Oscillate Wildly

At the end of my last chapter, I wrote a lengthy section describing how, after a certain meeting at a certain person’s house in the last week of December of 2003, one of the people who was present came to the wild but oddly irrefutable conclusion that one of the others was actually Satan incarnate; and the person in question seemed to be agreeing with this assessment, as far as was in his power.

Then I described how, after I returned home that night, a shadow appeared on my body; how it followed me around the room; and how the source of its origin remained mysterious until the moment that it disappeared. Then I gave a long, volatile, highly-charged, and, unfortunately, not very clear explanation of how I had given so much authority to my own belief in the supernatural that its powers were almost equal that of mine; that it acquired a kind of sentience; that it began reinforcing my convictions through external means, by actually causing the accidents, betrayals, horrors, visions, and fulfillments of prophecies, which I had experienced in the last five months; and now, at last, was beginning to encroach on the physical world through physical means.

In the revision stage of the chapter, I appended this passage, which proved to be the key to the rest:

The savage lancet parasite that dwells within a morbid mind, to what end does it drive it, save to death?[1] To what dark uses is that man employed, whose soul is concentrated in a single thought! Who knows what gnaws at him, and why? Nor how, in such an ecstasy of ease, he casts himself headlong into the mouth of hell! For though conspiring in his own demise, his steps have ceased to be his own; and perhaps only in those final clouded seconds of his loathsome life, as inextinguishable fires reach their blazing arms to meet him, and the worm within becomes the worm without, does he at last behold that treacherous, conniving agent for whom hell is home; and, with a final, soul-shattering cry, in which all the miseries of mortal living, and the terrors of eternity, are bound, discovers the name of that malignant creature which for so long shared his skull; that creature which, no longer captive to an earthly apparatus, gazes coolly round in freedom at the world it has rejoined.

Ah, foolish Boze! If only you had spent as much time seeking after Jesus, as you did in seeking after tokens of His coming! If only you had looked up from your charts and maps, but once, and seen the fire in His eyes!

Sadly, I bungled the ending (at least on the first public reading) by mangling the passage on the sentience of ideas. Reading it, you wouldn’t have known what I was talking about. My intention was to explain the process by which an idea can take on consciousness and power; how it becomes, in effect, a self-created, self-sustaining demonism, whose relation to the true demonic is mysterious, but at least in my view highly probable. In the future I should remember that when I’m introducing unusual, convoluted, and (apparently) controversial ideas into a story, expositing on those ideas in an oblique and convoluted manner only further fogs the understanding of my readers. They won’t even get to the part where they find it controversial if they miss my meaning altogether. And I want my meaning to be clear. People will find fault with my convictions here, but I want them to grapple with it, mull it over, ponder it at length. I don’t believe the Holy Spirit gave me so much insight into the psychology of monomaniacs and men of morbid mind for the sake of my own acquisition of knowledge.

And the last part is convoluted in thought, but not so much in expression, which I like. It’s grand and full of passion, which of course I also like, and it would work very well in the context of the chapter if I hadn’t tried too hard and gone too far, immediately before. This is exactly what Carl Hovde was speaking of in his introduction to the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of Moby-Dick: Attempts at writing in a soaring and sublime style are doomed to failure if they haven’t been prepared for in the rest of the text through striking characterization and a scintillating brilliance with ideas. It almost works… almost. But the parts that came before it need to be clearer. By the time we get to the emotional part of the passage, I’ve already lost the audience way back in the exposition.

“We know screw-ups are an essential part of making something good,” says Lee Unkrich, the director of the forthcoming Toy Story 3. “That’s why our goal is to screw up as fast as possible.” Agreed! You can’t be afraid to make mistakes; you won’t get anywhere at all that way.

But, as it happens, God has been speaking to me rather constantly about the need for clarity within the last two weeks. Shortly before I began my seventh chapter, He released me from a suffocating focus on my style. Essentially He said, “Your style is very good as it is. Let it be what it is; let it go.” Then, a few days ago, before I had even finished the eighth chapter, He actually started recommending that I reread Harry Potter and listen to secular, popular music. I’ve been talking with God for a long enough time now to know when it’s Him and when it’s me, and I can promise it was Him (however blasphemous that might appear to certain people here). Indeed, this revelation proved prescient not long afterwards, when certain portions of the present chapter proved too convoluted, or at least too muddy, and even Tyler suggested that I take some time off and reread The Goblet of Fire.

God is telling me that for too long now I’ve placed almost my whole understanding of what it means to be a great writer on how I said what I said. It seems that when He promised me that level of anointing, eleven years ago, He wasn’t merely speaking of a certain kind of style. Of course I still believe that’s important: How a person says something is just as important as what he or she says, and the reason I couldn’t have written that emotional passage at the end of the last chapter in any other way is because my intention was to convey what it looks and feels like when a person is suffering from a psychological collapse—in other words, descending into hell. It feels very grand, but you’re living on fumes; yet those fumes have the power to eat you from within. I think it’s pretty fair to say that I’ve suffered emotional calamities unknown to the majority of people, so if I want to describe what those calamities were like in any manner approaching accuracy, I can’t portray them in a normal way. And while that will certainly alienate some people, there are others who will really get it; who will love it all the more, in fact, for having gotten it; and who may even, for the first time in their lives, feel truly understood.

At the same time, the majority of people won’t understand the true horrors of those emotional calamities unless I can learn how to relate them in a way that they can grasp; just as most people have never know what it’s like to be trapped in a pillar of Eternal Night, but understood the emotional ramifications readily enough in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.

