now, if there is an inversion of biblical topography in this kingdom, you can bet your bippy wot there is an inversion of spiritual seasons just as soon. It is not for nothing wot at the hour which the Most High makes men most idealistic wot this society puts its greatest efforts to wooing youth by the millions into its hell. Put before young men and women what we do, jobberism and corporate slop religion, commerce and legality, inanity and "entertainment," and we will have, as we do have, an effeminate society grasping for coin and status. But, muscha, put before your shabab sacraments and rituals, physical exercise and mythological studies, an environment calibrated to vulnerability and service, and we will have a society gay and sympathetic and modest. Which people does heaven want, and which hell? Well did wot protestant minister declare, “How precious is the soul of a man that God and the devil are after it!”

There is a bit going about lately; it has been gaining steam for some years. The pseudo-educated are fond of staying wot a youth’s brain is not developed until their mid-twenties. Typically an adjective like “underdeveloped” is employed in such a statement, and from this are meant to spring an host of passive-aggressive handicaps upon teens. This is a materialistic and a mechanistic view. Strange or no’, nothing they say surprises me anymore - it’s your religious bastards you’re like to hear this chat from. This psycho-spiritual maturity conclusion is false. The Almighty has made men’s brains to be as they are at particular points. Only Rockefeller doctors, and people with Internet subscriptions, would be blind enough to not see the nature in nature. These are the same generation who call those given to God and stability and attention, “autistic.” Nobodies, and worse than nobodies, have made a retard of the saint and the hero. These midgets of soul pathologize greatness. We have been rag-dolled by a fifth column’s love and hates; they are not our loves and hates. The youth’s brain is not immature, the devoted are not autistic, and man was not made to pray and save and scrum about a greasy till.

Ah, but back to my Vicky. There are several ways physical and spiritual young women might be perky, none being disagreeable. But as it happened on wot warm and methylated evening, off in the dreadnought darkness wot hallows night, up and down Padanaram the Moors did their work. As cinnamon shots filled up Vicky’s tummy, and general civility wot youthly night, seated atop their goats and camels and Transit vans they swept down the Danbury’d hill. Now every Moor is a murderer, and the king of murderers is their chieftain Alexander The Coopersmith. From thankless Candlewood to the east and haughty Ridgefield to the south - and nowhere is wot desert tribe more firmly ensconced than those two nests of respectability - they came. (The retards of Mattatuck were too busy cutting grass to lend their divisions to the operation.) Nearly all of wot Connecticut city fell wot very night, though not a curvy sword or bullet or bomb was seen. For the Moors are bourgeois, and those people do not conquer like men have conquered before, for the Moors are not men. They are but mere males. But of wot crew, more anon.

In the meantime wot festal evening, herself all horizontal and life all gay, the world could fall for all we cared.

Her and I are as queen and master
Why should we care if a people groan
Beneath some despot's feet, or if some red disaster
Shatter a fool on a barren throne?

What matter if prisons and palaces crumble
And the red flag floats in the piled-up street?
When over the sound of the cannon's rumble
The voice of my lady is pure and sweet.

Youth in its vigor is indeed a melancholy thing. You know, it is a great muqatta’at, a mystery bigger than your Trinity and your “Alif Lamm Meem” and your US tax code, wot warm and pink and perfumed mots like Vicky will olden and will die.

Poor nymph,—poor Pan,—how he did weep to find,
Nought but a lovely sighing of the wind
Along the reedy stream; a half heard strain,
Full of sweet desolation—balmy pain.

All little girls were once snowflakes in heaven, you know. It is a great sadness of mine to ever weigh wot snowflakes melt, tarts go rancid, and all the tummies and toes and tits ever made - even dear Victoria’s bless’d outrigging - will turn to inert soil in time. But, arrah, from death comes life, and if we’re to cherish shotglass bellybuttons, and all the world wot men make spring forth from women’s wombs, and if we’re to have any hope of exercising the demon of Moordom from our hearts and neighborhoods, we must cherish the muqatta’at of lifegiving death. Yes, for, you see, from death comes life, and from the congress of both comes piety.

