History of the Conquest of Peru

One month ago I announced the commencement of my reading of William H. Prescott's History of the Conquest of Peru, to be attended, it was hoped, with the just fruits my labors, in the form of dinner at a local Mexican food restaurant or a weekend getaway at a river resort. The drawing has not yet taken place, but I have at any rate completed the book.

All told, it was five hundred pages in small print, fairly bristling with footnotes. Fortunately the allotment of raffle tickets respects hours of reading rather than page count. Much to my discredit, it's been a long time since I've read such a large, dense book, I, who once spent a week of Christmas vacation tearing through Gibbon!

I have several times mentioned my longstanding interest in the Spanish exploration and conquest of the New World. In the past my acquaintance has been mainly with the exploits of Cortés in Mexico, the fullest and most enjoyable account of which is Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico. (I have the two volumes in a Modern Library edition.) The conquest of Peru presents a very different picture. Cortés, it is true, was little better than a freebooter, waging a war of avarice and rapine against an empire that had done the Spanish crown no harm, but it's hard to think of a crueler nation with more iniquitous social institutions than that of the Aztecs. We needn't admire Cortés the man to appreciate his skill as a commander, and, while we may regret the extinction of the civilization from a romantic point of view, it's hard to mourn the end of its bloody subjugations and diabolical sacrifices.

But the Peruvian empire was of a gentler sort, waging war for the sake of expanding its dominions, and exerting an iron sway over its people, but never indulging in the refined cruelties of Mexico. And their conqueror, Francisco Pizarro, far exceeded Cortés in audacity, perfidy, and vindictiveness. He destroyed the empire in one bold stroke, by seizing the person of the Inca, without anything like the thrilling campaign that conquered Mexico. After his capture, that prince offered to ransom himself by filling a room with gold; though he fulfilled the terms of the agreement, his continued existence was too great an embarrassment, and Pizarro had him executed on a pretext. The mode of execution was to have been the stake, but, upon the Inca's acceptance of the Christian faith, this was commuted to strangulation, and a mass was said for the repose of his soul. The empire of the Inca dissolved like a dream.

It's the clash of civilizations that draws me to these histories, the seeming anachronism of Spanish caballeros encountering a scene out of Herodotus, the virgin beauty and splendor of the American empires crumbling before the Spanish crown. The book opens with a comprehensive description of Peruvian civilization: its system of roads and hanging bridges, its tiered crops rising on one mountain from the tropics to temperate climes, and, of course, its cyclopean architecture.

But the most renowned of the Peruvian temples, the pride of the capital, and the wonder of the empire, was at Cuzco, where, under the munificence of successive sovereigns, it had become so enriched, that it received the name of Coricancha, or "the Place of Gold." It consisted of a principal building and several chapels and inferior edifices, covering a large extent of ground in the heart of the city, and completely encompassed by a wall, which, with the edifices, was all constructed of stone. [...] 

The interior of the temple was the most worthy of admiration. It was literally a mine of gold. On the western wall was emblazoned a representation of the deity, consisting of a human countenance, looking forth from amidst innumerable rays of light, which emanated from it in every direction, in the same manner as the sun is often personified with us. The figure was engraved on a massive plate of gold of enormous dimensions, thickly powdered with emeralds and precious stones. It was so situated in front of the great eastern portal, that the rays of the morning sun fell directly upon it at its rising, lighting up the whole apartment with an effulgence that seemed more than natural, and which was reflected back from the golden ornaments with which the walls and ceiling were everywhere in crusted. Gold, in the figurative language of the people was "the tears wept by the sun," and every part of the interior of the temple glowed with burnished plates and studs of the precious metal. [...]

Adjoining the principal structure were several chapels of smaller dimensions. One of them was consecrated to the Moon, the deity held next in reverence, as the mother of the Incas. Her effigy was delineated in the same manner as that of the Sun, on a vast plate that nearly covered one side of the apartment. But this plate, as well as all the decorations of the building, was of silver, as suited to the pale, silvery light of the beautiful planet. There were three other chapels, one of which was dedicated to the host of Stars, who formed the bright court of the Sister of the Sun; another was consecrated to his dread ministers of vengeance, the Thunder and the Lightning; and a third, to the Rainbow, whose many-colored arch spanned the walls of the edifice with hues almost as radiant as its own.

As for the narrative, I most enjoyed the slow progress of Pizarro from the mangrove swamps and deserts of the coast, through the icy pinnacles of the Andes, and into the sheltered green vales of the thither slopes.

