Dr. Lao, a bald, opium pipe-puffing (I don’t think anybody thought there was anything but tobacco in Dr. Lao’s pipe in 1964, but times have changed), “me-no-speekee” Chinaman rides into the Western town of Abalone to set up his tent of wonders.  The townspeople are busy having their community stolen out from underneath them by an unscrupulous real estate speculator, but they pause in their headlong rush towards chaos and dissolution to pay heed to the dusty and weatherworn marvels on display at Dr. Lao’s “circus”.    Alternately astonished, cynical, unbelieving, and shocked, the inhabitants of Abalone are one by one coaxed out of their fantasies of individual power and significance to confront themselves as they actually are;  ridiculous but necessary and beloved threads of the greater tapestry that is the community of Abalone.

Not all of them pass the test.  One of the most uncomfortable moments in the film is when the blind soothsayer confronts a silly not-really-a-widow who is desperately clinging to an outdated self-image of herself as a young coquette.    Apollonius tells her that she will never be rich, she will never marry again, and that her days will blur together into a dreary parade of sameness until she dies and is forgotten.  For good or for evil, he tells her, she will have had as much effect as if she had never existed at all.  As self-awareness breaks over her character, the talented actress playing this role displays for a brief moment the horror of the damnable truth Apollonius has just told her, but then her face relaxes again as she pulls her comfortable lies back around her.

This is a deeply Taoist film, whether by design or happy circumstance.  I have always wished Christianity was more like Taoism.  I wouldn’t want Christianity to be  Taoism, exactly, because the Tao of the Old Boy is impersonal and, frankly, a bit scary.  Nevertheless, when I look at the face of the personal Christ in the New Testament, I see a lot more that reminds me of the Tao than of the joyless moralist we have made Him into.  Dr. Lao, who has to be based on the founder of Taoism Lao-Tzu (he disappears from the town of Abalone mounted not on a bullock, but on a donkey, the foal of an ass), strikes me as a Holy figure.

I have always wanted to study the idea of Holiness apart from the idea of Morality,  with the idea of Morality being a declension from holiness, an oblique case of Holiness, as it were.  Dr. Lao, despite his seeming amorality, is good place to start.  Without striving, and without putting himself forward in any way, he gently diverts each of townspeople who are amenable to his guidance away from the stampede towards non-being they are pursuing back towards a position of Coinherence in the Web of Exchange that is the town of Abalone.

Interestingly, the author of the book that this film was based on, Charles G. Finney, was not only an influential writer of fantastic fiction in the thirties and forties, but he was also the great-grandson of the evangelist Charles Grandison Finney, who introduced so many fantastic elements into the American strand of Christianity.

