THE HUMPTY DUMPTY MANIFESTO
MANIFESTOS 1
Humpty Dumpty is the man for our time: he is the man for all time!
HUMPTY DUMPTY SAT ON A WALL
Humpty was strong once, erecting erect erections all over the once-green Earth, sneering cold command like his dumptylganger Ozymandias:
Look on my Works Ye mighty and despair!
He couldn’t be YHWH so he had to be the architect of Babel, ape the original patriarchal project: Creation.
There’s a world to remake because there’s a world that’s been made.
(Humpty… Nimrod… these dunceified names… the male in fail is a nothing but a cautionary tale.)
The wall, the tower, the kingdom, the citadel, the palace, the garden, the great work: reactions to the anxiety of uninsured eternity.
Here’s Humpty once the wall has been built, the world divided between his sun and his shadow, the harvest ensured, women hoarded (the hoary lecher, Humpty the insatiable grotesque), the matter of swordclatter settled, there’s nothing to do but sit on the wall, bask in it all, the rotless glint in your thrall.
Our Fahrter exhales. Like YHWH’s postcreation assplunk: it’s time to rest; perpetuity is won.
But not even the reign of the Flood was forever.
We forget Ecclesiastes,
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. No one remembers the former generations, and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them.
Some become Humpty: glory dumptyfied thru time, age; bloodfilled throbbing monuments turn drooping ruins, afasted from your handmade erections; the trumpets, pomp, fanfare, the people who once laid laurels in your path turn jeery tomatotossers, clamoring for your head on a plate.
You’d have to search the outskirts of the oldest outskirts to find one who remembers the golden king and not our hunchbacked rotten crown.
But some are born Humpty, like our first father. Adam emerged from a swirl of dust on the throne on the wall.
An illegitimate wallplopper, ain’t no blood on his boots, ain’t no hardwon toilsome crown. AdamHumpty is the already-ersatz staff and mitre of the second project after Creation: Control.
But there is no control without respect. The angel has to remind AdamHumpty to keep Eve in check,
For what admirest thou, what transports thee so, an outside? fair no doubt, and worthy well of thy cherishing, thy honouring, and thy love, not thy subjection.
Despite the pulchritude of paradise, AdamHumpty is a nepo-blob, YHWH’s little favorite thrust into britches too big for him.
On Earth as it is in Heaven: ChristHumpty is given the crown to Lucifer’s untriumphant discontent; Eve cannot endure six whole hours of Adam’s rule.
Futile battles, three more walls: Power, Patriarchy, Persistence. Because no battles are ever won. They are not even fought.
If it’s not Eve or Satan, Time will annihilate & collapse. Quentin in The Sound and The Fury is killed by Humpty in the shape of a watch,
It was Grandfather’s and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it.
And then, not even Time will remain.
I wish I could warn Humpty.
Tell him REPENT! your glory is VANITY! but he can’t hear me.
And what must be, must be.
Have you heard of one Humpty Dumpty? Who fell with a roll and a rumble. He was one time the King of Our Castle, now he’s kicked about like a rotten old parsnip. He was fafafather of all schemes for to bother us, but soon we’ll bonfire all his trash, tricks, and trumpery, and not all the king’s men nor his horses, will resurrect his corpus.
HUMPTY DUMPTY HAD A GREAT FALL
Why did Humpty fall? Shelley saw humpself ancient out in the desert,
Half-sunk a shattered visage lies. Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away.
The fall must be the first story.
We know inertia: an object at rest stays at rest until acted upon by an outside force. How do we go from the perfection of stasis to that insalubrious state: story?
Not even six hours in Eden and Eve is restless with her Dumpty, lumpty in repose. We can see her bored, rolling her eyes. She wants to go off alone.
The secret of the Adam & Eve story is that Eve was not tempted, she wanted to fall,
And what is faith, love, virtue unassayed alone, without exterior help sustained? Let us not then suspect our happy state left so imperfect by the maker wise, as not secure to single or combined. Frail is our happiness, if this be so, and Eden were no Eden thus exposed.
So late our happy seat. Eve knows that Humpty’s kingdom is hale and humpty for hum humpself. The first story like Joyce tells us,
of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy.
He pins down the again-and-again-ity: verdant glittering stasis (Christ, Adam, Humpty), the Wall; is upturned by the transgressing revolutionary force (Satan, Eve, Ulysses), the Fall.
The Wall & the Fall is the first and only story; we retale it again and again like idiots, with different chords and hues, learning nothing.
The center of Finnegans Wake is Humpty Dumpty,
The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes.
Humpty is Finnegan here too, he is the protean masculine allfallen.
IN HUMPTY’S FALL WE FALL ALL.
Joyce imagines Adam, East of Eden, up to his neck in the muck of his banishment, still with that worry about his trace: he sends a lackey to scout for his legacy: did he leave a footprint of his tumptytumtoes in Eden?
Was there any remaining evidence of his rule?
This abominable desire, the odious plague that clings the desolate head, —sticking out of the Egyptian desert, —to that once-I-was-here.
HUMPTY IS THE NAME OF THE FALSE MESSIAH.