The descent of the sierra, though the Andes are less precipitous on their eastern side than towards the west, was attended with difficulties almost equal to those of the upward march; and the Spaniards felt no little satisfaction, when, on the seventh day, they arrived in view of the valley of Caxamalca, which, enamelled with all the beauties of cultivation, lay unrolled like a rich and variegated carpet of verdure, in strong contrast with the dark forms of the Andes, that rose up everywhere around it. The valley is of an oval shape, extending about five leagues in length by three in breadth. It was inhabited by a population of a superior character to any which the Spaniards had met on the other side of the mountains, as was argued by the superior style of their attire, and the greater cleanliness and comfort visible both in their persons and dwellings. As far as the eye could reach, the level tract exhibited the show of a diligent and thrifty husbandry. A broad river rolled through the meadows, supplying facilities for copious irrigation by means of the usual canals and subterraneous aqueducts. The land, intersected by verdant hedge- rows, was checkered with patches of various cultivation; for the soil was rich, and the climate, if less stimulating than that of the sultry regions of the coast, was more favorable to the hardy products of the temperate latitudes. Below the adventurers, with its white houses glittering in the sun, lay the little city of Caxamalca, like a sparkling gem on the dark skirts of the sierra. At the distance of about a league farther, across the valley, might be seen columns of vapor rising up towards the heavens, indicating the place of the famous hot baths, much frequented by the Peruvian princes. And here, too, was a spectacle less grateful to the eyes of the Spaniards; for along the slope of the hills a white cloud of pavilions was seen covering the ground, as thick as snow-flakes, for the space, apparently, of several miles.

For me the climax of the history is the moment Hernando Pizarro and Hernando de Soto ride up to the Inca at the steaming baths of Cajamarca. The death of Atahualpa takes place halfway through the history, most of the rest of which is concerned with the Spaniards' wrangling for control of the empire. For my money it might have closed with the assassination of Pizarro in Lima.

At length, Pizarro, unable, in the hurry of the moment, to adjust the fastenings of his cuirass, threw it away, and, enveloping one arm in his cloak, with the other seized his sword, and sprang to his brother's assistance. It was too late; for Alcantara was already staggering under the loss of blood, and soon fell to the ground. Pizarro threw himself on his invaders, like a lion roused in his lair, and dealt his blows with as much rapidity and force, as if age had no power to stiffen his limbs. "What ho!" he cried, "traitors! have you come to kill me in my own house?" The conspirators drew back for a moment, as two of their body fell under Pizarro's sword; but they quickly rallied, and, from their superior numbers, fought at great advantage by relieving one another in the assault. Still the passage was narrow, and the struggle lasted for some minutes, till both of Pizarro's pages were stretched by his side, when Rada, impatient of the delay, called out, "Why are we so long about it? Down with the tyrant!" and taking one of his companions, Narvaez, in his arms, he thrust him against the marquess. Pizarro, instantly grappling with his opponent, ran him through with his sword. But at that moment he received a wound in the throat, and reeling, he sank on the floor, while the swords of Rada and several of the conspirators were plunged into his body. "Jesu!" exclaimed the dying man, and, tracing a cross with his finger on the bloody floor, he bent down his head to kiss it, when a stroke, more friendly than the rest, put an end to his existence.

Two things subsequent to the death of Pizarro stand out, however. The first (which actually took place at the same time) is the disastrous expedition of his brother, Gonzalo Pizarro, from Quito into the Amazon basin.

At length the way-worn company came on a broad expanse of water formed by the Napo, one of the great tributaries of the Amazon, and which, though only a third or fourth rate river in America, would pass for one of the first magnitude in the Old World. The sight gladdened their hearts, as, by winding along its banks, they hoped to find a safer and more practicable route. After traversing its borders for a considerable distance, closely beset with thickets which it taxed their strength to the utmost to overcome, Gonzalo and his party came within hearing of a rushing noise that sounded like subterranean thunder. The river, lashed into fury, tumbled along over rapids with frightful velocity, and conducted them to the brink of a magnificent cataract, which, to their wondering fancies, rushed down in one vast volume of foam to the depth of twelve hundred feet! The appalling sounds which they had heard for the distance of six leagues were rendered yet more oppressive to the spirits by the gloomy stillness of the surrounding forests. The rude warriors were filled with sentiments of awe. Not a bark dimpled the waters. No living thing was to be seen but the wild tenants of the wilderness, the unwieldy boa, and the loathsome alligator basking on the borders of the stream. The trees towering in wide-spread magnificence towards the heavens, the river rolling on in its rocky bed as it had rolled for ages, the solitude and silence of the scene, broken only by the hoarse fall of waters, or the faint rustling of the woods,—all seemed to spread out around them in the same wild and primitive state as when they came from the hands of the Creator.

