Daniel Otto Jack Petersen

Everything had been leading to this... (rough draft and unfinished)

2011-09-16T10:06:00.000-07:00

Everything had been leading to this. He didn’t know that, of course. None of us ever know that kind of thing. But everything is leading to something, for each one of us individually and for us all collectively. Reconciliation or Absurdity, Chaos or Harmony, Personal Communion or Impersonal Totality, take your pick and stake out your variety. But motion is. The spatial is consecutive: it starts, it progresses, it terminates (as in ‘terminus’, a goal, a destination, an End to which all is rushing or slouching or shuffling or limping; or hideously scrape-thud-crawling or gloriously leap-thrust-soaring. Or some of both, no doubt. Some of both. Surely. It was certainly some of both for him).

But the corollary of the fact that the spatial is consecutive is of course that the chronological is dimensional: just as space is hurtling through a continuum so time is weighted and extended materially with volume and viscera. The latter was the significant thing for Hadwin Heath. Space. Space and its textures and possibilities, meshed in time… and times. Everything had been leading to his discovery of this (or rather, its terrifying discovery of him). As he stood before the painting for the tenth time in a week. After travelling so far to stand before this particular work. As he pondered its physical texture of paint, the colours brushed and congealed to this emotion, this psychological state. He was discovered.

He involuntarily tried to move his head to glance round the gallery and see if anyone else was looking at the painting or at him, but his head would not move. Or rather, it would move in no direction but impossibly slowly and inexorably toward, into, the painting. He stood thus for hours. No one could have observed him move in ‘real time’ (as we say). But over a period of six hours his head was not in the place it had started. It was moving into the painting.

Those ‘six hours’ were not for him the experience that phrase conjures for us. For him, everything had ‘slowed’ – each thud of his heart was a long, sonorous and deep-growling b-o-o-o-o-o-o-m. Each breath was a completely strange and alien all-sucking inhalation followed by the mighty god-like blowing of the exhalation – a mythic cycle of these roaring and warring winds. And each emotion… each emotion of appreciation and wonder and agitation and queer joy and hinted terror, intermingled and interlocked in wrestling and dancing, became like the paint, flowing but frozen, fixed in flux. Each emotion was thereby for him a topographical piece of terrain, a ‘place’ to ‘go to’ and occupy before exploring onward, to be returned to in the meandering.

This state occupied him so long and so utterly from the moment he had tried to turn his head (which had been his last moment of awareness about his surroundings outside the painting) that only after these many engrossing hours did he once again give thought to trying to move his body and this time only in response to his engagement with the painting. He involuntarily reached for it, to touch it, the impulse always suppressed in the public space where this gesture was forever and fiercely forbidden by social cherubim with flaming swords and radios, closed circuit television, badges, respectability and respect, the (understandable) need to preserve precious physical artefacts.

When he reached for it he found he could. He could move. This movement only, in response solely to the painting and in motion toward its surface—this only was ‘allowed’ for him, though all the world around he and the painting may have disallowed it.

The para-temporal experience he was having did not cease with the movement. No, this singular gesture was an epic part of it. The alien god was majestically, miraculously bearing his arm to the creation not his own. The colonised paint received him regally and ritually with statecraft and pomp and pageantry. Its textures and tones were reaching also for him. Its sweeps and layers were longing and plying toward his touch. Its pigments made supplication to him and resigned themselves to wait patiently for his sign from their watchtowers. Were security guards this moment shouting to him, rushing him, even tearing at him, pulling him back? He was not aware of it. He had no experience of it. Were mortified alarms blaring and angry lights flashing redly? They were meaningless to him for they were unknown to him.

He touched the sacred surface of the painting. Skin contact on oils coated in invisible protective chemical shields. His forefinger, then each of the others and the thumb, a geologically gentle and reverential clawing or pawing of the paint.

And the paint discovered him. The oils rose and lapped his fingers, withdrew, receded, then lapped again, then leaped and covered his whole hand.

His nose was now only a centimetre from the painting’s surface. He did not see the painting envelop and welcome his hand into its oils. His eyes were long-locked in a great age of staring upon the painting at a proximity known only to the master who had made it. He was seeing what he could never have seen before, nor would he ever ‘un-see’ it. In a vast pilgrimage of time-movement he barely perceived, his head too was received.

Into the paint. Into the painting. This is what he began to see on the other side, from within the within.

2011-05-18T16:21:00.000-07:00

New Voice of the Mysterons and Blaster the Rocket Man - available to the world!

<a href="http://laminarexcursion.bandcamp.com/album/lem-volume-20-october-2010">LEM : Volume 20, October 2010 by Laminar Excursion</a>

ARTIST'S STATEMENT (stab, reconnaissance)

2011-05-01T12:26:00.000-07:00

We are the weird and deformed things thought to be spied grubbing among the rubble. We haunt you, we invite you in to our carnival-festival, we menace your monsters, we harass your poltergeists. We eagerly want to shuck the shell from off your real skin and bones, we zestily come at you with sharp but rusty knives to cut that fester-scab off your exo-heart (inner but shown, known through body talk). Ah, the ripping PAIN! It's unavoidable. Receive it now not latterly. So we urge in urgent whispers unheard. Clickety, clickety, scuffle, shuffle, snuffle, slaver, cackle at the corners and edges of your mind, we creep on you from before and behind and under and over and inside-out and outside-in, beneath and upon your skin, knocking to get out of your skull and rap-rap-rapping to get in.

Revenge of the Sacred, 1973!

An entire life('s work) may well be a well-timed joke or wisecrack of theo-comedic Revenge on a world that rejects—an offhanded, sharp little retort with some biting but reconciliatory import. Who can say?

(Monsters of) The Middle Ages

2011-04-02T11:22:00.000-07:00

The Huge Father Beast Thrashed Amuck,

Raised an Enormous Rumbling Ruckus,

Roared and Writhed and Rent Asunder,

Tore and Tunnelled and Trampled Under,

Winged Up to the Rarest Skies,

Clawed Deep Into the Darkest Earth,

Threw About his Dirt-Girt Girth

For All its Wild Worth.

And Lo, his Feral Wee Ones Wondered on,

Strove to Imitate his Massive Machinations

In their Frolicking, their Captured Imaginations

Raptured by his Rollicking.

But Alas, Alack, the Daddy Beast Grew Slack and Slowly

Slowed and Lacked Alacrity.

Yet was He Fairly Hale with Lingering Heft,

But of the Young Thrasher he Had Been

Little was Left.

As his Monstrous Prime Began to Fade Behind

There Welled Up from Deep in His Beast Belly

A Long, Long Groan that Became a Hoarse Howling,

But Only Alone, Down Deep

In His Caverns or High Up

On his Crags, in the Waste Places

Where no one Brags.

Finally, he Rested, for he knew he was

Bested. All that he Boasted was Busted.

And he Turned Unto his Own

Son, Lately Grown so Monstrous and Mighty,

And Spake Thusly: ‘It is Your Turn.

I Hope you Learn from All I Was and

All I’m Not.’ And the Precocious

Son-Beast Leapt Up with a Ferocious

Cry and Showed the World the Vast Measure

Of all his Strength and Ardour.

And the Daddy Beast, Sweetly Pierced,

Heaved his Lately Great Gait without Regret

To Gather How Monsters Grow Hoary

And what Lesser Havocs he might Wreak Yet.

Untitled

2011-04-01T04:55:00.000-07:00

I am, to the blue depths of me, I am

Rationalist? Idealist? Supernaturalist?

Whatever. But not, clearly,

an empiricist.

Yet, contra the bell-toll of an aching soul

I concede to my senses that I am not,

in fact, a poet, but merely

a lyricist.

INDIANA BONES - Digging Up My Midwestern Roots

2011-03-26T10:40:00.000-07:00

I was born in a hospital in Louisville, Kentucky, even though my parents lived across the river in New Albany, Indiana at the time. So it's 'Louisville' on the birth certificate. There was a year or so we lived in Louisville proper when my dad pastored a congregation there. I was in kindergarten I believe. I can still picture the average working class neighbourhood of small-to medium-sized wood-panelled and brick houses (ours was red brick I think). Three or so concrete steps and metal rails composed what we had of a back porch. (I ripped my lips off when I tore my open mouth away from those frozen rails one winter. True story.) In the house we had a ‘den’ that was off the kitchen by a step down, in which I loved to run madly round in circles, arms held out to my sides, lips vibrating in a buzzing noise, whenever my parents would play the ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ record on the couch-sized wood-cased record player.

But the rest of my upbringing was an Indiana one and I’m very much a product of Middle America, the Midwest more specifically, Indiana in particular: I grew up on the East Side of Indianapolis, the capitol city (in Marion County). I’m a product of wide-open flat cornfields and cow pastures punctuating working and middle class neighbourhoods, mostly a dozen or more miles out of downtown but still part of the greater metropolis of ‘Indy’. I’m a product of big blue skies, of cold white winters, warm wet springs, long hot summers, and crisp bittersweet autumns. I’m a product of tight electric air before a fierce downpour of rain and of the never-seen-with-my-own-eyes terrifying rumour of a nearby tornado, the aftermath of which could be seen plainly on the evening news or on a drive through a nearby town. Grassy Creek Elementary School regularly had 'tornado drills', rows of children with their heads between their knees lined along the corridor walls like folded up bugs.

My most formative years were the decade of age seven to seventeen—the 1980s. So I’m Ronald Reagan, John Cougar (Mellancamp), Michael Jackson, Run DMC, Bryan Adams, Max Headroom, Mad Max, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Jim Henson, John Carpenter, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael J. Fox, MTV, The A-Team, Manimal, Automan, PacMan, Space Invaders, Atari, Commodore 64, Donkey Kong, Q-bert, Alf, The Cosby Show, Facts of Life, Eight Is Enough, Different Strokes, Family Ties, Magnum P.I., Knight Rider, Miami Vice, Ocean Pacific, Panama Jack, Bahama shorts, parachute pants, muscle shirts, bandannas, Vans, Air Jordans—whatever came down the pike, I guess.

I was a pastor’s kid, a churchgoing boy in a devout, fairly 'low church' Southern Baptist-cum-Jesus-Movement family. My Dad was a working class post-hippie rock’n’roller who, still rooted in this half of his identity, became also a seminary-trained pastor-evangelist. That pretty much defined us culturally as a family. Stacks of rock'n'roll records and shelves of theology books. Loud music and Bible reading. Rock concerts and churchgoing.

I grew up on all the stories from the Bible (mostly learned in ‘Sunday School’ every Sunday at church). I knew them all forward and back by the time I was ten probably. I mean I really did – there wasn’t really any bit of the Bible I hadn’t heard of, wasn’t familiar with. I thrilled to many parts of it, but regardless, it was just the air I breathed. The God of Moses and David and Jesus and Paul felt very near and real, across the Eastern ages right down to me and my Western adolescence. I also discovered Greek and Norse mythology at the elementary school library and soaked myself especially in the Trojan War with those mighty heroes Ajax and Achilles and Hercules. Oden and Thor and Loki were only dipped into but I had deep respect for Thor as my Norse Hercules. Books on Trolls and Goblins and Ogres were also much appreciated with awe and some fear. ‘Factual’ books about, on the one hand, dinosaurs in the incomprehensibly remote past, and, on the other hand, flying cars, wrist-watch video phones, rocket ships, and colonised moons and planets in the surely oh-so-attainable, not-too-distant future also supplied part of the standard imaginative fare of those years.

And comic books: I preferred (and still do) Marvel over DC any day of the week. Reasonable respect to Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, the Flash and their ilk. But, for me, it was really all about X-Men, Spiderman, Hulk, Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Avengers, Micronauts, Moon Knight, ROM, Ghost Rider, and the rest of that inexhaustibly inventive throng.

