Poison and Cigarette Butts

When I paint, I begin with a vision of a thing to be represented, but I find, as I really get down to business, that I take the picture as a plane surface covered with pigment. My task, as a painter, is to make as beautiful a carpet of color and form as my skill permits. Forms from the natural world are admitted and retained, just as colors are, but both, and the ideas that inspired the painting in the first place, are subordinate to the unity of the final product.

I have something of the same approach to writing stories. Whatever material elements may go into it, in the end I'm just trying to make an interesting pattern with the things I have at my disposal. Sometimes the things I have at my disposal are ugly, like Jackson Pollock's cigarette butts; sometimes they're poisonous, like the arsenic-containing emerald green used by Van Gogh. Well, you're not supposed to eat a painting, are you? Something similar might be said of a story.

I never set out to make a point in a story. That's not to say the things I think about and argue about don't find their way in there. It's just that they're like Jackson's cigarette butts. I do think the pursuit of truth important. I just don't care to do it in stories. Sometimes I even find it fun to seem to make a case for the opposite of what I believe to be the truth. That bugs people these days, because they want to know where you stand on all the important issues before they decide to like your work. I guess that's only natural, what with the Internet being overrun by pitchfork-waving mobs of one stripe or another. But it's also terribly boring.

Being an autistic Puerto Rican Greek mathematician in small-town borderland Texas, I have a skewed view of things. At least, I'm led to conclude so when I have conversations with other people. I'm like one of those strange side characters in Dostoevsky, like Ippolit in The Idiot, or Kirillov in The Possessed. My view comes out in weird and (to me) unpredictable ways.

*

For a few years I've thinking about how "magical multiracial" fantasy (with elves and dwarves or whatever) reflects, distorts, or falsifies race issues in the real world. I mean, that type of fiction is read mainly by white people in the anglosphere, right? At its most commercial-generic, it represents a society consisting of discrete categories of beings that coexist without mixing, which reminds me of those modern celebrations of "diversity" that often amount to a kind of segregation.

The magical multirace paradigm was set by Tolkien, although Tolkien, to be fair, got it at least partially from the Poetic Edda and such things. There are various human races in Tolkien, such as the Easterlings and the Haradrim. Aside from Sam's musings, though, they're painted in broad strokes as scarcely-human hordes. There's much talk, too, of greater men intermarrying with lesser men, to the detriment of the former. Does Tolkien, within his own universe, think it a bad thing for higher races to mix with lower races? Given what he says elsewhere about the "sin" of the elves and the role of the hobbits, I'd be inclined to say that his view was nuanced, at the very least. Still, there's a lot to be looked into there, such as the fact that Tolkien came originally from South Africa, and that The Lord of the Rings was conceived and written during the first half of the twentieth century, when a lot of ugly ideas about race were coming to a head all over the world, not just in Germany.

I've mused a bit about half-breeds in fantasy literature, and half-breeds certainly figure in Tolkien, to an extent not often approached by writers of the commercial-generic fantasy that capitalizes on his work. He has mixtures of human races, such as the men and hobbits of Bree, but also, more memorably, mixtures of human and non-human races, such as the progeny of Beren and Luthien. Philosophically, those are a little different, as Tolkien makes it clear in his letters that the elves are not a distinct biological species, differing from men only in their spiritual constitution. It's interesting that such half-breeds are allowed to choose which race they'll belong to, a choice sadly denied to human half-breeds, who must inhabit both worlds, and therefore neither. The ill-favored squint-eyed Southerner at Bree, who appears to be part human, part orc, is not treated so sympathetically, and we are not told that he got a choice like Elrond Halfelven's. Actually, the way he's described reminds me of the descriptions of mulattoes and "Asiatic" half-breeds in some of G. K. Chesterton's more offensively racist stories, and I think a case could be made that Tolkien and the writers who came after him were merely transplanting those old fears of half-breeds into less overtly racist soil.

That said, it's only by being great writers that Tolkien and Chesterton have the capacity to offend. The most your standard commercial-generic writer can aspire to is to be slightly irritating. And I do find discrete categorizations of races, magical or otherwise, to be slightly irritating. You don't just see it in fantasy. You see it whenever members of "other" races are given character traits stemming from race alone, offset, in cleverer works, by superficial differences.

Scene from John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13, which I think is a sly
reference to what I'm talking about. (Is that Cuervo Jones at the wheel???)

In reaction to one of my Carvajal stories, a psychologist friend of mine, whose professional interests include evolutionary psychology, explained that, according to theory, it's natural (in the evolutionary sense) to have a mistrust of half-breeds, because it's unknown to whose tribe their loyalties belong. To that my reply was: perhaps it's natural or justifiable, perhaps not, but, as far as my story is concerned, I don't really care, because I'm not trying to make a point. My friend was trying to understand what I was getting at, but the truth is that I wasn't getting at anything at all. I was just making a pattern with things I've picked up here and there.

Religion makes an appearance in those Carvajal stories, too, though I'm not certain that the faith of Hispania corresponds to real-world Catholicism. Carvajal is, at any rate, an archetypal Bad Catholic, praying on the fishbone rosary mentioned somewhere by St. John of the Cross while doing his best to be a conquistador. Because I am myself Catholic, a faith it's increasingly hard to be proud of these days, I like to render the religion of the various tribes he encounters sympathetically, while I render his religion as worthy of contempt, incomprehension, or terror. The red demon-god at the end of "White Rainbow and Brown Devil" is based on the seraph that gave St. Francis of Assisi the stigmata, and the institutional church appears as a literary cigarette butt in one of my forthcoming stories. But, again, I'm not really making a point. I'm just letting things come in where they want to.

*

My professional and artistic and personal lives are beginning to converge in ways that I wouldn't have expected several years ago, and I feel the need to emphasize that my fiction really is art, that is, a set of patterns I've formed so as to make pleasing units, and not, say, a coded manifesto. That's not to say that my deeply-held beliefs and opinions wouldn't be offensive or incomprehensible to some of the people who might be interested in them. They're just not to be found in my stories or my rambling, contrarian blog posts.

That said, get ready for "Raft of Conquistadors," coming out in the November issue of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly!

The Four-Dimensional Lord of Dance

I wrote two posts last year dealing with the fourth dimension:

• Views of a Tesseract
•  Arts and Crafts in Four Dimensions

The focus was mathematical, but along the way I looked at how the fourth (spacial) dimension appears in the works of authors like H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Heinlein, H. G. Wells, Jorge Luis Borges, and, most memorably, Madeleine L'Engle, whose A Wrinkle in Time is about to appear as an uninspired-looking Disney movie in March (sigh). I also talked about mathematical visionaries and mystics like Paul S. Donchian and Charles Howard Hinton, both of whom made real contributions to the field, if only in the sense that they developed and humanized what the academics were saying in their inaccessible research articles, and both of whom might be labeled as cranks or crackpots.

