Surely Shorty @ Ultramarine Literary Review

 here 

This how things went in the Angel Dog Shorty's day. I dreamed there was a moose at the office. a baby just born. As soon as I heard we went to it and it was fine, licked us and Shorty licked it and talked about a big pen there for it. As I was doing the flood later a golden eagle landed on the front lawn for a long drink. Since then this angelology rule for seeing claims enlargement of the senses of mind and vision that makes visible opacity become transparent. Were a society of this believed among those who consider the spiritual, not the natural eternal, contemporaries together might say with David, Shakespeare, Milton and Dante, as much as with Shorty the hound, who lays her snout and large eyes upon the board to say, away I will no more, these seeming contradictions of a spiritual world upside down, reverse the order of the natural where what was under seems above, which paradoxes are believed among those who already believe and disbelieved among the rest almost exactly in proportion as the acknowledgment of this belief is known. In this praise for Transfigurations I told her  that I wanted Ruth here to do the opposite of what happened to Momo.

 

Debits in Metrics-the Money Trap @ Culture Cult

Adapted from The Remains of Lit and Und on Shunt, where appetite devours itself. Here money eats itself, until it becomes Data Banks. An anthology including the ubiquitous Gary Beck among others, who lists his real credentials. I don't know why my bio is in the fantastic. P. 190-193 @ Lulu. And Now here

Review of The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O'Connor

Asking Jesus to "stab me in the heart," O'Connor is full Gael, and should be seen among those great extremes as no less a religious figure than Yeats, who was plenty of that. Without her violence we would not know how the violent can carry the kingdom of God away,  but that is surely a most prophetic dictum in her work akin to the "Second Coming," The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity. If you have not and are not seeing the Violent Bear it Away that is because it is been shielding from your eyes by such distractions as are applied, which it is the business of O'Connor to annihilate, hence all the images of fire in her work that so appeal.

 Call it the Calling of the 5000, in Ch. 12, the sun on the tree line, red mammoth, the wood thrush's four notes, the forked birch that frames the sky and the two chimneys, then the burned clearing, open mouthed, the breeze on his neck threat encircles him with its violet shadow that talks to him so that he lights the tree on fire, torches the now burning bushes and the whole landscape. He sees the cornfield, the wall of the woods, black Buford on his mule, who mounded the uncle's grave, all amid the hunger, loaves and fishes, night streaks of the red hunger tide rising in Abel's blood all cleansed by the red gold tree of fire that consumes the darkness, like the fire in the furnace, Elijah, Moses' burning bush burning anointed by a raised grave as he heads with the speed of mercy to the city to preach, fulfill the call.

Without the powerful extremes infused into this writing, the stores lose all their power, for we are always alert fro the next apocalypse to break in, when Mrs. Greenleaf rocks back and for, "Jesus, stab me in the heart," as her act of devotion. With out all the invocations of violence to Jesus these works translate into  domestic chit chat  of laundry women with their betters. But another powerful validation for its favor is in the preservation of that time when a black person could be glorified into a N, a primal force, an unknowable god, while at the same time a denigration, for that suits to a T the white critical world to celebrate its racist heart while glorifying it. These became the upright moralists who inherited the tradition of Bonhoeffer. 

This does not any way negate the beauty of her prose, the burning tree of the mammoth sun on the tree line. He who made all things can honor all things. So Tarwater as opposed to holy water, the designated prophet who seeks to avoid his call, like Jonah, anoints himself in the grave of his uncle, fills his face in the dirt, that gives him the black eyes at least, as all this overlooks the cornfield, the field white unto harvest, wheat and chaff, and the feeding of the 5000 in his hunger and non hunger at it all. 
These are some readers notes for riders to this stupendous UnRagnarok. 

 "Dear God, 

I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth’s shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon. The crescent is very beautiful and perhaps that is all one like I am should or could see; but what I am afraid of, dear God, is that my self shadow will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon, and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing. I do not know you God because I am in the way. Please help me to push myself aside."

What justifies O'Connor and compell her need is her doltish friends, readers and followers who speak in her behalf and interpret her scenarios in speeches and podcasts. I know this because the algos brought them, but they are  full of moralistic condemnation of Mrs. May in "Greenleaf," and do not seem to include themselves in the wordless condemnation of this absolute judgment of the heart. They don't know that they are Mrs. May, all the voices and referees, and when "the bull had buried his head in her lap like a wild tormented lover, before her expression had changed, one of its horns sank until it pierced her heart...she seemed... to be bent over whispering some last discovery into the animal's ear' (53). YOU have to sell out Flann shouts! She might have been a Flann O'Brien herself had she not escaped catalogue in the Dalkey Archive. 