Here is the list.  My choices are in bold:
The Acts Of Caine Series, by Matthew Woodring Stover
The Algebraist, by Iain M. Banks
Altered Carbon, by Richard K. Morgan
American Gods, by Neil Gaiman
Anansi Boys, by Neil Gaiman
Anathem, by Neal Stephenson
Animal Farm, by George Orwell
The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers
Armor, by John Steakley
The Baroque Cycle, by Neal Stephenson
Battlefield Earth, by L. Ron Hubbard
Beggars In Spain, by Nancy Kress
The Belgariad, by David Eddings
The Black Company Series, by Glen Cook
The Black Jewels Series, by Anne Bishop
The Book Of The New Sun, by Gene Wolfe
Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
Bridge Of Birds, by Barry Hughart
The Callahan’s Series, by Spider Robinson
A Canticle For Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller
The Cat Who Walked Through Walls, by Robert Heinlein
Cat’s Cradle , by Kurt Vonnegut
The Caves Of Steel, by Isaac Asimov
The Change Series, by S.M. Stirling
Childhood’s End, by Arthur C. Clarke
Children Of God, by Mary Doria Russell
The Chronicles Of Amber, by Roger Zelazny
The Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant, by Stephen R. Donaldson
The City And The City, by China Mieville
City And The Stars, by Arthur C. Clarke
A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
The Codex Alera Series, by Jim Butcher
The Coldfire Trilogy, by C.S. Friedman
The Commonwealth Saga, by Peter F. Hamilton
The Company Wars, by C.J. Cherryh
The Conan The Barbarian Series, by R.E. Howard
Contact, by Carl Sagan
Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson
The Crystal Cave, by Mary Stewart
The Culture Series, by Iain M. Banks
The Dark Tower Series, by Stephen King
The Day of Triffids, by John Wyndham
Deathbird Stories, by Harlan Ellison
The Deed of Paksennarion Trilogy, by Elizabeth Moon
The Demolished Man, by Alfred Bester
The Deverry Cycle, by Katharine Kerr
Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delany
The Diamond Age, by Neil Stephenson
The Difference Engine, by William Gibson & Bruce Sterling
The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin
Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K. Dick
Don’t Bite The Sun, by Tanith Lee
Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis
Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey
Dreamsnake, by Vonda McIntyre
The Dune Chronicles, by Frank Herbert
Earth, by David Brin
Earth Abides, by George R. Stewart
The Eisenhorn Omnibus, by Dan Abnett
The Elric Saga, by Michael Moorcock
Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card
Eon, by Greg Bear
The Eyes Of The Dragon, by Stephen King
The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde
The Faded Sun Trilogy, by C.J. Cherryh
Fafhrd & The Gray Mouser Series, by Fritz Leiber
Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
The Farseer Trilogy, by Robin Hobb
The Female Man, by Joanna Russ
The Fionavar Tapestry Trilogy, by Guy Gavriel Kay
A Fire Upon The Deep, by Vernor Vinge
The First Law Trilogy, by Joe Abercrombie
Flowers For Algernon, by Daniel Keys
The Foreigner Series, by C.J. Cherryh
The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman
The Foundation Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov
Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
The Gaea Trilogy, by John Varley
The Gap Series, by Stephen R. Donaldson
The Gate To Women’s Country, by Sheri S. Tepper
Going Postal, by Terry Pratchett
The Gone-Away World, by Nick Harkaway
The Gormenghast Triology, by Mervyn Peake
Grass, by Sheri S. Tepper
Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon
The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood
Hard-Boiled Wonderland And The End of The World, by Haruki Murakami
The Heechee Saga, by Frederik Pohl
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
The Hollows Series, by Kim Harrison
House Of Leaves, by Mark Danielewski
The Hyperion Cantos, by Dan Simmons
I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson
I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov
The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson
The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury
The Incarnations Of Immortality Series, by Piers Anthony
The Inheritance Trilogy, by N.K. Jemisin
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke
A Journey To The Center Of The Earth, by Jules Verne
Kindred, by Octavia Butler
The Kingkiller Chronicles, by Patrick Rothfuss
Kraken, by China Mieville
The Kushiel’s Legacy Series, by Jacqueline Carey
Last Call, by Tim Powers
The Last Coin, by James P. Blaylock
The Last Herald Mage Trilogy, by Mercedes Lackey
The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle
The Lathe Of Heaven, by Ursula K. LeGuin
The Left Hand Of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin
The Legend Of Drizzt Series, by R.A. Salvatore
The Lensman Series, by E.E. Smith
The Liaden Universe Series, by Sharon Lee & Steve Miller
The Lies Of Locke Lamora, by Scott Lynch
Lilith’s Brood, by Octavia Butler
Little, Big, by John Crowley
The Liveship Traders Trilogy, by Robin Hobb