Since then I've done a little research on Hinton, Donchian, et al., and have found a number of other links between the idea of a fourth spacial dimension and various forms of spirituality or mysticism. For instance, the German astronomer Friedrich Zöllner (1834 – 1882) apparently tried to use the fourth dimension explain Spiritualist phenomena. In his eagerness, he was imposed upon by the medium Henry Slade in experiments that have since been debunked. Fantasy and horror authors in their turn used the claims of Spiritualism in their stories; some, like Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood, actually subscribed to its views. Hinton, who wrote a number of "scientific romances" himself, was a post-Christian altruist who speculated that spiritual agencies might work by means of the fourth dimension and believed in something like eternal return.

Some Christians of the late Victorian era, disconcerted by the advance of materialism, attempted to colonize the fourth dimension themselves. For other Christians, such as the liberal theologian Edwin Abbott Abbott (author of Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, a book much admired by Hinton), higher spacial dimensions were merely a metaphor for gradual way in which the human mind must approach divine truths. 

[source]

Salvador Dalí appears to have used the fourth dimension in a similar way, in his famous 1954 painting Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus), which portrays Christ crucified on the net of a tesseract / hypercube / 8-cell (Schläfli symbol {4,3,3}) hovering over a square grid (Schläfli symbol {4,4}), illustrating the incomprehensibility of God to man.

I have in my hands a Dover edition of Speculations on the Fourth Dimension: Selected Writings of Charles H. Hinton, which includes several of Hinton's scientific romances. It's edited and has an excellent introduction by Rudolph v.B. Rucker, also known as Rudy Rucker, author of the Ware Tetralogy and a modern tribute to Flatland and all-around sci-fi author of note. So no doubt I'll soon be posting about all of this yet again.

*

My post on four-dimensional arts and crafts includes an account of my building the sections and net of a 120-cell. More recently, I've printed and built the sections and net of a 24-cell, which is a regular four-dimensional polytope built from twenty-four octahedra.

The sections proceed as follows, with colors given as the craft paints I bought at Wal-Mart: (I) the octahedral cell at the "south pole" (Parchment); (II) the truncated octahedral section cut by a hyperplane through the midpoints of the edges "above" the south pole (Parchment and Real Brown); (III) the cuboctahedral equatorial section cut by a hyperplane through the set of vertices to which these edges connect (Look At Me Blue and Real Brown); (IV) the truncated octahedral section analogous to Section II but in the "northern hemisphere" (Look At Me Blue and Real Brown); and (V) the octahedral cell at the "north pole" (Coffee Latte).

The net has the "south pole" at the center and the "north pole" at the base. For reasons fully known only to my subconscious, but partly inspired by Dalí's painting above, I decided to model it after traditional depictions of the Hindu god Shiva as Nataraja or Lord of Dance, with three-fold rotational symmetry.

Shiva is the destroyer, and his dance is the cosmic dance of creation / destruction. That puts me in mind of the line from the Bhagavad Gita, uttered by Krishna, quoted by Robert Oppenheimer, and used by me in the title of a short story: "Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds."

Ashes to Ashes

Today I'd like to talk about a man. We all know who he is. Some think of him as a great man; none more so than himself. He is, in many ways, the man for our times. True, he's not the most intelligent person. He's not the most emotionally mature. Most of his injuries are self-inflicted. He's apt to say whatever comes into his head, and his decisions reflect an extreme lack of forethought. His words and actions are frequently reprehensible, sometimes even disgusting. He's a bit of a racist, a bit of a xenophobe, a bit of a sexist. He thinks very highly of his attractiveness to women of all ages, and feels welcome to take what he wants when he sees it. Still, time and again, he's proven his detractors wrong. He's proven that he does have it in him to be a winner.

This is Donald Trump, the President of the United States.
He is not the subject of this post.

Heart of the Hollow Earth

I recently watched Apocalypse Now for the first time. It is undoubtedly the best and most beautiful film I've seen in some time. People generally regard it as the best Vietnam film. Though gritty and realistic in its details, and, to some extent, inspired by real events, it represents an almost mythical vision, floating from The Ride of the Valkyries to Dante's Inferno and man's primordial roots in the jungle.

What made me want to see it was a comparison someone made between it and my Tashyas story. Actually, as I've said, I was thinking about Herzog's Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Conrad's Heart of Darkness. As is well known, though, Francis Ford Coppola cited both of these as major influences on Apocalypse Now. As a matter of fact, it's fair to say that Apocalypse Now is nothing more than a film treatment of Heart of Darkness, translating the Company's involvement in equatorial Africa into that of the United States in Vietnam, each presented just as imbecilic, futile, and destructive as human endeavors tend to be.

I've started to regard Heart of Darkness as a kind of modern myth. It has two basic motifs: the dark journey inward, and the great man who goes native and betrays humanity. The moral is that civilization is a veneer over something very dark indeed. Like the plot of Red Harvest (which I regard as another modern myth), it seems to have become part of the dream-logic of our culture. Aguirre and Apocalypse Now have been mentioned; I'm reminded also of Ridley Scott's Alien (whose ship and shuttle are named from Conrad stories) and James Cameron's popcorn-selling sequel. And, as a very recent and not-quite-legitimate descendant, we have Kong: Skull Island, which I went to see at the $4.00 matinee last week.

It's pretty plain that the makers of Skull Island were wanting to evoke and/or perfectly willing to plunder the visuals and general atmosphere of Apocalypse Now. It opens at the close of the Vietnam war, and the first scenes are chock-full of in-your-face historical details that let you know exactly what era you're looking at, while the jungle scenes are overlaid with the predictable rock songs so that you don't forget that this is the Vietnam era despite the overwhelming chronological ambiguity. (Me, to my eight-year-old son: "They played a Creedence song in that movie I just saw. Can you guess which one?" Him, without a moment's thought: "'Run Through the Jungle'!")  It's one of those movies where the older, uglier, and/or more annoying actors tend to meet grisly fates, and the young, pretty, highly paid actors do not. There's one guy I knew was destined to get picked apart by pterodactyls or something from the first moment I saw him.

Well, so, kind of a stupid movie.* But, as you may know, I'm a sucker for movies about little people running from giant monsters, and this one is pretty awesome in that department.

One really cool aspect is the hint that all these weird creatures are coming out of gigantic caverns beneath the earth's surface, where MUTOs have apparently been thriving for millions of years. Skull Island is set in the same universe as that Godzilla movie that came out in 2014 (also stupid, but also quite enjoyable), and it seems likely that we're looking at appearances by Mothra, Rodan, and Ghidora in the near future. Bring on the MUTOs! All monsters attack! I'm giddy with excitement!

But back to the hollow earth thing. Since my earliest childhood, I've known deep down in my heart that the whole earth-is-just-melted-rock-until-you-get-to-China theory is false. I mean, no one has actually been down there, have they? It's much more likely that there are massive caverns inhabited by gigantic prehistoric creatures and forested with huge mushrooms. Otherwise, the planet would be mostly wasted space, and, if there's one thing we know about Nature, it's that she hates for things to go to waste.