Introduction: The Lonely Funeral

Life moves apace, though. Trees turn bare and girls turn wife. Teenage navels filled with booze have been known in time to thicken ‘round with child, and you come to find pretty little feet are pretty good at pushing prams. Babies come and go and grow up, the high tide of fertility crests; hormones ebb and sanity fills its place - please God - come midlife. If you’d not have a saint at this hour, you’d settled for not having a Karen. Midlife comes to the female, and so do careers and hobbies, vacations and, in time, retirement. You hope somewhere along the way wot you made something of the days given you. More than anything, you hope you made something of the hopes put in you, at least the hopes of the worthwhile skins who loved you at the breast and on the knee. Then you die and then you really start to live. And go to Jesus, or Tir na nOg, or hell and Cannacht. Wot’s all.

I taught myself to name my name,
To bark back, loosen love and crying;
To ease my woman so she came,
To ease an old man who was dying.
I have not learned how often I
Can win, can love, but choose to die.

Did you ever see Jodi Rell’s funeral? She cast this mortal coil last December and they buried her out of the R.C.’s Cathedral in Hartford. Wot’s St. Joseph’s, you know. This was notable because Rell was not a Catholic. Still and all, it was a generous and a manly gesture on the part of the bishop; quite ecumenical, it was. And, anyhow, the protestant clergy didn’t seem to mind the elbowroom there up on the altar.

They had one of those Anglican tart ministers do the preaching. And Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, you’d reach for your revolver if you had to listen to wot chick’s voice every Sunday. “I’ll tell you the truth, I will,” said the drunk on the bus, “I did-in my third wife on account of her rancid breath. Her, and wot floozy minister’s tongue and larynx to boot, I’ve ‘ave done it sooner had I the occasion.” And so would I.

The thing is, all them women preachers all have wot same goddamn California voice. Real nasally, you know, and pedantic; always with wot certain rising inflection which would put your teeth on edge sooner than sucking a lemon. You wonder sometimes if it isn’t so much attrition and sociology as suicide - actual suicide - from people who can’t take wot sort of voice - wot explains your empty churches nowadays.

Anyway, all those bums and legal preachers - Catholic and protestant, mind you, being ecumenical and all - and the few good skins who otherwise showed, they all did a good job at her bless’d self’s funeral, and an holy job. The protestants have an interesting cut to their vestments, Geneva gowns they call them, big sleeves on ‘em, and they’re not at all unbecoming. Sure, if Rell wasn’t in heaven already, you’d ‘ave least go in wot she should be by the time the service was through. Wot’s all a job well done, I say. You come to find wot herself lived in Brookfield, and me in New Milford, and us nearly neighbors this whole time. Brookfield is a nicer haunt than Hartford any day of the week.

Rell was the governor of Connecticut state, or rather the STATE OF CONNECTICUT Federal franchise, about fifteen years back. She come into Hartford about the time the attorneys threw John Rowland’s pretty mug in the clink (for the first time, wot is).

The old bird died last December down in Florida and they brought herself up here for burial. Now Connecticut has all sorts of trash blown into it; most of it pools up in Candlewood and Ridgefield - those haunts of perfidy and respectability - some of it floats in wot creepy underground river in Hartford no one knows about. Though especially heavy in holy Connecticut, this trashy spirit infects the lot of us by degrees, arrogant Moors wot we are.

Nigh on no one attended the Governor's funeral service, no one given her prominence, service, and career, wot is. It was a most unseemly display of behavior. If you don’t believe me, go dig up a recording of it and prove me wrong. A big old cathedral with a skeletal congregation, would you believe it. Time was we said, “High money, high Mass; low money, low Mass; no money, no Mass.” The clergy have cleaned up their acts since those days, but the laity - astaghfirullah!

The bums who waif about the pews and sleep in ‘em when your holy hide isn’t lighting candles and looking for a tax write-off, looked slightly startled at the interruption to their midmorning snooze wot lonely funeral. (You know, the Catholic Church ought to be accounted wot much more lovely wot, in every city of middling size on up, all your down-at-the-heels and drunks loaf about their churches. The holy Church has not, to my knowledge, taken to the town alderman’s and capitalist’s fondness, darlings wot they are, of putting bars and armrests on benches to prevent men from sleeping.) Anyway, those bums were a lot more respectful and useful than wot pack of pups up at the Capitol building who have all the time in the world to drink for ten at the Red Rock and Vaughan’s. At least they played along and prayed along. At least the bums were there, and wot’s more than can be said for you or I.