And a fairly random assortment of novels and stories. Some childhood standards like Where the Wild Things Are, Where The Red Fern Grows, Old Yeller, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (and even the lesser known Charlie and the Glass Elevator), Ralph S. Mouse, White Fang, Call of the Wild and that sort. But also some standards and some bypaths of fantastic literature: Chronicles of Narnia, Chronicles of Prydain (Lloyd Alexander), The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, Screwtape Letters, Edgar Allan Poe to mention some of the more memorable tomes.

And, of course, the popular movies: Star Wars, Indiana Jones, E.T., Goonies, Uncle Buck, Fletch, The Jerk, Blade Runner, Princess Bride, Back to the Future, Ghost Busters, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Road Warrior, The Thing, Dark Crystal. (Some of these were sneaked.) It seemed like a magical decade for a boy.

Baseball and basketball and football were in the air and on the television. Super Bowl, Rose Bowl, Orange Bowl, World Series, NCAA, NBA, NFL: they’re part of who I am as an American, but I never truly cared for them, even when I sincerely tried to (I was pretending, playing a role, which was fun for a short while). I played soccer for eleven seasons, enjoyed it, played well on defense, and I wrestled for a few years in junior high, enjoyed it too, but dropped out after a few seasons, unwilling to hack the intense and frequent practices. I tried skateboarding latterly but only liked the music, the ‘look’, and the general counterculture associated with it. I was pretty terrible at it. But even without much sports or athletics, I spent many long hours outdoors exploring woods, climbing trees, wading in creeks, chasing and play-fighting with friends at all hours of day and night in all seasons.

I had a sort of ‘puppy-love’ girlfriend or two, danced at a few dances, longed and pined secretly, tried my hand at a love poem or two, held hands whenever I could, and eventually got way over-committed in a few late teen relationships.

Somewhere around sixteen, two life-shaping things happened. One was that I became self-aware of a huge disenchantment with mainstream culture and what it cared about and was struck with the desire to strike out and figure out a way to ‘be different’, which I did as best I could as a Midwestern kid. (I’d been unconsciously seeking this for some years.) After some misspent early teen years courting heavy metal, I now finally and fully discovered punk rock and realised this was the main musical medium for me. I began scheming to sing in a band.

The other was that my latent, childhood, familial faith woke up with a vengeance and I experienced God in a profound way like I never had before. It swept me right off my feet and switched on an insatiable spiritual thirst and hunger that sent me questing after Jesus (because his was the only divine voice that called to me and he was the one who jumped inside my soul when I said ‘ok, Sir’). Reading the Bible, praying, going to church, ‘evangelising’ others became exquisite peaks of experience, not chores at all. Make of it what you will, I whole-heartedly and besottedlyloved Jesus in blissful naivety and blessed simplicity. My time of running from that and furtively returning would come a little later.

Growing up I was generally an incurable underachiever. From first grade onward I ended each year with an overflowing folder of backed-up schoolwork that, if I and my parents promised I would finish, then the school would pass me on to the next grade. I was a lazy daydreamer. Schoolwork was hard work (because it required focus and sustained attention, not necessarily because I couldn’t understand or perform the work) and imagining fantastic tales in my head constantly and easily overtook my mind and pleasurably passed hours on end, at school and at home. I had an inexhaustible wide-screen, full-immersion cinema in my own head and the temptation to look inward and enjoy the epic entertainment there was just too great for my young undisciplined soul, especially when the alternative prospect was schoolwork.

A few teachers did manage to get me writing some small amounts of poetry and fiction in the early years, which they (along with my parents) encouraged me I had a gift for. I loved it. But I was too lazy to do much of the hard work of getting all that wonderful stuff out of my head and onto paper. At some point I discovered this little alternative called ‘song lyrics’. Those came thick and fast and easy. I was a writer from the depths of my soul and I simply had to write and I was profoundly relieved to finally discover that lyric writing was the path of least resistance for me. (Choosing to follow this path, though successful to a certain degree, would also keep me undisciplined for any other form of creative writing for decades to come.) The songs I wrote were total crap for the entirety of my teenage years and I’m completely torn about having lost all my notebooks full of that trash. I’m so glad the world will never have the slightest chance of seeing them. Yet wouldn’t I love the morbid, macabre thrill of looking over them and ruefully relish the resultant cringing and self-loathing?

But I had found what I liked and, more importantly, what I could actually do. It wasn’t until I’d graduated high school that band members finally came along and it wasn’t until I was married a few years later that the opportunity for putting some of those songs out permanently arrived. I liked what I did. Lots of other people did too. (That surprised me, but, without meaning too, I just took the approbation in stride and kept at the craft with pleasure and not a little pain too.) I was never entirely happy with anything at all that I created, but I kept seeing potential in it that I hoped I could ‘get right’ the next time (which always became the next time after that).

Mid-Western Pioneer Dialect: "Them Pea Ridge folks is all hatefuls, an' if they'r a-lookin' fer trouble they'll shore get a lavish of it"

2011-03-16T16:54:00.000-07:00

'In speech, as in blood, the Middle Westerner of the pioneer period was essentially "American" - that is, his language was a blend, with the Southern Appalachian element generally predominating. The speech of the southern highlands was a survival of Anglo-Saxon of the Elizabethan Age, with some "Scotch-Irish", "Pennsylvania Dutch", and Indian influences. Description is difficult... Strong verbs were made weak and weak verbs strong. The mountaineer "blowed", "ketched", "drawed", "knowed", "seed", and was "borned"; but he also "clum", "div", "retch", "drug", "et", "snuck", and "skun". Old forms were common. He "taken" things to town, and he "heered" or "hearn say." "Affeared" for "afraid", and "et" for "ate" were good English ancestry. Cases, moods, auxiliaries, relatives, agreement of subject and verb, as well as tense, were treated with true Elizabethan indifference: "Me and her was a-sparkin," "Hit shore is me," "She seed he and I a-comin' down the road."

'Yourn", "hisn", "hern", "ourn", and "theirn" were commonly used possessives. Adjectives served as adverbs: "I could ketch him easy"; as verbs: "I shore didn't aim t'contrary that ol heifer fr'm Hell Holler," "Hit darknin' out doors," "He'll sly outen the law"; and as nouns: "Them Pea Ridge folks is all hatefuls, an' if they'r a-lookin' fer trouble they'll shore get a lavish of it"; verbs as adjectives: "He warn't thoughted [intelligent] enough"; and as nouns: "Did you all get the invite (or give-out)?" Nouns were used as adjectives: "Them dang fool houn' dogs," and as verbs: "Don't fault th' young-un jes' fer bein' puny," "That 'ar shoat'll meat th' hull fambly a month, easy," "Waitin' so purty and patientable to bride her man."

'Beyond the knowledge of Elizabethan forms, or grammar and idiom, is required an understanding of the spirit of the folk who created this speech. The frontiersman refused to be restricted in style by law of grammar no less than law of Parliament or Congress. Clearness in expression was preferred to grammatical correctness, and brevity to clearness... Pronunciation and emphasis played an important part, but grammatical shift of parts of speech, word compounding, word coining, use of obsolete comparatives and superlatives, together with imaginative and picturesque speech figures, added appreciably to the expressiveness. Double identifying nouns such as "kitchen-room", "shootin'-iron", "rifle-gun", "ham-meat", "ridin'-critter", "man-person", and "cow-brute" were common, as well as such obvious compounds as "carrytale", "lackbrain", "wantwit", "breakvow", and "clutchfist."

'There were compounds, such as "tale-bearing" and "lie-swearing." Adjective compounds came easily: "sweet-meaty," "hind-leggy," "dumb-brutely," "sheepsy," "stuff and non-setty"; and compounded superlatives were effective: "mud-piedest," "dry-uppedest," "shut-pocket'dest," "sought-afterest," "up-and-comin'-dest," "nothin'-doin'dest," and "flea-huntin'dest." Hybrids with borrowed prefixes and suffixes were created: "disremember," "ingrateful," "onsartin'," "unproper," "unthoughtedly," "disturbment," "revilement," "sadful," "argyfy," "teachified," and so on, as well as words with diminutives or redundant suffixes such as: "tittery," "tumbly," "withery," "frecklsy," "quicksy," "slickery," "tickle-sweety," "stillsome," "patientable," and "virginous."

'Vocabularies were rich, flexible, and sometimes strong. Such words as "brash" (hasty, brittle), "bound" (determined), "beatenest" (hard to beat), "bresket" (energy), "bee-gum" (beehive), "clever" (kind, accommodating), "cazan" (cause), "crick" (creek), "dunk" (dip), "dauncy" (half-sick), "enjoy" (entertain), "fitten" (decent), "lavish" (a large quantity), "guess" (think), "heap" (a great deal), "middlin'" (fair, tolerable), "passel" (parcel, of people, etc.), "poke" (bag), "powerful" (exceedingly, extraordinary), "racket" (fight), "ruction" (quarrel), "reckon" (guess, wonder), "red up" (tidy up), "whang" (thong), "swan" (swear - "I swan," etc.), might necessitate a glossary for one unfamiliar with the speech. But "contrarious," "cumfluttered" (confused), "caterwampus," "flopdoodle," "fractious," "mozy," "ornery," "peart," "piddlin'" (trifling or puttering around), "sashay," "triflin'," and "tetchous" (touchy) are practically self-explanatory. More expressive still are descriptive words and phrases such as "fritter-minded," "gone franzy," "plumb moonshined," "buck-eyed," and "hippoed" (applied to mental states), "lickety splittin'," "lickety brindle," "gimlet-eyed," "chisted out" (swelled up), "sow-belly" (pork), "granny woman" (midwife), "woodscolt" (illegitimate child), and "lollygagin'" and "tomcattin'" (applied respectively to slushy and promiscuous sexual behavior).

'This was the foundation speech of the majority of the folk who populated southern Illinois and Indiana, predominated in parts of Ohio, and figured prominently in the settlement of the northern parts of these states as well as in Wisconsin and to a certain extent in Michigan...

'The western man ripped out remorseless oaths, swearing a blue streak with a remarkable breadth of expression. Whereas a Hoosier described himself as "catawampously chawed up," the Yankee was merely a "gone sucker." Inquire about his health, and he tells you he is "so as to be crawlin'!" As one contemporary observed: He talks of "spunkin' up to an all-fired, tarnation, slick gall, clean grit, I tell yeou neow"; and naturally he has a "kinder sneakin' notion arter her." If she were to tell him to "hold his yawp" he would admit that he felt "kinder streaked, by golly!" He describes a man as being "handsome as a picter, but so darnation ugly"; or as "a thunderin' fool, but a clever critter as ever lived" - ugly being Yankee for wicked, and clever for good-natured...

'Naturally current events affected speech. For example, anyone knew in the 1830's that "to swarthout" (after Samuel Swarthout of New York) meant to default and flee. To "go the whole hog" meant to have refreshment or to vote a straight ticket; "to have steam up," ready to go. When political ferment or reform movements got to humming, people were warned "not to mistake the whizzing of the safety valves for the bursting of the boilers." "Have you seen the elephant?" must have originated as a result of the tour of the great pachyderm. The question (and answer) usually had connotations but remotely related to menageries. When a man had "seen the elephant" he had been everywhere, seen everything, perhaps was, in the language of a later period, "fed up"...