So I was very interested to read some of the amazing hollow earth theories recounted by Ryan Harvey over at Black Gate in some of his Pellucidar posts. Clearly, I'm not alone in my deep-seated convictions. But the most interesting, I think, is the theory of Cyrus Teed, an amateur scientist who founded a religious sect (Koreshanity) in the belief that we are already living on the inside of the world. From his Cellular Cosmogony:

The sun is an invisible electromagnetic battery revolving in the universe's center on a 24-year cycle. Our visible sun is only a reflection, as is the moon, with the stars reflecting off seven mercurial discs that float in the sphere's center. Inside the earth there are three separate atmospheres: the first composed of oxygen and nitrogen and closest to the earth; the second, a hydrogen atmosphere above it; the third, an aboron atmosphere at the center. The earth's shell is one hundred miles thick and has seventeen layers. The outer seven are metallic with a gold rind on the outermost layer, the middle five are mineral and the five inward are geologic strata. Inside the shell there is life, outside a void.**

Teed established a commune in Florida in 1894, which finally fizzled out in the 1960s. The place is now a state historical site. Strangely enough, soon after reading Mr. Harvey's post, I met a professor who lives near the site and takes his students there on occasion. So when he started talking about this theory that we live on the inside of the earth, I actually knew what he was talking about and could respond intelligently. It's called social networking, people. "You see?" I told my wife. "Reading weird stuff on the Internet isn't just wasting time after all!"

But it's strange, isn't it, how many "alternative" scientific theories (hollow earth, Atlantis, spiritualism, etc.) of the turn of the century gave birth to subgenres of fantastic literature? One wonders what theories Burroughs was familiar with in creating Pellucidar. At any rate, he was apparently unfamiliar with the shell theorem, first proved by Isaac Newton, which states that, at any given point in a spherically symmetric distribution of mass, only the mass closer to the center than the point contributes to the gravitational force at that point; all other mass can be ignored because its gravity cancels itself out, so to speak. The upshot is that, inside a perfectly hollow spherical shell, there would be no gravity at all; if, as in Pellucidar, there were a massive sun-like body at the center of the hollow, everything would fall into that body and burn. Of course, there would be nothing to keep such a body in its place at the center.

Speaking of Pellucidar and stupid movies, I recently watched At the Earth's Core, an Amicus production starring Peter Cushing and Doug McClure, with my kids. ("Hi! I'm Doug McClure! You may remember me from such films as At the Earth's Core!") Not so great, but the kids loved it. We also recently watched The Valley of the Gwangi, a Ray Harryhausen film about cowboys trying to capture dinosaurs for their wild west show in Mexico. It has same basic plot as King Kong (another modern-myth candidate) and ends with an allosaurus stalking a cowboy, his girlfriend, and a boy named Lope through an empty cathedral, which is pretty awesome.

Kong-derived stories seem always to feature some kind of dark journey upriver to primordial beginnings, which we saw as a key element in the Heart of Darkness myth. And so we're brought back to the primordial beginnings of this post, that is, Apocalypse Now.

* At one point, a search party happens upon a letter that a guy who got eaten was writing to his family. They make a big deal about how they're going to see that his widow gets his things. It's a solemn moment, but I couldn't help but imagine how that would go: "Ma'am, I'm very sorry to inform you that your husband was killed in action. Well, no, actually it wasn't in Vietnam. No, he survived that. What happened was, we were sent on this special mission to a secret unexplored island inhabited by prehistoric monsters, where he was eaten by a giant lizard creature. I'm so sorry for your loss."

** Actually, I imagine that there's probably prehistoric creatures on the outside.

Vast Active Living Intelligence System

I've never been much of a science fiction reader. My attempts at writing it have been pretty unsuccessful, too, at least to my mind. Sometimes this embarrasses me. When a "real-life" acquaintance finds out I write, and they ask, "Oh! What sorts of things?" I stammer a bit, and say, "Oh, you know, sci-fi fantasy stuff." But that's not quite honest, is it? It's just that, if I come right out and say, I write fantasy, people don't seem to know what I'm talking about. Maybe it's just where I live. It sounds like I'm confessing to writing, you know, fantasies, as in the "fantasy suites" down at the Ramada Inn. But sci-fi they understand, and it gets the basic idea across.

Me, I like the prose laid on thick, as in Conrad or Melville. That's probably obvious to readers of my books. But you don't find many gothic edifices or thickets of purple prose in the science fiction field. Descriptions are terse and often rather vague. Everything is done by suggestion. My eye just glides right over it. I'm not particularly intrigued by fictional advances in science or technology, either. Maybe I spent too many years studying spin geometry and quantum field theory.

Leaving aside romancers of the cosmic future like Herbert and Wolfe, whom I personally consider to write a species of fantasy rather than science fiction, what I find when I look at the authors I most enjoy (A. E. van Vogt, Alfred Bester, Philip K. Dick) is a preoccupation with philosophy, religion, and psychology.

What brings on this little soliloquy is the fact that I've just read (or listened to, at any rate) Philip K. Dick's VALIS yet another time. I find myself reading Dick whenever I go through a particularly severe bout of depression and isolation. His books tend to be about people who are depressed and isolated, of course, but I find them strangely consoling for that very reason. He's a humane writer with a sympathy that never becomes sentimental.

Though possibly his most idiosyncratic work, VALIS is one that I've returned to again and again. It's Dick's hilarious yet deeply sad semi-autobiographical account of one seriously fucked-up (as Dick would put it) person's (or is it persons'?) slightly brain-fried search for God (or whatever) in paranoid post-Nixon 1970s California. Unlike a lot of Dick's fiction, drugs play only a peripheral role. Religious experience has taken their place. I remember my mother once telling me that, to her, it seemed like the Jesus People of the seventies had merely traded one drug for another (that is, dionysian ecstasy). Maybe that sums up Dick's experience.

The milieu described in a number of Dick's drugs-and-religion books bears a disturbing resemblance to a certain phase of my own life, when I spent all my time with card-carrying prophets, traveling evangelists, drug addicts, professional bead-necklace-making drifters, hippies living in station wagons, cell group leaders, paranoid schizophrenics, Hare Krishnas, recovering vampires, and undercover missionaries. I was scared out of my mind, autistic without knowing it, and, for a while, on the verge of homelessness and utter ruin. But that was my world, and the only thing I could do was try to find meaning in it. My general situation was, like Horselover Fat's, fucked up. Actually, it was just after I'd divorced myself from that world that I first started reading Philip K. Dick, starting with And Now Wait for Last Year. What I'm trying to say is, Dick's whacked-out religious novels hit close to home.

You might call VALIS an exploration of lowercase-g gnosticism, that is, salvation through special knowledge (or "information," as Dick puts it). The Exegesis runs all through it, with frequent citations from the New Testament and the pre-Socratic philosophers. What's strange is that it seems to call into question the very concept of saving knowledge, reaffirming John of the Cross's path of negation. A message is only as reliable as the messenger. Sensory impressions, interior locutions, and emotional experiences can always be questioned. Maybe they come from a divine source, or maybe someone's just playing with microwave transmissions. Maybe you're speaking to an incarnation of the pleroma, or maybe it's just a little girl rigged with wires and speakers. Looking in from the outside of Dick's universe, it seems to me that a god whose communication of himself takes place solely on the plane of "information" will always turn out to be a resident of some star system or other, that is, a being more powerful but commensurate with human beings.