That she addresses the Father of Lights in whom is no shadow of turning who oversees and inhabits creation to the sparrow on the altar, as so abstract, I take her to the Mennonite, The real life and death causes of extreme sacrifice, pacifists and militants who background this moral in all regions and times, now focus on Pinter's America and the West. Two sides of uneconomic coin oppose the cultural West of every Greek myth, Proteus everywhere, Dionysius liberated, Orpheus inebriated. Let us call them Mennonites and Muslims, lack of self defense and counter offense, who think the knock at the door, the firing gun, the sirens are for them. Iraqis and Mennonites pray at start of day, before they plow a field or eat a meal. They pray on the way to market and mosque that they may live or die. They pray past the hospital up the way to school. Hospitals, markets are full of victims, fuller than prisons. When American reporters honk their horns they get out their prayers.

But you should read Fox's Martyrs first to bone up on your techniques, and the inquisitions and all in one The Book of Mennonite Martyrs Flannery does not know, where Mennonites and Muslims, but at the same time verbalize that Flannery's brillant acceptance is not also because she expresses the gospel according to Thomas Jefferson and Count Tolstoy who could not abide Jesus the Blessed any more than Tarwater. How far satire goes to replicate the very thing it mocks is a matter for Goethe whose young Werther sparked a rash of suicides, so which O'Conner is uproariously funny to a Christian, she gives aid and comfort to the enemy beside. The very formal address of the prayer journal of words if of the heart need never be spoken might have been sent to the universe.Her podcasts do not celebrate that verse thought, "to know Christ— the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death." In the gothic southern style this gets dramatic play in the violent bear it away. Did you know the charismatics corner stone of dominion is to take the kingdom of heaven by force? To be swallowed up in the fire, what could be better? If you have lived this way all of life in this medieval fire of unknowing in the fhe furnace, burning, not burning, you can read ch. 12 of The Violent.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13067179-the-violent-bear-it-away

Review of That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis @ Goodreads

 As a Christian controversalist Lewis on the airways, Lewis in Mere Christianity lends the most rhetorical backbone to the evangelization of the intellect and can be read there and in his Problem of Pain, Reflections on Psalms and on, but in his fiction and the penultimate, Hideous Strength, where Arthurian legend, scientific transhumanism run pagan amok with Stonehenge, Merlin and planetary intelligences we find him at his eloquent self, speculating and entertaining. We look back with affection at earlier states of thought in his letters and journals in literate society that existed then. We all know this state has been fully abrogated by 2020, for the death of our Oxford don 1963 was Nov 22, 1963, the death of Jack Lewis, of JFK and Aldous Huxley on the same day .

But what I want to know is how Lewis can ascribe the title, King of Kings, to Jupiter, when in fact this is not a title of Jove Jupiter at all, but of the One True High King of Kings, biblically reserved for Jesus Christ (Revelation 17:14, 19:16). and a sticking point if it comes to that at the appearance of the planetary spirits in the upper room retreat with the revived Merlin: "For this was great Glund-Oyarasa, King of Kings, through whom the joy of creation principally blows across the fields of Arbol, known to men in old times as Jove by fatal but not inexplicable misprision, confused with his Maker--so little did they dream by how many degrees the stair even of created being rises above him"( Ch. 15, The Descent of the Gods. p. 403 Bodley Head, 1949). So the critique is, if we are to take seriously the biblical claim that the name “King of Kings” belongs to Messiah alone as a name above every name, then even a literary transference of that title to a planetary spirit—however benign—compromises the singular glory of Christ. Even with all his learned hedging—“by fatal but not inexplicable misprision... so little did they dream...” etc.— blurs the line between Creator and creature, precisely at a moment that Scripture (Revelation 19:16) intends to make that line blindingly clear. Jupiter is "king" among gods, but never titled “King of Kings”in the Greco-Roman religion. The imperial title “King of Kings” appears only in Mesopotamian.