But I think I will write at least part of my next chapter from the perspective of Booth; first, because my story is beginning to encompass so many different perspectives, that I need to have three pairs of eyes in place in order to describe what I want to describe in the next chapter, which is full of horrors; second, because I like the idea of a chapter written in the style of the Christ Clone Trilogy, with shifting narration and quick, short moments of suspense, which inevitably intensifies the sense of something dark and ominous at work; and third because it would be helpful for people to see that my shift into grandiosity and convolution at the end of the previous chapter wasn’t so much a result of personal quirks on the part of the writer, as it was a necessary reflection of my internal state during the section in question. Booth was always precise and matter of fact. Showing a scene from his perspective will solidify that what’s happening at our school isn’t just an extension of my own exaggerated fancies, and will bring it into starker contrast through his simple and straightforward telling, so that it will become all the scarier for being so relatable and real.

And I aim to maintain that starkness through the rest of the “high school” chapters. Of the eight chapters which I’ve so far written, the fourth and the sixth have been the ones which inspired the fiercest, most burning affection in the hearts of my readers. Yet the odd thing about the sixth one, “Philosophers and Prophets,” is that it managed to be simple, and breezy, and quick, and yet at the same time complicated, dense, and multi-layered. More than one person compared it to Harry Potter; yet it wasn’t lacking in meaning, or exposition, or atmosphere, or character, or emotion, or subtlety, or any of the other qualities which God has been trying to tell me constitute a work of genius, apart from mere style. Indeed, it had a good deal more of several of those qualities, than almost any of my other chapters, and it was far subtler. I don’t understand how that happened; it lacks nearly all my excessive tendencies, and this was at a time when I was inalterably driven to excess. I have, as always, oscillated wildly between extremes.

---

[1] The lancet liver parasite, or, as it is also commonly known, the lancet fluke (dicrocelium dendriticum). This parasite, first discovered in 1819, develops and breeds in the liver of cows and sheep. When freed against its will through excretion, it will invade the body of an ant and seize its ganglion, a cluster of nerve cells at the bottom of the esophagus. The ganglion it then uses to manipulate the ant’s actions. Night after night, at sunset, the zombified ant is drawn away from the rest of its colony and wanders out into the field by itself, where it climbs to the top of a blade of grass. This it will continue to do until freed from its appalling existence by a passing cow or sheep, which, eating it, returns the parasite to its place of origin.

The Old Man's Voice

(in the corner of an old bookstore; rain)

Booth was never quite as skeptical as I imagined him to be, but as his eyes continually wandered during conversations, there were times when I accused him wrongfully of being bored and apathetic towards the subjects which concerned me most. “Are you listening, Booth?” I pleaded, almost in despair.

“Yeah, why do you think she’s going to win?” he inquired, with genuine interest in his voice.

“Because,” I explained. “God says He wants Priscilla to win. Priscilla will win.”

“Well, I think that’s kind of unfair to the other people,” said Booth. “I mean, why wouldn’t God want Corey to win? Why wouldn’t God want Holden to win? Is it because God likes Priscilla more than Corey? What do you think Corey would feel about that?”

“I don’t even want to think about what Corey would say,” I replied, with a nauseated shake of my head.

“No, Boze,” said Booth. “I think the truth is, someone else wants Priscilla to win the election. Really badly. Someone who doesn’t like Corey. You really need to consider the fact that… WHOA!” he shouted, with an abruptness that was startling. “Finnish Magick!”

All unawares, we had wandered into the “New Age” section of the bookstore. Booth pointed to a row near the topmost shelf to indicate the book he had spotted. He reached up to grab it.

At that moment, something very strange happened.

There was a shuffling from the darkness in the dusky regions underneath the stairwell. Then, as we looked on, confused, a man stepped out—a weathered, older man who wore a trench coat buttoned to the neck. He appeared to have been lurking in the stairwell since before we arrived, but the suddenness of his appearance, and its timing, raised in both of us the specter of alarm.

“You laugh,” he said gravely. “But as a matter of fact, ‘magick’ is still practiced in the primitive regions of Northern Finland, especially up in the Lapp area.”

So saying, he removed his fishing hat, bowed slightly (almost imperceptibly), and left the room.

“Who was that man?” I whispered.

“I don’t know,” said Booth. “But that was scary.”

We stared at the doorway for a long moment in silence.

“Do you think we should go try and talk to him?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Booth again. “How did that man know so much about Finland? He knows more about it than I do. And he looks like another Mr. Blankenship.”

“Let’s go,” I said. Booth handed me the book on magic and we hurried from the room.

We found him in the folklore section, browsing professorially through an encyclopedia of spells and incantations.

“I’m sorry,” Booth prefaced politely, “but we were wondering how you knew so much about Finland. Have you lived there?”

“I’m actually not Finnish,” said the man, “but I do teach anthropology at HISD. Unfortunately, Finland isn’t a course of study.”

“What were you saying earlier about Finnish magic?” asked Booth.

“Well, it’s interesting,” he said, in a variation on his previous remarks, “because primitive Shamanism is still practiced in certain parts of the world, particularly in the northern regions. In fact, you have a trend of Shamanism in different areas of Finland, but it’s different from the kind of Shamanism practiced, say, by the Japanese, Inuits, and Siberians.

“If you want to know more about Finnish magick,” he went on, with the fluidity of someone well-acquainted with the subject, “keep in mind that root Shamanism and witchcraft are completely different. Finnish magick has its roots in Shamanism, not witchcraft. In certain parts of Finland, particularly up north, as I mentioned, the natives practice herbalism, healing, shape-shifting… Finnish shamans have methods of attaining altered states of consciousness with the ultimate goal of gaining power over their environment. They claim the power to control winds. They believe knowing the ‘true’ name for something gives you power over it. They also communicate with the haltija, which is the spirit of something, what you would call its essence.”

“Wow,” said Booth, in a soft tone of wonder.

