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The Exquisite Corpse - A Journal of Letters and Life
Edited by Andrei Codrescu
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The Corpse Reads Classics

Do Not Bring a Tree into the House
by Dennis DiClaudio

Yes, Hypatia was dragged from her carriage and pulled into the Caesareum. She was stripped naked. She was flayed with sharpened tiles and beaten and killed. Yes. Her body was carved into pieces and then burnt on a pyre in the Cinaron. It was a painful and cruel death, yes, but do not bring a tree into the house.
Trees belong outside, where their roots can grow downward into the earth, where their limbs can reach upward toward the sky, where birds can make their nests in their branches and wearied travelers can rest beneath the shade of their leaves. And though it was a party of Nitrian monks, good Christians, who sharpened their ostrakois against rocks and waited for Hypatia's carriage to pass, we cannot help but view this event with some concern. Is it too much to assume that there was screaming, angry death cries and doleful wails? Is it too much to ask that you not bring a tree into the house?
     You have now tracked mulch across the living room floor twice this week, and there is an ultimate reality beyond our human comprehension, one which must be sought despite our impotence to realize its consequence. And there is a hierarchy of realities beneath our own, one corresponding to every thought the human mind can conceive. Is this so pagan a philosophy that one should be labeled a witch? A Satanic magician?
     I know. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that Hypatia would don her philosopher's robe and walk the streets of Alexandria, interpreting the lessons of Plato and Aristotle for the citizens. And now there is a squirrel scurrying across the top of the bookshelf. We will not be able to get it down without the use of some very long stick, like, perhaps, a broom handle, like, perhaps, Hypatia beguiling Orestes, the prefect of Alexandria, through her magic and turning him against the Nitrians and against the teachings of Christ so that he would no longer take Holy Communion. How she forced him, through demonic possession, to publicly subjugate Hierax for his knowledge of the holy doctrine. How the branches of this tree stretch into the dining room and the study and scrape the newly painted pantries in the kitchen.
     The house is no place for a tree. Look. I've written it down and posted it on the refrigerator where you can see it every morning, so you won't forget. And John, Bishop of Nikiu, you have written the history of this incident in ink with the seal of the church, so it is official in the eyes of God.

 

 

 

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the making and unmaking of person the corpse reads classics letters

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