It was an ill-fated expedition, stricken by starvation and betrayal. Down in the jungle, almost overcome with sickness and fatigue, the men constructed a crude boat from felled timber, with nails made from the shoes of devoured horses, and the cavaliers' rain-rotted clothes to stop the holes. This was sent ahead to the populous village which, the natives assured them, was just downstream. The scouts, upon reaching the Amazon and finding no village in evidence, decided to explore the river down to the Atlantic and win the glory of its navigation rather than labor back upstream, and so abandoned their comrades to their fate. After months of waiting, Gonzalo marched the rest of the way to the confluence, discovered what had happened from a starving maroon, and, undaunted, led the survivors back to Quito, two and a half years after setting out. He went on to make himself tyrant of Peru before the inevitable turn of events saw him beheaded as a traitor to the crown.

And that's the second thing subsequent to Francisco's death that stands out to me: the deposing of Gonzalo at the hands of a humble ecclesiastic, Pedro de la Gasca, sent by Charles the Fifth to sort out the mess into which Peru had fallen.

Pizarro could not discern, that under this modest exterior lay a moral power, stronger than his own steel-clad battalions, which, operating silently on public opinion,—the more sure than it was silent,— was even now undermining his strength, like a subterraneous channel eating away the foundations of some stately edifice, that stands secure in its pride of place!

Without any ostentation or display of force, this unassuming, politic little man conquered the conquerors, and saw Pizarro beheaded and his ferocious octogenarian lieutenant, Francisco de Carvajal (the "Demon of the Andes"), drawn and quartered on the same day without having had to strike a single blow. He returned to Castile after setting the empire in order, and died a bishop many years later. Though the death of Francisco Pizarro seems the most logical place to end the history, Prescott seemingly has a rhetorical or artistic purpose in closing with Gasca.

After the dark and turbulent spirits with which we have been hitherto occupied, it is refreshing to dwell on a character like that of Gasca. In the long procession which has passed in review before us, we have seen only the mail-clad cavalier, brandishing his bloody lance, and mounted on his war-horse, riding over the helpless natives, or battling with his own friends and brothers; fierce, arrogant, and cruel, urged on by the lust of gold, or the scarce more honorable love of a bastard glory. Mingled with these qualities, indeed, we have seen sparkles of the chivalrous and romantic temper which belongs to the heroic age of Spain. But, with some honorable exceptions, it was the scum of her chivalry that resorted to Peru, and took service under the banner of the Pizarros. At the close of this long array of iron warriors, we behold the poor and humble missionary coming into the land on an errand of mercy, and everywhere proclaiming the glad tidings of peace.

Take-aways? It makes you queasy, the extent to which men will debase themselves for material gain. Latter-day preachers will tell you that the besetting sin of our age is materialism, by which they mean avarice, but to my mind our chief vice is sloth, acedia. But the Spaniards, now – they knew avarice. What's strange about it is the facility with which these freebooters mixed their bloody pursuits with religion. Prescott several times refers to the Crusades, but the Crusades, whatever course they may ultimately have taken, were to a great extent a matter of defense. The Turks besieged Vienna as late as the seventeenth century – think of that! But the American conquests – what mundane purpose did they serve, other than to fill the coffer? You can say, well, the Conquistadors' "religion" was just a matter of convenience, a pretext for doing what they wanted to do. Perhaps in some cases that's true. But that's too easy an out in general. No, you just have to accept that these men thought of themselves as righteous, as devout, even, while committing the cruelest atrocities. Such a chimera is man!

Still, the trouble with condemning the vices of historical figures is that you might very well be condemning their virtues. Each era has its own excesses and enormities and blind spots, our own no less than others. Prescott recognizes this, and I found Peru much less opinionated than Mexico, especially on the score of religion. Or perhaps I'm just less touchy now. At any rate, they're both excellent histories. We've made great advances in historical research in the last century and a half, but books like them just aren't written anymore.

As usual, I will conclude by saying that I want to get down to see the sites sometime. My father spent the better part of a year in Ecuador and Peru on state business when I was in college. He was stationed near the headwaters of the Amazon, in an environment similar to that encountered by Gonzalo Pizarro's expedition, I suppose. While there he sent me a fine watercolor bought from a street vendor. It depicts a mountain village with a church and natives in traditional garb, and hangs at a prominent place in my bedroom. I'm sitting here looking at it now, hoping that a trip to South America is in the cards for my future.

Literary Chorizo

I continue to labor away at The King of Nightspore's Crown, the sequel to Dragonfly. Various things are going into the stew, including ancient Athenian lawgivers, Prairie School architecture, medieval bestiaries, the national park system, Heart of Darkness, Andrew Lang's fairy tale collections, the history of the conquest of Mexico and Peru, and assorted giant monsters and prehistoric creatures, not to mention all the usual suspects among my favorite genre writers. They say you should never watch sausage being made (or, around where I live, chorizo), but I tend to assume that people who visit my blog have strong stomachs.

Incidentally, I have a story called "The Scale-Tree" coming out in Beneath Ceaseless Skies sometime in the not-so-distant future, which will provide interested readers a glimpse into the topological-mythological underpinnings of the counter-earth at the cosmic antipodes.

