Something Entirely Irrelevant About Death

The news that Guillermo del Toro and Neil Gaiman were collaborating on a short film called Death And Me , and that the film had just recently moved out of  limbo and into active production sparked a controversy in our family as to which actress should portray Gaiman’s perky little Goth-girl Grim Reaper:

I always thought that Selma Blair would be the perfect choice.  She’s dark-haired, slender, puckishly beautiful, and has experience in the fantasy/horror genre (Scream 2, Hellboy).   My children were aghast.  “Dad, you do know she’s almost forty, don’t you?”  It was to no avail that I tried to point out that Gaiman’s fictional character was a good deal older than forty.  Indeed, forty centuries would probably be a better measure.   It didn’t matter.  Death should have no wrinkles.

My son wanted to see Thora Birch (Ghost World, American Beauty) take on the part.  Miss Birch is an impressive actress and I think she could bring both what my son calls “indie cred” and old-fashioned sex appeal to the part,  but a large part of Death’s cachet is her appearance of waifish vulnerability.  Miss Birch can certainly do vulnerable, but waifish she is not.

My daughter stood up for current Disney Channel queen Demi Lovato.  Demi is dark, slender and very pretty, but she doesn’t have a hint of mystery about her.   I was surprised that she didn’t mention  fellow Disney protegée Selena Gomez.  Selena has the same coloring as Miss Lovato, but she looks more like she could have a mysterious side.  Of course, here we are talking about very young women with no track record outside the tightly programmed Disney teen market environment, but then former “Diz kids” like Reese Witherspoon and Hayden Panetierre have emerged from that environment and have established themselves well in the larger world.

Finally, this past week, I was able to catch a movie I had been wanting to see for some time; 500 Days Of Summer. The movie didn’t really live up to its hype.  As a chronicle of post-modern relationships among the angsty twenty-something Belle and Sebastian set, I have seen better, but I thought the female lead, Zooey Deschanel, despite the obvious Glass family reference, deserved to be on any short list to play Gaiman’s heroine.

Anybody else with me?

Taking Up The Burden Of The Mercy

I recently had the opportunity to re-sample a bit of Charles Williams’ Arthurian poetry, thanks to the inclusion by Google Books of a volume of criticism that, fortuitously, includes the poems and forgoes the criticism.  The “Prelude” from Taliessin Through Logres is a particularly powerful piece of work.  I don’t know much about the mechanics of poetry; drilling in iambs, trochees, and anapests had percolated their way out of the public school curriculum by the time I arrived to ninth grade English, and I am much the poorer for it.

Nevertheless, the poetry is splendid for reading aloud, at least as splendid as anything by Yates or Eliot.   The problem comes when you try to puzzle out what the poems are about. I am almost certainly in over my head here.  Williams is a difficult writer even when he’s trying to be straightforward.  He uses a private theological language in his essays with terms like “under the Mercy”, “Web of Exchange”, or most famously, “the doctrine of co-inherence”.

I think that Williams’ Taliessin poems are all about coinherence, about mediation, and  about the emergence of history from mythology.  The Arthurian figures are counters, I think, for Williams, who uses them in a dialectic for which the grammar has been given us already by Malory.  The subject matter of the Arthurian poems is the calling forth of Logres by the Emperor, the attempt and failure by Arthur to realize  Camelot-in-Carbonek, and of the decline into Britain.   It is like his commentary on the Tarot card of the Tower, where every human endeavor, even the most noble, partakes of the Shadow and contains the seeds of its own destruction.

Another theme that I notice:  Williams is concerned about the matter of Europe; Europe as Christendom, Europe as the sacramental body:

the poetry is filled with that sort of imagery.  For example, he sings that milk rose in the breasts of Gaul, (Western) man suckled there and his bones hardened.  When I first read that line, it unpacked for me as the transition from a way of knowing during the so-called Dark Ages, also known as the Age of Saints, of whom the last who embodied this particular way of knowing would be the enigmatic figure of John Scotus Erigena.  Then came the schoolmen, “the milk rose in the breasts of Gaul” in the teaching of Abelard, Albert Magnus, and Anselm.  “Man drank, and his bones grew hard.”