'Of folklore, proverbs, and superstitions, the West had no distinctive variety, and made few original contributions. The most-used gems of wisdom were those which had stood the test of time - those used in colonial times, in England, Germany, even in ancient lands. "Buying a pig in a poke," "A chip off the old block," "He cut a real swath," "A hard row to hoe," "He's been through the mill," "He'll never amount to a hill of beans," "He's come to the end of his rope," "Short horse soon curried," "It comes and goes like the old woman's soap," and hundreds of others, saws and sayings as well as proverbs, which comprised a considerable part of ordinary speech, antedate the new West.

'Nor can the habit of the smart answer or "wisecrack" be said to be indigenous to the West, although it certainly was characteristic. To his tall tales, practical jokes, and witty replies the Westerner gave his peculiar twist - and how he loved them. To the greeting "How do you do?" a keen citizen would reply, "About as I please, stranger, how do you do?" If he were asked, "Where does this road go?" he might aptly observe, "Don't go nowheres, mister, stays right there." If asked how his potatoes turned out, he would say, "Didn't turn out at all, had to dig 'em out." And so on. Such pat answers were used over and over on friends as well as strangers, and never seemed to die out as do slang and current expressions. The river boatmen, professional teamsters, later the lumberjacks and other workers with a vocational pride or esprit de corps, had their special collections; the reputations of such heroes as Mike Fink and Paul Bunyan rested as much upon their ready wit as upon prodigious feats of valor and skill. The embarrassing question, the successful baiting of a rival, above all the riposte verbale were often more decisive than a fight, and longer remembered.

'Though the common speech was less used by the educated and those of wider contacts, still there was always a tendency for even these classes to speak with somewhat less grammatical correctness and propriety of diction than they had knowledge of. Correct pronunciation and too much attention to diction was put in the same category as fastidiousness in dress, and was regarded as "stuck up." Lawyers who aspired to office, newspaper editors, even preachers, had to be careful about such matters. To many, however, such precaution was unnecessary. Not too exceptional was the legislator from Columbiana County, Ohio, who spoke of the "hebias kawus law" and referred to "Jefferson's immanuel" address. "Zelious," "magnanimious," "scurlious," "philanthripic," "embazzle," "inoquivocably," "reitriate," and "oughter" were favorites with him. He was reported as using "rise up enmassey" and saying "his garden are cut, his house are kept by the state."

'Lack of acquaintance with books and a knowledge of the classics, history, and philosophy was ordinarily no handicap to the active-minded Westerner. He relied heavily upon personal contacts, conversations, and firsthand knowledge. "Fluency of language, with an ease and power of expression which sometimes swells to the dignity of eloquence, and often displays itself in terms of originality, at once humorous and forcible, constitute the conversational resources of the western man."'

-R. Carlyle Buley (1951), The Old Northwest: Pioneer Period 1815-1840, Indiana University Press, Bloomington

The Behemoth cum Leviathan cum Cherubim cum Seraphim Monsters of Heaven and Earth Meta-flesh Manifesto

2011-03-14T15:27:00.000-07:00

Earth:

Shining wake-mire boils!

White-haired deep heaves!

(Heap it up! Heap it up!)

Mud sucks under-flux, cuts,

cracks creep across earth mantle cover-crust

High Beast beats low, sneezes flame

(and all the lovers say: ‘My heart leaps up!')

Lumbering limbs laughingly lift heavenward,

crush cumbrous, shut up in scales,

flails tails log-like, slashing,

mighty afraid of his crashings

‘Who can open the doors of his face, with his terrible teeth all around?’

What spatial strictures on Creation’s facial features?

Deep sea creatures, deep space structures,

Oh, gargantuan form and frightening frame

Frolic before the Omnipotent!

Heaven:

A hundred eyes burning from a body

Thunderous winging wondrous, ringing

graced, four-faced (Lion! Ox! Eagle! Man!)

molten glowing metal showing

moves of cloven hooves,

awesome rims of wheels full of eyes

under fiery whirlwind skies

engulfed in jagged jumping lightning-flame,

HOME

of the white-hot engine

beneath the great white

THRONE!

Abyss assailing abyss

in this unveiling instance of the Omnipresence!

While a giant hand knocks on the shoddy sky,

a Voice turns my bones turn to water:

‘Child, child, child,

let me in before the night comes.’

Many Dimensions in Unison:

Every tribe, tongue, nation

revels in the revelation Omniscient!

Exponential thousands of experiential

multi-dimensional creatures in the deafening ecstatica

to the Voice of the Mysterion!

Interim:

‘Will you put a hook in his nose,

leash him for your maidens?

Lay your hand on him:

Remember the battle—Never do it again!’

The Teachers, The Preachers

The Four Living Creatures

flanked Him with triple sanctum

(‘HOLY! HOLY! HOLY!’)

in the Omnisophical scheme

of Yahweh Elohim.

logos pistis dunamis theos

And underneath are the everlasting arms

logos pistis dunamis theos...

The Maker Speaks:

Seven eyes!

Seven horns!

The Lamb that was torn

scorns the shame

breaks the seals

reveals the Name!

Fearsome roaring of the Lion of Praise…

It’s the

Voice

the

MYSTERION!

PETERSEN FAMILY MISSIONARY REPORT, MARCH 2011: GLASGOW, SCOTLAND

2011-03-12T12:31:00.000-08:00

We send greetings of grace and peace to you all in Jesus Christ. We give sincere thanks to all of you who pray for us and support us in various ways. We thank God for his provision and care through you.

2010 was a year of major changes: my dad died in late February; my four years with UCCF (Universities & Colleges Christian Fellowship) came to an end in August; and in late September we started a church in our home and I enrolled as a part-time student at the University of Glasgow. Much prayer went into the decision to start a church, and it was especially with confirmation and encouragement from church family and leadership in Indianapolis that we stepped out in faith to do so. In the following report, I outline first what is going on with the church plant, then give a snapshot overview of how the family is doing, and lastly I try to tell some of the personal story of being called to our present course of action.

The Church

Who Comes?

The church (unnamed as of yet) has been going four months and they seem to have flown by. The same group that we started with are still coming: there is one other family besides ours: Travis and Alison with their four- and six-year-olds, Felix and Eirlin. There are also the ‘singles’: Malcolm, Val, Robin, Kirsteen, Helen, and Rachel. Helen’s American boyfriend, Wesley, was also with us until his return to California in January. Most were unchurched people at the time of joining with us. Some are from Christian families and some not. Many had been going to church as teenagers, became disillusioned with it at some point in university or after graduation, and hadn’t been going for several years. A few are still students at university, the rest are ‘young professionals’.

What Does a Sunday Morning ‘Service’ Look Like?

There are a few in the fellowship with some background in leading musical worship, and when they are available to do so, we have a time of praising God through song before the teaching of his word. When there is no music, we have a time of open prayer. We have been studying through Luke’s Gospel and are currently on chapter six, slowly but surely seeing how Luke builds his portrait of Jesus that we might believe in him and follow him as his disciples. The teaching lasts for about an hour, including some time of open discussion since it is a small group (the sermon notes are available by clicking here on this text).

The young children stay in for the time of musical worship. Then our daughter Lydia, my wife Andrea, and Alison each take turns in rotation taking the children to the kitchen and leading them in an age-appropriate Bible time during the adult teaching time. The older children stay with the adults throughout. All the children say they very much enjoy having church in our home and they mix well with the adults, participate readily and freely in group discussions and ask questions with candour and perceptiveness.

What is the Fruit?

We have honestly been a bit surprised at signs of spiritual activity and growth even in this short time. Those coming have felt safe enough in our gatherings to voice their sincere and hard questions about the faith. They have been very open to such answers as we are able to give at this time and the continuing love and welcome they receive from the fellowship. Prayers offered aloud from those still seeking and searching, asking for God's help to believe and obey him are also encouraging signs.

Our small fellowship has also begun to really get to know one another and care for one another beyond Sunday mornings. They have been meeting socially during the week, supporting one another’s creative ventures outside church, and helping one another in various ways. Some of them even took our older children for an outing because they said they desired to get to know them better too. One of the single women hosted a ladies’ weekend in her parents’ house out in the hills of Balfron last month. We take these indications of sincere fellowship as yet more signs of God’s blessing.

Several of the people have also approached us expressing a desire to tithe to the church and we are in the midst of setting up a bank account for them to do so. This modest amount of money will be used to purchase coffee and tea for Sunday mornings and will otherwise be usefully saved toward the need of renting a public space in the city centre when we outgrow our living room. This willingness to give we also discern to be a sign of God’s work in their hearts.

How Will the Church Grow In Size?

As yet we are not ‘advertising’ the church to the city at large but are simply working with this small group that have naturally come together. The word is very slowly creeping out that we are having this meeting in our home and so others have expressed interest in visiting. We have no idea when this might cause us to grow beyond the house as a meeting place (we probably can’t hold more than about 15 people in addition to our family) but we feel led that it is best to let the fellowship grow in tiny trickles like this for now, through natural contacts and relationships, and by word of mouth as God draws people in.

Who Am I Accountable To?

I meet once a month with former colleagues from UCCF, Cully and Clive. They are both also in full time ministry and are married men with children. We spend about four hours together sharing, studying the Bible, and praying. At a more formal level, I am accountable to my pastor in Indianapolis, Dave Kosobucki, and the board of elders at Horizon Christian Fellowship Central, who ordained me as a pastor. I’m pleased to say that God has also provided Andrea with some women’s fellowship outside of the church through a handful of mums from the children’s school, one of whom is a pastor’s wife.

Our Family

The Children

Lydia, aged 15, will be entering Fifth Year of High School, in the autumn. Otto, aged 13, will enter Third Year; Jack-Lewis, aged 12, will enter his First Year of High School; and Hugo, aged 5, will enter Primary Two. Olive Ann is 14 months old. All are in good health. The three oldest children have each publicly professed faith in Christ over the past year or so and we are treating them as young disciples, trying to help them in their growth through Bible reading, prayer, and obedience to Jesus’ Lordship in all of life (creativity, studies, play, relationships, etc.).

Andrea

Andrea still works as a full-time homemaker, caring for Olive Ann and running the household. Her health has not been good since being pregnant with Olive Ann and this has been a point of some stress and trial for us. I help out quite a bit with the house and kids and yet still she works hard from morning until evening managing the household. Added to this, of course, is hosting a church meeting in her home every Sunday. She has been very taxed and exhausted both emotionally and physically and has chronic back pain. Her doctor has started her on medication for an underactive thyroid and this has had mixed results. We are trying to carve out time for her to really rest and also for her creative endeavours, but it is difficult. As I said, she has some friends who give her some spiritual support and even the young women in the church have begun to offer to help if they can at various times. One other helpful development is that Travis and Allison live next door to us and are now beginning to host some of the Sunday mornings in their home, which gives us a welcome break.

Dan

I am able to attend university part-time for free due to our low income. I have been able to maintain good marks so far in my subjects, English Literature and Philosophy, but it is very difficult to meet university deadlines and requirements whilst keeping up preparation for Sunday teaching and also helping out quite a bit with children and home. For now, however, we believe this is the path I should be taking, acquiring learning and skills in these areas, and staying in touch with the world outside church by this means.

This picture of our family life looks busy and rather stressful, which is an accurate depiction. We surmise that it is a combination of being in a very demanding time of a large family that still has some small children in it, as well as the spiritual strain and struggle of birthing a church. We are trying to hold on and be faithful in what we have come to believe is God’s calling for us at this time in our life. We hope and trust he will sustain us, for his glory and our joy.

The Calling

In closing this report I want to share more personally about God’s calling on my life as I understand it at this time. I have tried to give as objective a report on the state of our mission here in Scotland as I can, for my own sake as well as for the information of our supporters.