The term misprision here in its older sense of “misunderstanding” or “mistaken identity” is softened by the acknowledgment that it had a kind of tragic logic, conflated with divinity. “So little did they dream by how many degrees the stair even of created being rises above him”—emphasizes that even a being as exalted as Glund-Oyarasa (Jupiter) is still vastly below the Creator. The “stair” here suggests the Great Chain of Being, where each rung ascends through created order toward the uncreated. So, the passage may both honor the majesty of Jupiter and insists on the infinite qualitative distinction between Creator and creation, unless you consider Jupiter illegit. Which compounds with Lewis' wider view of redemptive syncretism—a harmonizing recovery of ancient cosmology within a Christian framework to rescue the logos in the pagan cosmos without falling into idolatry, But if “King of Kings” is a name revealed and reserved in the apocalypse of John for Christ alone, then applying it to Jupiter, even within a reconciliatory system, softens the apocalyptic edge—the very edge by which Christianity exposes and condemns all rival metaphysical claims, whether pagan, imperial, or angelic, diluting the Name, collapsing distinction into hierarchy—what the biblical witness refuses to allow, a return to the many, when Revelation insists on the One?

Tolkien balked between Lewis’s baptized Platonism and his more incarnational imagination. The kingdom of Logres, as Charles Williams dreamed it—and Lewis inherited it—of an inner spiritual Britain, mystical realm of true kingship, spiritual order, and Platonic form behind appearance, leans heavily into a Platonism worldwide that turns the Gospel into a system of ascent rather than descent, even if Lewis walks that stair beautifully, and softens the radical scandal of Jesus as God in flesh crucified, not idea, Platonic defense mechanisms against the flesh!

When we read Acts with Revelation and hear the town clerk declare "the city of the Ephesians is a worshiper of the Great Diana and of the image which fell down from Jupiter," (Acts 19.35) who brings peace by this declaration, we compare Lewis’ narrator allowing the title King of Kings to Jupiter, and in the parlance of that  idol image possess Merlin, whe that narrator has previously said, one can be pagan or Christian, eat with fingers or fork, or not at all, it smacks of  shamanizing wonder talk that occupied the beginning of the 16th century and continued, as is well recounted by Lewis in his standard work of the Sixteenth Century, to savor Platonic theology, “a deliberate syncretism based on the conviction that all the sages of antiquity shared a common wisdom and that this wisdom can be reconciled with Christianity (10). Our author literally wrote the book on this. “anthropomorphic life, dancing, ceremonials, a festival not a machine. (4). But as Lewis admits, and which has drawn minds to it even in our own time, "fantasy, conceit, paradox, color incantation return. Youth returns The fine frenzies of ideal love and ideal war” (1) displayed in such splendor in this fiction. with many sources so you can read it there.

His own criticism of Dr. Dee however imperils the matter, and the trips to the royal courts of Poland and with the royal s of Europe who sought the fruit of alchemy and knowledge second hand with Dee, so not only Queen E his confident, so if we look into Dee has a near avatar of that time we find the caveat, that what was fun in the 16th is dire strait in the 21st. "Whether you go to the future of the golden age promised, or back to past myths of Enoch and Gilgamesh before the Flood, or anywhere in between the precessions, collisions and calendar shifts of the age, on the day that myths turn fact and the images on shirts of the Seven Fold Avenger actually come to your door, keep down. All the neighbors will be firing guns. They think they have a cure for the Minotaur (A Bloody Theory of Divine Light).

To what extent Lewis eschews OT supernaturalism, the falling of Sargon off his altar, losing his head, and the insistence that nothing lies behind the image but devils who cannot move, the material is married to Arthurian romance and Christian humanism in all its parts so that we may not think the author of Mere Christianity ‘s preeminence of Christ, whose title in Revelations as "King of Kings" embroidered on his garment, is quite sufficient when attached to Jove Jupiter in his sphere come down to Ransom’s attic and there ascribed that title.