It's kind of strange, really, but I get the feeling sometimes that I'm exploring a world that's already there, rather than inventing a new one of my own. It's a bit like mathematics, which is accomplished much more by fiat than people suspect. The mathematician says, Let it be so!, and it is so, and he or she goes down into the world that he or she has made and explores it. That's how I feel about Antellus. Its axioms established, it developed on its own, down to the least detail. Fortunately, as Gödel's incompleteness theorems have established, I still have infinitely many avenues of freedom open to me. Or something like that.

 

In other news, I'm toying with the idea of creating a new edition of a public domain fantasy classic, like The Worm Ouroboros, for sale through Hythloday House. I have sketch of a wrap-around cover inspired by Persian miniatures that I may try to work up over the remainder of the summer. I have no idea if there'd be a market for such a thing (well, ha ha, of course there's not, but I'm Quixotic that way), but it would please me to produce it all the same. To my knowledge there's never been an edition with a map, so there's that.

Strange Islands

In my last post, I discussed Martin Buber's philosophy of I-Thou and my own attempts to people my world with minor gods, concluding with a promise to apply these ideas to fantastic literature.

What brought all of this back to my mind was a reading of The Spiritual Canticle by St. John of the Cross. St. John is, they say, one of the great poets of Spanish literature; his Spiritual Canticle is an exposition of his poem of the same name ("Cántico Espiritual"). To me, Stanzas 14 and 15 stand out in particular:

Mi Amado, las montañas,
los valles solitarios nemorosos,
las ínsulas extrañas,
los ríos sonorosos,
el silbo de los aires amorosos,

la noche sosegada
en par de los levantes de la aurora,
la música callada,
la soledad sonora,
la cena que recrea y enamora.

In my deep and extensive knowledge of sixteenth-century Spanish, and lamentable liability to poetic licence, I render this thus:

My Beloved, towering range,
deep-delved lonesome wood,
islands strange,
thunder-flood,
zephyr's nocturne of love,

the tranquil dim
of dawn's lifting aperture,
silent hymn,
solitude's laughter,
feast that feeds and enraptures.

Regarding Line 3 of Stanza 14, John says:

Strange islands are girt by the sea; they are also, because of the sea, distant and unknown to the commerce of men. They produce things very different from those with which we are conversant, in strange ways, and with qualities hitherto unknown, so as to surprise those who behold them, and fill them with wonder. Thus, then, by reason of the great and marvelous wonders, and the strange things that come to our knowledge, far beyond the common notions of men, which the soul beholds in God, it calls Him the strange islands. 

We say of a man that he is strange for one of two reasons: either because he withdraws himself from the society of his fellows, or because he is singular or distinguished in his life and conduct. For these two reasons together God is called strange by the soul. He is not only all that is strange in undiscovered islands, but His ways, judgments, and works are also strange, new, and marvelous to men. 

It is nothing wonderful that God should be strange to men who have never seen Him, seeing that He is also strange to the holy angels and the souls who see Him; for they neither can nor shall ever see Him perfectly... [O]nly to Himself is He neither strange nor new.

God is strange; indeed, he is much stranger than even the angels could ever imagine. A point often forgotten by the dogma-bound. There is hope here for me. The strange islands of my own mind, which find their way into my stories, are, I suppose, not the strangeness of which John speaks, but perhaps they touch those outer waters as the net of islands and shifting shadows ring Tolkien's blessed Aman. Then again, perhaps not.

Regarding Line 3 of Stanza 15, John says:

In this silence and tranquility of the night, and in this knowledge of the divine light, the soul discerns a marvelous arrangement and disposition of God's wisdom in the diversities of His creatures and operations. All these, and each one of them, have a certain correspondence with God, whereby each, by a voice peculiar to itself, proclaims what there is in itself of God, so as to form a concert of sublimest melody, transcending all the harmonies of the world. This is the silent music, because it is knowledge tranquil and calm, without audible voice; and thus the sweetness of music and the repose of silence are enjoyed in it. The soul says that the Beloved is silent music, because this harmony of spiritual music is in Him understood and felt.

This calls to mind the mysterious Psalm 19:

The heavens are telling the glory of God;
     and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
Day to day pours forth speech,
     and night to night declares knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words;
     their voice is not heard;
yet their voice goes out through all the earth,
     and their words to the end of the world.

It seems paradoxical. There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard; yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. But their voice and words are their very being. By being what they are, they speak. Try to "listen" to them on any other wavelength, and you miss it. Or worse, manufacture their speech for yourself.