For a handful of years now I have felt a keen homesickness for the States, particularly Indiana, the region in which I was raised. As a person of a philosophical and artistic bent, I am susceptible to perhaps overly intense and stirring emotions and ruminations. At this time in my life, though we have lived in Scotland nearly 9 years, I find that I feel rootless. We have, of course, adapted and acclimated to Scottish culture, and it is a beautiful culture and land, even though flawed (just like every other nation on this planet, including the one I come from originally).

Even though Scotland is a desirable and blessed place to live in many ways, still I often yearn rather piercingly to be back in the land that reared me, that I know so well in my bones (though in some respects it is no doubt changed beyond recognition to me, not least because I have myself changed whilst away). I sometimes long to be near family and old friends and familiar sights, sounds, places, weather and climate, landscape, peoples, customs and so on. Andrea does not share this feeling so keenly with me. She is more settled in Scotland, though she misses America at times. But over the past few years she has prayed and tried to trust God to lead the family aright through me as the husband and father.

I share all this, which may seem like a slightly abstract inward feeling, because it pertains to what I believe is God’s calling on my life at this time: though much of my heart would like to return to the States, I believe I have heard decisively from God that he does not permit us to return at this time.

In some desperation about two years ago, I literally prayed that God would allow us to return to the States, that he would bring this time of mission in Scotland to a close and permit us to move back. It was a very serious prayer for me to pray and I did not make the request lightly. It was a very momentous thing for me to approach God with this petition. I made my case before him and pleaded the painful longing and uprootedness in my heart. It brought me strangely close to God and made me freshly open to his voice.

In the period I awaited his answer, I happened to be reading through the Gospel of Luke in preparation for taking a group of students through its sequel, the Book of Acts. In the long middle section of the Gospel, chapters 9 through 19, Jesus speaks much of the cost of discipleship and I felt him speaking vividly and directly to my own soul like I have rarely heard the voice of God, in such phrases as:

‘whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it’ (9:24);
‘Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head… Follow me… Leave the dead to bury their own dead. But as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God… No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God’ (9:58-62);
‘If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple… first sit down and count the cost… Otherwise, when he has laid the foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, “This man began to build and was not able to finish”… So therefore, any one who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple’ (14:26-33);
‘Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or wife or brothers and sisters or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, who will not receive many times more in this time, and in the age to come eternal life’ (18:29-30).

I knew without doubt what God was communicating to me. I needed to be freshly willing to give up absolutely everything to follow him and obey his will for my life. My will was answering ‘yes, Lord’ in submission, but it took some time for my emotions and mind to settle into it. One evening I recall vividly, I sought space alone in our full and busy little house to pray very seriously to God about this again. I found Otto and Jack-Lewis’s bedroom to be empty and I knelt at their bottom bunk. With a deep and long sigh I told God aloud that I was saying ‘goodbye’ to America forever if that is what he required of me. I would live and work wherever he willed for however long he willed it. It was maybe the hardest thing I’ve done in my life so far. The next day is when I received the phone call from my sister back in the States that my dad was diagnosed with cancer and had six to nine months to live. My submission and resolve were immediately tested by fire.

During our visit to the States to bury my father six months later, the pastor and his wife and several others at Horizon Central in Indianapolis confirmed in no uncertain terms that I had the gift of being a pastor-teacher and they felt I should stay in Scotland and plant a church there. They were willing to ordain me for this purpose. They also encouraged me to enrol for university part-time so that I could fulfil God’s call on my life to develop the academic and creative passions that also feed into my pastoring and preaching. We received much needed encouragement and cheer from them and returned to Scotland resolved to start the church, the very beginning results of which you have read about above.

I still do not know how long God will call us to this: short term, long term, or lifelong—that’s up to him. We’re trying to hear and obey. I share all this because I want people to know where I’m coming from with this and why I’m doing it. It’s not been easy at all for me to come to this decision and it’s not always easy to stick at it. I still have stabs of yearning for the States and sometimes feel rather bewildered in trying to obey this call to pastoring. I do not feel triumphant—indeed, I feel more conquered than conquering! It is not all joy and glory and success. However, I do feel a quietly surprised sense of God’s hand of blessing on what we’re doing when I see the effect in the lives of the people that attend the church. At this point we are just trying to be faithful to his call and we hope we are open, attentive, and submissive to how he directs us in all of it. Right now, it seems to me that the need for us is here in highly un-churched Scotland rather than in the States. I try to remain very open to how God will guide. If he shuts doors and moves us on, my intention is to obey. We are very open to questions, counsel, and challenges, but we also very much need ENCOURAGEMENT and PRAYER.

Thank you so much for reading this lengthy report. It is from the heart.

Love in Jesus Christ our Lord,

Dan, Andrea, Lydia, Otto, Jack-Lewis, Hugo, & Olive Ann Petersen

Micro-Fiction Weirdness

2011-03-11T11:03:00.001-08:00

The following is the first draft of an creative writing course assignment I wrote last week:

The bedroom was entirely dark but for the green glow of the numbers on the alarm clock. The couple slept back to back, protected from the chill air under the comforter. He half-woke, facing the clock, but he couldn’t see its numbers without his glasses on. Slipping his warm arm out from under the blanket into the sharp coldness at his bedside, he grasped the smooth little grey hand that reached up from the floor. Four small muscular fingers with tiny sucking mouths at their tips clasped him back alarmingly tight. Long, folded legs out of proportion to its little arms vaulted its slight but dense bulk easily and swiftly from the floor into the bed where he received it with his other hand also. Its strange weight pressed into the bedclothes and into his body. His wife slept on while its oblong, narrow face stared into his with lidless black eyes that were so close to his own he could see the unblinking onyx orbs even in this dark. The sucking mouths of its fingers made his flesh crawl from their frenetic probing of his bare arms and chest. In despairing terror, he couldn’t scream and he couldn’t understand it. Why? Why would I invite this into the bed, why? The thought raced through his mind repetitively, a muddled repeat-loop of half-meaning, as the grey thing sat on his chest, its black eyes boring through his own eyes into his mind, intruding indescribably horrific images and feelings of fetid lunacy and bedlam. Revulsion wracked him and with a renewed effort to cry out, he woke up. He shifted away from his wife so that they were back to back and stuck an arm out into the cold air at his bedside, trying to force himself to stay awake until the terror subsided. His mind was no longer the least afraid of that weird little thing he’d lifted into their bed in the dream. But his body and animal sense of fear needed more convincing and more time to subside.

He chuckled inwardly at the absurdity of nightmares. He realised he was in painful need of relieving himself – no doubt the source of the dream’s urgent insistence that he awake. He slipped out from under the bedclothes, subjecting the entirety of his half clad body to the coldness and skirted round the bed toward the door of the bedroom, fumbling and swaying in the darkness and drowsiness, trying not to wake his wife. Quietly shutting the door behind him, he padded hurriedly down the hallway toward the bathroom, smothering the irrational terrors that rushed at him with renewed potency in the dark outside the confines of his bedroom. Little, grey, inhuman fingers did a split-second tap dance from the base of his spine up to his nape, producing an electric shiver and a remote but shrill ring in his ears. This dreadful fancy suppressed, his heart then nearly leapt into his throat as he passed the yawning stairs that rose upward on his left full of malevolent threat rushing upon him from above. He could almost physically feel something hideous crash into him sending prickles of terror all along the flesh on that side of him. Such was his imaginative state after the dream, though it was receding.

He pushed open the door to the bathroom at the end of the hall. To save his eyes, he didn’t bother with the light and hoped his aim was true. Once relieved, he washed his hands and finally felt the last ragged shreds of his fear dissolve. He reopened the bathroom door and reeled backwards with a choked scream from before the dark man who stood there in the doorway facing him. His wife lurched from out the bedroom screaming gutturally and hysterically at the back of the man in the darkness. From where it was held in her arms like a baby, she flung a little grey thing at him, which unfolded itself as it hurtled through the air and wrapped its grotesque appendages round the dark man’s head as it collided into him. Overcoming his horror and loathing the husband darted out of the bathroom, quickly skirted the writhing mass on the hallway floor, and clung to his wife in a tangle as they both ran in the opposite direction toward the front door of their house. They looked back and saw many more of the small-bodied, long-legged grey things ripping and tearing with the many mouths of their hands at the dark man on the hallway floor and stuffing bits of him that came away into the mouths in their heads. Their eyes were red now and swivelled toward the couple with a look that bespoke ancient sagacity, neither malign nor interested. The husband huddled on the porch, hugging his cold, cold, half-clothed body to himself, his arms feeling the prickle of the hairs of his legs. His wife moaned and sobbed next to him. He was so cold. So cold, in fact, that the whole business became intolerable and he, with huge force of effort, wrenched himself awake to see what was the matter. He found that his wife had all the bedclothes on her side of the bed and he lay there nearly naked and totally exposed to the extremely chill air of their bedroom.

His conscious mind was still full of terror at the possibility of horrible, unexplainable things in his own home but he now could reason himself out of the fear while he retrieved his half of the comforter from its exclusive entanglement with his wife’s body. His heart pounded and his hairs stood on end as he tried to nestle down into the bed again. His wife shifted and moaned at his movement and he pressed his body into hers to calm his fear. But he did indeed desperately need to relieve himself and so he braved the cold and dark and then returned from the bathroom without incident, relieved. His fears were still subsiding, but he knew he now had his material for the creative writing assignment this week.

In Praise of My Love's Lash-Wit

2011-02-20T13:22:00.000-08:00

Doctor Dark and Hellboy

Come a hoofin’ it over here,

Over toward me, and me

Lady licks her teeth, ready to cut ‘em

Down to size. Remarks able she is

To give, to size ‘em up, sum ‘em

Up, summon up somethin’ suitably

Sick-savvy acidic, a critic to cringe

Before, so she is. Oh she is so

Visual-visceral vengeful (viz.

Venomous) to friends and enemies

Alike. She likes ‘em all, licks ‘em

All up with her flicked out flame

Tongue talk, bless her, so she does,

My love, me lady, lickin’ teeth a

Waitin’ for ol’ Hellboy and Doc

Dark a hoofin’ it on over, up close

Now, cloven hooves and uncloven—

She loves ‘em both, for lovin’ lives

And downsizing the big guys fits her

Gig-wise. Well, Black and Red both look

Fell as dead, and both shook and

Fell as dead before me lady’s lead-lined lines.

She lines ‘em up , loves ‘em up,

Looks ‘em up and down,

Lashes out a lickin’ so

Scorchin’, oh that tongue-torch of hers!

Poor sirs all scissored and ribboned,

Served up flickering and flaming

By here naming them so—

Oh and would you look!

Look at that Hellboy

Just a chagrined and grinnin’

Red skin redder than

In the beginnin’, and who

Knew the Dark Doctor’s midnight

Black could blanche bright?

I tell you, me lady lays ‘em

Out, slays the stout-hearted

And highly self-regarded in

Unguarded chitchat, she’ll

Hit that mark, sparks fly

And the mighty high go of a sudden shy.

Oh and I too have the marks

To prove it, her love tongue

Lashings lift me laughing abashed,

Awash in her wit’s worth…

It’s worth it. I love her

Hatchet-habit, wouldn’t have it

Any otherwise.

So all you prize-sized

Wise-in-your-own-eyes-guys,

If you see me and me lady

And you’ve half a mind to hoof it over,

Think it over, talk it over

With Hellboy and Doctor Dark—

Ah, but they know the worth of her

Word-whippings on strapping

Saplings such as yerself.

No, Hellboy and Doctor Dark’ll

No tell tales after dark

About how she gobbled ‘em.

They’ll just jerk you straight

With smirking eyes and say:

‘Don’t worry, she’s no prob-l-em.’

