The Heroic Human

If you were going to condense every random tracer streak that flies through my rotted head and stony heart at any given moment, to tie Snorri Sturluson to Klaus Nomi, the Aeneid to Fear of Girls, King Uzziah to Andrew Koenig, Borges and Eco to Lovecraft and Barker and E.E. Knight, James Cagney to Tom Lommel, Flannery O'Connor to Felicia Day, Muhammed Ali, Floyd Patterson and Jack Vance, Cicero and Dracula, Ramses and the Baldwin Brothers, King Saul and Steve Wozniak, Frodo and Manfred Mann's Earth Band, Tom Waits, Warren Zevon, and LazyTown, machine language and Anglo-Saxon...to bind them all into one, pre-apocalyptic gainland of the strange and it would be this:

The heroic human is the one who knows his smallness all too well, yet stands in the way of the strange, spreading roots of evil.

As a troll on the sidelines of the human story, I look on those precious few among your race who turn bravely to be swallowed by the dark. What madness compels you, what joy inspires?

Who made you a hero?

E.E. Knight: Desparkler of Vampires

E.E. Knight has a great hometown write-up (In the photo, Knight is the one on the right.) If you aren't into his spectacular Vampire Earth series, then you should at least check out his Age of Fire books.

After all, there are only two kinds of people on this planet: Vampire People and Dragon People - you must be one of them.*

Anyhoodle, Knight's vampires are of the decidedly Lovecraftian sort - otherworldly, grotesque, uncaring. Not an ascot to be found among them.

"Beneath the heavy robes of bullet-resistant material the Kurians wear is a bony, angular physique of wiry muscle. Their knees and elbows can bend either way in an unsettling manner. Aside from the grotesqueness of its motions, this allows the Reaper to coil its entire body for a leap, climb rapidly, and change position in a hand-to-hand fight with terrifying speed. Their bones are not white, but rather a dull black, as are their pointed seizing teeth within their snake-hinged jaws. Their blood turns into a thick, tarry substance when exposed to air, so they rarely bleed to death.

...they use their long, flexible, beaked tongues to stab into the prey, using their teeth to fix on the victim as a lamprey does while they pierce poor wretch's heart with their stabbing lingular syringe...They are hard to kill, vulnerable only to massed firearms, burning, or decapitation....

Only a fool takes on a Reaper alone at night."

Entirely unrelated (unless they are a front for a vampire hunting operation): have you ever wondered what the most beautiful website in the solar system for a Ukrainian Orthodox Church might look like?

Me too. (The photo gallery alone is worth the price of admission.)

*I'm both. This places me in the unique class of "First to Die" during the Vampire/Dragon apocalypse.

Josh is Five. Josh is Always Five.

Jeffty is Five, the Locus-winning classic short tale by Harlan Ellison, has long held a melancholy spell over me. (It is on page 71, and the book takes a little while to load).

It traces long lines into my own sense of the memorable (and malleable) past, touches on the eternal and the transient, and places nostalgia and reality on parallel tracks which intersect at tragedy. The beautfully-written story of the friendship between a five-year old boy who never ages and his normally-aging pal got its title from a misheard bit of conversation.

At a party, Ellison overheard actor Jack Danon * saying something like "Jeff is fine. He's always fine!" but thought he said "Jeff is five. Jeff is always five." The man who said it was a guest at a party hosted by Walter Koenig, Star Trek's "Chekov."

I had no idea, until today, that the character inspiration for "Jeffty" was another person at the party: a five-year old Joshua Andrew Koenig.

In the words of the author: "Writers take tours in other people's lives. Jeffty is me; he is also you. This is a short, memory-filled trip through your own life."

*Danon, incidentally, started his career in radio shows, like Fibber McGee and Molly, which casts an interesting, if wholly unrelated, light on the strange transoms of inspiration that helped carry this particular story to its fullness.

Evil League of Evil NEEDS Lommel Lead of Lommel

If this private, unread online journal of mine could be encapsulated into a single three-minute video, it would be done as follows:



Make your video application to the Evil League of Evil today.

F is for Fire that Burns Down the Whole Town*

I climbed a high tower, looked over the land, and saw water where there should be no water, fire where there should be no fire, and a moon turned to blood.

Somehow, St. John on Patmos doesn't seem so delirious to me.

I'm going to admit something: I get a kick out of the apocalypse. Pure entertainment. That's not to say that I don't take the writings of John seriously. I do.

But man oh man does the book of Revelation inspire some cool stuff: big godzilla monsters coming out of oceans to join forces with, then fight and torture a beast-riding queen of religion and whoring, hailstorms of superbug disease cupcakes, trumpets rolling out the best of Count Basie in a syncopated rythym to beat the devil.