For me this is a cogent truth of practical import, for I tried – really tried – to hear the music of the spheres for many years. I'm currently reading A Wrinkle in Time to my kids, and enjoying it very much; but I was almost obsessed with it and Madeleine L'Engle's other books when I was about nine or ten, and, in hindsight, I think they had a tremendous influence on how I saw the world. It wasn't until I finally gave up trying to hear the "voices of the stars" that the cosmos came rushing back like a breaker crashing ashore. St. Augustine speaks of something similar in Book X of his Confessions, in his questioning of the deeps and the heavens, and their answering him in their beauty of order.

This is the kind of thing I think about while composing my sword-and-planet tales.

As I said above, I'm often really looking for a certain kind of silence in fantasy. It's not easy to put your finger on it, but lack of silence seems tied to the flippant or frivolous use of fantastic elements, to the failure to reserve these things for their proper places, to the devolution of the invented milieu into a muddled slurry which bores in its very freedom from restraint. The presence of silence brings about the recovery of which Tolkien speaks, a reconciliation with the universe.

Many modern fantasists have understood this. Their work is characterized by a spirit of listening, a sense of wonder, a willingness to go along and let things happen and see what the world has to show us. Various passages come to mind: Koshtra Belorn; the Night Land; Middle-Earth; Perelandra; Earthsea. Mystical silence isn't limited to fantasy, but fantasy is uniquely equipped to make the most of it. It's not something that can be established through the mere manipulation of material elements, and the works of your safe genre writers possess it to a much lesser degree. For there the sense of wonder has been worn away by familiarity, and the startlement that cleanses the eyes of the soul and brings recovery is no longer possible. The reader's heart becomes jaded, and she looks for new sources, of which this world contains all too few.

In these days of isolation and frustration, I admit that I find myself drawn more to hard-boiled writers like Hammett and Chandler, or to amoral S&S and weird horror by the likes of Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Lieber, or Michael Moorcock. But perhaps here, too, there is a kind of silence. In Hammett, for instance, there's his unrelenting desire to pare away everything but the naked skeleton of the narrative. The utter absence of any kind of moralizing (which is really just chatter in a story) comes as a great relief. To quote Nietzsche on the point:

The desert…where the strong, independent spirits withdraw and become lonely – oh, how different it looks from the way educated people imagine a desert! – for in some cases they themselves are this desert, these educated people.

To be continued!

Seila in Living Color

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to bring you a colorized version of Seila, lovely odalisque of the Enochite underworld. It's a companion to my Zilla painting; both illustrate characters from my novel Dragonfly.

Painted in watercolor on Arches hot-pressed, mostly with my trusty Winsor & Newton 0000 Cotman round, it measures three and a half by five inches, hence is probably smaller than seen in your browser. I continued to listen to the stories of Clark Ashton Smith as I painted it; as a matter of fact, I was listening to "The Theft of the Thirty-Nine Girdles" as I painted the girdle. I'm starting to regard these audiobooks as much material as pigment, paper, and memory.

(Incidentally, I very highly recommend the CAS audiobooks put out by Night Shade Books; I'm picky about narration, and have enjoyed them thoroughly.)

So, my plan to begin illustrating my stories proceeds apace.

Because I paint on such a small scale, it amuses me to examine my work up close. For me, the final step of scanning and zooming in is an integral part of the process.

 

When I was in high school, and (as my art teacher and I thought) a future artist, I was often chided for working on too small a scale: I would take a big, 16" x 20" sheet of paper and make a tiny drawing right at the center. At the time I coped with Mr. Jones' demand to embiggen things by dividing the paper up into a square grid and filling in one square at a time. Now that I'm an independent adult, I simply make tiny little paintings. This is convenient for practical reasons, in that I have a tiny little studio and a tiny little bank account.

Mr. Jones would also sometimes circle the lower extremities of my figure studies, with a derisive HUMAN FEET??? scrawled in red ink. Hands, however, I had always excelled at. In fact, on the first day of sixth grade (I took art from Mr. Jones throughout both junior high and high school), our assignment was to draw our own hands, and mine was so realistic that he hung it up at the front to shame his advanced high school students. It was literally the first time I'd ever drawn anything from life; I've read of similar incidents in the lives of other people with autism disorders. Other body parts came less easily, but under his sarcastic tutelage I progressed steadily.

Now, throughout high school, as one advanced in the ways of art, I was suffered to work independently, and generally did pretty much as I pleased. My efforts were directed exclusively toward art, though a variety of extracurricular activities were pursued by my classmates. The art lab was in the vocational building, i.e., the outlands; it had once been a shop class, and possessed various storage rooms, locker rooms, and other dark and secret little corners. Among other things, the loft, up above the drop-ceiling tiles, was known as a good place to take a few tokes.