Perhaps I can find a scan of Williams’ scandalous [for the 1930s] frontpiece to Taliessin Through Logres. It is the figure of a naked woman with her navel in Jerusalem, her privates in Rome, and her arms and head in England.   There is a lot, a lot, of astrological imagery in the Taliessin cycle and the correspondence of the superlunary body to the Index of the Body.  As I have said before, Christendom is the greatest matter of myth we have, and it may be the only enduring myth.

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Paganism and Christianity

The beast ran in the wood
that had lost the man’s mind;
on a path harder than death
spectral shapes stood

Charles Williams “Taliessin Through Logres”

At one time, I wondered whether there had been any unbroken tradition of cult a practice between the pre-Christian peoples of Europe and the burgeoning pagan/earth-based religion community that we see emerging today.   European paganism persisted longer in the regions bordering the southeastern Baltic than in any other region of Europe, that is Pomerania, Prussia, Lithuania, and Latvia.  Strangely, these areas are very conservative linguistically as well, and are studied by linguistics because of the archaic features they preserve that other related languages have long since dropped.  In addition to this, I had heard that Lithuanians were never as fervent in their Catholicism as, say, the Poles.

For all these reasons, I thought perhaps, just perhaps, in Lithuania there may have existed a living community of pagans who had maintained their ancestral faith down to the present day.  Checking through the Internet, though, I found a very familiar pattern; whatever pagan material had survived in Lithuania survived mostly as a constellation of folk practices or “superstitions” the content of which had been forgotten by the people practicing them.  Even in Lithuania, which had maintained its traditional paganism into the time of John Wycliffe and Geoffrey Chaucer, Christianity had completely displaced traditional paganism.

However, in the 19th century, at the height of the Romantic movement, a literary and cultural movement called Romulva was initiated to restore traditional Lithuanian paganism.  It has had a modicum of success, but the majority of Lithuanians remain Catholic.  This movement coincided with a resurgence of interest in traditional paganism (Wagner, Swineburne, etc) in other Christian European countries.

How did Christianity displace paganism so completely?  A lot of historians point to the pressure of belonging to the wider Mediterranean/Roman world.  That makes sense for the early Germanic incursors into the western parts of the Roman world, but it makes very little sense for the pagan Saxons Slavs, most of whom were evangelized by Irish and Anglo-Saxon monastics unaffiliated with any “Roman” power, even the Merovingians who often actively opposed them.

St Boniface chops down Thor's Oak

As an Orthodox  Christian I want to say that paganism was displaced because it was replaced by a superior spiritual force.  Paganism has a very pragmatic and empirical side.   It worked for the pagans.  Pre-schism Christianity had an equally pragmatic and empirical side.  The hagiography of that era is full of what we could call “power encounters” between the old ways and the rising power of Christ, such as the battle between Saint Patrick and the pagan king Laoghaire on the hill of Slane.  Bede is full of this sort of story, and I am more disposed to believe Bede as a journalist than as a propagandist.

If paganism was the veneration of the “elemental spirits” of the world, then the Church was right in replacing the cultus of the pagan gods with the veneration of Christian saints.   Mankind was “coming into its own” under the tutelage of the Church, and the elemental spirits were being put out of a job.   The saints were taking it over.  In a way, secular scientism could be seen as an outgrowth of this development.

That leaves the explanation of the emergence of modern neo-paganism, even amidst the triumph of its successor secular materialism, as a rebuke to a denatured, splintered Christianity that has lost its spiritual mojo.

First Impressions Of Gene Wolfe

I have finally worked my way through the first volume of Gene Wolfe’s series The Book Of The New Sun, The Shadow Of The Torturer, and I have to say that I am thoroughly intimidated.  His prose is as tightly packed with information as a DNA strand, and it took me about twice as long to finish as I thought it

The Master at a Conference

would.  I had to reference backwards and forwards in the book continually,  and read several passages multiple times before I felt as though I had a handle on what Wolfe was trying to say.

