The Golden Legend and the Flowers of Sanctity: Fictitious Flash Novels in the Form of Parodies and Grotesques on Promulgation of the Ten Commandments

By Sead Mahmutefendic

In this book, Mahmutefendi has cheered us up with his texts, which were conceived as novels but never completed, as well as with dialogues, tricks, and situations that have ended up as a burr to some prose. Some will recognize in them tinges of Gogol, or perhaps Kharms, Domanovi, or even Nui, as well as works like childrens memory books, anonymous letters, secret diaries, and various fun and boring newspapers. All these bits and pieces constantly intertwine, swarm, and burst, creating one artistic world, the world of Sead Mahmutefendi, a wizard with the terrible power of imagination, a wizard who, from scattered nonsensicalities, creates an astonishing sense of existence.

His most significant works are the novels Kelvins Zero, Fish and One-Eyed Jack, The Centrifugal Citizens, Teasing of Salko Pirija, Demons, Like in a Movie, and Placebo: The Beauty and Horror of Lies, as well as the books of columns and essays, A Memorandum for the Reconquista and The Big and Small Cannibals.

Sead Mahmutefendis books have been translated into English, Russian, French, Italian, Macedonian, Armenian, and Danish.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Jan 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9781543488494

Sead Mahmutefendic

Sead MAHMUTEFENDIC (Sarajevo 1949). He graduated literature and languages from University of Belgrade. His books have been translated into 10 languages. He is the author of more than 30 books. Scientific symposium, organized in honor of his literary, essayistic and publicist work, entitled Modern Heretic Apocryphal Manuscript on Pre-apocalypse, emphasized that he is the writer whose creativity according to style and linguistic references could be contextualize in the South Slav and European literary space. His literary work tries to answer the question why there is so much violence, evil and lies among people in a wide range from empathy via irony to a sarcastic satire. Sead Mahmutefendic was nominated for IMPAC Dublin award in 2016.

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Copyright © 2018 by Sead Mahmutefendić.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2018900136

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-5434-8851-7

      Softcover      978-1-5434-8850-0

      eBook         978-1-5434-8849-4

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Rev. date: 01/17/2018

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Contents

Preface

Voltaire’s Second Section on Laws of Life

1. I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other gods before me!

2. You shall not make for yourself a graven image or any likeness; you shall not bow down to them nor serve them

3. Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy!

4. Honor your father and your mother that your days may be long upon the land!

5. You shall not kill!

6. You shall not commit adultery!

7. Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy!

8. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor!

9. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife nor husband!

10. You shall not covet your neighbor’s goods!

About the Author

Are the fables collected and adorned by Ovid the religion? Do they not resemble our Golden Legend, our Flower of the Saints?

Voltaire

Preface

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OR DECALOGUE

1. I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other gods before me!

2. You shall not make for yourself a graven image or any likeness that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them nor serve them.

3. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.

4. Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy!

5. Honor your father and your mother that your days may be long upon the land!

6. You shall not kill!

7. You shall not commit adultery!

8. You shall not steal!

9. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor!

10. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house! You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s!

Voltaire’s Second Section on Laws of Life

Sheep live very peacefully in society, they are considered very gentle, because we do not see the prodigious quantity of animals they devour. It may even be thought that they eat them innocently and without knowing it, just as we do when we eat Sassenage cheese. The republic of sheep is a faithful image of the golden age.

A chicken-run is obviously the most perfect monarchic state. There is no king comparable to a cock. If he marches proudly in the midst of his people, it is not out of vanity. If the enemy approaches, he does not give orders to his subjects to go and get killed for him by virtue of his certain knowledge and unlimited power; he goes to battle himself, ranges his chickens behind him and fights till death. If he is the victor, he is the one who sings Te Deum. In civil life, there is nothing so gallant, so honest, so disinterested. He has all the virtues. Has he in his royal beak a grain of wheat, a worm, he gives it to the first of his subjects who finds herself in front of him. After all, Solomon in his seraglio is nowhere near the barnyard cock.

If it be true that bees are governed by a queen to whom all her subjects make love, that is a still more perfect government.

Ants are considered to be an excellent democracy. It is above all other states, because everyone is equal there, and each individual works for the happiness of all.

The republic of beavers is even superior to that of the ants, at least if judging by their masonry work.

Monkeys resemble buffoons rather than civilized people; they do not appear to be assembled under fixed and fundamental laws like the preceding species.

We resemble monkeys more than any other animal by our gift of imitation, the frivolity of our thoughts, and by our inconstancy, which has never allowed us to have uniform and durable laws.

Who knows exactly what is allowed, and what is forbidden? Who will safely be able to set boundaries that separate good from evil? What rule will you give me to discern them?

Can we say that Kant’s ethics is simply not worth without asking the question: which ethics understands the division between good and evil that it can become an alternative to Kant. Do we have to shrug our shoulders and say: there is no ethics here? As a philosophical equivalent to a shocked and perplexed prisoner, it represents what author Primo Levi heard from the guard in Auschwitz: Hier gibt es kein warum. Translated, it means: Here there is no why. Is what we look for in the wrong place something that does not exist there; the ability and the possibility to act in accordance with what the philosopher, such as Kant, designates as moral? We begin to see that of Kant’s ethics – as well as most other ethics – virtually nothing is being used. As long as we have the prerequisite (ability) to choose an alternative that exists through insight into the situation by the participants, considering the consequences of actions, such ethics need not be used.

I could easily name this Preface using the philosophical diagnosis in Latin: Felices culpae in summa theologiæ.