Lord Of Light, by Roger Zelazny
The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Lord Valentine’s Castle, by Robert Silverberg
Lucifer’s Hammer, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
Lud-in-the-Mist, by Hope Mirrlees
The Magicians, by Lev Grossman
The Malazan Book Of The Fallen Series, by Steven Erikson
The Man In The High Castle, by Philip K. Dick
The Manifold Trilogy, by Stephen Baxter
The Mars Trilogy, by Kim Stanley Robinson
The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury
Memory And Dream, by Charles de Lint
Memory, Sorrow, And Thorn Trilogy, by Tad Williams
Mindkiller, by Spider Robinson
The Mistborn Series, by Brandon Sanderson
The Mists Of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley
The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein
Mordant’s Need, by Stephen Donaldson
More Than Human, by Theodore Sturgeon
The Mote In God’s Eye, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
The Naked Sun, by Isaac Asimov
The Neanderthal Parallax Trilogy, by Robert J. Sawyer
Neuromancer, by William Gibson
Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman
The Newsflesh Triology, by Mira Grant
The Night’s Dawn Trilogy, by Peter F. Hamilton
Novels Of The Company, by Kage Baker
Norstrilia, by Cordwainer Smith
The Number Of The Beast, by Robert Heinlein
Old Man’s War, by John Scalzi
On Basilisk Station, by David Weber
The Once And Future King, by T.H. White
Oryx And Crake, by Margaret Atwood
The Otherland Tetralogy, by Tad Williams
The Outlander Series, by Diana Gabaldan
Parable Of The Sower, by Octavia Butler
The Passage, by Justin Cronin
Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson
Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville
The Prestige, by Christopher Priest
The Pride Of Chanur, by C.J. Cherryh
The Prince Of Nothing Trilogy, by R. Scott Bakker
The Princess Bride, by William Goldman
Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge
Rendezvous With Rama, by Arthur C. Clarke
Replay, by Ken Grimwood
Revelation Space, by Alistair Reynolds
Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban
The Riftwar Saga, by Raymond E. Feist
Ringworld, by Larry Niven
The Riverworld Series, by Philip Jose Farmer
The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
The Saga Of Pliocene Exile, by Julian May
The Saga Of Recluce, by L.E. Modesitt Jr.
The Sandman Series, by Neil Gaiman
The Sarantine Mosaic Series, by Guy Gavriel Kay
A Scanner Darkly, by Philip K. Dick
The Scar, by China Mieville
The Shannara Trilogy, by Terry Brooks
The Shattered Chain Trilogy, by Marion Zimmer Bradley
The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Sirens Of Titan, by Kurt Vonnegut
Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
Small Gods, by Terry Pratchett
Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson
The Snow Queen, by Joan D. Vinge
Solaris, by Stanislaw Lem
Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury
Song for the Basilisk, by Patricia McKillip
A Song Of Ice And Fire Series, by George R. R. Martin
The Space Trilogy, by C.S. Lewis
The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell
The Stainless Steel Rat Books, by Harry Harrison
Stand On Zanzibar, by John Brunner
The Stand, by Stephen King
Stardust, by Neil Gaiman
The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester
Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein
Stations Of The Tide, by Michael Swanwick
Steel Beach, by John Varley
Stranger In A Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein
Sunshine, by Robin McKinley
The Sword Of Truth, by Terry Goodkind
The Swordspoint Trilogy, by Ellen Kushner
The Tales of Alvin Maker, by Orson Scott Card
The Temeraire Series, by Naomi Novik
The Thrawn Trilogy, by Timothy Zahn
Tigana , by Guy Gavriel Kay
Time Enough For Love, by Robert Heinlein
The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells
The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger
To Say Nothing Of The Dog, by Connie Willis
The Troy Trilogy, by David Gemmell
Ubik, by Philip K. Dick
The Uplift Saga, by David Brin
The Valdemar Series, by Mercedes Lackey
VALIS, by Philip K. Dick
Venus On The Half-Shell, by Kilgore Trout/Philip Jose Farmer
The Vlad Taltos Series, by Steven Brust
The Vorkosigan Saga, by Lois McMaster Bujold
The Vurt Trilogy, by Jeff Noon
The War Of The Worlds, by H.G. Wells
Watchmen, by Alan Moore
Watership Down, by Richard Adams
The Way Of Kings, by Brandon Sanderson
Way Station, by Clifford D. Simak
We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin
The Wheel Of Time Series, by Robert Jordan
When Gravity Fails, by George Alec Effinger
Wicked, by Gregory Maguire
Wild Seed, by Octavia Butler
The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi
World War Z, by Max Brooks
The Worm Ouroboros, by E.R. Edison
The Xanth Series, by Piers Anthony
The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, by Michael Chabon
1632, by Eric Flint
1984, by George Orwell
2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke
20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, by Jules Verne