The plot was unusually thin considering the considerable wordcraft that went into the book; others have commented at length about Wolfe’s portmanteaus, so I won’t go into them here.  It is sufficient to say that anyone who knows a smattering of Latin and Greek, and a little medieval French as well, will not be baffled by any  of Wolfe’s idiosyncratic vocabulary.  My favorite by far was Wolfe’s elegant euphemism for ‘executioner`, “carnifex”, that is, someone who turns a living body into just so much meat.

The novel is a bildungsroman, the story of a young man growing up and making his way in the world.   If I have any criticism of this work, it is that Severian appears to mature too quickly in the two days between when he is exiled from the Torturers’ Guild and when he arrives at the city wall with Dorcas in tow.

Of course, Wolfe packs a lot into those two days; the discovery of sex,  a duel to the death, a lecture on light and relativity, and a visit to the distant past (our own era?).  Still, this isn’t enough to explain the change in Severian from an uncertain and hesitant boy to the confident man he becomes by the end of the novel.

I have heard, on the other hand, that Severian, the novel’s protagonist, is not a trustworthy narrator, that he is propagandizing, relating a self-aggrandizing version of the story of his rise from obscurity to Autarch.

Somebody said somewhere, I don’t  remember who or where, that all writers should have ceased to write  after Finnegan’s Wake, or Light In August, or Gravity’s Rainbow. The same sort of thing is said about Gene Wolfe.  Now, I haven’t read anything yet by Joyce, Faulkner, or Pynchon (they are on my to-get-to list), but it is obvious that there has been plenty of writing since the publication of those masterworks.

But I understand the sentiment.  Anybody writing in the urban fantasy/science fiction is going to find that Gene Wolfe has set the bar very high indeed.

Gaiman’s Stardust

I am no big fan of graphic novels.  I find them less satisfying than books because of the peculiar way I read.  It appears I process language directly off the printed page without subvocalization.   IF the book is the right sort of book, and if I am in the right sort of mood, I merely open the book and watch the movie projected for me by my imagination on the frontal lobe of my brain.  It is hard for a graphic novel to compete with that.

Unfortunately, that makes the better part of Neil Gaiman’s body of work inaccessible to me.  Most people ask me, when they learn of my interest in Gaiman, how I liked the Sandman series, and I have to confess that I know very little about it.  This is a major lacuna in my knowledge of fantastic literature and mythopoesis. With the possible exception of  the Joss Whedon’s Buffyverse, Sandman is probably the best known and most beloved post-Tolkien legendarium out there.

Nevertheless, Mr. Gaiman has published some traditional novels.  I read and enjoyed American Gods earlier this year.   Neverwhere I was unable to finish because the male protagonist was so unappealing (honestly, he reminded me too much of myself).  But Stardust, which appears to be his first novel, has completely enraptured me.

I am not  enough of an authority on Gaiman to comment on what others have found in the book;  that it is different from the rest of his works.  It does lack the brooding melancholy that I found so deeply embedded in Coraline, Neverwhere, or American Gods, and so, it is a much brighter work than any of those others.  Another thing I appreciated is the almost encyclopedic knowledge Gaiman commands over fantastic and folkloric themes.   You know a falling star has to be a beautiful woman (Gabrielle Anwar as Ramandu’s daughter in the BBC version of Voyage of the Dawn Treader), you know that a ruthless king must have seven ambitious sons, of whom the youngest is the canniest and most relentless in his ambition, and you know that a boy inevitably must pass through fire and water to become a man.

The book was made into a movie, which I also enjoyed thoroughly.  It was better than any other fantasy film I have ever seen, apart from Jackson’s Tolkien films.  I preferred it to Willow, to Labyrinth, to Terry Gillam’s  Baron Munchcausen, to either of the Narnia films, and even to The City of Lost Children, which is high praise indeed.  Of course, I love Claire Danes, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Robert DeNiro, who I never would have believed as a cross-dressing pirate if I hadn’t seen it.

As an aside, there are fantasy movies which are unwatchable.  Please avoid Eragon, The Golden Compass, and Inkheart. Take my word for it.