As for matters of pure literature, one will easily recognize the sources I have drawn from. I wanted to combine the useful with the pleasant, and in compiling this work I have no merit or partaking other than my choice of stories. People of any country will find something to learn while having fun. It will be a collision and confrontation of the apocryphal (vegetative) with the canonical. This book does not demand continuous reading; but at whatever place one opens it, one will find matter for reflection. The most useful books are the ones where half of them are composed by the readers; they expand the thoughts of which the seeds have been given to them; they correct what to them seems incomplete, and they fortify by their reflections what seems to them weak.

Only enlightened persons can read this book; the ordinary man cannot grasp such knowledge, philosophy will never be his lot. Those who say that there are truths which must be hidden from the people, need not be alarmed; the people do not read; they work six days of the week, and on the seventh go to the pub or scream as maniacs at the playing field because of the ball in the net. In short, philosophical works have been created for philosophers, and every honest man must try to be a philosopher, without pluming himself on being one. One should not be less sensitive to their goodness and respectable zeal because of that.

His book could be burned as the work of a man who wanted to ridicule the Holy Bible, but I can argue that this possible misunderstanding lies in the discrepancy between his subtlety and the banality of the human genome, which opposes his subtle stylization.

The story of the fall of the angels is not to be found in the books of Moses at all. The first testimony to be given is that of the prophet Isaiah, who, approaching the king of Babylon, exclaims:

What has become of that exacter of tributes? The firs and the cedars rejoice in his fall; how have you fallen from heaven, o Helel, the morning star? This word Helel was translated with the Latin word Lucifer; and then, in an allegorical sense, the name of Lucifer was given to the leader of the angels who made war in heaven; and finally, this name, signifying Phosphorus and Aurora, has become the name of the devil.

The Christian religion is founded on the fall of the angels. Those who rebelled were precipitated from the spheres which they inhabited into hell in the center of the earth, and became devils. A devil, in the form of a serpent, tempted Eve, and damned the human race. Jesus came to redeem the human race, and to triumph over the devil, who tempts us still. Nevertheless, this fundamental tradition is to be found only in the apocryphal Book of Enoch, where it is quite different from that of the received tradition.

All that God has not expressly told us is the work of men, and the error is theirs. People have been commanded to love one another, but with their hatred they begin to abandon obedience.

The question is, was Jesus made or begotten. His nature is important if we are just and reasonable. Vain is the science of his words with a lesson which should guide human lives. It then only leaves faith to be a mass of sophistry, on one side, while on the other we have animosity, the spirit of cabal, thirst for domination, the urge of persecution, blind and sanguinary fanaticism, the barbarous credulity, which bring only horrors into human lives.

The truth that cannot bring any evil, and can do a lot of good.

The thought, indeed, being more sublime than it is true. From all these facts, I move to a moral question. Through the words of convict Vautrin in Father Goriot, Balzac claims that a man’s actions are predetermined by circumstances rather than by principles. The Sceptics doubted everything; the Academics postponed their opinions on everything; the Epicureans believed that the Divinity cannot interfere in human affairs. They were convinced that the soul is not a substance, but a faculty which is born and perishes with the body. They had no restraint but that of morality and honor. Since death is nothing, since death is no punishment, it is but the termination of our ills; it is a moment rather fortunate than fatal. It is our birth that is fatal, or our birth in the form of human is punishment for some past lives. If God created from humans the cruelest animal kingdom, ideologies and religions have tried to make attractive zoo gardens and camps from them. It had to be so fatal to fanaticism, and almost always fatal to virtue.

In former times, anyone who possessed a secret in one of the arts, ran the risk of being taken for a sorcerer. The fanatics accused anyone who departed from the language of the schools, and fools and hypocrites condemned him as a charlatan and a comedian, that his works were made up of the lowest and most disgusting puns not pleasing to the ordinary people (who do not read anything), and to men of judgment and honor he is insupportable. His arrogance is intolerable, and all fine people detest his malignity.

These same characters cry to him: "Be persuaded that a she-ass spoke; believe that a fish swallowed a man, and threw him up after three days, safe and sound, on the shore; doubt not that the God of the universe ordered one Jewish prophet to buy whores, and to make with them sons of whoredom (Hosea). (These are words put in the mouth of the pure and true God), believe a hundred things either visibly abominable or mathematically impossible: otherwise the God of Mercy will burn you in hell-fire, not only for millions of billions of centuries, but for all eternity, whether you have a body or not."

These inconceivable absurdities revolt weak and dark minds, as well as resolute and wise ones. They say: Our teachers paint God to us as the most insensate and barbarous of all beings; therefore, there is no God; but they should say: Our teachers attribute to God their absurdities and their furies; therefore, God is the contrary of what they proclaim, therefore God is as good and as wise as they say he is mad and wicked. Thus explain the wise men. But, if a fanatic hears them, he denounces them to a magistrate — who is the priest’s right hand; and that hand has them burned over a slow fire, in the belief that he is avenging and imitating the divine majesty he actually offends.

Finally, it is impossible not to recognize in these fables a living image of pure human nature. Through rewritten old stories or a caprice of the imagination. It is with fables as with our modern tales: some convey charming morals, and others the insipid ones.

O poor unknown and ignorant people, who knew no art either useful or pleasant! Dare you even say that you have invented anything? You have not known either how to discover truth or how to lie.

Here’s your splendid chance to make it right!

1. I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other gods before me!

What is the devil S. M.?

(Thirst for domination)

(Centaurian hagiography about S. M.: beauty and dream that still last and shimmer like turquoise horses of light. Palimpsest of the lost manuscript of one writer from the City of R., originally from the City of S.)

I am, let it be known, that little carved