One day, when I was a freshman, Mr. Jones told me to go into the locker room, where freshmen were seldom allowed. Obeying, I found the ceiling lights turned off, and a pretty girl wearing a ruffled black-and-white polka dot bikini enthroned at the end of the room, brown hair pulled back in bouncing curls, basking in the glow of spotlights that set out her contours in warm chiaroscuro. She wasn't in our class, but had been commissioned, so to speak, for my personal instruction that day. She was a couple of grades ahead of me, just to add a little extra spice to the experience.

We were alone in the room the entire period. As far as I can recall I said not a word to her, though she tried to engage me in conversation several times. I'd drawn more male figures than I could count, but I'd never drawn a female. I was pleased with the result. The girl came over afterward and examined my work. She was less pleased, and complained bitterly to Mr. Jones.

He laughed heartily and said, "Yes, Raphael draws what he sees." I still don't know whether he was commenting on me or the girl.

I Encounter No Dryad

This is a post from 2013; I'd intended to continue it at the time, but other things came up, and I forgot about it. I've been thinking about the topics lately, though, so here it is again, in slightly modified form, to be followed by its continuation shortly, unless something comes up and I wait another two years.

Masters of the interior life teach that it's inadvisable to dwell on one's own mystical experiences, and especially to speak about them with others. As John of the Cross has it: The Bride says in her heart, my secret for myself. Part of the danger is that we come to regard them as a species of personal property or, worse, as spiritual cosmetics; still more dangerous is the fact that true contact with the divine takes place, not on the plane of concept or feeling or experience, interior or exterior, but on the plane of relation. To speak of experience is to savor the peel and throw away the meat.

O secrecy without a secret! O accumulation of information!

So I will not attempt to quantify my own experiences (insofar as I've had any). But any writer's mystical and metaphysical outlook inevitably colors his writing; my own has been profoundly affected by I and Thou (1923), the slim but rich volume by the great Jewish religious philosopher Martin Buber.

Buber begins by asserting that man's twofold attitude toward the world accords with the two "primary words" that can be spoken by man.

     Primary words do not signify things, but they intimate relations.
     Primary words do not describe something that might exist independently of them, but being spoken they bring about existence.
     Primary words are spoken from the being.

The two words, he says, are compound words. Each involves the I; when I speak a primary word, I enter it and take my stand in it. Any use of the word I is really a use of one or another of these words.

     The one primary word is the combination I-Thou.
     The other primary word is the combination I-It; wherein, without a change in the primary word, one of the words He and She can replace It.

He goes on to say:

     The primary word I-Thou can only be spoken with the whole being.
     The primary word I-It is never spoken with the whole being.

To speak I-Thou is to be in mutual relation. To speak I-It is to objectify. Think of talking to a person you love, of looking them in the eyes and addressing them as You, and how different this is from talking about someone not present as He or She. The thing is, you can use the word You and still mean It; there are people out there – narcissists and flatterers and manipulators, objectifiers and personifiers and conceptualizers – who are incapable of speaking in any other way. Such people never really live; the present is to them not the realm of eternal being, but the infinitesimal endpoint of the past.

The present is not fugitive and transient, but continually present and enduring. The object is not duration, but cessation, suspension, a breaking off and cutting clear and hardening, absence of relation and of present being.
     True beings are lived in the present, the life of objects is in the past.

Our relation with other men stands in the middle place. Below it is our relation with the world of nature; above it is our relation with the divine. Our address of I-Thou to (say) a tree may be somewhat mysterious, and take place on a dark, subliminal level, but it is real for all that. The I-It analyzes the tree according to utility, or form and color, or chemical composition, or what have you; the I-Thou sees it as it is in itself.

It can…also come about, if I have both will and grace, that in considering the tree I become bound up in relation to it. The tree is now no longer It. I have been seized by the power of exclusiveness. […]
     The tree will have a consciousness then, similar to our own? Of that I have no experience. But do you wish, through seeming to succeed in it with yourself, once again to disintegrate that which cannot be disintegrated? I encounter no soul or dryad of the tree, but the tree itself.

When we speak Thou on any plane, says Buber, we address the eternal Thou. But there is an attempt to evade this dichotomy between the past and the present, It and Thou, object and subject, by appealing to a world of ideas, by raising up a conceptual structure and dwelling in it as a bulwark against the onset of nothingness.

But the mankind of mere It that is imagined, postulated, and propagated by such a man has nothing in common with a living mankind where Thou may truly be spoken. The noblest fiction is a fetish, the loftiest fictitious sentiment is depraved. Ideas are no more enthroned above our heads than resident in them; they wander amongst us and accost us. The man who leaves the primary word unspoken is to be pitied; but the man who addresses instead these ideas with an abstraction or a password, as if it were their name, is contemptible.