A Tale Of Three Parishes – Prolegomena

Since my family’s Baptism and Chrismation into Holy Orthodoxy in 2006, we have been involved in a number of parishes; OCA, Greek and Antiochian.  Since we are converts ourselves,  we feel most comfortable where there are a lot of other converts, especially those coming from an Evangelical Christian background.

However, this can sometimes lead to a niggling suspicious feeling that I as a  convert am just “playing Orthodox”  I have a bad   self-congratulatory attitude about being in the “true Church” which feeds my ego at both ends; first, for having been an Evangelical Protestant and so understanding the concept of regeneration and enjoying a facility with the Bible, and second, for being Orthodox and knowing about the Saints and the disciplines and all the panoply of historic Christianity.

The Ochlophobist has a friend, Samn!,  that left the following comment on his blog amidst all the flotsam and jetsam concerning the current malcriadez in the Antiochian Archdiocese:

+Philip and his clerical friends are quite anomalous even in their generation of Arab Orthodox because they for whatever reason missed out on the revival that came from the Orthodox Youth Movement and were already in America by the time the Lebanese monasteries like Dayr el-Harf really started bearing fruit. And so, like Jewish actors acquiring waspy surnames, they went out of their way to trade in Orthodox ways for the ways of the perceived American elites of the early sixties, Episcopalians. (I’m glad I’m not the only one who has seen this)

And so, when converts came, they were unable to transmit the heritage of the Church of Antioch to them, but rather allowed a trial-and-error approach to figuring out what a lived Orthodoxy is. The anti-monasticism and the America-firstism that have been signature traits of much of the Archdiocese’s leadership… have served to hinder spiritual bonds and bonds of affection and communication with the mother church. In the aftermath of this current crisis, those are the things that need to be cultivated, regardless of the Archdiocese’s ultimate autonomy, both for the sake of having a healthy and fruitful relationship with Damascus and for the authentic transmission of Antioch’s ancient heritage of lived Orthodoxy to all those who come to her thirsting for it.

And, just in case you are thirsting to know more about Antioch’s ancient heritage of lived Orthodoxy,  Samn! offers his own Arab Orthodoxy blog, and it is first-rate.

Please visit and encourage.

Preparing For The Coming Global Lent II – Christendom, The Empire, and The Revolution

And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

Verily, verily, I say unto you, Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man.

“We do not content ourselves with a pluralist marketplace of gods.  Polyarchy and utter, brawling anarchy are one and the same.  Division is strife, and hastens to dissolution…One is the might of my Trinity, One the knowledge, One the glory, One the power. so again, the Unity cannot dissolve, being greatly honored in the one harmony of Divinity.”

St. Gregory of Nazianzus

The organic body sang together; dialects of the world sprang in Byzantium; back they rang to sing in Byzantium; the streets repeat the sound of the Throne

I’m sorry that this post has languished for as long as it has.  At one point I wanted to make the ever-so-obvious point that the problem of the One and the Many has its reflection in the political sphere, and that an over-emphasis on the One leads to Tyranny, such as that which would obtain were the Islamic Universal Caliphate ever to be instantiated, and that an over-emphasis on the Many leads inevitably to Anarchy.

Over against this I wanted to deposit the idea of the Chalcedonian Commonwealth, of which the most consistent example were the Christian Empires of New Rome and Moscow, with their deeply ingrained idea of synergy, the working together of the Church and the State according to the Chalcedonian formula, although that synergy was honored far more in the breach than in the ideal in Byzantine and Russian societies.  Nevertheless, I believe that something akin to a Christendom, a commonwealth of Orthodox Christian nations, would most closely incarnate the life of the Trinity in the political sphere.

It appears from a reading of history that this state of affairs was beginning to coalesce in the West at the beginning of the fated eleventh century.  The Western Empire, as it was thought of at that time, had moved from Carolingian hands into the Saxon Ottonian dynasty, who with the help of a series of sympathetic popes culimnating in Sylvester II, was moving towards just this sort of Byzantine model of symphony.  The untimely death of the half-Greek Otto III lead to the severing of the two powers, and the development of the monarchial Papacy and the reaction of the development of the secular power as autonomous, and operating in an autonomous sphere.