I was glad to see both Moore’s graphic novel Watchmen and Gaiman’s Sandman series in such august company.   Both Earth Abides (Stewart) and Lord of Light (Zelazny) are close to perfect works of science-fiction.  Unfortunately, Stewart never wrote another book, and Zelazny fell off precipitously after LOL.  Amber wasn’t nearly as good.

I am not surprised that A Voyage To Arcturus didn’t make it onto this list.  It is very poorly written and hard to parse, but it does have a sticking power that many better works lack.  I was surprised to see that nothing by Lord Dunsany made the cut, nor was James Cabell represented, nor George Macdonald, nor Jack Vance.  In the mean time, you can amuse yourselves identifying the pictures off to the right.

Look To The Skies!!

The Last Starfighter – 1984      It was 1984.  The original Star Wars trilogy had just completed, with Return Of The Jedi having left an awful taste in everybody’s mouth after the gee-whiz fireworks of A New Hope,  followed by the masterful chiaroscuro of  The Empire Strikes Back.   Indeed, I think a good case can be made for TESB as the best science fiction film ever made, and for ROTJ as one of the worst.  Maybe it was the unsatisfactory resolution of the Star Wars trilogy that predisposed me to appreciate this goofy, well-meaning film that came out the next year.

There isn’t much to The Last Starfighter, but what there is is great fun.  If you can praise Breaking Away as the best film ever shot in Indiana (it is leagues better than the histrionic Hoosiers), you can similarly praise The Last Starfighter as the best film whose protagonist lives in a dead-end trailer park.  But what a trailer park!  there is community, romance, challenge, and galaxy-saving, all within the [terrestial] confines of a few scant country acres.

Alex Rogan lives in said dead-end trailer park.  All of his friends are going off to college, but he missed his chance at a scholarship and is stuck serving as a handyman for the Starlight Starbright Trailer Park.  His widowed mother and porn-addled little brother are no help at all.   The only bright spots in his dismal existence are his girlfriend Maggie (Catherine Mary Stewart, my favorite among the Starlets Referred To By All Three Names), and the  Starfighter, a stand-up arcade game at the park’s office where the player defends “the Frontier” from “Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada”. Eventually he becomes the highest scoring player of the game. Thereafter he is visited by the game’s inventor Centauri (Robert Preston, basically reprising his role as Harold Hill from The Music Man).  Centauri whisks him away to Rylos, an embattled planet, where Alex learns that Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada are real, and a real threat.

The Rylosians attempt to recruit him as a Starfighter, an elite corps of fighters who maintain the Frontier against the a rogue Rylosian noble and his Ko-Dan handlers.  Alex begs off, and Centauri returns him to Earth, but when the Ko-Dan threaten people dear to him;  his mother, Maggie, and other people in the Starlight Starbright Trailer Park,  Alex mans up and saves the Universe.

Yeah, it’s a coming-of-age story, one of the oldest ever.  But The Last Starfighter accomplishes for Alex Rogan in one film what the Star Wars trilogy fails to deliver for Luke Skywalker in three.

My response:

I hadn’t been Orthodox a year when all of a sudden it hit me why Evangelicals, my former self included, believed that Catholics and Orthodox **worshipped saints**, statues, icons and Mary. We treat them the way Evangelicals treat God. That is to say, we do religious acts in their presence, directed to them. No wonder. Since there is no [official] sacrifice in Evangelical worship, there is just “dylia” offered to God, religious acts done in His presence, directed to Him.

Any Cathodox would be aghast, and rightly so, at offering the Eucharist to anyone except the most Holy Trinity. Without the Eucharist properly understood… You have kind of a Jesusism, an ideology extracted from a text, subject to all of the vicissitudes and mutations of any ideology.

Without any doubt, his illustrations of the Edgar Rice Burroughs books that I devoured during my boyhood were the creepiest.  I knew nothing about him except his name;  Mahlon Blaine, and I ferreted out every book by ERB that he illustrated.  Towards the end of his long  and productive life (1892-1969), he was commissioned by the small publisher Canaveral Press to illustrate several Burroughs’ works; in particular the Pellucidar series.  The pictures were dense, and sometimes macabre, and I know they disturbed my mother and other guardians of my juvenile sensibilities.  It is a good thing that I never investigated him more thoroughly.  He was a very productive artist, active from the 20s until just before his death.  Somewhat like an American Aubrey Beardsley, his art  reveled in the decadent, the erotic, and the occult.  He was a strange choice as an illustrator for what is basically boys’ literature, but I’m glad someone had the courage to ask Mahlon Blaine to illustrate these books.