“It’s nature-based, but very practical,” the man said quietly. “A fascinating subject.”

Herbalism… shape-shifting… healing… all very tempting to a boy of little means. The old man’s voice was like the creaking of timbers on a ship in a high wind. Hearing it, you wished that you might stand and talk to him forever, so to hear him speak the more. I felt my resolution wavering. His intellect was so formidable, his tone so calming, and there in the semi-darkness fostered by the rain outside the windows all the lesser, insubstantial details of the morning—fractals, Amy’s eyes, French toast, this book of magic—rose to new and unexampled prominence. It was a curious feeling, but I felt like everything that I had seen that day had led me to this place. Had the man not stepped forth out of shadows, out of nothing? Did he not know more of Finns than Booth? Was this the road assigned to me, and did I run the risk of thwarting providence by turning round and going back the other way? And if, as seemed so obvious, my steps were truly being guided by another, why did I feel so frightened? Why was the muffle of my own heart beating all that sounded now within the hollow of my ears?

The old man took the book on Finnish Magick in his hands a moment and regarded it with a loving but sober expression. “If you want to know more on the subject,” he said, “you should read this. There’s also a book called Entering the Circle. You can find it at The Magick Cauldron bookstore on the corner of Westheimer and Montrose—the largest supplier for Wicca, magick, and alternative religions in the world.”

He handed me the book again and left. I regarded it for a long moment in silence.

Finally, a voice spoke. It was Booth’s. Far-off and faint it sounded, like a murmur on the wind.

“You hold it now in your hands,” he said. “The very fate of your future.”

“Am I supposed to buy it, Booth?” I asked. “Is this the next chapter of my story? Is this where it’s leading?”

“I have a feeling,” he said, “that we could have stood there and talked to that man for days. That was but a taste of everything he knows.”

“It’s really scary,” I agreed. “I don’t like what I’m feeling. It would be so easy just to put the book away and walk away. But if I buy it, which I’m tempted to do, then I’m trapped. There is no turning back.”

“Do you think he could have been a Satanic plant?” Booth asked.

“Nothing could be more likely,” I replied.

“Well, we’ll put it away,” he said gently. “We’ll never speak of it again.”

“Yes…” I said. “Yes.”

At that moment, something in the air around me shifted. It was as though a spell had been broken. All the noises of the bookstore and the sound of rain came flooding in again. A light came on inside my mind. I gave a final glance at the book in my hands and nearly dropped it with loathing.

Not more than a moment later, we heard the voice of Mrs. Pauley calling from the room next door. The bus was waiting for us outside. It was time to go home.

“Well, you passed the test,” said Booth, in a congratulatory voice, as we stood on the curb in the rain.

My face began to soften and a light shone in my eyes. I turned and looked at him and nodded, smiling.

“You’re right,” I said. “For now, at least, and maybe not for ever. But at least this once, I passed.”

Addendums and Predictions

I had to take down the end of my eighth chapter because the temptation continually to go back and rewrite it had proven irresistible. However, the full chapter is finally finished, and I don't intend to change another word. It's a turning point in the novel, just as it was in my own life; I haven't yet written anything so emotional as this. And I've gotten much better at being truthful, without being expository. This is very much an end-times chapter.

But we've come to it at last - the second half of Senior year; it only escalates from here.

My intention is to post another entry, either tonight or tomorrow, on the importance of popular music. Knowing how these things tend to go, I'll probably post a lot of links to songs by the Killers. So, you can look forward to that.

P. S. This is why I love Ross Douthat, and why I loathe the "historical" Jesus:

http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/choose-your-own-jesus/

Waves and Billows: Or, The Perilous Perturbations of Evil

Today’s text comes from the second chapter of Jonah:

I cried by reason of mine affliction unto the Lord,
And He heard me;
Out of the belly of hell cried I, and Thou heardest my voice.
For Thou hadst cast me into the deep, in the midst of the seas;
And the floods compassed me about:
All Thy billows and Thy waves passed over me.
Then I said, I am cast out of Thy sight;
Yet will I look again toward Thy holy temple.
The waters compassed me about, even to the soul:
The depth closed me round about,
The weeds were wrapped about my head.
I went down to the bottom of the mountains;
The earth with her bars was about me forever:
Yet hast Thou brought up my life from corruption, O Lord my God.
When my soul fainted within me, I remembered the Lord:
And my prayer came in unto Thee, into Thy holy temple.
They that observe lying vanities forsake their own mercy.
But I will sacrifice unto Thee with the voice of thanksgiving;
I will pay that I have vowed.
Salvation is of the Lord.

“If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.”

Well, the drama’s done—or just begun, more like. I’ve finished Chapters 5, 6, and 7, and, barring a few superficial adjustments to the opening of Chapter 7, can account them finished. They were well-received.

Yet a higher mountain looms. In saying that, I’m dimly conscious of a story I remember reading some years ago in The Thousand and One Nights. I believe it was the third in the series given under the title “The Story of the Three Kalendars.” Tempting though it is to tell the story over, all that matters for the present purposes is what transpires after the Third Kalendar departs from the island on which the story began. The captain of the ship on which he’s sailing warns him never to utter the name of Allah, under any circumstances. So of course he does. After seven days’ journey, a gigantic IRON MOUNTAIN rises up out of the midst of the ocean. “By Allah! That is a huge mountain,” cries the Kalendar. The captain disappears in a violent puff of Luciferian smoke. The metal joists and nails which hold the ship together, drawn by the inexorable magnetism of the massive mountain, send it splintering to doom.