It strikes me as ironic that Fat's friend David, a Catholic (and, apparently, a stand-in for Tim Powers), always tries to bring C. S. Lewis into his theodicy. Lewis was himself a gnostic, in that his descriptions of faith, in both his fiction and his apologetic works, amount to a kind of secret knowledge. The heaven described in The Last Battle is a thoroughly gnostic heaven; both Dick and Lewis routinely cite Plato. I wonder how much Lewis Dick had actually read, if any. The David character resists, but ultimately accepts the import of Fat's revelations and the significance of the Eric Lampton film. But then it all just fizzles out, gets explained away (if one can call it that) as the operation of mundane technology and delusion...

I think I'll read The Divine Invasion sometime soon. No doubt I'll have more to say then.

Some other posts on Dick-related material that you might enjoy:

• Dick's Broken-Backed Novels
• Can-D and Other Matters
• The Man Who Fell to Earth

Keftu (Still) Indomitable!

Okay, ladies and gentlemen. The King of Nightspore's Crown is back and better than ever. In honor of the awesome new series name, let's peruse a few passages from...the King James Bible!

And Cain went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden. And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived, and bare Enoch: and he builded a city, and called the name of the city, after the name of his son, Enoch. And unto Enoch was born Irad: and Irad begat Mehujael: and Mehujael begat Methusael: and Methusael begat Lamech. And Lamech took unto him two wives: the name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other Zillah. And Adah bare Jabal: he was the father of such as dwell in tents, and of such as have cattle. And his brother's name was Jubal: he was the father of all such as handle the harp and organ.

When I was about nine, I happened to see a hardcover Bible for sale in the mall. (This was back when you could buy books in malls.) I didn't have access to a Bible at the time, and this one caught my eye for some reason. I begged my mom to buy it for me. She did so, despite an initial reluctance out of fear that I would trash it or something. (I still have it, and it's still in perfect condition, so there.) (My parents were always suckers for buying me books, but they eventually discovered that I would buy them with my own allowance if necessary, so that source dried up.)

It was the King James Version. I set to work reading it at once. And man oh man, is there some weird shit in the Bible. I use the colorful metaphor advisedly, because scriptures are chock full of earthy images and bizarre carnal encounters, though the prudery of the translation hid certain, ah, matters, from my impressionable mind. I do remember asking my mother what "begat" and "slayeth" meant.

And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose. There were nephilim in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.

I read Madeleine L'Engle's Many Waters at around the same time, and even dressed up as Japheth the son of Noah for Halloween. Yes, I was a weird kid. But ever since, I've been fascinated with the first eleven chapters of Genesis. My Ant–, er, Enoch stories reflect that. I don't know what it is about Norse / Teutonic / Medieval settings and fantasy – Tolkien is to blame, I guess – but me? I'm all about the Greek and the Semitic (cf. here and here). I'm especially interested in the ways in which the religions of the surrounding cultures bled into the Bronze Age traditions that went into what we call the Bible.

And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.

Anyways, these days I'm not reading my Bible so much as J. B. Bury's A History of Greece (1900). I've also been working on Lord Foul's Bane, but I have to say, it's been kind of a slog. And I read Bleak House this year, people. I can't fault the author, really. Epic fantasy has just gotten kind of boring to me. Even edgy epic fantasy.

Wait, don't I write epic fantasy? I don't know. To me it's different somehow. More along the lines of The Book of the New Sun than The Lord of the Rings. Anyway, I used to eat up epic fantasy, but these days it's tough going. Maybe reading Cars and Trucks and Things That Go too many times has shortened my attention span.

Land of Enchantment and Atom Bombs

My painting of Taos Pueblo.

I just spent the better part of a week in the Santa Fe area. I've traveled, camped, and backpacked in New Mexico too many times to count, and Santa Fe is my favorite place to visit. Anyone who reads my blog knows that I delight in finding connections between seemingly far-separated subjects. Thanks to my trip, my brain is a whirl of such connections right now.

One thing that strikes me about Santa Fe is the almost painful juxtaposition of old and new. The region is the setting of Willa Cather's backward-looking Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) as well as Aldous Huxley's forward-looking Brave New World (1931). For both authors, the pueblos represent a link to a world rooted in the past. From the former:

Father Latour lay with his ear to this crack for a long while, despite the cold that came from it. He told himself he was listening to one of the oldest voices of the earth. What he heard was the sound of a great underground river, flowing through a resounding cavern. The water was far, far below, perhaps as deep as the foot of the mountain, a flood moving in utter blackness under ribs of antediluvian rock. It was not a rushing noise, but the sound of a great flood moving with majesty and power.
     "It is terrible," he said at last, as he rose.
     "Si, Padre." Jacinto began spitting on the clay he had gouged out of the seam, and plastered it up again.

Whenever I'm in the area I pay a visit to Bandelier National Monument, where the Frijoles Canyon shelters the ruins of the ancient town of Tyuonyi, the descendants of whose builders dwell at Cochiti Pueblo to the south; perched almost on top of it is the National Laboratory at Los Alamos, where the Manhattan Project was undertaken and where the first atomic bombs were created; beyond that is San Ildefonso Pueblo. Thus are the forces of preservation and destruction violently juxtaposed.

Upon passing the National Laboratory on this trip, I was reminded of a quote from E. F. Schumacher's A Guide for the Perplexed, which I recently read:

The pursuit of science is a matter of taking stock and formulating recipes for action. Every recipe is a conditional sentence of the type, "If you want to achieve this or that, take such and such steps." [...] The test of a recipe is purely pragmatic – the proof of the pudding being in the eating. The perfections of this type of science are purely practical – the objective, i.e. independent of the character and interests of the operator, measurable, recordable, repeatable. Such knowledge is "public" in the sense that it can be used even by evil men for nefarious purposes; it gives power to anyone who manages to get hold of it. (Not surprisingly, therefore, many attempts are always being made to keep parts of this "public" knowledge secret!)

Schumacher opposes knowledge for manipulation (described here) to knowledge for understanding, without which our civilization is sinking ever deeper into "anguish, despair, and lack of freedom."

The Trinity nuclear test. [source]
"I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
[from the Bhagavad Gita, quoted by Robert Oppenheimer]

My interest in the history and culture of the region has led me to begin collecting pottery from the local pueblos. Each pueblo has its own distinctive style, such as the famous black-on-black technique developed by Maria Martinez of San Ildefonso Pueblo, which has been exhibited at world's fairs and major museums around the country.

My modest pottery collection. The second and third from the left are from
San Ildefonso, where many of Maria Martinez' kin are still in business.
The others are from Taos, Santa Clara, Acoma, and Santo Domingo.

I prefer to acquire the pottery by visiting the native artisans and sellers. Entering a pueblo is like stepping into a small foreign country, and you are very conscious of being a guest who might be tolerated but is not particularly welcome. Some, such as Santa Clara Pueblo, are fairly friendly and informal; others are quite strict, and some discourage outsiders altogether. On this trip I was fairly run off from Santo Domingo Pueblo for unknowingly approaching during a day of ceremonial dances, which are closed to outsiders.