Orthodoxy requires a fall-of-the-West story.  At one time I considered this a defect in the Orthodox narrative.  Papal Catholicism, after all, does not appear to require a fall-of-the-East story to complete its narrative, but its narrative does not have, to me, the compelling nature of the Orthodox narrative.  The post-schism history of the Christian West makes better sense in the context of a gradual Dying-Of The-Light, a thousand-year  summer twilight in which the memory of the Kingdom of God is replaced by the Kingdom of Man, first in its ecclesiastical, then it its secular, and finally in its radical form.

Empire is the exterior of Church.  Church is the interior of Empire.

Neil Gaiman Nails The Neo-Pagans

For an Orthodox Christian, I sometimes think I have altogether too much sympathy for other religious expressions, especially Taoism or Sufi’ism and others of that stripe  which concentrate on the immanence of God.   Pantheism is a continual temptation for me, so you can see where I would find neo-paganism attractive in the abstract; first, neo-paganism purports to be eco-friendly, venerating the biosphere, that Web of Exchange which is the living, breathing skein of our planet.  Then, neo-paganism purports to honor Tradition and Ancestors, and I have always believed that anything built up by increments over millenia as a result of mostly unconscious impulses has to contain something of value, and anyway  is always to be preferred to a system created by a group of Really Smart People using their brains to Figure Things Out.   As an aside, Arturo Vasquez deftly captures something of what I want to say in a post of his, The Modern War Against Folk Religion. Take what he has to say to heart, all you people with the highly developed frontal lobes, the next time someone passes you on the highway with the Virgin of Guadalupe garishly splashed all over his back window, and remember the Wahabi.

However, on the ground, I am finding that “neo-paganism” is becoming a favorite feint of the “spiritual-but-not-religious” crowd, a means to continue their undiluted worship of their own reflections while avoiding the inevitable demands a god would make on them.

Now, Neil Gaiman strikes as close as any living writer I have read to the mythopoetic spirit of the Inklings (I haven’t yet read Tim Powers or Gene Scott).  OK, so he’s a horror writer.  To anybody who isn’t sufficiently anesthetized, our age must seem an unending horror. Indeed, I don’t think you could possibly write mythopoetic literature, have it accurately describe our present spiritual circumstances, and not descend into horror.

Nevertheless, Mr. Gaiman deftly dispenses with modern American Wicca/neo-paganism in this scene from American Gods. Please forgive the format.  My daughter borrowed my copy and there obviously isn’t a soft-copy version of a best-selling current novel available for cutting and pasting.  But thank God for books.google  and FastStone Capture.

Mr. Gaiman, if you stumble across this insignificant blog, I invoke the Fair Use clause, and want to thank you for a fascinating and thought-provoking read.

Also, if you are a neo-pagan who has wandered in here and are offended, leave a message and let’s try to be friends.

The Mythopoesis of America – Visionary Realism

On the coast they put up a few ramshackle huts
and slept uneasily. This, they claim, in the Riachuelo,
but that is a story dreamed up in Boca.
It was really a city block in my district – Palermo**.

Jose Luis Borges – The Mythical Foundation of Buenos Aires

Nothing is true or false until it is properly enstoried.

It can be handy  to think of our hemisphere as three distinct ethnospheres; Euro-America consists of most of the US and Canada, and the Southern Cone of South America, which were relatively empty (or quickly emptied) and where the indigenous peoples were displaced by  populations from Europe.

Afro-America consists of the Caribbean basin, some parts of the old Confederacy in the United States, and the northern parts of Brazil, where the same vacuum was filled by settlers from Africa.  Finally, Chthonic America consists of the heartlands of the old native American high cultures of Meso-America and the Andes, where the indigenous inhabitants were not eliminated so much as creolized, and where the underlying thought patterns are still very much Inca, or Maya, or Toltec.

The mythopoetic process, the digestion of Chthonic America, I believe, can be found in what is called the literature of “magical realism”, about which I know little, but at whose fountain I have tasted sweet waters and want to learn more.  Miguel Angel Asturias, of Guatemala, whose master-work Men of Corn I have yet to read but the portions which I have read burn like lava.