When we erect such a framework and dwell in it, we barricade ourselves from relation with nature, with man, with god. Yet how frequently do men try to scale the divine heights by such means! There will come a time – in the afterlife, if not sooner – when doctrines and confessional differences will fade in significance. For there are two fundamentally different ways of approaching the divine, and the dividing line cuts right across the world of ideas, confessional boundaries, and the human heart. It isn't the division between polytheism and monotheism, but between what I (for lack of better words and at the risk of being misunderstood) will label the pagan and the mystic. It is possible to be a pagan and yet believe in one god; it is possible to be a mystic and believe in many gods. Every person is at least part pagan. A pagan is someone who speaks only I-It. To him the gods are objects to be acted upon; to him a tree is nothing unless it be fictively personified, or conceptualized, or dissected and analyzed.

[W]ithout It man cannot live. But he who lives with It alone is not a man. 

Think of the old atheists' myth about the ebbing of belief. In the beginning, the legend goes, man believed that spirits inhabited trees and springs and other such things. As his familiarity with the world in which he found himself grew, he moved the divine agencies to the relatively inaccessible mountaintops. Further exploration forced him to relegate the gods to the distant heavens. And now, enlightened by precise astronomical observations, man has to locate god in the realm of abstraction.

Whatever the historical merits of this myth – asserted by some people with the ardent faith of the fundamentalist – I would counter it with a myth of my own construction. I would say that the peopling of hill and dale with rational spirits represents an attempt to deal with a fall. (Perhaps this is the source of the myth of the Fall, as hinted by Buber.) Man, alienated from the life of things, sought to regain his place by superimposing fictive animating agencies on the world of nature. No longer able to address the tree as Thou, at least on a subliminal level, he created the dryad. The impatient atheist is indeed fighting against one front when he denounces dryads and intelligent design. He is fighting paganism. But a pagan is really only a dishonest atheist; and there are atheists who, without realizing it, are mystics.

I've written a number of posts about how my perception of nature became warped when I was a teenager, due in part, perhaps, to my cognitive disability. At the time, I sought desperately to people my increasingly empty and meaningless world with minor gods. With all the data-acquisition-lust of my autistic mind, I pored over books about nature deities, demigods, elementals, fairies, and the like, collating and cataloging. I actually sought such beings in the woods and rivers.

Surely, I thought, the testimony of so many diverse cultures could not be without foundation. And perhaps it isn't! But I never found my fairies. Despairing, I sculpted goddesses from clay; I began the construction of a pagan shrine in the backyard, never to be completed. (My parents finished the garden after I went to college, but without the statue that was to have crowned it.) My point is that my alienation from the world of nature went hand in hand with my retreat into paganism.

When man fell, Our Father Who Art in Heaven became Jupiter; literally, the names mean much the same thing, but I speak in terms of connotations. Again, I'm not opposing monotheism to polytheism. Certainly the objectification of the divine lends itself to a multiplication of gods, which is always a movement of rationalization and conceptualization. But who could argue that the polytheist Socrates lived exclusively in the world of I-It?

I have some thoughts about how these two primary words, these two attitudes, play out in art, especially in the fantasy novel. Perhaps that would best be relegated to a second post. For the time being, you, my reader, who find yourself trapped in the world of objects, consider the following, as I have, and find hope and a path to life:

Believe in the simple magic of life, in service in the universe, and the meaning of that waiting, that alertness, that "craning of the neck" in creatures will dawn upon you. Every word would falsify; but look! round about you beings live their life, and to whatever point you turn you come upon being.

Seila in Pencil

Here's a pencil sketch of my Dragonfly character Seila, the lovely half-Druin odalisque of the Enochite underworld.

I'm working on a watercolor of the same size as my recent Zilla sketch, but my paintings don't always hold up to the promise of their conceptions, and I happen to like this little drawing considerably, so here it is for your viewing pleasure. Inspired by the Art Nouveau posters of Alphons Mucha.

History of the Conquest of America

Mural by Diego Rivera of life in Tenochtitlan, Palacio Nacional, Mexico City.

Summer is here, and our town library has kicked off its annual summer reading program for kids. Of course my kids always participate. They do pretty well in the raffle that follows, too.

Well, this year, there's a summer reading program for adults. Am I too proud to participate? No I'm not! Especially when the prizes comprise dinner for two at a local Mexican food restaurant, dinner for two at the country club, and a weekend getaway at a nearby river resort. The getaway and Mexican food sound pretty good; the country club dinner I think I'd scalp on e-Bay or something. At any rate, I've read less over the past few months than I like, so this is a much-needed spur.

So far I've read Prescott's History of the Conquest of Peru (1847) for about two and a half hours. (We keep a time log.) I read the same author's History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843) several years ago in a mammoth Modern Library edition that contains both volumes. They're good old narrative histories after the manner of Gibbon, based for the most part on primary sources.