And, in a way, that’s kind of a metaphor for what I’m trying to describe within the present chapter. Chapter Eight, December of my Senior year, and all the world to darkness turning. The Count of Monte Cristo warned his son, “You will bask in the sunlight one moment, and be shattered on the rocks the next.” This was my rock; this was my mountain. I was lost in the midst of the sea. It was only by an act of greatest grace that I emerged again.

The question I have to examine in this chapter is, “How did this happen? How can a man be steeped so far in evil that he can’t get out again?” For it wasn’t evil itself that drew me; it was something subtler.

The starting point for my examination of this topic will be Coleridge, who in one of his lectures on Shakespeare had this to say:

“When once the mind, in despite of the remonstrating conscience, has abandoned its free power to a haunting impulse or idea, then whatever tends to give depth or vividness to this idea or indefinite imagination, increases its despotism, and in the same proportion renders the reason and free will ineffectual. Now, fearful calamities, sufferings, horrors, and hair-breadth escapes will have this effect, far more than even sensual pleasure and prosperous accidents. Hence the evil consequences of sin in such cases, instead of retracting or deterring the sinner, goad him on to his destruction. This is the moral of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and the true solution of this paragraph—not any overruling decree of divine wrath, but the tyranny of this sinner’s own evil imagination, which he has voluntarily chosen as his master.”

What Coleridge seems to be saying is that the imagination can precipitate a person’s downfall. He had evidently seen this principle in practice. You begin, as I began, by abandoning your mind to the power of one trance-like, irresistible idea. This idea can be something as innocuous as an understanding of the verity of prophecy (as it was in Macbeth’s case, and in mine), but in the particular kind of psychological collapse herein described, the belief thus arrived at is always supernatural.

Then: “Whatever tends to give depth or vividness to this idea… increases its despotism, and renders the reason and free will ineffectual.” The idea begins reinforcing itself. I’m reminded of scenes in two movies; the first hasn’t come out yet, but it’s featured in the shorter trailer for the film Inception: “Do you know what is the most powerful virus known to man? An idea.” True! Christopher Nolan (the director) would certainly know. An idea is a virus that becomes a parasite. The second is from the movie Rope (1948), in which James Stewart notes, “It’s odd, isn’t it, the way the mind can pyramid simple facts into wild fantasies?” An idea can acquire such tyrannous power over the intellect that it begins reinforcing itself… like in that, frankly terrifying, scene at the end of the children’s movie Fern Gully, where an anthropomorphic blob of oil, played by Tim Curry, gains sentience and actually starts commanding the logging vehicle in which he was birthed. You get on that treadmill and you can’t get off. When once your thoughts begin to shape and run themselves, your puny, feeble fists of opposition are of little consequence.

For example, had I not already been seized by a predominating idea, before Senior year ever started, I would have looked askance, as no doubt almost everyone else did, at first, at the unnatural abundance of unworldly circumstances. As it was, I was caught in a web of my own devisings: I already more than half thought life could be a story, with a tangible beginning, middle, and end; I was at least open to the possibility of prophecy, demonic possession, and the near end of the world. Had I not been, I could have ignored those potent manifestations of corroborating evidence, but I did not. It was not without reason that [[ Petunia ]] and [[ Mortimer]] both chose me as the one person in whom they confided their mutual, but separately-acquired conviction that they were destined to bring about the end of the world, for I was already more open than most to the possibility of such a circumstance, and they knew it. My openness to these ideas allowed not a few of them to seize me, as the iacet parasite can seize the mind of an ant and lead it, forthwith, into the waiting belly of a cow. This is appalling to think on, but it’s almost as though I had grown a tumor with a mouth and arms entirely its own with which it fed itself apart. Both of the previous examples were horrific, and they ought to be, for these are horrifying things. The power of a rogue idea to feed itself on unembodied air can break a person’s mind.

Robert Burton also ponders the effects of imaginative sin in the first section of his Anatomy of Melancholy, which by a happy chance I have been lately reading. This is discussed in two separate subsections, the first of which is (again, conveniently) entitled, “Passions and Perturbations of the Mind, How They Cause Melancholy.”

"As by wicked incredulity many men are hurt… we find in our experience, by the same means many are relieved… So diversely doth this phantasy of ours affect, turn and wind, so imperiously command our bodies, which as another Proteus, or a chameleon, can take all shapes; and is of such force (as Ficinus adds) that it can work upon others, as well as ourselves. How can otherwise blear eyes in one man cause the like affliction in another? Why doth one man’s yawning make another yawn?... Why doth a carcass bleed when the murderer is brought before it, some weeks after the murder hath been done?... So that I may certainly conclude this strong conceit or imagination is astrum hominis, and the rudder of this our ship, which reason should steer, but, overborn by phantasy, cannot manage, and so suffers itself, and this whole vessel of ours to be overruled, and often overturned."

In the latter section, which happily deals with prophecy, apparitions, strange voices, and virtually every other phenomenon I had to deal with during my Senior year, Burton tries to arrest the fears of those who suffer from such things by assuring them that their quarrel is not with the devil, or with God. No, the father of these unbearable torments is the brain’s melancholy. “The spirits [humors] being darkened, and the substance of the brain cloudy and dark, all the objects thereof appear terrible, and the mind itself, by those dark, obscure, gross fumes, ascending from black humors, is in continual darkness, fear, and sorrow; divers terrible monstrous fictions in a thousand shapes and apparitions occur, with violent passions, by which the brain and phantasy are troubled and eclipsed.”

More will shortly follow, but for now I would only note how this corroborates my initial sense that the “moral” of this chapter, if there is one, will be similar to the one which Melville gives us in the “Try-Works” chapter of Moby-Dick: “Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man!... Believe not the artificial fire, when its redness makes all things look ghastly. Tomorrow, in the natural sun, the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking flames, the morn will show in far other, at least gentler relief… Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee, as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe, but there is a woe that is madness.”