I'm translating loosely, but still. Hellhorses, 200 million man armies at war, blood to the bridles, falling stars, thirsty dragons.

Yum. But you've got to remember that I'm the sort of troll who gets a kick out of cleaning out hog lots and dining on chilli dog spaghetti burittos.

I'm thick in the skull, so I can only afford to spend most of my time just bowing my neck and pushing forward in the Word, and trying hard not to fight against the scarylove Ru'ach of Jesus. I've got to leave the real End of Days to brighter minds than mine.

But I do have fun looking in on the apocalyptic expressions of others:

Apocalypse Soon
Berean Call
The always hilarious* Rapture Ready (I hope those manuals never come in handy for me.)
The God Still Loves Us forums... where being crazy and wrong never felt so good and friendly.

Oh, there are a jillion of them out there. There is plenty of pop-apocalypse, both Christian and non, that borders on (or even bathes in) the asinine. For example, I'm pretty certain that, despite the contemporary protests to the contrary, neither Ronald Wilson Reagan (good ol' 666) nor Barack Hussein Obama fit the profile of the Antichrist as described in the bible.

But the links above are reasoned and worked at. Even if they don't get everything right (because, after all, who does?) they do a good job of citing actual sources and doing their level best to comprehend something as wild and incomprehensible as the End of Days.

*Thanks, Plankton. I feel tingly inside too.

**to those, like me, who find Johnny Cash/Shel Silverstein meditations on death to be a hoot.

Mix and Match Apocalypse

I abandoned the floodwaters of Iowa for wildfires in the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia.

Which leads me to wonder: why aren't there more steam-related natural disasters?

Euhemerus, Myth and History

Euhemerus is a greek philosopher widely recognized as the first major proponent of the idea that Greek myths had their origins in non-supernatural historic events.

800 years after Euhemerus, Snorri Sturluson attempted to trace the origin of some of the Norse gods, particularly Odin, back to historic warlords.

The theory that many mythological figures have a source in history appeals to me on an intellectual level, but, somewhat more importantly, at an aesthetic level.* In congress with that notion is that there are supernatural events included in some histories that are quite different in character and tone than legends.**

This relates to the concept of a pre-apocalyptic gainland. From the post-apocalyptic point of view, pre-apocalyptic myths can form from fragments of history, but - and this is often overlooked - pre-apocalyptic history can seem like myth.

Before the flood, there were giants, descendants of angels, no less, roughhousing, slaughtering, sacrificing, and turning worship on its head. People had fallen into a deep corruption, one that we have likely never experienced in our lives. Civilization had become an anti-civilization - cultural anti-matter, a societal plague. It had to be cut off for any chance at redemption.

After the flood, accounts, both mythological and historical were recorded to reconstruct those prior days. Over time, some folks flip the legend with fact, so that, today, to many people the flood and pre-existing society seems legendary and fanciful. We've created a myth that the Flood Apocalypse is a myth. Call it a myth-myth if you must, but the point is that we are a post-apocalyptic wasteland, recovering from the great Flood, yet we have allowed the accounts to fall into legend.

This causes us to miss both the warnings and the opportunities of these last days. If we could only understand the history of the prediluvian period a little better, we might better see the landscape we walk today.

*In other words, it could be proven to me that, for example, Thor has no origins (disregarding the fact that history/science cannot prove a negative) in a historic warrior-king. I'd accept it willingly. But I'd still like the idea.

**I'm thinking here of a historic footnote I came across a few years ago. It was a Roman account of centurions attacking a big snake. A really big snake. Like 50 feet of snake. But it wasn't listed among stories or legends, but just run of the mill accounts of day-to-day activities. I know this stuff can feed wild-eyed cryptozooligists, but I guess I like my cryptids too much to care.

Puritans in Space

As the only surviving puritan troll on earth, I've been waiting for the culture to examine my existence in its literature, artwork or these newfangled talking motion pictures.



Nothing yet, so for now, I am kindred with Puritans in Outer Space!



[doffing cap and gently waving it in the direction of Toad House Happenings...]

Can the Damned Be Redeemed?

Tosca Lee points out a really fascinating complexity about the state of demonic salvation.

She quotes Augustine quoting the philosopher Plotinus* (and I quote Lee quoting them!):

"…that the very fact of man’s corporal mortality is due to the compassion of God, who would not have us kept for ever in the misery of this life. The wickedness of demons was not judged worthy of this compassion, and in the misery of their condition, with a soul subject to passions, they have not been granted the mortal body, which man had received, but an eternal body."

Plotinus is right. By association, so are St. Augustine and St. Tosca.