In the early eighties, I found a copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a used book store for $75.  I tried to ascertain why the book had such a high price tag, and I was told by the girl who was accompanying me at the time that the reason for the price was for the illustrations, which were by Arthur Rackham.  She begged me to buy the book for her, but between the two of us, we had probably $15.  The illustrations were captivating.  I since discovered that Rackham was a very prolific illustrator, having illustrated Charles Dickens, John Bunyan, and Edgar Allen Poe, among others.

His fairies were so unworldly that I often wondered if, like Lovecraft’s Pickman, he didn’t paint them  from life.

Vaughn Bodé was a hippie’s hippie.  It seems like I was just getting to know him through his work in National Lampoon when he was snatched from us by his untimely death in 1975.  In a way, I guess he really couldn’t be called a fantasy illustrator.  He illustrated one paperback by R.A. Lafferty, a strange but compatible pairing.   Lafferty, for all his playful and ironic prose, was a devout Caholic, and as I said, Bodé was a hippie’s hippie.  Bodé also illustrated some science fiction magazine covers, but overall, he was more of an underground cartoonist.  His big-eyed, small-mouthed, pneumatic women preceded Japanese manga, and his style is seen everywhere on urban walls and underpasses.

4. Hearts In Atlantis (2001)

Bobby and Ted form a bond.  It turns out that Ted can see the future, read people’s minds, and move objects  around with his will.  These abilities rub off on Bobby, allowing him to impress a neighborhood girl.  Unfortunately, Ted is being pursued by the government (?), and Bobby’s mother betrays him.  When Bobby  has to choose between protecting Ted or the girl, he chooses the girl.  Ted is apprehended, Bobby regrets it,  and the movie ends.

There isn’t much more to the movie than that.  No beasties, no locusts coming out of a man’s mouth, no bloodbaths.  What there is is sentiment, not something often associated with Stephen King, but I maintain that Mr. King is one of the few writers writing today who has what CS Lewis would call a functioning chest.  There is  clear good and clear evil in the movie, and the line is drawn where an American of King’s (and my) generation should draw it; for the particular against the general, for the individual against the collective, for honesty and genuine affection against ambition and realpolitik.

Although the movie didn’t contain the references to King’s  Dark Tower myth that the novella did,  perceptive viewers would see how well it fits.  If you want to see Sir Anthony out of character, watch The World’s Fastest Indian.

5. Gambling Apocalypse Kaiji   –   

It works.  There are emotions that the human face can register that no cartoon can render, and Gambling Apocalypse Kaiji  makes you feel every one of them.  In the end, the bad girl wins all the money, but Kaiji is allowed to keep his own soul, and the movie leaves you feeling that it was a risk well-taken.

We dream, let us say,  a sequence of persons, places and events whose casual linkages reside not in some ‘deep comprehension’ of those persons places or events, but instead are found in the empirical surfaces of the dream. [The dreamer] plainly understand[s], in the dream, how one event causes another. and how, possibly absurdly, two or more events are connected because the first is causing the next ones to occur; moreover, as the dream unfolds, [the dreamer] plainly sees how the whole chain of causation is leading to some conclusive event X; some denouement of the dream’s entire system of cause and effect.  Let us call this conclusive event X, and let us say that X occurred because of some previous event T which, in turn, was caused by S, whose cause was RE and so on; going from effect to cause, from latter to prior, from present to past, until we arrive at the dream’s starting point, usually some insignificant event A; and it is this event that is understood in the dream  as the first cause of the entire system.  But what about the tine external stimulus, the quick sharp noise, the brief ray of light?  To waking consciousness, this external stimulus is experienced as the cause of the whole causally interlocked system in which persons, places, and events arose in the dream.  Let us call this external cause Ω.