And that’s what happened to me, is it not? I looked too long. So it is with the sun, whose light, among its other nobler uses, warms and illuminates; there’s a generous, untiring benevolence in the undiscriminating blazon of its glow. And the sun is a god, after his fashion; not as fair, but in his own way greater than the moon, and brighter than the stars.

But woe to him who seeks to subvert, for his own uses, that which was created for our good! To stare too long or too directly into it, destroys the retinas; clouds the clear vision with vivid and thick-swarming hallucinations. Those are the gnats of the judgment of your hubris: Seek to see what no man fully sees, to do what no man can attempt—and bring the plagues of Egypt on your head. He will not be commanded; nor will constant searching ever yield to you his secrets, son of man!

For now, though, I would fain go further in this matter. Tomorrow, Lord permitting, we will continue with our examination of the root causes of imaginative evil.

"All the Subtle Demonisms of Life and Thought"

I wish to elaborate on some lines which I began tracing in the previous chapter.

It occurs to me that in noting some of the psychological reasons for the friction which eventually developed between me, Booth, and Augustys, I neglected the supernatural entirely. Lately I feel I’ve acquired from the Holy Spirit a certain measure of understanding on the nature of subtle, insidious demonic influences—what Carl Jung called “autonomous complexes,” by which he appears to have meant transpersonal entities acting on the psyche (“devils” or “demons,” in the common tongue). I’ve been continuously picturing knots for several days now. When you start feeding on an obsession, be it lust or rage or bitterness or excess of sorrow, it’s as though you’re chewing on things which aren’t entirely digestible. Your spirit wasn’t created to sustain within itself the noxious fruits of sin. But over time, as appetite increases, that evil begins to accumulate. It builds inside of you in knots. In the way that a cat, when in the act of cleaning itself, will swallow incidental bits of fur, so sin accumulates; and, if unchecked, the end result will be the same. Sin is a knot that grows with morbid pace, and often undetected haste.

Yes, that’s close to the feeling of what it is I’m trying to express. I’m finding that sometimes the easiest, most thorough way of understanding sin is watching it within yourself, though it makes you something like a specimen beneath a microscope—yourself the student and the subject! If you pour enough grease into a sink, it eventually coagulates and clogs the drain. We can take, for a useful example, the dream about Cassie which I had last week. In this dream (amid several other surprising events), I dated a girl who was wispy, clingy, ghostly, airy, insecure, and half-idiotic. The girl represents what some (myself included) would label a spirit; others (myself included) a psychological complex of sin. Practically and functionally, the truth is that I gave lenience to particular sins in the past (and sometimes even to the present day); yet in praying about it God showed me that the path to deliverance wasn’t exorcism, but sustained pursuit of holiness. So is it demonic? There’s certainly a greater capacity for interference by transpersonal forces; I’ve opened what many Christians call a “window” (or a “door”) to the workings of evil; yet the way to dispelling the complex is untangling the knot—in other words, making conscious decisions every day to follow righteousness. And doing so has banished it almost entirely (for the time, at least), in the space of only a few days.

Thus the simple wisdom of James begins to make profound sense: “Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you” (James 4:7).

Shakespeare actually wrote about this in Hamlet—in a passage blazing with inspiration and holiness, as in most of the play—though the metaphors are different:

Hamlet:
Mother, for love of grace,
Lay not that flattering unction to your soul,
That not your trespass, but my madness speaks:
It will but skin and film the ulcerous place,
Whiles rank corruption, mining all within,
Infects unseen. Confess yourself to heaven;
Repent what’s past; avoid what is to come;
And do not spread the compost on the weeds,
To make them ranker…

Queen:
O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain!

Hamlet:
O, throw away the worser part of it,
And live the purer with the other half!
Good night: but go not to mine uncle’s bed;
Assume a virtue, if you have it not.
That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat,
Of habits devil, is angel yet in this,
That to the use of actions fair and good
He likewise puts a frock or livery,
That aptly is put on. Refrain tonight,
And that shall lend a kind of easiness
To the next abstinence: the next more easy;
And either [master] the devil, or throw him out
With wondrous potency.

I felt something just now in the act of reading over everything I’ve written to this point in the present entry. Surprisingly, it’s not a feeling that I feel with regularity. I was struck by the seeming anachronism of the juxtaposition between my psychological descriptions of the spiritual processes at work in myself, and my (relatively cautious) understanding of demonic power; between the earnest, unquestioning citation of a verse in the New Testament of the Bible, in one paragraph, and the immediate transition to Hamlet, in the next—with the inevitable allusion to Jungian theory.

I feel that this kind of combination isn’t very common in Christian America: Those from the relatively orthodox denominations (evangelicals and, increasingly, Charismatics) have pursued their faith with such ferocious, combative tenacity that they haven’t developed a lot of understanding in what we would normally consider the “extra-religious” realms, with the possible exception of politics. Our reaction to the cesspool of immorality which constitutes so much of modern culture has been to barricade the culture out, but what have we brought in? I haven’t seen this argued in very many places, but I would guess that one of the primary reasons why there’s such a dearth of heritage in the modern American evangelical community is because we’ve been continuously embattled for a generation. The American Pageant quotes John Adams as saying, “I must study politics and war, that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain” (from a letter to his wife, dated 1780).