'The dreaded Infant's hand': A Christmas Fable

2010-12-31T11:13:00.000-08:00

This story came to me about forty-eight hours before Christmas. I tried to tap it out in stolen snatches during those few busy days and I read out the rough draft to my family on Christmas morning. They gave some good criticism and I've tried to work at some revision when I could over the last few days. It's still a very rough draft, but I wanted to go ahead and share it with everyone while we can still just barely call this the Christmas season, with wishes for a Happy New Year.

Do bear in mind it's not some fine piece of literature but more of a little entertainment and the tongue is not a little in the cheek. As Flannery O'Connor said of her novel Wise Blood, it was written with zest and should, if possible, be read that way. Enjoy!

(Oh, and I suppose I should give a mild warning that it might be rated 12 [PG-13] for, as they say, 'fantasy violence'.)

‘The dreaded Infant’s hand’

A Christmas Fable

Snow flurries again, furring all the trees and fences and rooftops and parked motors, rendering their familiar forms strange, hiding the hard white ice beneath, creating a queer quiet in the tight, pinched air.

In the first limp light of Christmas dawn I can make out that this fresh frost-fall covers the mangled tangle of corpses in my back garden, hugging their shapes precisely. Some are so obvious they’ve become outlandish: a rictified hand thrust upward on its arm-stalk, fingers splayed, tipped inward at the uppermost joint into a frozen clawing. All furred over with snow but still showing its unmistakable outline – but who could guess that this powdery shape is actually exactly what it looks like: a mortified human arm stiffened into the final articulation of its owner’s death throes?

Well, not human.

The uneven spray of blood all across the garden (still showing through this morning’s fresh coat of whiteness), against the wall of the house, dusting the snow-enveloped chute and shed, deep red in some places, pinkish in others, is also plain to sight but strange to apprehension. I suppose it might look like some kind of abstract ephemeral art installation I threw together in an inspired moment during this snowy fortnight.

Well. People just don’t know the price of a happy Christmas.

Somebody’s gotta foot the bill I guess. I certainly never thought I’d be called in to participate in dropping off the payment. Not like this anyway. But I’d been enlisted years ago and knew I was embroiled one way or the other all along.

My hands themselves are still bloodstained, all smeared and dyed, also in the spectrum from deep red to pinkish. I haven’t looked in a mirror yet but I’m sure my face is much the same. (Probably would’ve scared myself silly all over again at the horrific sight of my gruesome reflection!) I’m still wearing the same torn clothes, now covered by my dressing gown, which maintains the merest of shields against the icy cold. But last night I slept like I haven’t slept in I don’t know how long! I suppose the nightmares will come in time. Today, though, I have woken from a slumber dreamless and deep. My mug of coffee this morning tastes richer, earthier, more elemental and potent and preternatural than any coffee has ever tasted to me before.

When it was all over last night, I felt I simply must sleep before I could think through what to do next. I was far too exhausted to ring the police or anyone else for help. This morning, well rested, I just couldn’t begin to tackle how to deal with this until I’d brewed a pot of coffee. Now I was sipping the result and cupping my hand round the hot mug for warmth as I stepped out the back door into the uncanny carnival of blood-spattered, snow-encrusted lumps and shapes.

Until this sight hitting me in the increasing light of the new day, I think I was still in a fog of half-wakefulness in which I had a vague notion that the evening before was a very, very strange and very, very vivid dream. Now it all comes back to me with utter unrealism and realism mixed in equal measure. That old spade that leans on the side of the rusty, tin shed that I’ve been using lately to break ice and shovel snow came in handy I can tell you!

It was the usual Christmas Eve scenario: the kids were finally and fitfully tucked up snug into their beds and my wife and I were up very late (or very early—midnight, give or take). She had just finished wrapping the last of the presents and filling the stockings and I was taking out the overflowing rubbish so we could have a clean, clear start for the voluminous unwrappings of Christmas morning in our large family. Barely out the back door, at the click of its closing, I paused to look across the street that our house backed onto. The night was freezing cold and clear. The steam of my breath floated up in front of my field of vision, creating smoky, multi-coloured halos out of the Christmas lights on the houses on the other side of the street. That was when I saw the very large face of a very dirty and wild-looking homeless man pop up and peer over the wall of our garden.

For a moment I thought the head looked so large due to its mangy mane of filthy hair. I tensed with fright, of course, but I couldn’t really process what I was seeing. For a fraction of a second I had a confused notion of the man (I suppose because he looked homeless) warming his hands at a fire. But it was with a whole different kind of fright that I realised the fire was in his eyes—flaming there without burning up the sockets! I noticed too that his head was strangely, unevenly bobbing there at the top of our garden wall. A moment later two ropey things came slithering over the wall, which weirdly caused his oversized head to rise up further into the air. The snaking coils each revealed a thickening diameter as they came down into the garden and I realised they were supporting his upper body in place of legs. This unfathomable being’s fat but brawny bare-chested torso, topped by his great, filthy, flaming-eyed head now lightly but repulsively dipped and rocked on a writhing pair of serpents-for-legs inside the familiar confines my back garden, not twenty feet from me. It’s a wonder I didn’t faint on the spot!

In that moment of seeing this Thing enter the confines of my little slice of urban domesticity, I had what surely would qualify as a bona fide epiphany, a revelation. And, frankly, heaven’s special message for me wasn’t all that ‘inspirational’. The strange knowledge that came to me all at once was this: each year on the border of Christmas Eve changing temporal hands into Christmas Day, the rival gods of this world, both ancient and modern (sometimes even in bizarre amalgamation), are roused into a renewed and concentrated defiance of the Advent of that holy Infant in the Manger.

But with a shock that made me abruptly suck in a draught of the icy air in a short, sharp gasp, it also came to me in that moment that the newborn King inhabits his friends through which he inhibits his foes. There and then I inexplicably knew this horror towering over me was the god called Typhon and that, incredibly, I was meant to close in combat with him. As if that wasn’t clearly and laughably impossible enough, to pile horror on top of horror and turn the whole ridiculous situation into a genuinely grotesque and petrifying farce, there now also emerged, coming over the fence and out of the sky, a gruesomely multifarious host of deformed deities bearing down on me!

Though I had indeed consumed a large portion of spicy foods that evening, there was no time to, in some Scrooge-like manner, try to sceptically disbelieve my senses. When the seething god-horde first descended upon me all I could frantically think of was that I had absolutely nothing to hand to defend myself with. That is, nothing but the bag of rubbish I awkwardly and inefficaciously tossed at them in abject panic with a weak and shuddering little cry. (I always hate taking out the rubbish in the wee hours of the night, especially in the freezing cold, and now I felt quite justified in this loathing!) Why didn’t I just bolt for the door right behind me and bolt them out from inside? Even though only a moment ago I had experienced a stupendous epiphany, not one thing was now clear in my head. However, my heart or my gut or something basic and primal at the centre of me dreadfully urged me to lash out at this unholy host. Thus I looked round desperately for some means! When I caught sight of that wooden handle on the spade I shrieked a little Gloria from my heart! And no sooner were my fingers wrapped round that handle than I was swinging it wildly and murderously in stark terror and life-preserving rage at the things that were in that same instant bent on my demise and rushing me with deadly speed and cruel weapons.

As I hopped about madly bludgeoning and slashing I saw frightful flashes of animal heads on titanic human bodies, human heads on monstrous mergers of known and unknown creatures, technologies both familiar as well as strange combined incomprehensibly, antennae both insectile and electronic, huge fangs and claws and pincers both mechanical and organic, glowing terminals and read-outs and lights and lenses, and brutish eyes that yet shone in piercing mock-majestic gazes. Roarings and bayings and hissings and screechings and buzzings and beepings and blarings and whirrings and grindings, insinuating whisperings and imperious demands, all assaulted my hearing—well, not so much my physical ears as my mind. (This fact stuck out to me because I remember for an instant absurdly worrying about this devilish ruckus disturbing the neighbours!) In this tableau and to this soundtrack the arc of my homely spade met with god-flesh, its wide flat metal face smashing bones and glass and plastic, its three sharp angular tips sinking into arteries and circuitry, crunch and gore and sparks abounding. I can now only reflect with bemused bewilderment that it was the kingly Spirit of lowly Mary’s holy Baby upon me, within me, that was equal to these heroics, though I obviously was so pathetically far from it with my little squeals and wheezings and half-prayers and yelped attempts at war cries that sounded more like the shrieks of someone begging for their life. Perhaps this is something like bewildered young Mary herself felt as she carried and gave birth to the Son of God.

I had no real sense of the passing of time in this fearsome (not to say farcical!) fray but it somehow didn’t seem like long before the wooden handle of the spade was broken in two by some cruel blade or claw or fang. The tool’s metal head fell useless into the snow and the stake that the handle had become was used effectively for one last moment in the single eye of a cyclopean godling, now screaming and sightless.

Again unarmed, I unconsciously danced a terrified jittering jig by our old shed that was now to my back. I spun toward its door half expecting my quick and painful demise and half searching for a new weapon. I literally barked an exultant laugh and surely my raving, raging eye must have gleamed when I flung the rickety, rusty shed door open and saw within its shadows nothing less than a heavy, iron, long-handled sledgehammer leaning there. I vaguely recalled seeing it before but it had always gone completely unnoticed in my conscious vision, I not being a man of tools or fixitry. I instantly seized it and drew it forth from the doorway and wheeled upon my remaining foes with renewed frenzy for the battle.

As I brained one god and then another with the hammer singing through the frosty air, I became peripherally aware that the stars shone out in their courses with a degree of light like I had never before witnessed. They sang! Not with voices, melodies, or, I think, even sound – but in their brightness they rang out like a galactic choir! Their eon-ancient cold fire crackled keenly down on the battlefield of our home’s little garden and lit the scene of the gods’ demise with a ferociously shaming nudity.

Well, this Christmas Eve was turning out to be quite the night of mounting epiphanies. For as I battled and battered these godheads, I knew in my bones that this was no conflict like that with flesh and blood and that though I farcically and crudely wielded these physical tools-turned-weapons against them, this was not a carnal warfare at all and in fact the real weapons behind this scene were not at all carnal either. Superimposed on the god-carnage all round me my soul’s eye saw a very different vision: a teenage mother moaning and crying out in the pains of giving birth to a child—a newborn baby’s first cries amid the brute breath of steaming beasts—the long and wonder-filled and hurtful and happy years of childhood and growing up in family and community—the heady years of youth and learning scholarship and a trade—the fire and flourish of a meteoric ministry, thirty years in the making, three years in performing—surrendering to the divine Will, to the misunderstandings of man, to the criminal sentence and execution of judges and jurors not fit to pass judgment, to the vicious, shameful worst an Empire can do to its non-conformant members—bearing the weight of the crimes of an entire world—a suffering like no other suffering followed by a death like so many other deaths, a simple cessation of breathing—a beggar’s burial among the pitying rich—the disturbing dawn of an empty tomb and sightings and sayings and handlings and breakfasts and commissions. These, I perceived, were the real engines of war behind this weirdly comic battle.

I have zero recollection of how it ended. I think I was still swinging the hefty hammer back and forth, which eventually whistled cleanly through the ice-cold air and landed on nothing, finishing its arc in a mound of snow. Somehow they’d all been slain. Or fled? Typhon himself was certainly nowhere to be seen. I was just barely aware that there was quite a body count of bizarre corpses round about me. I only remember that my arms went suddenly limp and my legs felt like rubber bands and I swayed and leaned on the long hammer handle and spewed in the snow. I didn’t even survey my seemingly lion-like handiwork or pronounce a benediction, or even utter a wee prayer of thanks!

