Bible CAMP: MAYHEM Requiem

[bxr 1,794]

On 5/23/2026 at 9:32 AM, Apec said:

I need to answer here too... I have always found BJ+AF to be such an incredibly fascinating song (a bonus track even!) because it's supposedly about her background and coming-of-age yet centers on not only worldly but spiritual change the whole way through, the line that embodies the entire song for me has always been the one you quoted, “concrete poetry to feed my mind, old symbolism was left behind", embedded in a song in which she indeed centers a notion many Westerners still find too radical: That Jesus, geographically, would never be white, but darker in skin tone merely JUST CANNOT BE according to so many because of dogma. He needs to look like "us" to be acceptable. 

This hints at much deeper developments for her younger self: that the symbolic nature of this concept meant that all her received religious notions were on shaky foundations and while she yearned for truth and freedom, her mind needed community and liturgy, but in thinking for herself she rejected dogma and the discovery of such free ecstasy AND secular freedom (as it were) must've meant a lot to a young person trying to rhyme seeming contradictions (belief, ecstasy and liturgy making you feel more connected to humanity as well as divinity while organized religion has and still spreads misogyny, homophobia and further "others", marginalizes/scapegoats and has incredibly painful skeletons in its closet that came out even more as she grew up)... Seeing that she could integrate both profane openness of thought/sheer kindness and strenghten religious texts and ecstasy about loving, grace and humanity's inability to "throw the first stone" must've been the second layer to this song and why she chose "Black Jesus" to represent a song about her growing up and thus also about expanding her mind.

The incredible feat to turn said tools of oppression in either ways of self-expression and identity, using tools of subjugation and either defang them or use them to show survival or even dominance in a MV (I talked more at length about my views in a previous post) was masterful. But that rosary was indeed the key to understanding nearly all that came next: I've always seen it as HER portal, as it were, to her ever-evolving thinking. You put it beautifully, that the deconstruction and digesting of said rosary signals her already blossoming but finally integrated views: "loving thy neighbor" isn't an exclusionary idea ever and is even inextricably bound to "loving thyself". As you put so eloquently: "This type of “vanity,” which would previously have been decried as heretical by the patriarchal church becomes sacred self-manifestation of the divine through self-expression and compassion (“letting your own light shine…[gives] others permission to do the same”). Non-dualism shows up more and more in her work, a fascinating tightrope.

A trove of intrigue throughout the abovementioned, but/and particularly the revisitation of Black Jesus † Amen Fashion … the story within the song always feels like a sphinx hidden in plain sight … you explore the record‘s eponymous duality quite beautifully … somewhere at the locus of the existing dichotomy (Black Jesus, Amen Fashion) and evolving into this blossoming integration with the rosary and a certain portal into divine feminine / sacred matriarch embodied consciousness … I was just thinking of The Black Madonna (Monsterrat, Czestochowa, etc.), and am really curious wondering where / how / if you see any narrative association … ?

Hope you‘re resting well!

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Also 

[T]he line that embodies the entire song for me has always been the one you quoted, “concrete poetry to feed my mind, old symbolism was left behind", embedded in a song in which she indeed centers a notion many Westerners still find too radical: That Jesus, geographically, would never be white, but darker in skin tone merely JUST CANNOT BE according to so many because of dogma. He needs to look like "us" to be acceptable. 

 

[bxr 1,794]

On 5/24/2026 at 2:34 PM, Ladle Ghoulash said:

This sense of the “iconoclassic” reminds me of one of the ways in which Warhol’s (admittedly nihilistic) sense of postmodernity actually holds space for the sacred: Warhol discusses how, as a child, when his parents took him to church, he experienced profound aesthetic arrest at the icons of the saints, the Virgin Mary, and Christ in the statues and stained glass windows. These experiences he describes as formative to his own conception of the deification of pop cultural figures as these impressionistic archetypes and icons from which he derived a similar sense of aesthetic arrest. I do also think, in his own trickster way, Warhol’s nihilism was perhaps his own version of leveling the Cathedral by decentralizing conventional objects of worship, opening the door for the ruins to be inspected and interrogated to see what they were really made of.

The difference, and the way in which I think Gaga is truer to that ethos than Warhol ever was, is that Gaga’s sense of iconic and iconoclastic was always intertwined with a sense of the ecstatic: icons are not figures that live behind the glass at a museum, in the tabernacle of the church, or behind the sheen of a TV screen, icons (religious, pop cultural, political) become a discursive psychic force that animates our behavior, help us to interrogate and actualize ourselves, and, by extension, help us arrive at beliefs and principles around which we organize our understanding of the world and our role in it.