The vision of perfection is the Wall without End Amen: excluding rabble, revolution, revulsion. Heaven is so boring because there is no room for story.
But is there a true messiah?
Or will we fall & fall & refall?
Is Humpty Dumpty the only truth?
ALL THE KINGS HORSES & ALL THE KINGS MEN
Why do you think this is a story about a dumb clumsy egg?
You are being duped by the wiles & guises of the eternal I-HE. The rhyme is a riddle whose answer is egg. It is a joke about regicide, a joke so dangerous it must be told in obliquities, the eggking is a fragile king, a fragile king is an unsuitable king, an unsuitable king is no king.
Richard III tells us in Shakespeare,
The king's name is a tower of strength.
Humpty Dumpy is canonfire on the ramparts of his legitimacy: bastarderiding his strong name with an onomatopoeia of a bumbling fumbling crumbling fool.
And this little riddle was coined for Richard III after his death, after he was the last English king to die in battle, an ostensibly brave laudable endeavor out fighting in the field with his army, for his people, the most powerful man in the world, sitting on the biggest wall; in a few fracasfull hours there was no king but a slain carved corpse.
The real Richard III who an unbiased traveler passing thru the castle described as,
three fingers taller than myself, much more lean, with delicate arms and legs and also a great heart.
But who five years after his death was remembered as,
a hypocrite and a hunchback who was deservedly buried in a ditch like a dog.
There is no truth but memory. Humpty Dumpty was no KING, he was a deformed monster of heart and face.
All the King’s horses and all the King’s men, there is the unmistakable echo here of Satan tempting Jesus,
Then the devil took Him up into the holy city, set Him on the pinnacle of the temple, and said to Him,
“If You are the Son of God, throw Yourself down. For it is written: ‘He shall give His angels charge over you,’ and, ‘In their hands they shall bear you up, Lest you dash your foot against a stone.’
Legions of God’s angels will come to Jesus’s aid if he needs it.
But in this story, where Jesus is the (supposed) true messiah, he’s too smart to test YHWH, he knows the whole plan in advance.
But we can imagine Jesus the false messiah with the hubris of the rumptumbling Humpty in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass,
Why, if ever I did fall off—which there’s no chance of—but if I did—” Here he pursed his lips and looked so solemn and grand that Alice could hardly help laughing. “If I did fall,” he went on, “The King has promised me—with his very own mouth—to—to—
In this version of the story we can imagine the signage above Jesus’s cross reading INHR,
IESUS NAZARENUS HUMPTIDUS REX
Here lies Jesus of Nazareth, the HumptyDumptyian King.
COULDN’T PUT HUMPTY DUMPTY BACK TOGETHER AGAIN
Can you imagine what it’s like to be sitting atop the highest wall, to have dominion over all, you’re the most powerful, the most vaunted, your name is a fortress, your power inextinguishable, your—
and then suddenly your humptyhillhead is split open spilling out its regal sustenance, if this were ever to happen surely they would pick you up and put you back together again, place you back atop your wall, right?—
your life’s fleeting away from you now and all you can do is remember the sunrise over the horizon of your dear wall, the pinkredvioletgolden pageant for your providence, you’re Adam, senescent on his deathbed hallucinating the smell of the flowers in Eden, the sound of the waters of Eden, the anguished rending, the irrevocable separation—
you’re Christopher Columbus writing letters to the King of Spain begging for a few nickels to rub together while your body breaks from attrition, from the phantom pains of the chains they slung around your neck when they threw you in the brig, and it must be less of a consolation, it must actually be a horror to remember the clouds of parrots that sunshined your way on the first voyage,
Imperious Caesar dead and turned to clay might stop a hole to keep the wind away. Oh that that earth which kept the world in awe might patch a hole to expel the water’s flaw.
because now, —no matter who you were, —you are WORMFOOD.
There is another secret in this riddle, an ancient secret: if the King is an egg and his yolk has been spilled, there is only one thing to do: the people must consume the King.
Theophagy is the oldest sacred ritual after burial and marriage have been established: now that we have a civilization, a Humpty must lead it, and once he dies or is killed by our hands or our hearts, we must become enthused (enthusiasm is a word from the Greek Orphic rites) by him, take what’s left of his divinity and mingle it with our meager atoms.
If the messiah is true, we share in the divinity, freed from his reign, we reign ourselves for our own freedom (this is the animating idea behind the Eucharist), —
but if there is no true messiah, then consuming Humpty is worse than null, it is destructive, malignant, and we will perpetuate the cycle of the first story until the vestiges of our slightest footprints will be swept away from the surface of the earth.
Are we doomed?
HUMPTY! HUMPTY! HUMPTY!
Is it stupid putting all this credence into a silly nursery rhyme?
There’s nothing silly about it.
Our fates are woven into the mythic fabric of all of humanity’s stories.
There's a reason a rhyme subsists, becomes ubiquitous.
The nursery rhyme is a Trojan horse for ideas.
And anyway, I am Humpty and,
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
TAKE HEED. WE ARE NOT DOOMED. BUT YOU MUST DISCOVER WHY.
Humpty Dumpty is the man for our time: he is a man for all time!
🥚👑