In a few moments there came a shuffling, snuffling sound as some of the still writhing forms began to haltingly raise up their maimed bulk. Then more gods, some equally hideous in appearance, arrived on this scene and formed a crescent round the garden battlefield, some floating in the air, some standing on the ground. A powerfully silent solemnity seemed to have descended with their arrival. I wasn’t even capable of being shocked at this presumably worrying development. I simply accepted my immanent death, not even with despair or dread – just acceptance.

Then they knelt, every one of them. Bowed their great, hoary, grotesque or glorious heads in holy reverence. I looked up into the sky directly above me and one star shone out clearly over against the rest.

I must have somehow stumbled my way back into the house and into bed next to the delicious warmth of my wife. I recall she moaned ‘Cooold!’ and fell promptly back to sleep and I soon joined her, too exhausted to even be bewildered.

As I see all that baffling saga again in my mind’s eye this early Christmas morning, I notice a motion back through the window, small figures descending the stairs. I think we’ll open presents first before we clean up this mess and alert the authorities. The kids deserve that much. Just a normal Christmas like everyone else. I can’t wait to see their faces when they see what their mother and I got them. Ach, forget it, Christmas dinner is going to have to come off too before we get round to these dead gods. By then, of course, it will be too gloomy in these too-short winter days to clear up. Boxing Day then. Yes, definitely tomorrow. We’ll throw them out along with the all the wrapping paper and packaging. (Both for recycling no doubt.)

He feels from Juda’s land
The dreaded Infant’s hand;
The rays of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyn;
Nor all the gods beside
Longer dare abide
Not Typhon huge ending in snaky twine:
Our Babe, to show his Godhead true,
Can in his swaddling bands control the damned crew.

-John Milton, ‘On The Morning of Christ’s Nativity’ (1629)

Daniel Otto Jack Petersen, 2010

'The Underwater Universe' by Jack-Lewis Petersen, age 11

2010-12-03T00:34:00.000-08:00

Below,

Below...

The blue silk frothing through the watershine universe

She provides oxygen for the beautiful beasts below...

Below,

Below...

Her collage of awe and wonder a scrap book of a million life forms

Below,

Below...

Her children flow; flourish freely, her

Tranquil spirits of the deep

Below,

Below...

We must respect earthly monsters of the deep or we

Ourselves will become wild animals...

(Note: inspired by these photos of sea monsters)

A Prayer to the Fang Breaker

2010-06-12T05:37:00.001-07:00

Redeemer release me
from the maddening mastery
of the tainted taunts
of whispered wants

Help me
beat down the beast
crouching at my door
blessedly bludgeoned
until it snuffles no more

Sledge it, Lord
until its enslaving slavering
is silenced, and I hear
no more pawing paucity
of purity

Let its blood seep and seep
under the door
profuse effusion of
gutted gore
a glut of sweet-sticky
victory

You, Saviour
are my only hope
the Horror
of my enemies
the Holy One who hammers
my fierce and deadly foes

Because of your horned
and snorting Love
hold my hand and hear my cries
bend the clouds and rend the skies
and God who is pierced and weeps and hangs
Lord of all mercy—
BREAK THEIR FANGS!

The Bones of My Skull Beneath My Face Are Laughing Forever - Chesterton's defence of skeletons

2009-02-16T16:28:00.000-08:00

For Christmas a friend gave me a lovely early 1950s orange-coloured Everyman edition of a collection of stories, essays, and poems by G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936). In it is a delightful essay entitled 'A Defence of Skeletons', very characteristic of the ample G. K. C. and which is indeed a sound defence of sentiments I hold dear. Friends and acquaintances often enquire as to why the ‘creepy’ is so important to our family’s aesthetic. The following goes some way toward answering that. I shall here reproduce the bulk of the short essay.

Chesterton begins seemingly far from the topic, speaking of a walk he took through a winter wood full of trees bare, obviously, of their leaves. The locals, he informs us, were rather embarrassed of the trees in their ‘naked’ season. With typical wit he says: ‘I assured them that I did not resent the fact that it was winter, that I knew the thing had happened before, and that no forethought on their part could have averted this blow of destiny.’

Then we are treated to a deluge of his wonderful fantastic-rhapsodic description: ‘The tops of two or three high trees when they are leafless are so soft that they seem like the gigantic brooms of that fabulous lady who was sweeping the cobwebs off the sky. The outline of a leafy forest is in comparison hard, gross, and blotchy; the clouds of night do not more certainly obscure the moon than those green and monstrous clouds obscure the tree; the actual sight of the little wood, with its grey and silver sea of life, is entirely a winter vision. So dim and delicate is the heart of the winter woods, a kind of glittering gloaming, that a figure stepping towards us in the chequered twilight seems as if he were breaking through unfathomable depths of spiders’ webs.’

And now he comes to his subject proper and the rest of the essay I will quote without interruption:

‘But surely the idea that its leaves are the chief grace of a tree is a vulgar one, on a par with the idea that his hair is the chief grace of a pianist. When winter, that healthy ascetic, carries his gigantic razor over hill and valley, and shaves all the trees like monks, we feel surely that they are all the more like trees if they are shorn, just as so many painters and musicians would be all the more like men if they were less like mops. But it does appear to be a deep and essential difficulty that men have an abiding terror of their own structure, or of the structure of things they love. This is felt dimly in the skeleton of the tree: it is felt profoundly in the skeleton of the man.

‘The importance of the human skeleton is very great, and the horror with which it is commonly regarded is somewhat mysterious. Without claiming for the human skeleton a wholly conventional beauty, we may assert that he is certainly not uglier than a bull-dog, whose popularity never wanes, and that he has a vastly more cheerful and ingratiating expression. But just as man is mysteriously ashamed of the skeletons of the trees in winter, so he is mysteriously ashamed of the skeleton of himself in death. It is a singular thing altogether, this horror of the architecture of things. One would think it would be most unwise in a man to be afraid of a skeleton, since Nature has set curious and quite insuperable obstacles to his running away from it.

‘One ground exists for this terror: a strange idea has infected humanity that the skeleton is typical of death. A man might as well say that a factory chimney was typical of bankruptcy. The factory may be left naked after ruin, the skeleton may be left naked after bodily dissolution; but both of them have had a lively and workmanlike life of their own, all the pulleys creaking, all the wheels turning, in the House of Livelihood as in the House of Life. There is no reason why this creature (new, as I fancy, to art), the living skeleton, should not become the essential symbol of life.

‘The truth is that man’s horror of the skeleton is not horror of death at all. It is man’s eccentric glory that he has not, generally speaking, any objection to being deaf, but has a very serious objection to being undignified. And the fundamental matter which troubles him in the skeleton is the reminder that the ground-plan of his appearance is shamelessly grotesque. I do not know why he should object to this. He contentedly takes his place in a world that does not pretend to be genteel—a laughing, working, jeering world. He sees millions of animals carrying, with quite a dandified levity, the most monstrous shapes and appendages, the most preposterous horns, wings, and legs, when they are necessary to utility. He sees the good temper of the frog, the unaccountable happiness of the hippopotamus. He sees a whole universe which is ridiculous, from the animalcule, with a head too big for its body, up to the comet, with a tail too big for its head. But when it comes to the delightful oddity of his own inside, his sense of humour rather abruptly deserts him.

‘In the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance (which was, in certain times and respects, a much gloomier period) this idea of the skeleton had a vast influence in freezing the pride out of all earthly pomps and the fragrance out of all fleeting pleasures. But it was not, surely, the mere dread of death that did this, for these were ages in which men went to meet death singing; it was the idea of the degradation of man in the grinning ugliness of his structure that withered the juvenile insolence of beauty and pride. And in this it almost assuredly did more good than harm. There is nothing so cold or so pitiless as youth, and youth in aristocratic stations and ages tended to an impeccable dignity, an endless summer of success which needed to be very sharply reminded of the scorn of the stars. It was well that such flamboyant prigs should be convinced that one practical joke, at least, would bowl them over, that they would fall into one grinning man-trap, and not rise again. That the whole structure of their existence was as wholesomely ridiculous as that of a pig or a parrot they could not be expected to realize; that birth was humorous, coming of age humorous, drinking and fighting humorous, they were far too young and solemn to know. But at least they were taught that death was humorous.

‘There is a peculiar idea abroad that the value and fascination of what we call Nature lie in her beauty. But the fact that Nature is beautiful in the sense that a dado or a Liberty curtain is beautiful is only one of her charms, and almost an accidental one. The highest and most valuable quality in Nature is not her beauty, but her generous and defiant ugliness. A hundred instances might be taken. The croaking noise of the rooks is, in itself, as hideous as the whole hell of sounds in a London railway tunnel. Yet it uplifts us like a trumpet with its coarse kindliness and honesty, and the lover in Maud could actually persuade himself that this abominable noise resembled his lady-love’s name. Has the poet, for whom Nature means only roses and lilies, ever heard a pig grunting? It is a noise that does a man good—a strong, snorting, imprisoned noise, breaking its way out of unfathomable dungeons through every possible outlet and organ. It might be the voice of the earth itself, snoring in its mighty sleep. This is the deepest, the oldest, the most wholesome and religious sense of the value of Nature—the value which comes from her immense babyishness. She is as top-heavy, as grotesque, as solemn, and as happy as a child. The mood does come when we see all her shapes like shapes that a baby scrawls upon a slate—simple, rudimentary, a million years older and stronger than the whole disease that is called art. The objects of earth and heaven seem to combine into a nursery tale, and our relation to things seems for a moment so simple that a dancing lunatic would be needed to do justice to its lucidity and levity. The tree above my head is flapping like some gigantic bird standing on one leg; the moon is like the eye of a Cyclops. And, however much my face clouds with sombre vanity, or vulgar vengeance, or contemptible contempt, the bones of my skull beneath it are laughing for ever.’

Neil Gaiman's Stardust: a review

2009-02-16T05:03:00.000-08:00

‘These mythological ballads are full of that very primitive undergrowth that the literature of Europe has on the whole been steadily cutting and reducing for many centuries with different and earlier completeness among different people… I would that we had more of it left – something of the same sort that belonged to the English.’

-J. R. R. Tolkien

This is the first book I’ve read by Mr Gaiman (I have not yet seen the film version) and it will not be the last. If for no other reason because of his growing reputation and because he’s bright enough to have on numerous occasions made much of two of my favourite authors: R. A. Lafferty and Gene Wolfe. Let me start by mentioning that Gaiman’s writing style in this particular book is a nice light prose, generally pleasant to read, and he takes time to set up a genuine (if not deep) world. But the writing is not ‘deceptively light’ as the writing of some writers is described (e.g. Gene Wolfe). It is as it appears. I don’t sense a great depth or sophistication behind it (not great, I say, but there is some). I’m not accusing it of being outright shallow in either style or content. But there are many shades between casual and profound in writing.

The story starts with the comment that the town of Wall (where the hero hails from) is still here in the 20th century (the book was published in 1999), but then pleasantly and skilfully Gaiman sets his tale back in Victorian times. He does so in a way rather reminiscent of Lewis setting up The Magician’s Nephew in its era of Sherlock Holmes on Baker Street, the Bastables looking for treasure in Lewisham Road, stiff Eton collars, and cheap but delicious sweets. Writes Gaiman:

‘Queen Victoria was on the throne of England, but she was not yet the black-clad widow of Windsor: she had apples in her cheeks and the spring in her step, and the Lord Melbourne often had cause to upbraid, gently, the young queen for her flightiness. She was, as yet, unmarried, although she was very much in love.

‘Mr Charles Dickens was serializing his novel Oliver Twist; Mr Draper had just taken the first photograph of the moon, freezing her pale face on cold paper; Mr Morse had recently announced a way of transmitting messages down metal wires.