There are, I'm sure, more up-to-date histories out there, with glossy pages and color photographs, but I'll take Prescott over them any day. It's strange, but we no longer seem as able to produce the sweeping historical narratives that our forebears did, preferring the safety of narrow monographs and the like. My three favorite periods of history to read about are ancient Greece (for which I go to Herodotus, Thucydides, and J. B. Bury's A History of Greece), the later Roman Empire and Age of Migrations (for which I read Gibbon's Decline and Fall and Bury's Later Roman Empire), and the Spanish conquest of America. There's no better source for the last than Prescott.

Now, the author, William H. Prescott (1796 – 1859), an American historian who went blind after being struck in the eye with a crusty piece of bread during a food fight at Harvard College (!), is, unfortunately, rabidly anti-Catholic. What moved him to devote his energies to a culture for which he had so little sympathy I'll never know. Yes, the conquistadors were a damnable mixture of devotion, chivalry, rapacity, and cruelty, which is what makes them such interesting reading. And I'll even admit that perhaps their religion had more than a little to do with that. But it's tiresome to have Romish superstition and bigotry and credulity excoriated on every other page, and compared unfavorably with Anglo-Saxon virtues and the Protestant work-ethic.

One thing he likes to do is draw parallels between the human sacrifice practiced by the Aztec priests and the inquisitions of the Dominicans. Now, the enormities of the Spanish Inquisition are indefensible, but they were in quite a different category from Aztec piety, which (according to his sources) waged war for the sole purpose of securing sacrifices, and slaughtered tens of thousands of captives on an annual basis. I mean, it makes a difference, doesn't it, whether an execution is viewed (however wrongly) as a last resort but a necessary evil to preserve the social order, or as an act of supreme worship, an end in its own right commended by the gods? Plus, Protestant countries were not above the vilest cruelty in matters of religion or the mass delusion of witch-hunts, something Prescott conveniently forgets. I cast no aspersions, mind you; such was the tenor of the times.

But even this I'm willing to forgive, for they really are excellent histories, nitpicked but never to be superseded.

Mural by Diego Rivera of El Tajin, Palacio Nacional, Mexico City.

Why do I love reading about the Conquest? Partly I identify with it more than with the history of Anglo America. My father is Puerto Rican, that is, a mixture of Spanish, West African, and South American Indian. A good bit of that side of the family came from the Canary Islands, a stage in Columbus' explorations. In fact, my great grandmother's maiden name was Colon (Columbus), and family tradition holds that we're descendants of Columbus' younger brother, which would make me a great nephew of the explorer himself.

But beyond that, it's hard for me to think of a more picturesque period, combining familiar landscapes with fabulous civilizations and legendary heroic exploits. In 1541, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado y Luján marched across the Texas panhandle in search of the Cities of Gold. Think of that! Think of the clash of civilizations: of storm-tossed Spanish galleons landing on golden New World coasts; of armored caballeros hacking their way through steamy jungles and assaulting piled strongholds of ancient splendor; of floating garden-cities surrounded by snow-capped mountains, ruled by cannibal potentates of luxuriant cruelty; of stout Cortez who with eagle eyes stared at the Pacific, silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Well, no doubt I'll have more to say about the conquest of Mexico and Peru once I'm done. Or, more likely, you'll start seeing it pop up in my stories in various ways. I would love to write "sangre and sorcery" tales set during the time of the Conquest, but I fear that I'd have to visit the locales to do it justice. One day, perhaps I'll do just that.

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.

Zilla the Impaler

Here is a watercolor sketch of my recurrent character Zilla, one-time cupbearer of Vaustus the Enochite. It's 3.5" by 5" on Arches hot-pressed. I listened to a number of Clark Ashton Smith stories while drawing and painting it, including "Vulthoom," "The Weaver in the Vault," "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros," and "The Abominations of Yondo."

In other news, author Davide Mana of Karavansara fame has read and enjoyed Dragonfly. Read his review here. Rather than quoting from it, I think I'll just ask you to go read it yourself, because it's all very good. We obviously have very similar tastes in fantastic literature (he mentions Smith, Eddison, Hodgson, Peake, and Wolfe), so I take it as a great compliment that he enjoyed Dragonfly so much.

Incidentally, the one flaw he mentions is the lack of an e-book, a fault that has now been remedied. Go get it!

Dragonfly on Kindle

Being an incorrigible luddite, I've never owned or used an e-book reader of any variety. But I've read articles, you know? It's my understanding that, unlike print books, e-books don't "smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land." Also, people tell me that readers are terrible for pressing flowers and autumn leaves.

Nevertheless, it's come to my attention that some would appreciate the availability of Dragonfly as an e-book. And who am I to argue with potential patrons? Therefore, behold: Dragonfly is now available on Kindle. Price is $2.99, which is the lowest they'll let me charge. Get it here.

Incidentally, if you've already purchased the print edition from Amazon, you should be able to get the Kindle version for free through the MatchBook program.