Not that this is the only reason: Much of it, I feel, is either sin or ignorance. That’s a strong claim, but I make it in the memory of what I endured at [Nameless Bible Institute], during what Bethany called my “Siberian exile,” and what I saw of the state of learning at what I had believed to be one of the foremost evangelical graduate schools in the nation. The professors there appear to have been under the delusion that Christianity didn’t begin until around 1950; in all my classes, we were never assigned to read a book written earlier than that (and several of my assigned texts had been written by the professors themselves). So it tears at my heart, not only that the average devoted, zealous Christian has so very little concept of the history and literature of the world, which in many cases he already views as irredeemably evil, but he isn’t even being taught the history of his own faith. Oh, I could forgive the generation of my peers their single-minded study of religion, if it meant that they were really learning it; but in many respects they aren’t. In this I indict myself along with everyone else. We know more about Creationism than the Council of Nicaea, more about the pre-Tribulation Rapture than we do about Polycarp. And we’ve never even heard of Dante! Lately whenever I reference the Comedy, I have to preface the allusion with a lot of elaborate explanations about how there was a man in the middle ages who wrote a long poem about heaven and hell, etc… (having to leave out any mention of Purgatory, of course, as Papal nonsense). Dante is possibly the greatest, and was, at one point, the most famous poet in all Christendom. So not only do we as a body not know history or literature, etc., etc., but we don’t even really know Christianity. I believe that the Christian culture in this country is embattled, but at least from my own experience it seems their preferred method of fighting is to ignore the whole history of warfare, and to focus their attention on inventing completely new weapons made out of straw.

I can see how a person might receive the impression, from reading over everything I’ve written so far, that my purpose is for Christians to acquire an astonishing and (to their enemies) intimidating superflux of knowledge. Well, this is definitely MY aim, but to limit it thus would be missing the point. There’s nothing which the modern world possesses in greater abundance than knowledge, and nothing to which it puts more scattershot, destructive, undiscerning use. The things we need are simple curiosity, coupled with a sense of wonder, and an understanding of God which surpasses the bounds of religion to find Him in every good thing.

And what I finally began to see in my own writing (though of course I’ve witnessed it developing and taking root in other mediums as well, particularly in the modest, but significant, Christian intellectual and artistic flowering of the last decade) is a millenarian, fundamentalist Christianity which seemed not even a little out of place in the context of the whole philosophical and literary history of the culture which it helped to create. It shouldn’t feel out of place, at all, and that’s my point. The Bible, even now, is ahead of our time; as Chesterton said, in another context, “we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.” The great things of history, the things which we as a generation, Christian and non-Christian alike, have so callously disregarded, are the fruits on the tree of a spiritual history and a spiritual heritage which Christians are no longer willing to claim, and non-Christians are no longer willing to acknowledge. It is impossible to imagine the last 2,000 years in Western painting, sculpture, literature, philosophy, architecture, or any other of a dozen areas without Jesus. Yet we as the body of Christ have done so; as if we could burn down the first floor of a house because we liked the second better. At the end of the day, all we’re left with is ashes, and the scorn of the nattering multitudes.

Ashes and scorn—this is our cultural inheritance. Brethren, these things ought not so to be.

Yet it goes even beyond that; this is a far bigger issue than just cultural literacy, though that’s important, too. The thing that gets me about it, more than any other practical or even theological consideration, is that it maligns the character of God and makes Him only vaguely, coldly knowable. The most prominent symptom, and most injurious result, of an over-attachment to religion, as opposed to the person of Jesus, is an inability to conceive of God in anything but narrowly-confined religious terms. Thou all-creating, everlasting, and transcendent God! Chiefly known to us through Thy Son, and by His cross—Thou madest all things, and for Thy sake they are and were created. Thy way is in the whirlwind and the storm—in the fox and the flower—on stage and on screen! There is no place so dark that is not lit with some spark of Your radiance. And Your kingdom will cover the earth—not merely with laws and proscriptions—but in every conceivable way.

That is the revelation burning in my spirit which, more than any other revelation, with one significant exception, I feel called and bound by love to release upon our generation. Until we can see God and learn of Him, with Spirit-directed understanding, no less readily through a tulip or a tiger than a testimony, no less deeply through an actual examination of the seas, than through a fruitless and unevolving debate about their age and origins—until we have, if not the ability, than at least the willingness, to see as the work of His hands the witness of George Wishart (1513-1546) or Latimer & Ridley (d. October 1555), no less than the men and women who initiated and carried the Azusa Street Revival (1906-1915); until we can recognize His Spirit peering out at us, as from behind a veil, through the faces sketched by Rembrandt and Van Gogh; until we come to view the world and its possessions as gloriously alive with His presence, for ever and ever, the inheritance of saints, we have not yet fully grasped the heart of that universal law laid down by the Psalmist and the prophets, even in the centuries of pre-incarnate darkness: “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof.” “The whole earth is full of His glory.”

Newton's Laws of Motion

What does the work of an economist tell us, not about the financial transactions, but the souls of men? What would a “shifting comparative advantage” look like when shifted, so to speak, to the realm of the spirit? These are the questions we must ever have in view. For example, in one of the key scenes in The Count of Monte Cristo, the old priest in the prison is teaching Edmond Dantes economics and science. He strikes two stones, one against the other, and says, “For every reaction, there is an equal reaction, in physics—and in life…” to which Edmond concludes, “My quest for vengeance is a reaction against the evils committed by Mondago and Danglars.”

“Precisely,” says the priest.

That was the exact realization which I had myself yesterday when I was reading about the flowering of the Scientific Revolution in The Age of Louis XIV. Actually I had the revelation several days ago, in regards to the nature of pride, but hadn’t yet made the connection to the laws of science, till my studying suggested it. My revelation ran thus: The nature of pride is to oppose itself in others; so that two prides are ever striking against one another, like the clashing rocks that at one point threatened to destroy Odysseus (the Symplagledes, I think they were called).