‘Had you mentioned magic or Faerie to any of them, they would have smiled at you disdainfully, except, perhaps for Mr Dickens, at the time a young man, and beardless. He would have looked at you wistfully.’

There you can witness it for yourself. A very pleasant style with a light sophistication. Truth be told, if the whole book had kept up this level of intelligent playfulness, I would have enjoyed it more. But as in the Chronicles of Narnia, it rather quickly takes off into the strictly Faerie and as it does so I became less impressed with Gaiman’s exhibition of either erudition or invention. I found I had to ask myself: why would I want to read this if not for the respect I’ve heard given to him and because he’s smart enough to recommend Lafferty to people and even to make a self-confessed (and valiant) attempt at writing a Lafferty short story? I’m not sure.

Please understand, this is a fine book. It’s story is essentially sound. It is not a waste of time. Nevertheless I can find fault. For example, some of the magical elements are a bit too ‘cheap’ for my tastes. Just one instance: at a fair a miniature glass cat figurine is picked up and found to be alive, then dropped in shock. It sounds alright extracted as a summary like that, but it’s the kind of thing a writer like Gene Wolfe can do with a similarly light touch but that gives both an initial shock and lingers on in the mind with a genuine and even discomfiting sense of magic. This moment in Gaiman’s story felt just slightly obligatory or perfunctory, adding very little to the world it was creating.

Now I’ve said that the prose is pleasant enough to read, but nevertheless it must be confessed it can be overall just slightly pedestrian—though there is the occasional notable metaphor: ‘Mount Huon… had been expanded, improved upon, excavated and tunnelled into by successive Masters of Stormhold, until the original mountain peak now raked the sky like the ornately carved tusk of some great, grey, granite beast’; or ‘The lord’s voice wheezed out of him, like the wind being squeezed from a pair of rotten bellows’. (These sound even better in their context of course.)

In terms of exploring ‘the Big Questions’ through art, the story starts off promising. The very first sentence reads: ‘There once was a young man who wished to gain his Heart’s Desire.’ But I do not feel this simple but potentially pungent start pays off in the end. It really amounts to a rather conventional ‘love story’ where a boy thought his true love was ‘this’ girl but it ends up being ‘that’ girl. Nothing deeper.

Again I feel obliged to emphasis that this is actually a very decent and sometimes quite good book. I wouldn’t really say that it’s bad or poor at all. My criticisms are sharp and strict just for the sake of getting to the point and to keep the standard requisitely high.

I will tell no more of the story itself, of the hero’s dangerous adventures through fairyland with a beautiful fallen star and of the various sets of characters whose own plots slowly converge into one with passably commendable artistry. It is entertaining. When all is said however, I must give credit and respect to Gaiman for genuinely pursuing the land of Faerie in the way Tolkien described that fairy tales at their best do (not because I think Tolkien the final authority on such matters, but rather because he was humble and wise enough to simply historically discern what was the deep human impulse in such tales worldwide and from ancient times). That is, Gaiman in this story is longing for escape, hearing ‘whispers from beyond the world’, to use some of Tolkien’s phrases (from his seminal essay ‘On Fairy Stories’). That is, I think Gaiman is trying to rather frankly (and refreshingly) honour Faerie for what it is, which is especially pertinent to our age: mischievous, indefatigable, irrepressible, irreverent-yet-reverent, painfully poignant, acutely powerful anti-reductionism. I.e. he honours the fact that in our heart of hearts we humans wish (perhaps we know) that there is More Than This and so we turn to this weird and wonderful form of storytelling.

I must mention that in his Acknowledgments at the end of the book, Gaiman makes the very interesting comment: ‘I owe an enormous debt to Hope Mirrlees, Lord Dunsany, James Branch Cabell and C. S. Lewis, wherever they may currently be, for showing me that fairy stories were for adults too.’ I’m pleased no end that Lewis continues to have such a crucial influence on the arts, especially on more ‘pop-fringe’ artists like Gaiman. I have no idea what Gaiman’s personal beliefs about immortality are or how purely whimsical this comment may be, but I sense it is one more instance of his heartfelt anti-reductionism (even it it’s not an out and out affirmation of a supernatural worldview).

Neil Gaiman is trying valiantly to cultivate some of the aforementioned ‘primitive undergrowth’ for our times and I applaud him for it. There is something very right about his intentions. In honesty I’m bound to say I don’t sense the deep, deep power of myth coming through in this particular tale. Not that every moment of even the best myths do have this. I just mean it seems to me that it lacks somehow what Lewis called that ‘spear stab’ of true wonder. Or at least that in Stardust it comes across flickeringly in rare moments as more of a pinprick.

PARENTAL NOTE: I would recommend parents read this tale before their children do. Many, like me, would not find it age appropriate, especially for young children and probably even teenagers, due to a few graphic scenes of sex and violence. This is regrettable as I would have enjoyed having my children read it and seeing what they thought.

An Expostulation Against Too Many Writers of Science Fiction

2009-02-16T04:47:00.000-08:00

This is a poem by C. S. Lewis, the central thought of which I resonate with:

AN EXPOSTULATION
Against too many writers of science fiction

Why did you lure us on like this,
Light-year on light-year, through the abyss,
Building (as though we cared for size!)
Empires that cover galaxies,
If at the journey's end we find
The same old stuff we left behind,
Well-worn Tellurian stories of
Crooks, spies, conspirators, or love,
Whose setting might as well have been
The Bronx, Montmartre, or Bethnal Green?

Why should I leave this green-floored cell,
Roofed with blue air, in which we dwell,
Unless, outside its guarded gates,
Long, long desired, the Unearthly waits,
Strangeness that moves us more than fear,
Beauty that stabs with tingling spear,
Or Wonder, laying on one's heart
That finger-tip at which we start
As if some thought too swift and shy
For reason's grasp had just gone by?

Sixty-Six Divine Descriptors

2009-01-31T16:25:00.000-08:00

Theologeek that I am , I personally find poetry in the sesquipedalian technical terms of theology such as ‘soteriological’, ‘sublapsarian’, ‘perichoresis’, etc. I take particular pleasure in rolling summary divine ‘attributes’ off my tongue such as ‘omnipotence’, ‘omnipresence’, ‘omniscience’, ‘omnibenevolence’, and the like. And indeed it is their actual meaning that I most appreciate. Some find them cold and cerebral but I find them useful and helpful. I’ve even coined one of my own to sum up an oft neglected attribute of God: that God is ‘omnisophical’, all-wise.

My enjoyment of such terms notwithstanding, the Bible of course does not speak like this. True, it does at times ascribe to God that he is ‘Almighty’ or that he ‘knows all things’, but usually the above attributes are described by contemplative poetry (e.g. ‘where can I go in all the world and You won’t be there with me?’ = omnipresence) or in historical circumstances or prophetic utterances or ‘apocalyptic’ visions (e.g. angelic beings covered in eyes = omniscience). But I do believe all of the above attributes are described and affirmed in no uncertain terms throughout the Bible’s pages.

But another stimulating dimension to the way the Bible describes an infinite-personal God is that it does so by pictures and stories, particularly through literary genres and styles and forms and devices.

On a whim one day I listed the majority of the 66 books of the Bible with a summary statement based on a book’s form, style, prominent subject matter or theme and ascribed this to God’s character. Many are to be expected, but some I find fresh and surprising. Some of them are provocative and would require qualification and clarification. Anyone could easily make their own list that would bring out many different nuances than mine and yet would no doubt overlap a great deal in essence. I find it exhilarating and expanding and intriguing to think of God in this ‘biblical-canonical’ way. It shows both ‘the God of the Bible’ as well as the ‘Bible of God’ to be more wide, weird, warm and wonderful than we might usually conceive of.

I start with the New Testament, perhaps slightly more familiar in theme to us (though even here there are some intriguing bits), and then go on to the perhaps less familiar Old Testament. If you just say aloud the summaries one after the other it has a powerful effect I think.

Matthew (‘The Kingdom of God’)
Mark (‘The Secrecy of God’)
Luke (‘The Humanity of God’)
John (‘The Word of God’)
Acts (‘The Movement of God’)
Galatians (‘The Freedom of God’)
Philippians (‘The Joy of God’)
James & Jude (‘The Wisdom of God’)
1 Peter (‘The Fiery Ordeal of God’)
Hebrews (‘The Finality of God’)
Revelation (‘The Unveiling of God’)
Genesis (‘The Creativity of God’)
Exodus (‘The Presence of God’)
Leviticus (‘The Holiness of God’)
Numbers (‘The Journey of God’)
Deuteronomy (‘The Treaty of God’)
Joshua (‘The War of God’)
Judges (‘The Horror of God’)
Ruth (‘The Redemption of God’)
Samuel (‘The Politics of God’)
Kings (‘The Tragedy of God’)
Chronicles (‘The Retelling of God’)
Ezra (‘The Repatriation of God’)
Nehemiah (‘The Rebuilding of God’)
Esther (‘The Comedy of God’)
Job (‘The Perplexity of God’)
Psalms (‘The Beauty of God’/‘The Consolation of God’)
Proverbs (‘The Pathway of God’)
Ecclesiastes (‘The Enigma of God’)
Song of Solomon (‘The Erotica of God’)
Isaiah (‘The Majesty of God’)
Jeremiah (‘The Anguish of God’)
Lamentations (‘The Grief of God’)
Ezekiel (‘The Strangeness of God’)
Daniel (‘The Sway of God’)
Hosea (‘The Ardour of God’)
Joel (‘The Day of God’)
Amos (‘The Justice of God’)
Jonah (‘The Inclusiveness of God’)
Habakkuk (‘The Unorthodoxy of God’)
Haggai (‘The House of God’)
Zechariah (‘The Pictures of God’)

Malachi (‘The Approach of God’)

On theistic history as 'over-determined'

2009-01-27T13:38:00.000-08:00

In a stimulating discussion on historiography I heard a historian on the radio today describe a theistic view of history as ‘over-determined’. This is revealing. It shows what non-theists despise and fear in a Christian view of things. I can somewhat sympathise with the historian if he merely misunderstands that the theistic position is that all is ‘written’ in a deterministic sense that makes a mockery of our human story, as if we’re not doing anything truly significant in the unfolding of history but rather that all is a Divine Puppet Show. But I do think that’s a misunderstanding – even on the strongest Christian view of God’s sovereignty he is still good and holy and just and loving in his ‘rule’ or ‘authorship’ of history and his demands on us and overtures toward us as creatures made in his image clearly show he expects significance from us, personal and communal choices of far-reaching import, not that we’re mere links in a cosmic chain of cause and effect or that our apparent agency is just that, an appearance and not a reality.

However, I don’t think the revulsion of the non-theist is as unmixed as that – a mere misunderstanding. As a Christian I think this epithet of ‘over-determined’ also reveals our inherent fallen instinct to hate and oppose God for limiting our freedom, for putting a boundary on our significance and placing it squarely under his own divine glory. Again, I think this ‘bounded significance’ is misunderstood as an evil, for on the contrary I would argue that it is in fact our greatest good and unleashes human potential under God as no rebellion against our Maker’s rights over us can ever do. If anyone wants to ask just how it so unleashes us, I will attempt another article to explain something of what I mean.