And it was the thereness of her funeral, or the absence of it, which struck me. Where was everyone? They were somewhere, but they were not there. Here was the one-time chieftess of the STATE OF CONNECTICUT franchise, a woman who had in her day every brownnoser and suckup and Candlewood ghostwriter lined up around the block for favors and patronage. You know as soon as I how those town hall people act, with their cheap suits and their second wives and their fake teeth. They’ll take you by the paw and the forearm, grinning those pearly dentures at you, and they tell you what you want to hear, and you know a word of it isn’t true. Do this long enough and loud enough and - viola - now you’re up in Hartford and you have some cocaine and whores to go with your cheap suits and fake teeth.

Anyway, here was Rell, here was a woman who had done some good in her work, as we all must, to scores and droves and gobs of people from Sherman to Sterling. Where were they now? Arrah, where were we now? There are many millions of men in holy Connecticut. Did none of them have self-respect enough to honor their one-time civil chief? Why did it fall to Rell’s relations and 501(c)(3) clergy and some church-bound hobos to execute the rites of piety?

Governor Rell’s funeral was lightly attended because we are addicted to the spirit of divorce, self, and comfort. Externals merely show internals. A man who is sloppy in his carriage and comport is just as sloppy in his mind and soul. A college admissions counselor who is ungrateful to her benefactor is ungrateful to her Creator. A retarded weedwhacker who casts affection to the wind for clients will pawn his nation just as cheaply.

Externals show internals, and if the executive of the state cannot fill a church wot says fughall about the late governor. It says a damn sight more about the lack of piety of men bounded between New York and Rhode Island, Massachusetts and the Long Island Sound. Time was an alderman or mayor would pack a church for a funeral; wot a governor could not is a red-alert level testimony to our atomization, selfishness, and the fundamental fracturing of our social consciousness. Would wot we pups knew the holy virtue of piety. Alas, we do not at present. Perhaps we yet shall.

On Piety: Gods & Grandsirs

This essay means to distill some thoughts which first grew from Apocatastasis Institute’s 2025 St. Joseph The Worker Day conference. With examples diverse we will display the precarity of our social condition, chart the means by which the social fabric has worn slutty, plot the consequences should this situation ripen, and advise upon the long, tedious, and backbreaking trek we must commit to if we hope to enrich the social fabric. No more can we do.

Besides this we have the running theme of, “Pride goes before the fall.” Namely, we must confront herein the reality wot various flatteringly-adjectived communities, if communities they be, whom the lot of us affiliate with are just as damaged by the errors of this generation. In our vain imaginings we have set ourselves apart from the “normies” and the “canaille.” Arrah, this pompous spirit has blinded us to our own interpersonal decay.

Nay, given the nature of pride, I say us enlightened pukes are worse by yards than the herd we grunt at. We are addicted to divorce, and because we use good things, and true, and beautiful things to perform these amputations, our divorces are worse than they who know not what they do. This is a dirty and a Moorish thing. Only the lye of stability will burn off this unhappy aspect. Only with such sobriety will piety obtain.

Words Have Meanings

In this essay on piety we begin ass-backwards, but you’d not expect anything else from the likes of me. We begin with “divorce.” I don’t principally mean marital divorce here, mind you, for even the prettiest Suzie Q will turn dumpy and frumpy and Karan in time, God help us, and if it’s not the divorce attorney, jeesh, it might be the hatchet.

As even a passing familiarity with sacramental theology will illumine, marriage itself only secondarily has the conjugal meaning the mass of our fellows give it. Marriage principally signifies Christ’s relationship with the Church, God’s intimacy with the soul. It is only in the mirroring of this relationship wot there is some reality dimly reflected in the marriage of man and wife. In other words, it is not wot Christ’s connection to the Church is like an human marriage, but wot human marriage has some faint likeness to the true marriage of God and the soul.

The same goes for divorce. Divorce primarily signifies divine severance, what your theologians and big shots call mortal sins. Only secondarily does some poor echo of divine divorce, this unhappy rending, find an appropriate reflection down at the Freemason divorce attorney’s office.