This is how it works: Let’s imagine that I’ve developed, for reasons owing both to my own insecurity and defensiveness—a defensiveness which has been long building from a combination of disillusionment with the Church, frustration with authority, and irritability at the chafing limitations imposed on the vainglorious ambitions of my spirit by the mere fact of my own finitude, which I then turn around and blame on the farcical, footling confines of the narrow and repressed society in which I live—let’s imagine, I say, that I’ve developed a grudge against religion; subtle and unseen, in that even I’m not much aware of it. If you had asked, I’m sure I would tell you I’m a pretty churched-up chap; and I would think that the truth.

It’s an axiom among religious types, that anyone I find to be more radical than I am, is a fanatic. We’re pretending that I have a slow-accreting, subtle, in-built grudge against religion, and against religious folk. And, to continue with the fantasy, another person comes along; this person is religious in a particularly irritating sense, meaning he harbors the sort of religion most provoking to my pride, by conjuring up, in my own fancy at least, if not in the reality, everything that I find unsavory about my religion (which I half-despise already, without even being aware of it). He quotes from the Bible; claims that certain men and certain women have, at certain times, been given the ability to hear the voice of God; blushes at the thought of nudity or sex; gives long lectures on the nature of prophecy and the nobility of waiting; listens to the most appalling music; in sum, does things which seem inspired by some devil in the depths of hell to chase me from my own religion, by exaggerating its worst aspects, as the convex lens on the inside of a telescope, to an unsustainable degree.

And why would this malevolence be accumulating, all the while, like an obscene pearl, on the small dust of my original irritation? Because of an angry, unrighteous pride, born out of a defensive sense that in everything my fanatical fool of a friend is doing, he’s passing a cool, corresponding unspoken judgment on me and all my ways.

Meanwhile, what is my religious friend thinking? Well, my religious friend is angry and defensive. My religious friend views every mere breath of an argument blown, even but lightly, in the face of his faith, as an affront to his dignity, and not only to his own, but, far more, to the glory of the cosmos—the glory of the heavens—the glory of God! My religious friend is insecure because he doesn’t even believe in his faith as much as he would like; still regularly questions his most cherished tenets, though he would never admit so to me, whom he already more than half-suspects of harboring hatred towards him; sees the world but as a sinister, ignoble shadow-show, where evil, cackling men (who constitute the majority) beat up on the lesser, meeker men (comprised of himself alone, primarily) who become so flustered and angry whenever argument is joined that they can’t even defend their own positions, but retreat into personal attacks, and pointed, irrelevant allusions to their own superiority (“Who wins the Quizbowl tournaments? I ask you!”).

My meek, intelligent, religious friend considers himself, in the secret places of his heart, neither meek, nor intelligent, nor religious, which is why he becomes, at times, so wildly self-assertive in defense of each. He’s painfully sensitive to slights and injuries; grows angry when another person, like myself, wonders aloud whether Handel really saw the heavens opened, when he wrote Messiah, or notes the corruption inherent in religious institutions. He has actually taken on himself the responsibility for all religion, through the ages; and thus feels a corresponding need to defend it all, from paving-stone to spire.

Why does he feel thus freighted with such dreadful weight of purpose? The truth is, because of his own pride. If I’m sometimes going to rile him, by questioning the tenets of particular religions, he feels that he has to lock himself into a solidly religious position, by defending everything. He can’t accept the culpability of Catholic priests in abusing children, or at any rate can’t accept that the hierarchy of the Church was responsible for provoking, and stoking the problem. Why? Because in order to do so, he must needs agree with me! When he knows, or thinks he knows, that all the while, I’m really attacking the Church because I hate religion; and so consequently, inevitably, the implication is that I must hate him.

Thus irreligious pride, and its religious cousin, shove against each other; and one pride takes particular pleasure in riling another’s. And each of us takes particular pleasure in condemning the passions of the other as useless, like the two popes who both held the throne of Peter, at the same time, and each of whom damned the other to an everlasting hell. And just as Newton discovered that the force applied to a body in physics produces a proportional (and opposed) acceleration, so that one ball slamming against another will provoke a precisely-corresponding level of violence as it flies in the opposite direction; in the same manner, my own pride, bounding against the pride of my erstwhile companion (now my foe in all but name), provokes that in his nature which causes him to rebound against me with the same vehement loathing.

The Devil and Descartes

Here are a few other things that I’m pondering of late. Look at how rapidly Melville alternates between the comical, the expository, and the Sublime in the middle portions of Moby-Dick, and how effortlessly he manages to meld the three:

"Still, we can hypothesize, even if we cannot prove and establish. My hypothesis is this: the spout is nothing but mist. And besides other reasons, to this conclusion I am impelled, by considerations touching the great inherent dignity and sublimity of the Sperm Whale; I account him no common, shallow being, inasmuch as it is an undisputed fact that he is never found on soundings, or near shores; all other whales sometimes are. He is both ponderous and profound. And I am convinced that from the heads of all ponderous profound beings, such as Plato, Pyrrho, the Devil, Jupiter, Dante, and so on, there always goes up a certain semi-visible steam while in the act of thinking deep thoughts. While composing a little treatise on Eternity, I had the curiosity to place a mirror before me; and ere long saw reflected there, a curious involved worming and undulation in the atmosphere over my head. The invariable moisture over my hair, while plunged in deep thought, after six cups of hot tea in my thin shingled attic, of an August noon; this seems an additional argument for the above supposition."

Note also the shift between long and short clauses, as when he says, “all other whales sometimes are.” It brings the whole passage back to earth with a clear, crisp focus; it narrows the attention to this one point, and thereby keeps you reading till the end.

Strangely, I stumbled upon some rather pointed affirmation regarding the developing focus and theme of the chapter I’m writing (the focus and theme which I explained at length in the entry previous to this one). In one of my favorite passages in the second book of Paradise Lost, Milton is describing the delightful dalliances of devils:

"Others apart sat on a Hill retir’d,

In thoughts more elevate, and reason’d high

Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate,

Fixt Fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,

And found no end, in wand’ring mazes lost.