I can see too how this misunderstanding would lead someone with professional interest in the matter to fear that a theistic historian looks only (or mainly) for divine and not human causes in the past. But of course this does not follow from a true understanding of theism. Whilst the theistic historian assumes a divine Hand or Plan overall and behind all, and will indeed be open to seeing evidence of this, even apart from ‘special revelation’ that makes such divine activity explicit (e.g. Holy Scripture), he or she will still be on the same hunt for what every historian of whatever ideological stripe is after: fairly interpreted facts from which to speculate about causes and explanations of past occurrences. It is a matter of both/and, not either/or. It is the same in all other disciplines and arts. Theism enriches and enlarges rather than diminishing or reducing. It should be well known that the reductionism is all the other way. It is those whose philosophy dictates before research ever gets started ‘thus far and no farther’ that are in danger of excluding facts and causes.

Interestingly, I think it is this same misunderstanding of a biblical philosophy of history that fuels present trends in the more ‘liberal’ and ‘emergent’ theologies that seek to limit God’s rule so that our lives don’t feel ‘over-determined’. (I’m referring to an in-house debate amongst my ‘co-religionists’ as to the nature of God: some argue experimentally that God is ‘open’ or ‘in process’ while others argue that such a being would not actually be God at all but some sort of Super-Creature in some kind of symbiosis with the universe and that the atheists would be right after all—that all is imminent with no transcendence, that all is ontologically dependent with Nothing to depend on.) Indeed, I strongly suspect it is the pressure from socio-cultural influences such as I heard on popular radio that are the original inspiration for many of the ‘experimental’ theological moves being made, rather than first and foremost a fresh reading of the Scriptures that has required reformation of the church’s long held views. A different way of reacting to such challenges from culture is of course to explain and defend and show the beauty and goodness of the very doctrine under attack, rather than altering it to fit the sensibilities of those in opposition to a scriptural worldview. It is not theological progress to go down a dead end alleyway.

When the Knight Came from Outer Space

2008-12-12T08:25:00.000-08:00

When the knight came from outer space, the whole world looked like the giantest dragon he’d ever seen, curled up on itself in a stacked serpentine sphere.

The closer he rode in from the stars, the gianter the dragon grew; its mind-bendingly huge jaws he found—once he entered the atmosphere—were open cavernously wide across the firmament. The dark dank dragon-maw yawning insanely above him was the only sky in that world, oppressively hot and reeking carnivorous.

The great knight’s great blade—five feet of double-edged steel extending from his hand, nearly doubling his height—shone out a mere pin-prick of defiance (if that much) in the face of that sky-wide obscenity. Yet he charged, urged his deep space wave steed dragonward, brandishing his blade and slashing its steel dragonward, and the scarce solar rays that yet crept in from the edges of that murk wrapped the blade in dazzling energy cutting across the foul firmament, the sword’s electric edge refracting right across the blighted sky, a lethal beam leaping at the great planet-monster.

The vast dragonhead-heavens reared, roared.

The fire kindled right across the miles of sky in mere seconds. The world-wyrm’s whole body rumbled with it as it poured forth from its throat. The gigantic curtain of flame leapt down upon the knight, the knight defiant, adamant and advancing, his great shield raised as the fire blazed all around him. The huge hammering fist of red-orange heat held him tight, hurled him down, hurt unbearably, but he held out, sword and steed bearing down upon the dragon in furious ascension.

The roaring flame deluge diminished, then ceased. The knight’s ears within his helm rang maddeningly loud. His eyes behind his visor were dazzled almost to blindness. Yet his wounded vision could make out patches of blue-white in the atmosphere. The dragon’s great mouth was shut! Smoke, however, heaved forth from its monstrous nostrils like twin titanic tornadoes swirling insanely down upon the world. Those two gargantuan hateful holes in the sky threatened to choke the world afresh with gloom. Yet glittering ominously huge through the hellish clouds were two more discs, elliptical pools of bottomless hatred and pride—the dragon’s enormous eyes, throbbing redly down upon the world in malevolence! The knight was bewildered. He faltered, lost ground in the air as he fell back landward. The armour of both he and his steed, as well as his steel blade, were charred, chinked, yet glowing with heat, tearing in parts, threatening to melt, burning them insufferably, fused to their skin. His mounted figure was a haze, heat pouring off of it in all directions.

But he renewed his charge.

With fresh fury, no doubt his very last, he thrust again his trusty blade and bade his still lusty steed assault the sky. There was yet holy murder smouldering in the knight’s seared eyes. Then all he saw was the maw again becoming the sky as the dragon opened wide once more.

The colossal ceiling of fire descended renewed, now burning red, red, edged with white, as the dragon raged and raged against the tiny knight defiant. The shield curved backward around his arm in the heat. All the knight’s accoutrements melted to liquid in the livid flame. The red river ripped him from his mount and the faithful beast was lost completely in the torrid torrent, consumed. His sword still held aloft finally gave way, boiled and broke and disintegrated. The knight’s metal-mottled skin, splotched with patches of his own armour running together with flesh, also came free in the fire. Muscles and blood were quickly licked off by the flames, licked up and lost. Lastly, a knightly skeleton still arched dragonward, arm outstretched through the fire as though it still brandished the sword, a bone grip clenched round a vanished hilt. And the skull, the skull of the great defiant knight gazed with deep empty sockets, the ruined eyes now purged away, up through the bellowing firefall at the enemy. Then the bones too were incinerated.

The dragon had been roaring throughout the second firestorm, seeming even to violently chuckle in the cacophony. Indeed, a massive guffaw could be discerned in the vile noise. But just as the knight melted away like a troublesome little bad dream that the dragon had roused itself from to forget completely upon waking, there was another note in the deafening derision. Piling up behind the last of the roaring laughter and shoving it out was an altogether different sound declaring an entirely new emotion from the dragon. There distinctly arose from the monster’s gloating throat a scream.

That whole world was filling with a hideous, bloodcurdling, agonising scream of pain. A choking, strangled-anger shriek of pain, then of terror. The fire had stopped falling the moment the laughter ceased. The terror-scream became a terror-screeching, which gave way to an utterly horrified wail. It seemed to last ages long, but it was not long. The despairing wail became hoarse, then an idiot gurgling, then lifeless rasping. Then nothing. There was no sound but smouldering. The sky was close-dappled with ash. The burning stench was pestilent.

The last sight the dragon’s eyes took in before its monstrous head came crashing to the world-surface was that it had washed itself completely away in its own deluge of flame.

Any sections of the serpent’s great coiled length that were only severed rather than obliterated in the flame-deluge were explosively propelled from the planet’s surface, forced all the way through orbital pull and out into space drift, eventually lost from terrestrial view altogether. When the serpent’s head fell, a month-long scattershot series of severe quakes and shifts resulted from the impact of the monolith. Then all was still for a century. The world spun on with a fossilised dragonhead atop it.

The rest of the account appears legendary, though not because numerous generations passed between the time of the event and its telling. The witnesses are early and reliable but still, it is nearly impossible to believe. They say the dissolved particles that were the bones of the knight woke up and danced, danced themselves back together. And further, beggaring belief, the flesh came rushing back upon him till he was clothed with body again, though not with armour, and that his body somehow bore the scars of his burning, yet was beautiful, whole, and glorious. And we are told that for nearly two months he climbed, naked, the mountain of the dragonhead, at incredible speed, and reaching the apex, put his bare foot upon its topmost point. And they say he stands there still, the dragonhead slowly crumbling into an unrecognisable ruin, it’s shadow cast over different halves of the planet at different halves of the day, but only the shadow. Whatever transpired, the air is different (breathable, to note its least effect). That much is certain.

On Writing Poetry (or Lyrics or the Poetic) - another'n from the notebook

2008-11-14T16:04:00.000-08:00

The heart is a massive, powerful beast awakening, gathering strength, on occasion striking, charging, goring, thundering, bellowing, thrashing.

The mind rides atop the heart-beast with swiftness, agility, prowess, cunning, whipchord intelligence, adept reflexes, sparkling cerebral laughter, grim-wit and sharp-wit and wise-wit, keenness and determination (and pride and vanity). The mind's purely intellectual thrill and mirth tingle atop the beast-heart, agitating its spiritual animality (only rarely does the beast laugh, and then it is belly and soul and pure delightful pain emotion and terror and the mind-rider's cackles are completely overwhelmed by the psychic noise of it) - the mind dares to leap upon this vast unwieldy brute and seek to direct its awesome power to the mind's own ends (foolish and impetuous but joyous and on rare occasion, successful).

This is my honest attempt at explicating the phenomenon from my own experience. Yeah, it's subjective, but...

from my notebook Aug 2008

2008-11-14T13:12:00.000-08:00

Tom Waits is playing (a slow one) across the hall in the lounge. (It's not a long distance, but it's so gratifying to be able to say 'across the hall' in another room after the rather more cramped atmosphere of our last house, from which we moved only recenlty.) BBC Radio Four is playing (also across the hall, diagonally) in the kitchen where Andie is working at various things. I'm in my study (finally! after so long having an 'office' in our bedroom) reading a pop level Donald Guthrie commentary on Ephesians. It's a 70s paperback, pages falling out, with an obnoxious red and yellow cover featuring a soul-destroyingly ugly photo of an open Bible with a rainbow superimposed to end upon its pages. But I wasn't even noticing that. I was noticing the pleasing symmetry of the approaching hour of 11:00, the children several hours in their beds, Waits and the BBC presenters competing for aural attention, blending rather well, and Guthrie's expert terse comments under my mind's perusal.

I'm tired, in more ways than one. I have several diverse anxieties pulling at my heart. I am experiencing my frequent malaise in the face of a number of upcoming writing/preaching projects, notwithstanding the thrill it gives me to be privileged to be part of the them, and the pleasing prospect it is to have good work before one to start chipping away at, shaping it up toward an at least presentable, if not finished, product.

Despite these vaguely dubious feelings, the afforementioned scene describes one of the truly fine moments in life. And there's Radio 4 announcing the hour. We have to try to wind down toward sleep now. Waits has moved through some of his amusing burlesques and is now driving home a solid, Western, forward-moving stomp. That's not wind-down music. Well, fine human scenes can't always fade out as smoothly as they emerge.

This is not a 'weblog' (I hope)

2008-07-25T09:19:00.000-07:00

In fact, I hope no one will discover this until I've crafted some genuine attempt at truth, goodness, and beauty (even though we're 'post' all that). This entry already nauseates me. I feel like an R. A. Lafferty character. I usually do. That's only one reason why he's my (maybe) favourite author. It feels like the more prominent reason he's my fave is the joyous glory of his worlds. Yeah, that's it - mediocre (but almost genius) characters in glorious worlds accidentally stumbling into transcendence (I'll work on that last word). That's an impromptu stab at why Lafferty is the best.

So I suppose this has already begun to be something of a dialogue with myself. Is that what a 'diary' or 'journal' is? Is this a journal? A web journal? (I often detest fragment 'sentences' like the previous one, but occasionally they strike me as appropriate - is this instance appropriate?) A private web journal? I wonder how long you can remain private and secret in this public domain? Do they force people onto my 'blog' somehow, unwittingly, unwillingly?

But I hope this is not a 'weblog', a 'blog'. (I can only speak of it in 'inverted commas' because I inexplicably cringe when I use the words - I know, this whole thing is elitist - that insight will no doubt only be borne out time and again.) That is, I hope this is not more useless cybyerwaste floating in what is to my non-technical, non-computer savvy mind, an unfathomable sub-space-time ether.

This is bound to be [cybers***e is a desirable word here, but I don't generally 'swear' unless as a joke, especially not before an indiscriminate public - so I shan't use it!] webcrap because there's no automatic spell check! I hate 'blogs' [I could stop the sentence there with some truth and justice] that contain more than a fierce minimum of grammatical errors and type-os!

I repeat, this is not a weblog. Or a blog. (Or a place where you can expect intermittent fragments instead of proper sentences.)

This was a practice post and will probably be deleted.