Now, what makes the dreamer awaken?  When we look at this question from the point of view of the waking consciousness, we might say that it is Ω (the noise or the light) that awakens us.  From within the dream, however, it is plainly the conclusive dream event X – the denouement - that, precisely because it ends the dream, awakens us.  Taken together, we see that Ω and X almost perfectly coincide in such a way that the dreamed content and the wakened cause are one and the same.  This coincidence is usually so exact that we never even wonder about the relation between X and Ω; Ω is obviously a “dream paraphrase” of some external stimulus invading our dream from without.

For example, I dream that a pistol has gone off, and in the room near me someone is actually shot, or someone has slammed a door.  So there is no doubt that the dream was accidental; of course the pistol shot in the dream is a spiritual echo of a shot in the outer world.  The two shots are, if you wish, the double perception – by the dreaming ear and by the sober ear – of the same physical process.  If in a dream I should see a multitude of fragrant flowers at the very moment that someone puts a bottle of perfume under my nose, it is wholly unnatural to think that the coincidence of the two fragrances (the flowers’ in the dream and the perfume’s in the waking world) is accidental.  Or I dream that someone is strangling me and wake in horror to find that a pillow has fallen over my face.

Or take the famous dream outlined in the psychology texts.  In this one the dreamer experiences the French Revolution, participating in the very beginnings of the Revolution and – for over a year inside the dream – goes through a long, complicated series of adventures; persecution, pursuit, terror, the execution of the King, and so on.  Finally, the dreamer is arrested with the Girondists, , thrown into prison, then condemned  by the Revolutionary council to die.  The wagon rolls through the streets to the guillotine; and he is taken from the wagon and his head is firmly placed on the headrest, and then the guillotine blade falls heavily onto his neck; and he awakens in horror.

It is the final event (X) that interests us: the touch of the blade on his neck.  Can anyone doubt this: that the whole dream sequence from the first stirrings of the Revolution to the conclusive fall of the blade, is one seamless whole,  Doesn’t the entire chain direct itself precisely to that conclusive event (touch of cold steel) that we term X?  To doubt this total interlocked coherence is to deny the very dream itself- and improbable supposition.

And yet the dreamer found, in the moment of his terrified awakening, that the metal bedstead of his bed had somehow broken and had struck him heavily upon his bare neck.  We cannot doubt the whole coherence of his dream from the first stirrings of the Revolution (A) to the the falling of the guillotine blade (X).  Equally, we cannot doubt that the sensation of the blade (X) and the touch of the metal (Ω) are the very same event; but perceived by different orders of consciousness; dreamed and wakened.

Thus, while X is a refelction of Ω in the imagery of the dream, it is clearly not some deus ex machina with no connection to the dream’s internal logic of events, some alien intruder that senselessly terminates the stream of inner imagery.  No, X is a true resolution.  It genuinely concludes the dream. None of this would be extraordinary if the touch of the bedstead (Ω) had awakened the sleeper and if in the instant of his awakening had been enfolded by the symbolic image of the touch , and if this symbolic image had subsequently unfolded into a dream of sufficient length.  But no, it is the external cause Ω which is the cause of the entire dream.  Thus, in daylight consciousness and according to the scheme of daylight causation, this event Ω, the bedstead falling on the dreamer’s neck should precede the first stirrings of the Revolution (A), but in the dreaming time, it happens inside out, and cause X appears not prior to all the consequences of A, and of all the entire sequence of consequences b,c,d..r.s.t) that follow thereupon, but following it, concluding the whole sequence determining it not as its efficient cause but as its final cause, its  τέλος.

Thus, time in dream runs, and acceleratedly runs, towards the actual and against the movement of time, when we think in the Kantian sense of time,  in the waking consciousness.  Dream time is turned inside out.  The very same event that is perceived from actual space as actual is seen from imaginary space as imaginary, i.e. as occurring before everything else in teleological time, as the goal or object of our purposefulness.  Contrarily, the goal seen from here appears, because of our to appreciate goals rightly, as something cherished but lacking the energy of the ideal, but seen from there,  from the other consciousness, the goal is comprehended as the living energy that shapes actuality as its creative form.

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”

“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”

“‘Take my camel, dear,’ said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.”

“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” 

Each of these lines at the beginnings of their respective books grabbed me by the shirt-collar and pulled me into the story.   If you dont recognize them, they come from J.R.R.  Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1938), C.S. Lewis’  The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952),  Rose Maculay’s The Towers Of Trebizond (1958), and Steven King’s The Gunslinger (1982).  It is interesting that only Lewis’ made it into American Book Review‘s 100 Best Opening Lines Of Novels .