Taking it further, the way that Gaga revolutionized that process was by asserting that icons are not idle constructs emerging from the ether, but are actively forged (or born, should I say) through cultural, historical, and political dialectics. By becoming an icon openly engaged in conversation surrounding the nature of icons, iconoclasm, and the social/cultural/historical/political forces that animate them (and us, by extension), she becomes a figure that functions almost like a lens for her audience: a way for them to see their own agency through the nature of her own self-invention and a way for them to understand all of the potential avenues for self-invention through the scope of her omnivorous cultural and intellectual attitudes and also a force that, through it’s own synthesis of its own relationship to its context in culture et al, both becomes aware of itself, the world in which it lives, and its relationship to it, she provides a sublimated experiential blueprint for the individual, through the initially mediated lens of the icon, to become agentic within that same matrix.

The Andy insights, the native cultural context … the “way for them to see their own agency through the nature of her own self-invention and a way for them to understand all of the potential avenues for self-invention through the scope of her omnivorous cultural and intellectual attitudes and also a force that, through it’s own synthesis of its own relationship to its context in culture et al, both becomes aware of itself, the world in which it lives, and its relationship to it, she provides a sublimated experiential blueprint for the individual, through the initially mediated lens of the icon, to become agentic within that same matrix.”  

A brief first blush on the blink, the Pittsburgh / Parochial intersection surfaced with immediate significance … and it underscores this postmodernist triptych (maybe an expansion or adaptation of the Hall / Warhol scale), that finds a certain significance in the native or creative source of zeitgeist pop iconography … Warhol feels industry-adjacent (which, in its own way (The Factory, etc.) seems to naturally reflect Pittsburgh‘s Steel City industrial DNA in production, and the presentation / aesthetic philosophy reads, to your point, tantamount to religious imagery), the icon‘s native creative source is industrial; here, Hall feels culture-adjacent, the discursive significance of the icon is rooted in the people and the cultural identity of the audience participants (which might echo the working class anchor in Caribbean and British mass / pop culture); and Gaga’s native creative source within that zeitgeist pop icon scope feels inherently rooted in the personal—your person (your spirit, your soul, your spark)—is the source of that postmodern pop iconography / zeitgeist icon identity (which, to the point of * gestures broadly at Marry the Night, et. al. * engages with the New York City genome) … so, something felt resonant within the industrial-cultural-personal postmodern icon triptych

Your lucid insights into the admittedly nihilistic approach‘s capacity for the sacred, for some reason, just called to the surface the word: void … the apparent vacuum of a nihilistic world cipher or sense of conventional significance as a fundamental nonentity, reminded me of the philosophical “void” as this mysterious essential source singularity … so, heading toward the admittedly more abstract, but for the sake of why not … Musashi, in particular, on the front …

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What is called the spirit of the void is where there is nothing. It is not included in man's knowledge. Of course the void is nothingness. By knowing things that exist, you can know that which does not exist. That is the void. People in this world look at things mistakenly, and think that what they do not understand must be the void. This is not the true void. It is bewilderment. […] Polish the twofold spirit heart and mind, and sharpen the twofold gaze perception and sight. When your spirit is not in the least clouded, when the clouds of bewilderment clear away, there is the true void. In the void is virtue, and no evil. Wisdom has existence, principle has existence, the Way has existence, spirit is nothingness.

… but then, with the further progression into process revolution, Lao Tzu just felt resonant at the root in that Way … possibly because the icon is also defined in its elementary function as subject of the sacred to direct the audience to the supernal (whereas the idol, for instance, is the end to reverence / devotion / allegiance to the object of itself) … there was a sense of the icon as, to your note, the way (to / through the Way / Tao … ?) … but, fundamentally here, was just this element of nihilism as this essential nothingness, but/and that as the essential source of, everything … ? so, maybe the icon establishing its identity (whether industrial, cultural, personal, etc.) from that void of the unknown, it‘s that mysterious nexus of ineffable creation … the spark from pitch darkness … but/and culturally, that could also reflect the emergence of stellar icons amidst cultural dark ages … dawn from darkness, or something to said effect … 

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4

The Tao is like a well:
used but never used up.
It is like the eternal void:
filled with infinite possibilities.

It is hidden but always present.
I don't know who gave birth to it.
It is older than God.

5
The Tao doesn't take sides;
it gives birth to both good and evil.
The Master doesn't take sides;
she welcomes both saints and sinners.

The Tao is like a bellows:
it is empty yet infinitely capable.
The more you use it, the more it produces;
the more you talk of it, the less you understand.

Hold on to the center.

6
The Tao is called the Great Mother:
empty yet inexhaustible,
it gives birth to infinite worlds.

It is always present within you.
You can use it any way you want.

7
The Tao is infinite, eternal.
Why is it eternal?
It was never born;
thus it can never die.
Why is it infinite?
It has no desires for itself;
thus it is present for all beings.

The Master stays behind;
that is why she is ahead.
She is detached from all things;
that is why she is one with them.
Because she has let go of herself,
she is perfectly fulfilled.

So much to consider: a sequel! 

Edited 1 hour ago by bxr