So when Lewis pours the power of the planets into his resuscitated Merlin to harness the planets to the stars to defeat the conspiracy of transhumanism on the earth here below, it was all began in the Silent Planet when in 1939, “a pupil of mind took all that dream of interplanetary colonization quite seriously, and the realization that thoughts of people in one way and another depend on some hope of perpetuating and improving the human race for the whole meaning of the universe—that a ‘scientific’ hope of defeating death is a real rival to Christianity…. That in his enthusiasm to set right his reverie of prose enamored by the very thing it opposed, chalked up to overflow if you like, or experience, is further exposed in his meeting Yeats in situ, 1921, a Merlin figure before the fact, who appeared ‘in the presence chamber, lit by tall candles, with orange colored curtains and full of things I can’t describe because I don’t know their names, which sounds rather like Merlin at the door and thereafter a while, until tamed, an audience accompanied by a priest who feeds judicious questions to the mage Yeats, which is how Merlin as translator camouflages. In the Yeats audience, “Finally we were given sherry or vermouth in long curiously shaped glasses, except the priest who had whiskey out of an even longer and more curiously shaped glass.” The poet was very big, about sixty years of age; ‘aweful’ as Borzy says. When he first began to speak I would have though him French, but the Irish sounds through after a time.” (letter 14 March 1921) You may doubt all you like that Yeats is Merlin revisited, that is your right, even as much as the delightful suggestion that you might also like to burn Chas Williams at the stake, To His brother 5 November 1939, “Wrenn expressed almost seriously a strong wish to burn Williams, or at least maintained that conversation with Williams enabled him to understand how inquisitors had felt it right to burn people.’ This in debate over the adage -narrow is the way and few they be that find it.” Wrenn, of course, took the view that it mattered precisely nothing whether it conformed to our ideas of goodness or not, and it was at this stage that the combustible possibilities of Williams revealed themselves…”

Not to regress, but if Yeats as Merlin, what about Blake, but we are assured along the way, where “Mozart had remained a boy of six all his life, Coghill also delivered, ‘that Blake was really inspired. I was beginning to say, ‘In a sense----’ when he said ‘in the same sense as Joan of Arc.’” (Letter, 4 February 1923). So Blake as Joan of Arc and Yeats as Merlin so seem to populate the air with Steiner’s spiritual forces, in abstentia, cascading back and forth over Jack like this only shows the pretext of our own vagaries we contend, but reserve also our suspicion that a man is over board and we might break out a life boat for him, not that it matters, for he is in better hands.

This is what I mean about catching ourselves in the act of contradiction. Hideous Strength was written in '43 or so, but in 1923 (7 July) Lewis had written in his journal of Rudolph Steiner, "the spiritual forces which Steiner found everywhere were either shamelessly mythological people or else no-one-knows-what…I also protested that Pagan animism was an anthropomorphic failure of imagination and that we should prefer a knowledge of the real unhuman life which is in the trees etc…the best thing about Steiner seems to be the Goetheanum which he built up in the Alps…Unfortunately the building has been burned down the Catholics….” 

In the end I don't know who was the more naive. I had hired Kim KIeubel to work at the Drug Garden in he late 70's. He brought his Banisteropsis to work and and let it live in our greenhouse, to take the air as it were, and it did all right, no like the way too leggy, Salvia divinia the assistant had in the botany greenhouse on campus, starved for light. In the course of work on the beds of henbane and hemlock Kim was prone to mouth these God curses, first in general, presumably at things he could see or feel or couldn't see or feel. to these I objected that they were uncalled for, a verbal pollution in the air as if speech were a pollutant like aluminum or barium. H replied what did I care since he wasn't impugning any god in particular. I that there being only one God any such was a dereliction of the One. He was amazed I saw the many in the one. I was amazed he could not see the One was undivided and everywhere.. This was not resolved. I think he thought it a punishment thought that I would not let him store his lunch in the refrigerator, but context explains the reason, for at that time I also had a part time sinecure  at the Clayton foundation on campus and it was of much import to me when the post docs told me never to open the refrigerator in  one lab because it was radioactive. It sat there and irradiated, for those labs were filled with radiation, added to by the need discovered that in order to save cost of buying new little one ounce lab bottles that the contents within were to be emptied out and washed from their radioactive zyelene, which economy was designated to the dish washer, moi, bo empty and wash, but with the window in the lab open a litle. The nosebleeds from this were likely involved in roping off the Garden fridg. An excessive measure we may think but not know, for radioactive at low levels builds slowly in the body to its own climax,  So let it be said to prevent the same bili rueben test I took after the nosebleeds, and the workman's comp case it spawned to pay for it, these matters in those days were carefully pushed aside. Indeed it reminded me then of the rabbit the same post doc kept in the basement which he asked me to feed when he was away once. the rabbit was in cage in the dark corner. I moved the room around and put the cage below the only window in the light. Later the post doc moved it back. that is the story of life. hook line and sinker. None of these people survived. The whole Exp Science bldg is gone. The Drug Garden is gone.  Flora Petit is gone. Dr Lester Reed is gone. Bill Lee  just disappeared. Kim went decades ago. It is 2025 in this tale.