I heard a lot about John Crowley’s masterpiece Little, Big before I located a copy for reading.  Written in the last year of the ante-penultimate reality, 1980, it had  fallen out of print until very recently.   I heard that Crowley was a  writer’s writer, that his prose was difficult and opaque,  and that Little, Big was a slow read.  All of this turned out to be true, but it was the opening paragraph that convinced me that the book was worth whatever amount of time required.

On a certain day in June, 19__, a young man was making his way on foot northward from the great City to a town or place called Edgewood, that he had been told of but had never visited.  His name was Smoky Barnable, and he was going to Edgewood to get married; the fact that he walked and didn’t ride was one of the conditions placed on his coming there at all.

Everything a careful reader needs to know about Little, Big is skillfully woven into that opening paragraph.  Crowley’s is a world that contains no hidden surprises, where everything is at it seems, but the ordinary rules don’t apply, and the insides of things are larger and much more significant than their outsides.  It is, although Crowley never comes right out and says it, the world in which we live and move and have our being.

The story that supports Little, Big is a love story, the story of a courtship, a wedding, and a marriage between Smoky Barnable, an anonymous Rorschach blot of a man, and the euphoniously named Daily Alice Drinkwater, the oldest daughter of a very eccentric New England family that may or may not have dealings with the Faerie folk.

The whole family lives in a house with a unique architecture which has been under both construction and analysis since its foundations were laid four generations previously.   This house, Edgewood, which serves as a focal point for a certain district whose boundaries are kept fuzzy throughout the book, may or may not be a portal to the Fairie realms, where things get larger and more significant the further “in” you go.

There are both agnostics and believers among the large and unruly Mouse/Drinkwater clan into which this affable young man marries, and Smoky Barnable is unable to resolve a single crucial point; was he given to his wife in compliance with a pact with the Faeries, or is all of this just a complicated game his adopted family insists on playing?   Alas, Smoky is no closer to a resolution by the end of the book than he is at the beginning.

For this is the most allusive book I have ever read.  It implies everything, and says nothing clearly.  Indeed, I don’t think it can be said to have a plot at all.  Smoky marries, investigates his wife’s background, sires children upon her, and maybe her sister, but probably not.  There are metamorphases, fairy godmothers, changelings, and other romances and heartbreaks.  Appearances are made by Titania and Oberon, and the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa who rules over a spiritually exhausted, twilit America at the end of her tether and whose political legitimacy is shown to proceed, albeit distantly, from the grandeur that was Rome.

All of this takes 800 pages to unwind, and the prose is like eating summer strawberries with cream, under a spreading maple tree, with the buzz of bees in your ears.

I think that if Little, Big is about anything at all, it is about something called, for lack of a better phrase, horizontal transcendence.  The fairies here are not supernatural beings.  In fact, they are so much a part of the natura naturans that nearly everybody overlooks them entirely.   As Owen Barfield puts it;  ”The obvious is the hardest thing of all to point out to anyone who has genuinely lost sight of it.”   Yet, the fairy influence pervades the environment, directing human generation and movement.  Everything in Smoky Barnable’s life is as it is supposed  to be, yet the disposer is not the Transcendent God of Jewish or Christian theology, but rather a college of elementals whose attitude towards us is neither benign nor malicious, but uninterested, quite as that of a sentient rock or thunderstorm would be.

Reading Little, Big made me nostalgic for the Road Not Taken.  Written in 1980, it is still redolent of hashish and patchouli.  It has the feel of the last wave of New England Transcendentalism meandering through the sloughs of late 19th century Spiritualism into the shallow bay of the Hippie movement, finally breaking against the rocky shore of a triumphant conservativism.  Parts of the book are prophetic, such as this passage describing the Republic at endgame;

For the City, even more than the nation, lived on Change; rapid, ruthless, always for the better.  Change was the lifeblood of the City, the animator of all dreams there. the power that coursed in the veins of the men of the Club, the fire that boiled up wealth and bustle and satisfaction.  The City that Auberon came to, though, had slowed.  The quick eddies of fashion had grown sluggish; the great waves of enterprise had become a still lagoon.  The permanent depression that the Club struggled against but was unable to reverse began in this grinding-to-a-halt, this unwonted, cumbersome loginess of the greatest City, and spread outward from it in slow ripples of weary exhaustion to benumb the Republic.