Of good and evil much they argu’d then,

Of happiness and final misery,

Passion and Apathie, and glory and shame,

Vaine wisdom all, and false Philosophie…"

In analyzing the plot, themes, and dynamics of the sixth chapter, I’ve discovered that every person I encountered that day, or in the few days following, had a theory they were anxious to relate about the nature of prophecy, man, magic, and the imminent end of the world. I mean, really: Booth and I were standing around and talking in the bookstore, when a man in a long coat and a fishing hat appeared from beneath the stairs, as though from empty air, and presented us an extended discourse on the uses of Finnish magic. Petunia, Priscilla, Corey, Mortimer, Amy, and the Finnophiliac professor, each of these people had secrets they were eager to disclose.

I’m beginning to think that this wasn’t merely a curious circumstance. In the fourth chapter I discovered that there was a subtle and insidious but nonetheless very real evil in the hollowness of airy spectacles, contrived infinitudes, and unutterably endless connections. What happened in the two or three weeks before the end of that trimester appears to have been an outgrowth and extension of this. Because what Milton is doing in Paradise Lost is showing where the subtle, insidious evils which infest our ordinary, human lives in historical time derived their devilish origins. Thus, when he wants to foreshadow the vain philosophies and meandering, endless conversations of the ancient Greeks, he has the devils sitting on a hill, engaged in sportive feats of chatter. It’s a trick he employs throughout the poem.

This wasn’t a coincidence at all. But I would like to know what it means [[ But I should like to have known what it meant ]]. It’s very subtle, and for six years it completely escaped my attention. You wouldn’t normally imagine a lot of people sitting around and talking about philosophy and theology as being the result of some heinous diabolical scheme, and when it occurs in the right context I imagine it’s fine, but I also remember several of the tedious classes I had to endure as an undergraduate, where de Acosta would stand up and start ranting about the great, big, enormous handkerchief that created the universe, and how everyone would argue about whether the universe was more like a handkerchief, or a FAT bowl of ice cream, [[in language so clotted with obscurity, it but clarified the fact that their pretensions had been heightened to the direst limits of endurability]], and [[ ask yourself if you didn’t feel, at the very least, some half a dozen inches closer to that exasperating tedium and numbing, monotonous circularity, which men have ever asserted is among the lesser nuisances of hell, there in the sluggish, Sisyphean torpor of that endless hour, than you did on emerging later into the bright, mild sunlight, and the tranquil, thinly-clouded sky.]]

WHOA! I had forgotten. There is, in fact, a corresponding passage in Melville:

"And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness; and who offers to ship with Phaedon instead of Bowditch in his head."

(This is incredible! But he goes on: )

"Beware of such an one, I say: your whales must be seen before they can be killed; and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten wakes round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm the richer. Nor are these monitions at all unneeded. For nowadays, the whale-fishery furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar and blubber…

"But lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature: and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Cranmer’s sprinkled Pantheistic ashes forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.

"There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise forever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists!"

Well, that’s exactly what I was trying to say; though perhaps said a bit better than I would have done.

Here’s John Calvin, warning of the dangers of attempting to understand God’s election in time:

"The discussion of predestination – a subject of itself rather intricate – is made very perplexed, and therefore dangerous, by human curiosity, which no barriers can restrain from wandering into forbidden labyrinths, and soaring beyond its sphere, as if determined to leave none of the Divine secrets unscrutinized or unexplored. As we see multitudes everywhere guilty of this arrogance and presumption, and among them some who are not censurable in other respects, it is proper to admonish them of the bounds of their duty on this subject. First, then, let them remember that when they inquire into predestination, they penetrate the inmost recesses of Divine wisdom, where the careless and confident intruder will obtain no satisfaction to his curiosity, but will enter a labyrinth from which he will find no way to depart. For it is unreasonable that man should scrutinize with impunity those things which the Lord has determined to be hidden in himself; and investigate, even from eternity, that sublimity of wisdom which God would have us to adore and not comprehend, to promote our admiration of His glory. The secrets of His will which He determined to reveal to us, He discovers in His word; and these are all that He foresaw would concern us or conduce to our advantage."

Presumably the labyrinth is going to become a central symbol, at least of the first part of the novel, and potentially the second as well. Even now I have pictures on Facebook of the labyrinth through which we all wandered together at the beginning of our last semester; I’m sure I could dig up the notes from that venture, as it would be a foolish waste of a maze to have been actually lost in one, in the middle of all this capering madness, and not to employ it somewhere in the story.

And look at what Carl Hovde says about Melville’s use of imagery and allusion in Moby-Dick:

"Melville takes us off the ship by extended similes of the kind so frequent in The Iliad, in which action is similarly constricted to the patch of beach before Troy’s wall. In “Squid” (chap. LIX) ‘the seamen rushed to the yard-arms, as in swarming-time the bees rush to the boughs’ (page 327). We are on dry land again for a moment with an image familiar in country life… All these similes take us off the Pequod’s deck and momentarily ventilate the closed-in scene of action on the ship.

"By far, the most frequent means of widening the stage is the novel’s great allusiveness; the book is a magpie’s nest of information, and these references take us to many other people, ideas, and places in the world. It is hard to think of another work of fiction that so frequently makes overt use of history, geography, travel writing, literature, philosophy, religion, and the science of the day. And it is less remarkable that Melville acquired such wide knowledge than that his imagination could so readily call it up to enrich the narrative by similarities, precedents, analogies, contrasts, contradictions, and illustrations by anecdote."

Heed it well!