Maria Martinez, who developed a new style of blackware, with physicist
Enrico Fermi, who worked on the Manhattan Project and created
the world's first nuclear reactor. [source]

At Santa Clara, a dealer from whom I ultimately bought a couple of pieces had a long talk with my family, explaining to my children in steps how the pottery was made. At one point he showed us a wedding picture of his grandparents: his grandfather, recently returned from service in World War I, in full uniform, beside his grandmother, looking rather sullen to have her picture taken, in a buckskin dress or robe, and two other men in full costume, with feathered headdresses. A wedding vase sat on the earth at their feet; ruinous adobe brick dwellings loomed behind.

My painting of the adobe church at Los Ranchos de Taos. This church
was painted many times by Georgia O'Keeffe. A thoroughly modern
abstract painter, she found refuge in northern New Mexico after her
years in New York.

Another site I never fail to visit is the Santuario de Chimayó, a major pilgrimage site and, depending on your outlook, a holy place or an instance of irrational fanaticism (or possibly a curious mixture of the two). The small adobe chapel, built in about 1816, lies at the bottom of a narrow valley on the High Road to Taos, surrounded by rocky red hills and juniper trees.

Chimayo in 1934. [source]

It resembles many such churches in northern New Mexico, with this exception: a tiny square room, called el pocito ("the little well"), reached through a door beside the altar, contains a round pit filled with "holy dirt," which can be taken away by the pilgrims and is reputed to perform cures. The long room running from el pocito alongside the nave holds numerous photos, ex-votos, and discarded crutches.

The town of Chimayó was named for a local hill, known as Tsi Mayoh in the Tewa tongue. Whether it was a site of devotion for the natives before colonial times is not clear. An old tradition holds that a pueblo formerly stood in the area; a book I have (purchased, of all places, at a tacky tourist gift shop in Clines Corners) describes the experiences of Maria Martinez upon visiting the chapel from nearby San Ildefonso.

My own picture of the Sanctuario, taken in 2007.

Most accounts have the chapel built by Don Bernardo Abeyta. An early member of Los Hermanos de la Fraternidad Piadosa de Nuestro Padre Jesús Nazareno (more commonly known as the Penitentes, about which more in a moment), Don Abeyta supposedly discovered an ancient crucifix at the pit's location while performing penitential exercises there on Good Friday sometime around 1810.

Signs in the Santuario museum suggest that the crucifix was left there by Spanish explorers. However that may be, Don Abeyta was seemingly devoted to the Christ of Esquipulas, worshiped at a basilica in Guatemala where the clay is also held to have curative properties, a belief possibly adopted from the native culture and "baptized" by the Spaniards. The museum speaks of the ceiba tree, which holds a central place in Maya mythology, hinting (on somewhat slender evidence, it is true) at other connections between Chimayó and the pre-Columbian religions of Central America.

Esquipulas Basilica, Guatemala, in 1895. [source]

The Penitentes are credited by some with preserving the Catholic faith in the area during the tumultuous period after the Catholic religious orders were expelled from Mexico. Cather's novel deals with the aftermath of this dark time very effectively. Linked with the medieval Flagellants (in spirit if not in historical continuity), the Penitentes were a secretive sect that the Church sought to suppress after the capture of the Southwest by the United States and the division of the current archdiocese from that of Durango.

An interesting book I have, Missions and Pueblos of the Old Southwest (1929), written by one Earle R. Forrest, who had once worked as a cowboy in the Arizona desert and had traveled throughout the area extensively before the arrival of the first automobiles, devotes a chapter to the Penitentes. According to him, the brothers would scourge themselves with chunks of cholla cactus woven into thongs of rope; crucifixion ceremonies were held in remote places at night, and sometimes the Cristo whose ardor was thus tested never returned.

The book is illustrated with photographs taken by the author; one depicts a Penitente morada, or meeting house, and another purports to be the only known photograph of a Penitente procession:

The piety of the Penitentes plays a role in Brave New World. The protagonist, John, raised on a Savage Reservation in New Mexico, becomes a sign of contradiction in the World State, and creates a public spectacle in his attempts at purification through self-flagellation:

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."

Mining the Bible

The Book of Tobit isn't the most well-known book of the Bible. For one thing, it's very short; for another, it's not in all Bibles. Catholics refer to it as "deuterocanonical," indicating that it is not in the current Hebrew Bible, but regard it as canon; to Protestants it is "apocryphal," hence non-canonical.

The events Tobit describes are placed in the 8th century BC, but it was probably written in the 3rd or 2nd century, or at any rate sometime after the return from the exile. It was written in Aramaic, but most modern editions are based on one of several ancient Greek versions. The Aramaic and Hebrew versions were thought lost until fragments were found in Cave IV at Qumran. St. Jerome claimed to have based his version for the Latin Vulgate on an Aramaic copy.

The book is, according to most scholars, a kind of religious fairy tale:

Tobit is a righteous Israelite living in Nineveh after being deported by Shalmaneser, the king of Assyria who conquered the northern kingdom. He adheres to the Mosaic law, practices charity, and is especially solicitous regarding the burial of the dead. This gets him in trouble with Sennacherib, Shalmaneser's successor, forcing him to flee for his life. (There are some historical errors here, but I'm presenting the story as-is.) After Sennacherib's assassination, Tobit's nephew Ahiqar (a Near Eastern folk hero) pulls some strings to allow for his return. He takes up his dead-burying activities again, prompting the derision of his neighbors. After burying a man strangled in the marketplace, he sleeps in the open, and birds poop in his eyes. This causes cataracts and, eventually, blindness. He prays for death.

Meanwhile, a young Israelite woman named Sarah, who lives in Ecbatana in Media (in modern-day Iran), is experiencing troubles of her own. She's gotten married seven times, but every time, just as she was preparing to go to bed with her new husband, the demon Asmodeus (from the Persian aeshma daeva, demon of wrath) appeared and killed the groom to prevent their consummating their union. Her maid accuses her of having strangled them all. She prays for death.

Both prayers are heard by God, who sends the angel Raphael to make things right.

Tobit sends his son Tobias to Media to retrieve a large sum of money he deposited there many years ago. Tobias enlists the service of a young man (Raphael in mortal disguise) who claims to know the roads. While en route, a fish tries to eat Tobiah's foot as he's bathing in the Tigris River. He catches the fish, and Raphael advises him to keep the liver, the heart, and the gall. The first two repel demons when roasted, and the third is a cure for cataracts.

They reach Sarah's house. Tobiah marries Sarah and they go to the bridal chamber. He places the liver and heart on embers prepared for incense. Asmodeus is driven by the smoke into Upper Egypt, where he is bound by Raphael. Tobiah and Sarah rise to say a prayer together. It's a prayer of thanksgiving that goes from the cosmic to the intimate, dwelling on the heavens and the earth, Adam and Eve, sexual complementarity, mutual support, sincere love, and the hope of growing old together.