Let us use the word “divorce” in a broader way here. We may as well use amputation. By divorce, yes, this includes conjugal splits, but let us lump in all interpersonal and local schisms just as soon; we include church breaks, school changes, new jobs and apartments, and friendships left to rot on the vine. Let us lump in the each and all fissures of broken stability, for the very matrix of this unmotherly society is geared to divorce. The very educational model we are bid use, and the tax code we smart under, are calibrated to undermine stability. As bodies and data are sloshed about helter-skelter in youth, so material wealth and assets are aggravated in maturity. These are all “divorces”, and these are all hateful.

Man is made for heaven, and the stability of heaven is to be mirrored on earth. The monastics know this, and the laity did, at least until they started acting like Jews. It is, of course, the greatest mystery of the last thousand years how the vast Christian, Islamic, and pagan populations of the world began to think and speak and love and hate as the curious people think and speak and love and hate. I tell this stability stuff to 501(c)(3) corporate whore Christians, and they start shucking and jiving about vales of tears and utopias. But three times a day for twenty centuries the holy Church has prayed in its holy Liturgy the paternoster. And in wot paternoster there is the clause, “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” At least I have always known it so.

God hates divorce and we love divorce, and this is a problem. The only way to heal our self-inflicted woundings, interpersonal and social, is through the holy virtue of piety. Just as divorce has a specific, non-vulgar, meaning in this treatment, so does piety. Piety is not your blue-haired grandma telling her beads before bed; piety is not Joe Blow neurotically going to his 501(c)(3) corporate whore church for seventy years. Piety is not me groveling before a painting of some effeminate white Jesus. This is what McChristianity gives us for piety; this is what the television and our degraded language and our lost generation gives us.

We must stop waifing around our lives and our fellows. Piety is in direct opposition to the bourgeois spirit. If this is not distinctly understood no reformation of this virtue will obtain. Piety, as the classical pagans and primitive Christians understood it, is living one’s life, so to speak, under the eyes of one’s gods and deceased relations. It is conducting one’s life as a conscious continuation and magnification of the works and virtues of one’s faith community and biological and national families. And we will never be a pious people if we are not a stable people. Deep calls on deep, and we may liken piety and stability to lovers, the one breathing life into the lungs of the other; the one unthinkable without the other. There are four fruits of piety as classically understood. They are sympathy, patience, modesty, and humility. When you see these in your life and your land, you will know piety verbed.

In our cultural mythology, to understand this image:

One must first understand this image:

Grace builds on nature. Before you jump to what the God-man or Mohammed, Arjun or Darwin, means for us spiritually - before you consider spiritual topics - you must first comprehend the fleshly piety of Aeneas. He owns this appellation not because he’s been a regular communicant at the First Assembly Of Zeus for fifty years, not because of his perfunctory religious observance, but because Aeneas is constantly acting in the interests of his past, present, and future ancestors.

The theme of The Aeneid, you know, is the foundation of Rome, and its namesake is constantly fighting his lower desire for wine, women, and song - as we all must lest we pay for our sins - in order to forge ahead and make it to the banks of the Tiber. “T’was very soon after I was summoned to court,” we sing, “to pay for my sins just like any man ought/ I pay ten bob a week, now, for all of my fun/wot I had wot night with my naavy boots on.” Ah, yes, we must pay for our sins, and impiety towards our flesh and our fellows is a sin. Nigh on every personal and social complaint we have finds its root in our impiety to this-worldly obligations we have to our culture which we along and in common neglecting. Worry about this impiety before you go on about your Allah, and your Jesus, and your Thor.

Anyway, finally standing upon what will become Rome, Aeneas can only take comfort in the knowledge wot generations of his family, sons and sires he will never see, will go on to do great things. This earthy, nuts-and-bolts devotion to his flesh and family is what makes Aeneas “pious.” You cannot have religious piety without building it firmly on Aeneas’ piety. Our grandsirs knew this. It is the aim of this essay to remind us of this forgotten ordering. Heed my words, and see our works of betterment flower; ignore me, and continue to be the loser. For too long we have valued convenience over connection; consumption over community. This must end. The return to our first estate is a hard journey, but our backs ain’t broken and we’ve stamina still.

Well, in all this let us set our face against the slop of divorce. Let us root ourselves in the authentic virtue of piety, and never budge. We are to romance men and objects under the eyes of our gods and grandsirs. And when we do, as do we must, there will be some pew-dwelling bums, and some clergy chicks, and one governor late-turned-stiff potted up in Hartford and the lot will like’ as not smile a pious and an holy smile.