Along the same line, the mythopoetic impulse in Euro-America, I believe, can be found in what I like to call “visionary realism”, except that the seminal works are not fiction, but non-fiction.  Let me explain.

About 15 years ago, before moving to Miami, Florida, I read a book by a remarkable woman, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, The River Of Glass. Yesterday, I began another book by an equally remarkable woman, Mary Hunter Austin, The Land Of Little Rain. These two books are so similar they almost appear to have been written by the same mind. Certainly, they partake of the same spirit.

Both books were written by women of powerful character who, despite being early feminists and agitators for “women’s rights”, kept their husbands’ names.   Both of them endured a rocky and tempestuous marriage that ended in divorce.  Neither of them was native to the place she wrote about;  Mrs. Douglas grew up in Minnesota, but moved to South Florida in 1915,  and she lived there until 1998.  Mrs. Austin moved to the Mojave Desert in 1890 and remained there for the next 17 years.

Mrs. Douglas wrote about the Florida Everglades, and Mrs. Austin about the Inyo valley on the leeward of the Sierra Nevada range, and both of their masterpieces share a common structure.  Both begin with the geography and the flora of the region, then they discuss animal and bird life, noting peculiarities caused by the singular environments, overly wet in the case of the Everglades and overly arid in the case of the Inyo valley.

After this, they describe in considerable detail and with great sympathy the lives and customs of Native Americans that lived, and continue to live,  in these areas.  Only after all of  this are the stories of white settlers introduced.  At first they are the stories of solitary, furtive men, miners or trappers, who wander into the region hoping to find some kind of quick economic salvation from a region that at first sight has very little to offer.

Only towards the end of the books are the stories of  “smart men” introduced,  well-connected men, who can systematically exploit the scarce resources of the region efficiently.   This then draws the region into the larger American narrative, dominated by a nearby large city;  Miami in the case of the Everglades and Los Angeles in the case of the Inyo valley.

I think I would call the writing style of both The Everglades: River of Grass and The Land Of Little Rain “visionary non-fiction”.   Think of Annie Dillard’s  Pilgrim  At Tinker Creek or Barry Lopez’ Arctic Dreams, both of which have been recommended to me and both of which I have tried to start.  It is possible that I have an antipathy to Dillard and Lopez in the same way that I have an antipathy to the very derivative Tolkien imitators that so abound these days.

This visionary realism may just be the essential Euro-American way of mythopoesis.    It attempts to “get inside” a place, to show how the contours and characteristics of  the land work their way into the consciousness of its settlers, and how the consciousness of the human agents affects the land.   Both River of Grass and Land Of Little Rain are spiritual histories of a particular place, at the margin of the easily habitable and easily “developed” parts of the country.  Yet they are far from tedious.

Both Mrs. Douglas and Mrs. Austin accept a  responsibility for their respective territory that leave you feeling as though they had become, through their artistry, almost a familiar spirit or a guiding genius.  Mrs. Douglas, in particular, living in South Florida until her 108th year, was continually referred to in the press as a spokeswoman “for the Everglades”, or for “the cause of Everglades conservation”, whereas, truth be told, she felt every unnecessary subdivision and short-sighted, self-serving political decision impacting her beloved River of Grass as a personal affront.   I heard that she didn’t die a happy woman.

It may very well be that the project for the Church for the next millenium will be to drop the Imperial Church one-size-fits-all fantasy and begin to develop what Father Stephen Freeman refers to as Orthodoxy Where You Live, what I would like to call the Orthodoxy of Right Here, Right Now, and what Mark Thomas Hoyer calls, following Mrs. Austin, Local Christianities.

To be certain, embracing sectarianism is not the idea. Each square inch of ground has to have a tutelary spirit, a guiding ideology. I want it to be Orthodoxy, the Faith Once Delivered, but it may very well be that an Orthodoxy lived out and developed in a particular place wouldn’t “work” 50 miles down the road.

Maybe we need to find out.