Sarah says, "Amen," and they get in bed together. Sarah's father, who had ordered a grave to be dug in the night, has it filled in when he discovers the happy outcome. The money is retrieved and the couple goes to Nineveh. Tobiah applies the gall to his father's eyes and is able to peel the cataracts off his eyeballs. The angel then reveals his true identity:

I am Raphael, one of the seven holy angels who present the prayers of the saints and enter into the presence of the glory of the Holy One.

He also gives some insight into the nature of his supposed corporeality:

All these days I merely appeared to you and did not eat or drink, but you were seeing a vision.

Years later, from his deathbed, Tobit admonishes his son to return to Ecbatana, for the prophet has preached the destruction of Nineveh. So Tobiah and Sarah and their family return to Media, where they hear about the fall of Nineveh and praise God.

All in all, it's a strange, beautiful tale full of bizarre happenings and vivid details that passes freely and unapologetically from the scatological, the visceral, and the sexual to the angelic and the divine. It's entertaining – it could almost be the basis for a story in the Arabian Nights – at the same time as being edifying and thought-provoking. More than anything, viewed purely as a story, it's a wonderful mine for writers.

John O'Neill of Black Gate fame recently mentioned his surprise that fantasy authors don't do more with Biblical material:

When I was editing fiction for Black Gate, I was always a little surprised at how many writers were eager to tap the dead religions of Ancient Greece, Rome and Scandinavia, and how few seemed interested in the rich storytelling of the Bible. Maybe it was an overabundance of respect — or, more likely, a lack of real familiarity with the source material.

I suspect that, culturally speaking, it's just too close, for believers as well as non-believers. There's a sense of ownership. We know the Bible, or so we think. It's old hat.

The truth is, the Bible has a lot of weird, sexy, and violent parts that don't come up in Sunday school. The Old Testament is a Bronze-Age epic of love and revenge and worship and war, rich in historical detail and local color, with poetic images that are some of the most beautiful in any language. It's a bridge from the cosmic to the historical, establishing a supernatural link and parallel between the Temple liturgy and the creation of the universe.

Even the New Testament has more strangeness to mine than most people suspect. Think, for instance, of the exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac, in which Jesus casts the demon called Legion ("for we are many") out of a tomb-dwelling demoniac, but, at its request, allows it to enter a herd of swine, which promptly drown themselves in the sea. That story alone prompts countless questions about the nature of the world of spirits; it makes you feel like you're catching just a glimpse into a strange and frightening plane with its own secret laws.

One fantasy author who did do a lot with Biblical material is Madeleine L'Engle. I read her Time Quartet many times when I was a pre-teen. My favorite was Many Waters, in which the "normal" Murray twins Dennys and Sandy are accidentally time-warped into the days leading up to the Deluge, where they meet the patriarchs, fall in love with a beautiful young woman, and come into contact with nephilim, seraphim, virtual unicorns, and tiny wooly mammoths. When I was in the fourth grade I began a project of reading the King James Version of the Bible, and Many Waters went hand-in-hand with the strange things I was encountering there. I even dressed as Japheth for Book Day in the fifth grade.

I happen to do a lot with Biblical material myself. The world of Antellus represents a blend of Greek and Semitic mythology. Like L'Engle, I'm especially drawn to the first part of Genesis, from the creation accounts (there's two of them, you know) down to the Tower of Babel. Robert Alter's Genesis: Translation and Commentary (W. W. Norton) is an excellent non-religious translation. I'm also fascinated by the mythologies of other Semitic peoples, especially the Arabian/Islamic jinn, on which I base my nephelim, as well as some of the other ancient Jewish traditions. But I have a special affection for Tobit, which is one reason I chose my pen name as I did.

So, go read your Bible. If you don't have one, get one. I'm sure you can find someone more than willing to give you a nice one for free, even if you tell them that you just want to mine it for material. It just might not have the deuterocanonical books in it...

The Iron Leaps

There is in the last second of time or hair’s breadth of space, before the iron leaps to the magnet, an abyss full of all the unfathomable forces of the universe. The space between doing and not doing such a thing is so tiny and so vast. [Chesterton]

My first real publishing credit is "Some Remarks on Autism and Catholicism," an essay that appeared in the Catholic literary quarterly Dappled Things in 2009. It's actually what led to my current fiction-writing endeavors, as the same issue contains this excellent advice on writing by Catholic sci-fi author John C. Wright, whose van Vogt sequel Null-A Continuum I reviewed here.

That essay is written under my real name; I'm kind of coming out of the closet here. I don't usually write about such matters on my blog, except as it affects my various crafts. What I mean is, I don't seek to persuade people to see things the way I do. Of course it's true that I'm just a scribbler, and have no reason to presume people would want to read my inane thoughts on religion. But then again, I do apparently presume that there's a big demand for my inane thoughts on fiction, art, logic, and chickens.

(Want to know something weird? I just finished watching Big Trouble in Little China, and the voice in my head as I reread this now sounds like Jack Burton's bad imitation of John Wayne. Here's the movie poster, just because.)

So I ask myself, what's the difference? Here's what I've come up with:

1. I've noticed that taking unpopular stances on controversial topics and stickin' it to 'em is a really awesome way to drive up your Internet readership and sell lots and lots of books. But somehow that isn't what I set out to do when I started writing.
2. I don't want to get stuck in a Catholic ghetto. Everyone wants to be the next Flannery O'Connor, but Flannery O'Connor was never the first Flannery O'Connor.
3. Some of my stories have gotten really negative reactions from Catholics. For instance, a science fiction story about nuns that I submitted to a Catholic literary contest last year garnered a "very bad visceral reaction" from a reader and "terrified" the editor. And most of my other stories involve sex and violence. So why bother?

But on the other hand, there's these recent Pew results about religion. I'm too lazy to look them up and link them, but it seems that American Catholicism is on the decline or something. It's got all the Catholic bloggers worked up. And really, it is getting harder and harder to be Catholic these days.

Elizabeth Scalia, a.k.a. The Anchoress, whose blog I've read since 2005, has called on Catholic writer-types to come out and say why they're not going to leave the faith. And, well, I'm not exactly a Catholic writer (though I'm Catholic and I write), but I feel like I ought to participate.

So, first little background, if you got bored and didn't finish my essay: After a youth of being taught by my elders to despise Catholicism, I was lured – lured, I tell you – into a fervid southern sect as a college freshman by a very pretty sophomore, who happens now to be my wife. Things went bad (and really, really weird), and I ended up a rather depressed and isolated atheist working on a doctorate in mathematics. And also married.

Some years later, in the midst of a prolonged bout of soul-searching, I went camping. This was 2005, shortly after the death of Pope John Paul II. It was Pentecost, though I didn't know it at the time. I had a long dream about the mass and the universal church and the election of Pope Benedict XVI. I won't go into the details, but it ended as I entered a confessional. That morning I knew I had to return.

Yes, I made a major decision that subsequently changed the course of my entire life as a result of a mystical dream.

However, the first thing I did was go to the university library to check out John Henry Newman's Development of Christian Doctrine. I read it in three days. Next I read the Apologia Pro Vita Sua of the same author. Then I knew that I really had to return, which I did that summer. My wife decided to convert as well, and was received into the Catholic Church at the following Easter vigil...