"Damned" isn't soft terminology. I think it is easier for those who have not faced a direct confrontation with evil to believe that it can be redeemed or reformed. It doesn't work like that. You don't purify Tianenman Square by celebrating the Olympics there: you only spoil the torch.

Keep in mind that demons, before demonhood, had been granted the one thing we really wish we had: immortal bodies. How many times have we thought that everything would be just fine if we only didn't have to deal with death in all its forms (breakdowns, breakups, breakouts, brokenness).

Well, so did the angels. But immortality turned out to be insufficient for a huge number of them.

So the demons are blessed with the one thing we covet: eternal existence. But it still isn't enough for them. They were built for community with God, but they used their immortality as a wedge against their own design!

Theoretically, physically, God could redeem a demon, but His just and righteous -- and loving -- character dictates that he not redeem a demon.

I know you humans think you are smarter than He is. You think you are more loving than He is. You, given the omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence of the Lord, would devise a delightful means by which the whisperers of Auschwitz might find redemption, even if they don't want the redemption you offer.

Instead of casting them to outer darkness, you'd be better than our father Abraham, who would not even send a dead man to witness to five lost brothers. Instead of separating yourself from the absence of good, you people, in your infinite justice, would marry yourselves to it.

Oh, wait, you** already have.

Why do we have such compassion for the devil? Isn't a demon a sort of tarbaby for misplaced sympathy?

Sincerely,


St. Grumpy



*Plotinus' efforts, by the way, should rightly be seen as an attempt to clarify Plato. His philosophical influence stretched from neopagans of the day to Christians. It is also worth noting that his philosophy is as overtly hostile to gnosticism at the intellectual level as Christianity is at the spiritual.

**(we)

The Bleeding Edge of Christian Entertainment

What? What? It is so Christian entertainment.

We have the theological issue: Tom Cruise is a Scientologist (although, unlike those pesky Christians, he keeps his beliefs to himself and never foists them upon the public).

We have the cultural relevance: the ukulele that all the kids are so into these days.

We have the self-conscious religious iconography: isn't that a shamrock on her shirt? That's a hidden symbol of the Trinity! Oh, wait, no it says "visit beautiful" -- same thing.

When they finally accept my application to be the station manager at TBN, I swear I'm going to open and close the broadcast day with this video. And wear powder blue polyester every day.

[Credits: Music and Lyrics by the Great Jonathan Coulton, performed by a famous ukulele-ist sort of named sweetafton23, but not in real life.]

From Malachi to Matthew

I can't recreate the sensation of living through the entire history of the world through the Old Testament and the subsequent "familiar shock" that arrives in the God-man Jesus portrayed in the book of St. Matthew.

I can only recommend that you attempt it. God is real and alien; strange and family; omnipotent and weak; omniscient and humble. There are only two thing stranger than the idea that God was born a man in order to save some humans: the first is that he told us, in great detail, for millenia, that he was going to do it (and we still didn't get it) and the second is that there are so, so many humans who don't believe it now even though it has already happened.

Poor, stupid humans. I've seen tar that reflects more light.

Life Before "Life After People"

I beat the History Channel to the punch, but only after they beat me to it first. Or vice versa.

Let me explain:

The History Channel will be airing a speculative documentary called "Life After People." It attempts to look at our cultural artifacts in a setting in which human life has abandoned or been stricken from, creation. Cherynobyl provides a case study.

The book I'm working on is a speculative story that attempts to look at our cultural artifacts before an apocalyptic* disaster. So, yeah, my book is sort of the spiritual pre-quel in fiction to Life After People. The other thing is that, in my book, the cataclysm isn't something currently popular, like nukes or disease or fire or demons or angels or spaceships. It is a relatively subtle, fundamental change to our social infrastructure.

So yeah, the book isn't published yet, isn't finished, even, and may end up in print ten years after Life After People airs, but, see, it comes first!

*I hate this term as it is used today. An "apocalypse" is NOT a widespread or total disaster that devastates a population. An "apocalypse" is something wonderful, like an unveiling at an art show.

Why "Strange Wind?"

There are really two reasons, one that I knew at the time when I started this journal and the other that only became apparent later.

The first reason stems from a project I'm working on right now regarding a pre-apocalyptic gainland (as opposed to a post-apocalyptic wasteland.) It is weird, dangerous, violent, familiar and hopeful.

The second is because of a passage in Jeremiah 4:

“At that time the people of Judah and Jerusalem will be told,
‘A scorching wind will sweep down from the hilltops in the desert on my dear people.
It will not be a gentle breeze for winnowing the grain and blowing away the chaff.
No, a wind too strong for that will come at my bidding. Yes, even now I, myself, am calling down judgment on them.’

Look! The enemy is approaching like gathering clouds. The roar of his chariots is like that of a whirlwind."