1: — THINGS NEVER ATTEMPTED . . .

THE ONLY DECORATION in my room is a print of Pieter Brueghel’s Tower of Babel (1563) scotch-taped to the wall.

Every morning, I stare at the melted collapsing decadent cake of Brueghel’s tower : worker-ants crawling over it in impeccable toil : — King Nimrod in the bottom left corner, cronies bowing down, imperially executing his goddefying VISION. . . The Babel myth : an almanac on which to base my own personal agriculture. . .

Here’s Juan Benet’s description of Bruegel’s painting in The Construction of the Tower of Babel (1990) :

“It is not the Tower of Babel that Brueghel painted, but rather the construction of the tower of Babel at a very late stage—quite close, clearly, to the abandonment of the enterprise—in order to realize his aim of transmitting, through the canvas, a vision of agony, of the final moment of a creature doomed to corporeal incompletion and which, prostrate, abandoned, and left a ruin with the passage of the years, will be drained of its double coloration to take on the ashen tone of archeological remains.”

The Tower, — man’s first MONUMENT, — : abandoned Leviathan : — whose devastating wounds no amount of minute attention will suture.

What is Brueghel trying to tell us about AMBITION?

DO U KNOW the story of the Tower of Babel?

It emerges, a sudden-weed in Genesis : a shout from an impossibly ancient culture ; here’s Robert Alter’s translation,

“Now all the earth was of one language and one set-of-words. . .

And they said, ‘Come-now! Let us build ourselves a city and a tower, its top in the heavens, and let us make ourselves a name, lest we be scattered over the face of all the earth!’

But YHWH came down to look over the city and the tower the humans were building. YHWH said, ‘Here (they are), one people with one language for them all, and this is merely the first of their doings— now there will be no barrier for them in all they scheme to do! Come-now! Let us go down and baffle their language, so no man will understand the language of his neighbor.’

Therefore its name was called Babble for there YHWH baffled the language of all the earth-folk, and from there, YHWH scattered them over the face of all the earth.”

YHWH isn’t enraged because foolish humans think their Tower can reach heaven; but b/c if they figure out how to build the Tower, they won’t need YHWH to SAVE them : their civilization will be complete! They will have SAVED themselves!

Instead : they are scattered : their Name annihilated ; their fretted Tower fixed in the annals of history as warning.

A doomed civilization senselessly, assiduously laboring,

“. . . to pass down to the generations a definitive testimony to failure, a consummate embodiment of disgraced will, indisposed to sell their dream short, to make peace with compromise, to reconcile the utopian tower to the diminished scale of a mundane building like so many scattered throughout societies’ histories.”

If King Nimrod can’t have his perfectly envisioned Tower, he’ll create an inhospitable monument to FAILURE . . .

2: — BUT SOLEMN AND SUBLIME . . .

THE FIRST PERSON to write a commentary on the Gospels : Basilides of Alexandria (117-161AD) : 24 volumes completely lost to time,

(we have almost NOTHING left of all the Literature in history. . . ) :

— his thinking was preserved in fragments & refutations; — his son Irenaeus wrote a book called Against Heresies :

where we have Basilides’s flabbergasting conspiracy theory abt the crucifixion :

“It wasn’t Jesus who was crucified, but Simon of Cyrene. The Roman soldiers forced Simon to carry Jesus’s cross. The next sentence in the Gospel of Mark says that they crucified him.

But who is “him”? Simon or Jesus? The subject isn’t clear. Basilides says Jesus transformed his body to appear like Simon, and Simon’s body to appear like Jesus.

As the soldiers crucified Simon, Jesus laughed at their foolishness.”

JESUS SWAPPED HIMSELF OUT ON THE CROSS & LAUGHED ABT IT!?

But, if U believe this : what’s the point? Why does Basilides invent the Switcheroo?

. . . the turning point is the Agony in the Garden, the day before Jesus is gonna be arrested, endure the whole torturous drama, he can’t handle it, he begs God : please let this cup pass from me; His sweat became like drops of blood, falling upon the ground, —

I know I couldn’t handle being crucified for the sake of humanity. . . what did Jesus realize about himself? He was a COG in a plan he wanted no part of : restoration of YHWH’s EMPIRE. But what can he do now?

He plots his own version of a divine project; — sick of relegating his salvation to the whims of some VOICE : he concocts his own Babbelian plan : the Switcheroo.

But what if there was only one person fooled by the Switcheroo : YHWH : ; what if the whole people came together, realized they wanted to kowtow NO LONGER in cosmic submission, decided to pull the wool over YHWH’s eyes! — The famous drama in Jerusalem was an act to FOOL the Almighty. . .

Jesus laughs at his supreme prank, while Simon, dressed like him, dies on the cross; — his laughter is contagious; an illumination so ardent it spreads like fire,

“They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.”

Jesus’s laughter is the HOLY SPIRIT : the only truth of the Trinity. . .

But what about the innocent man crucified in his place?

3: — BE LOWLY WISE . . .

THE MOST ICONIC part of Church Street Boxing Gym is the WALL: a collaborative collage plastered floor-to-ceiling in our stinking cavernous basement: — fight posters, polaroids, hot babes in magazines woven in a tattered cacophony.

There’s this one dude in all the old pictures with Church Street fighters, holding his fists up, — big smile on his face; I used to think it was the former owner who I heard was a scumbag, — but this dude didn’t look like a scumbag.

Something caught my eye yesterday; written in black sharpie, — an arrow pointing to a picture of him:

THIS WALL IS RAFFY CORREA’S MASTERPIECE

Never once did it occur to me someone was responsible for the WALL. I looked him up : found his obituary; he died in Alabama in August 2025 :

Correa, who boxed in the 1966 and 1967 New York Golden Gloves, accumulated a pro record of 15-11-3 (8 KOs) between 1967 and 1974. But it was what he did afterwards that had an even bigger impact: working as a trainer alongside his former coach Jimmy Glenn at the famed Times Square Gym from the late 1970s until the gym closed in the early ‘90s. Among the champions who prepared for fights there were Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini, Wilfredo Gomez and Emile Griffith.

I asked Action Jackson, — our resident OG, — if he knew Raffy ; he said,

“Raffy, course I knew him! I knew him 40 years! I met him at the Times Square Boxing Gym. He wasn’t a good fighter, he wasn’t a good trainer, BUT, he was a great Second! And he made this wall. This wall is his masterpiece!”

Raffy was a great Second : U don’t hear that a lot; — a Second is the guy in the corner behind the trainer; tending to the fighters’ cuts, holding the spit bucket; — invaluable, invisible, bloody work. . .

U scheme out these grand projects, foolhardy, harrassable by the passing of hours & days; — not chasing hearth-fire ambition but self-immolation; — at the end nothing is done, everything is in a state least impervious to the usury of time. . .

In Brueghel’s painting, Babel’s original architect has been dead for generations, but the workers are still hammering away at the Tower’s facade, showing up every day : maybe the wisdom is in accepting the failure of the enterprise and working anyway.

Raffy’s WALL is an intentionally incompletable project ; inherent in a project which will outlast U and keep accumulating is a renunciation of GLORY for something maybe more valuable : collaboration, continuance. . .

Simon of Cyrene got the call one day to swap places with Jesus : — he knew he would never sit at the right hand of the Father; — the only thing promised him was a bloody ignominious death and a forgotten name. . . but he said YES.

What if Simon was laughing, too?

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