So, what was I trying to explain? Why I'm still Catholic? Well, it's my whole life. My whole life is the answer. Which isn't very satisfying, perhaps. So here's what I'll do. In the near future, I'll post a personal memoir about a crazy guitar duel with the Hare Krishnas of Mexico.

Hope and Horror

Tolkien was a watershed in fantasy, but I've always found myself drawn to what went before rather than to what came after. The analogy's not perfect, but H. P. Lovecraft has something of the same role in weird horror, and in much the same way I generally prefer to explore his predecessors. Not that I'm denigrating either author; it's just that they're so big in their respective genres that nothing that came after could be quite free of their influence, either positively or negatively. They brought about a loss of (literary) innocence, and to me there's always something wild and free about their forerunners.

For instance, while more developed, Lovecraft's mythos or whatever you want to call it is tame compared to what you find in Arthur Machen, William Hope Hodgson, Robert W. Chambers, Oscar Wilde, &c. By tame I don't mean boring or not worth reading; I simply mean that it's been taught its place, answers when called, and retires when dismissed. For all their eldritch grandeur, Lovecraft's alien gods are too well delineated to be truly horrifying to me, and I've always read him as a fantasist rather than as a horror writer. But Machen's Pan, while of course quite familiar in a cultural sense, has something unspeakably perverted and wrong about him.

Hodgson is my favorite of the aforementioned authors; this spring I read his masterpiece, and one of my favorite novels: The House on the Borderland. Not content to recount a brutal battle with swine-things from the mysterious subterranean world beneath his house, after the manner of The Boats of the "Glen Carrig", he expands the scope to cosmic proportions, traveling far beyond the compass of even The Night Land. Here H. G. Wells' The Time Machine, another favorite of mine, was clearly an influence (and how much a one, I wonder?), but House delves much deeper into the temporal abyss.

*          *          *

Now, this is neither here nor there, but when I was a kid I was a huge fan of the Infocom games – I've beaten Zork I, II, and III, which, if you've played them, should impress you! – and the setting of Zork I vaguely reminds me of The House on the Borderland. The programmers seemingly took grues from The Dying Earth:

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

What is a grue, you ask?

> what is a grue

The grue is a sinister, lurking presence in the dark places of the earth. Its favorite diet is adventurers, but its insatiable appetite is tempered by its fear of light. No grue has ever been seen by the light of day, and few have survived its fearsome jaws to tell the tale.

I wonder if they were Hodgson readers as well?

*          *          *

As an OCDS I sometimes ask myself, Self, what business does a person with religious pretensions have reading (or writing!) supernatural horror? Shouldn't the things I read and write have some kind of moral or eucatastrophe or epiphany or something? Certainly the kindly old ladies I meet with every month would be scandalized if they knew the sorts of things I've put out there, which happens to be one of the chief reasons I write with a pen name. And some of my unpublished pieces – my Hodgson fan fiction, for instance – are quite openly at odds with received dogma. But more than anything, what characterizes supernatural horror is a plot of hopelessness, of despair that an end exists to be attained, i.e., the negation of a theological virtue. Otherwise it would be a thriller or some such thing. Who ever read Lovecraft hoping the protagonist would somehow get out of it all and find that, really, God's in his heaven, and all's right with the world? But isn't it an imperfection or a sin to dally in such crooked fancies?

Part of the answer (if there is one) is, I think, that stories are works of art, and not religious tracts. A stunning revelation, I know. But it's one not many people these days seem to understand, and it's not just religious-types. For instance, if you make the progressive in your story a good guy, and the stick-in-the-mud a pharisee or a doofus, then everyone will think you're scoring points for progressivism (or whatever -ism you like), even if you're actually attacking it by exposing its weaknesses in some subtle way.

Graham Greene understood the narrative weakness of making your protagonist the one who's right about everything, and the Catholics in his novels tend to be no-goods, like the whiskey priest in The Power and the Glory. In Brighton Rock, for instance, the crusading protagonist is a modern pagan named Ida, while her opponent, Pinky, who eventually gets what's coming to him, is a vindictive, hateful little hoodlum and a Catholic. Plenty of readers conclude that Greene is attacking Catholicism – just look around on the Internet – but by giving Ida her head what he's actually doing is exposing every joint and rivet in her naked worldview and allowing the reader to see its inherent poverty and blindness. It's the contrapositive of optima corrupta pessima.

So people nowadays facilely assume that the white hats are the truth-tellers and the black hats the liars, and that what happens in a story is a working-out of the way the author thinks the world should be. But even granting that authors with an ax to grind can be slightly more sophisticated in their approach, can we admit authors who deliberately subvert their own worldviews?

I say yes. Because the point of a story – especially a short story, as I see it – is to form a beautiful pattern, and if its inner logic calls for the violation of some deeply held truth, well, then truth must be violated. In the story, all that matters is narrative truth, plot-logic, and the writer who sins against it sins against beauty, a transcendental in its own right. Furthermore, the thing about Lovecraft and his circle is that there's a very great element of playfulness about it all. We can play make-believe, can't we?

And even if I were to cede that literature must have a moral purpose (which I do not), who's to say that it can't be a thought experiment in which I start with certain assumptions and take them to their logical conclusion? Consider also that even great saints can experience hopelessness – e.g., Thérèse of Lisieux, the young Carmelite whose temptations to blaspheme and despair while dying of tuberculosis were censored from the earliest editions of her autobiography – and it might be said that there's something cathartic about stepping into a malign cosmos for a brief moment. Because, really, that's the human condition, that's what we face every day. "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me" (Pascal).

So, there's that, a little apology in case any of my church-lady friends find this blog, which, since I doubt they're out trolling the Internet for musings on weird fiction, seems unlikely enough.

See also: Catharsis and the Post-Apocalyptic

Of Rodents and Ashes

This being the first Friday of Lent, the season of penance, allow me to spend a few moments dwelling on the doctrine of Purgatory and its role in one of my favorite movies: Groundhog Day.

I had originally intended to post about this topic on, you know, Groundhog Day, but instead I was in the hospital watching my daughter, Agnes Callista, being born, and then, later on, sleeping fitfully in a hospital easy chair whenever I wasn't changing horrible, horrible meconium diapers (don't click the link if it's close to lunchtime). Still, though it may seem a bit silly, it was special to me that our daughter was born on Groundhog Day, which also happens to be Candlemas.

Before we begin, I would like to invoke the capybara as a beneficent animal spirit-guide in our quest. Why the capybara, you ask? For one thing, it is a rodent, like the groundhog. It is, in fact, the largest rodent in the world, and one of my favorite animals. The picture shown here is a watercolor painting I did a few years ago in its honor.

But, more than this, there is a legend that sixteenth-century missionaries to South America, in a quandary as to whether the creature was to be considered fish or flesh, obtained permission from the Vatican for Catholics to consume its meat on Fridays. (The word "fish" has not always been used in the current taxonomical sense – cf. Moby-Dick, Chapter 32 – so this is more plausible than it may seem.) Rumor has it that this permission has never been rescinded. Me, I'm not a big meat-eater, and don't particularly care for fish (or giant aquatic guinea pigs), so I'm more than happy to forgo the K of C fish fry in favor of pasta or saag paneer on Fridays. Living where we do, we have to substitute queso fresco for the paneer, so it's not quite the same, though our Indian friends to whom we introduced q.f. now do the same thing, and actually like it better.