In contrast to the entropic City, although not in clear opposition to it, is the House and its inhabitants.  Moving to the quickening rhythms of another world that is just now awakening, those who dwell, or who have ever dwelt, in Edgewood find themselves drawn Further In and Higher Up.  All the separated Drinkwaters, Mouses, Flowers, Woodses, Brambles, and Meadowses; human, animal, or fay as chance may have overtaken them, are drawn into a mysterious center, a re-enactment of Smoky’s and Daily Alice’s nuptials, where numerous transformations and coronations take place.

So there is eucatastrophe, albeit a sideways one.  The way out of the World is not beyond it or above it, but into it.  In one way, I can see the Oprah-ization of transcendence here.  No God above, no Devil beneath, just the water sprites, the trees, and Brother North Wind beckoning us to be what we were always meant to be.  Yet on the other hand, I am hesitant to assign this book to the Deepak Chopra discount bin.  It is too good, too descriptive of the path we are meant to follow.  The World has an inside.  We are the inside.  Actually, Christ is the Inside, Who is Everywhere and Filleth All Things in a way that the Augustinian demiurge never could.  The narrative of the Bible is the icons hanging on the wall.  And as we unite with Him, we penetrate further in.   We find that although at first it appears smaller, things really are larger and more significant, and like Adam, we can name them.

We become the Fay.

]]> http://asinusspinasmasticans.wordpress.com/2011/05/08/john-crowleys-little-big-an-exercise-in-horizontal-transcendence/feed/ 3 asinusspinasmasticans clb210753 6a00d8345161d869e200e54f4311d78834-800wi mythcreatures_fairies http://asinusspinasmasticans.wordpress.com/2011/04/28/the-man-in-black-fled-west-across-the-desert/ http://asinusspinasmasticans.wordpress.com/2011/04/28/the-man-in-black-fled-west-across-the-desert/#comments Thu, 28 Apr 2011 23:32:48 +0000 asinusspinasmasticans http://asinusspinasmasticans.wordpress.com/?p=510 ]]> …and earlier this month it was confirmed that Spanish actor Javier Bardem would be pursuing him, on the big screen, anyway.

I have a love-hate relationship with fantasy films.  Ralph Bakshi’s 1980 attempt at animating The Lord Of The Rings was deeply disappointing to me, so much so that I didn’t even bother to see the first film of Peter Jackson’s trilogy when it came out in 2001.    Despite my love of the genre, there have been fantasy films which have been so awful as to be unwatchable.  Eragon, for example.

I haven’t finished The Dark Tower series yet.  Even though the pace is slow and some of the episodes are gruesome, I am very, very impressed by it so far.  So impressed that I am ready to consider it the quintessential piece of American mythopoeia.    The Dark Tower  is American in a way that reworks our history.  For this reason it is violent and virginal at the same time.  There is a lot more I would like to say about King and The Dark Tower, but not now.

I hope Ron Howard is up to the task.  He is not the first director that springs to mind in adapting Steven King to the silver screen.  He is somewhat sentimental, but in this, he matches King himself.   The Dark Tower is awash with sentiment, despite its darkness.  Brian De Palma didn’t capture it in Carrie and Stanley Kubrick certainly didn’t capture it in his emotionally frigid The Shining.   Both of those films are technically superior to Hearts In Atlantis or The Green Mile,  but these two imperfect films capture King in a way that Carrie or The Shining do not.  I have to keep telling myself that Howard has some fantasy rep;  Splash, Cocoon, and Willow  were all good films.

It remains to be seen if the rest of the series is as well-casted.  May I suggest Ryan Gosling as Eddie Dean, and Isaac Hempstead-Wright (Bran Stark from A Game Of Thrones) as Jake Chambers?  I know Isaac is British, but isn’t Jake upper-crust New York?  It shouldn’t be too much of a stretch.