The Eladogran Cosmogony

My fiction is based on a set of documents that came to me from a source which must remain secret. However, because this is my blog, where I may do as I like, I will here offer one document for the reader's perusal. If inclined to doubt its authenticity (or my sanity), please regard it merely as an exercise in mythopoeic verisimilitude and an attempt to gather my extensive notes into one place, somewhere among Plato's Timaeus, Tolkien's Ainulindalë, Blake's Book of Urizen, and The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick.

The text comes from the counter-earth at the cosmic antipodes, though whether from the future, the past, or some other cycle I cannot say. It appears to be of Recusant authorship. The editor's introduction, however, is plainly the product of Enochite erudition, which tends to miss the point about most things.

The edition relies on secondary sources, namely, transcriptions of the original codex into the cylinders used by the Enochite archives. Cylinders are decoded by mechanical readers, and are known to be more durable than other forms of record-keeping, but even slight damage to a cylinder can make entire passages completely inaccessible, a drawback not shared by paper or baked clay.

Though I didn't scruple to make use of modern English punctuation and vocabulary in my translation, I did my best to retain the flavor of the original. One word posed a special difficulty, however. The nephelic tongue uses different terms for the human species as a whole and for the male of that species, while the English word "man" can refer to either. "Human being" is an unforgivable solecism, and "human" is, properly speaking, an adjective, not a noun. In the end I went with traditional English usage, though this does some injustice to the text.

The manuscript in my possession (which, strangely enough, is on paper, not a cylinder) is accompanied by a number of curious pictures. Unfortunately, the gamma radiation to which they were exposed during their long sojourn in the deeps of space has caused them to fade badly. I fear that the harsh light of a document scanner would only cause further damage. Even the darkened, climate-controlled room where I keep the manuscript has not proved entirely adequate. I may attempt to reproduce the pictures by hand at some future date. If I do so, I shall certainly append them to this post.

I caution the reader not to expect too strict an adherence to the letter of this document in my writing. The account reflects philosophical, mythological, historical, and topological traditions, whereas my stories are works of literature.

And now, on to...

"Love in the Isle of the Combinators": Free Fiction

This is my first published story. It originally came out in The Colored Lens, but their rights are non-exclusive now, so I'm placing it here for whomever might be interested. You can still buy the magazine from Amazon.

The ghulim around which the story is centered play a role in my stories, particularly in Dragonfly and "Witch of Anûn." They represent some theological / psychological / biological speculations on my part. 

I see rationality as a black-and-white trait: an organism either is or is not rational and self-aware. This is a philosophical view. It accords well with modern biology, though, because inheritance does seem to be "digital" rather than "analog," characterized by genetic on-off switches, Punnett squares, and the rest, not by gradual continuous changes.

So, what if rationality in mankind began in only a few (say, two) individuals? What of the other members of the species? Scientists have recently told us that mankind could not have stemmed from a single female, and, perhaps with a similar motivation, children at parochial schools have for untold years delighted in asking their teachers whom Adam and Eve's children married.

Well, perhaps the rational soul was passed on as a "dominant trait," so that the offspring of a human being and a beast in human shape would be another true human being, not a "mixture" of the two. And perhaps the force and/or forces (I'm trying to be ecumenical here) responsible for the awakening of these anthropoid apes tasked them, not only with the care of the earth and the naming of the creatures, but also with the husbandry of their fleshly kin, treating them, not as equals, but not exactly as animals, either, with the possibility of "intermarriage" as a kind of religious vocation akin to celibacy.

The state of grace would then be characterized by the gradual diminution of the sub-rational population, which would continue to be nurtured with the dignity due their station until only rational descendants remained, while the fall from grace would be characterized by the persistent presence of the sub-rational and their treatment as animals or chattel. In such a fallen world, the dominant culture might regard inter-couplings as taboo, and the stature of a man might be measured by the dignity with which he treats his fleshly kin, though all such dealings would be tainted with "original sin." 

My ghulim are inspired partly the sub-rational deep-sea mermen glimpsed by Ransom in C. S. Lewis' Perelandra, partly by Mike Flynn's amusing and thought-provoking essay "Adam and Eve and Ted and Alice," and partly by my own reading of Thomas Aquinas and Etienne Gilson. But they have been filtered through the turgid medium of my wayward brain, so I wish to emphasize that none of these authors bear any blame for what is to follow.

The text has been lightly edited so as to accord with the current state of my invented terminology. It has also been made slightly less crass. It's a story about true love in a cracked world. I hope you enjoy it.

Love in the Isle of the Combinators

Linimer's fingers caressed the brass dial. Six plus four minus one choose four. The engine rang out its answer, one note in a mechanical symphony. Sixty combinators danced along the face of the machine, up and down the Hall of Computation.

Nine choose four and nine choose five is ten choose five. Six hundred fingers flew over the cogs and stops. Slanting sunbeams streamed through the high windows, making gnomons of the workers and gold dust of the whirling motes. It was evening.