On Whether the Artist Gets a Pass on Judgement Day

regarding forthcoming excerpts from my novel Fear Is A Hollow Verb

On Whether Artists Get a Pass on Judgement Day

Brothers and sisters—

I am having a spiritual crisis. I am laboring under a possible excess of scruples over things that I have written and whether they are blasphemous. It sounds baffling in this day and age to worry about this, but the worry is there. I have recently ripped myself away from Twitter where I have been narcotized by a need to fit in with other writers, with the zeitgeist, by reading and writing edgy things. To write something blasphemous to “be like the cool kids” is perhaps the act of a weak person, and current events, and current impulses in me, raise an acute discomfort and fear of judgement.

Excerpts of my spy novel tentatively entitled Fear is a Hollow Verb will be published soon. One is already out, an excerpt called “Codename Tarragon,” from Fugitives & Futurists. It is the tale of two Russian spies, Klorofil and Moglyubin, who have been sent to assassinate Anthony Bourdain, who the novel posits is actually a jet-setting spy. I worried, perhaps in a premonition of my anxiety over being judged by God for my writing, that somebody would sue me for libel or for besmirching the memory of a real living person. The theme seems to be feeling very unsettled over the propriety of what you have written and how it will be judged, as you will see.

Does the artist get a pass on Judgment Day? There is a Hadith in Islam (a saying of Muhammad) saying that on Judgement Day anybody who makes a picture will be challenged to put a soul into that picture and he will not be able to do it. By making a representation the artist is stealing creation from God and is not being equal to God in creation. To say nothing of blasphemy.

Two extracts from the novel have been placed here in this substack, entitled “The Qadi Abol Khaseb” and “Green Screen Zawahiri.” The spy novel is partially about Islamic terrorists belonging to a group called Ribāt al-Tanzīh, or “Fortified Monastery of Deanthropomorphism.” Being that they’re terrorists and this is supposed to be a comic novel, it seems like it’s kosher to make fun of them. But there is more. I wanted the novel, which is incomplete right now, to be a genre affair on the surface (spy novel), then one layer below that, a comedy (spy spoof), then one layer below that, a serious disquisition on religion.

“Green Screen Zawahiri” is scheduled to be published by Misery Tourism at some point. That’s fine. I probably won’t know about it since I’m off twitter. Zawahiri was the second in command of al-Qaeda after Bin Laden, and he has appeared as a talking head in propaganda videos sitting in front of digital backgrounds which were done with “green screen” ChromaKey technology. Also, green is the color of Islam.

And I have learned that the publication Apocalypse Confidential—the title of which given recent events strikes fear into my heart—is publishing two more excerpts of the novel. And I don’t know how to feel about it. The artist in me is at war with the frightened religious person. I’m excited at being published and yet terrified of damnation.

One excerpt called “Weekend Visit” is about the Russian spy Klorofil (remember him?) taking his Venezuelan girlfriend Carmen, who is an assassin, home to meet Klorofil’s father Trofim who lives in a house in Lithuania. Trofim is an ex-KGB man whose duties in the Cold War were stealing documents that could then be used as forgeries against the West. Trofim’s hobbies are bizarre; he builds model trains of the Nazi train system used to take Jews and others to death camps in Poland. He shows Carmen the Nazi model trains, which have been set up to mimic the Sobibor uprising, where Jews in the death camp rose up against the SS and escaped, and has a fantasy about spanking her to the point of orgasm over the table where his trains are. It may or may not have happened, it’s like Schrödinger’s cat. But anyway I feel like that might have been offensive to the memory of death camp victims although the scene was meant to be a demonstration of the two characters’ evil, a plumbing of the depths.

The other excerpt which is called “Isnad” is about a member of Ribāt al-Tanzīh who is a courier secretly ferrying messages from the larger organization of jihad groups to RT. This courier’s nom de guerre is Khuftullah which is Arabic for “I feared God.” The excerpt in question discusses Khuftullah’s love for movies and his marriage, while bringing up Khuftullah’s bi-curious feelings for another courier who he meets in Tunis named LaFleur. The joke is that these jihadis who are conservative Muslims might actually be gay. And “Isnad” is a reference to the term in Islam which is the chain of narrators that goes back into history indicating who transmitted the sayings of the prophet Muhammad. This is supposed to be another cheeky joke referring to the homosexuality between the two men, the chain of transmission.

Am I going to Hell for this blasphemous jesting? Could I be offending Muslims, some of whom as we know don’t look favorably on people making jokes about their religion?

I am trying to perhaps indirectly invoke Thomas Pynchon who wrote about serious world affairs and history in a joking, wildly allusive and irreverent manner. But I don’t know if I, staring down the barrel of fears of nuclear war, have the balls to make these kinds of jokes mocking Islam and being irreverent about the Holocaust and Anthony Bourdain right now. I might be too weak for this strong material in the teeth of this spiritual crisis brought on by Vladimir Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling.

Then I think of people like David Bowie saying that, as an artist, you should approach the thing that makes you scared like you would approach the depths of the ocean, and be willing to go deeper until your feet don’t touch the bottom anymore, and that’s where you need to be as an artist. Afraid.

(By the way the title of the novel Fear is a Hollow Verb is a reference to how, in Arabic, “fear” is the word “khawf” which in the trilateral root system of Arabic, is “kh-w-f” with a “w” in the middle of it, an Arabic vowel—therefore being hollow.) Fear also being a component of the character Khuftullah’s name. As well as an overriding emotion in my life as a writer and visual artist. Fear of God. Maybe I should just write about sunshine and roses. If someone would just give me time, I could write the whole novel and demonstrate the seriousness behind the laughter. I know many people don’t believe in God, perhaps you don’t. That is your business. But I do, and I am praying for time to work on my writing so I can show people what I think of the whole thing and maybe, I don’t know, give honor to God by triangulating jokes and disturbing remarks about religion and put it into a whole novelistic thesis, which it is not right now, not yet. Do you think God, if He exists, knows the wholeness of the project in the heart of the artist, the intentions behind the art, and the artist might be given a pass?