But I digress.

Many years ago, when I was not a practicing Catholic, I came across Tolkien's short story "Leaf by Niggle," which is the "leaf" of his Tree and Leaf. It is the story of a niggling artist who, like me, is devoted to his art despite his obscurity and mediocrity, but who tends to be a bit negligent of the things of this world, i.e., the needs of his neighbors. He is compelled at last to start his journey (death) and is sentenced to performing mundane tasks (like painting boards) for a long, long period of time. This gradually changes him. He learns discipline, how to make the best use of his time. And then, at long last, he is judged fit to pursue...a new task, with the help of his old neighbor, with whom he is now reconciled.

It is, of course, a story about Purgatory, which I didn't believe in at the time. It made me see, if not the religious necessity of the dogma, at least the psychological necessity of thing itself. To tell the truth, I'm not all that interested in disputing the truth of the belief. Most people have a rather stupid comic-book idea of what it actually entails, whereas the official teaching is fairly agnostic. But let me at least say that I was at the time living in the Bible Belt, where altar-call, pray-this-prayer-and-you'll-be-saved Christianity reigns, and I always found the concept of faith-alone salvation without purgation repugnant. Because I knew that, deep down inside, I was a twisted, messed up person. Maybe I wasn't that horribly sinful, but at any rate I had a lot of problems. The idea of my getting "saved" without being made virtuous and strong seemed like putting lipstick on a pig.

One reason I enjoy Groundhog Day so much is that it gets at the same idea, at the psychological need for purgation. You see, everything we do affects who we are. That is why the Church insists on penance. A sin can be forgiven in a legal sense, but the damage done to the integrity of the person remains, and must be healed. You can't just wake up and say, starting right now I'm going to be a better person. You can change your actions in a superficial sense, but you can't change who you are, and who you are is what ultimately determines what you do. What is required, at least on this earth, is time. Sometimes – rather rarely, these days, but they're still around – you come across a Catholic who has a very literal tit-for-tat understanding of Purgatory and indulgences in terms of days and years. But even this simplistic understanding stands for the truth that a journey from Point A to Point B must be made, and that, for us, in the flesh, this means time. It's a truth often neglected in fiction, and people are generally quite sensitive to its absence.

Phil, Bill Murray's self-absorbed weatherman (who, amusingly, shares his name with the famous Punxsutawney rodent whose prognostications he's sent to report on), finds, as everyone knows, that his Groundhog Day repeats. At first he lives for material gratification. This leads to despair, and he begins committing suicide in an delightful variety of ways. But through all this he starts to see the goodness of his producer Rita, a woman he once despised, and determines to win her heart. Because of who he is, this takes the form of manipulation. He tries to learn what buttons to push to make her do what he wants her to do. She's still an object to him, not a person. His attempts at seeming cultured and kind are hilariously superficial. And she sees through him every time.

Here there is a turning point. Realizing that he will never succeed in making her love him as he is, but also having come to find some true love for her in his heart, he opens up to her about what he experiences every day. And she opens up to him in return. His day keeps repeating, but from that point on he seeks to better himself through hard work, reading, learning how to do things, performing good deeds, figuring out the best way to help the people around him on their own terms. This takes a long, long, long time. But in the end he is loved by all, including Rita; the breach between him and the human race is closed; the spell is broken.

Apart from all that, it is a hilarious movie, and one with amazing production values. It bears repeated watching, if only to observe the subtle similarities and differences in the background action from day to day.

So, there: I managed to write a post about the multiple connections between rodents and penance.

Bosque-Larios I

My most recent artistic endeavor:



Bosque-Larios I, 7" x 5", watercolor on hot-pressed paper.

In 1675, the first expedition from Mexico into the part of Texas in which I live was organized at the request of the local Indians, a Gueiquesale group, who wished to convert and enter under the protection of the Spanish crown. The Bosque-Larios Expedition, named for its leaders, Fernando del Bosque and Fray Juan Larios, crossed the Rio Grande and traveled north toward the Edwards Plateau. A high mass – reputedly the first high mass in Texas – was celebrated on a portable altar not far from where I live, and attended by more than a thousand Indians.

There, according to the expedition's travel log, a curious story was related to the explorers by a Gueiquesale leader. The Cabesas, a group of Indians with whom the Gueiquesales had dealings, had some time previously come into the possession of two Spanish children, a boy and a girl. The boy they had shot full of arrows – he died praying over his crucifix – while the girl was made a servant of, until, long after, she too fell victim to her captors' arrows. Her dead body was left where it fell. Two years later, the Indians happened upon it again, and found it as fresh as though she had just died, with no sign of decay or molestation by wild beasts. They moved the body to a cave. The account ends by noting that the girl had long hair.

[Cf. The Native Americans of the Texas Edwards Plateau, 1582-1799, Maria F. Wade, University of Texas Press, pp. 39-40.]

Did this actually happen? Materialists might doubt the Indians' story, or posit natural causes. For what it's worth, there is a precedent of saints' bodies remaining incorrupt. The romantic in me would like to think of these two as nameless martyrs in the wilderness. Many a medieval cult was established on slimmer evidence. Being a circuit-riding professor who teaches night classes, it is my lot to drive long, lonely desert roads after dark, and the story often comes to mind, especially when I'm in the vicinity of where the mass took place. I imagine the girl's body still reposing undiscovered somewhere in the hills to the north, where limestone caves abound. Whether the episode is more likely to have happened around here or over in Coahuila is more than I can say.

The plants in the picture (agave, prickly pear, red yucca) are such as are found locally; the figure is inspired by depictions of St. Sebastian and St. Cecilia, whose tombs I visited several years ago. The upper part of the picture employs a lot of chrome green and Naples yellow, the lower more sap green and raw sienna, with plenty of cadmium red and burnt umber throughout. As usual, no black was used, but there is a bit of black in Payne's gray, which I frequently employ.

The execution was inspired by William Blake and his disciple Samuel Palmer. I recently read G. E. Bentley's biography of Blake, which is quite excellent, but found the author strangely dismissive of the "conservative," naïve Palmer, to whom we owe many important impressions of Blake's last days. Palmer's early visionary works are far ahead of his time and among the most glorious in British art. Before his youthful exuberance was curbed by his father-in-law, the painter John Linnell, he seemed obsessed with trying to portray nighted pastoral scenes under the glow of the crescent moon. I'm always trying to get something of the magic of these works into my own pictures.

I once spent time poring over a facsimile of Palmer's famous early sketchbook. Unfortunately, after the artist's death, his son burned the other sketchbooks from that period because of their "unmanly" qualities, which, given the historical context, I take as a reference to homosexual undertones. It is a shame. Indeed, it is a great crime against art. And a great sadness that such genius should have been sandwiched between two such uncongenial minds.

Sometimes, as I continue to paint and sell art, and to write stories and publish them here and there, I wonder what will have become of all of my faltering efforts in a hundred years?