All Connected

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The physical world is interconnected.  It’s not the only world, I’m convinced (there’s simply too much evidence that it’s not), but it’s certainly entangled.  We’re clearly part of a planet-wide system.  More than that, perhaps life is endemic in the universe.  We like to think our planet is exceptional, but what if it’s quite common (as the stats would seem to indicate)?  Sometimes physical objects can influence the spiritual world.  We don’t really know what the spiritual world is, so how the physical and spiritual interact we can’t always say.  My brother, knowing we needed some hope, sent my family some small gifts.  Things like this can cross worlds.  What he sent me was the replica of the famous “alien nickel” reported in the news last June.  (He knows me.)

A coin collector in Michigan was going through a roll of quarters in 2022 looking for any that might contain some silver.  You see, until 1964 US dimes and quarters were still manufactured with a portion of silver.  I very seldom use cash any more, but I always used to glance through my change to see if there was anything unusual before putting it in the coin jar.  In any case, the Michigan man found a buffalo nickel that, instead of the American Indian head on the obverse, it had an alien head.  “Experts” (numismatists, presumably) declared it a “hobo nickel,” as the homeless used to redefine currency to their own liking, apparently.  The interesting thing about this news story is that it disappeared from attention soon after the coin was found although the pictures indicate a high degree of artistry for a homeless person etching with a penknife.  It’s not alien currency, I know, but I do wonder from whence it came.  With hope.

For all the advances our society has made, we still defer to ridicule to explain the unexplained.  This is wrong-headed.  I have my own theory about why it is so, but in part it’s because science as we know it, in its Enlightenment form, was born in a Christian context.  Scientific thinking has been around for as long as humans, but the Enlightenment marked the point when the interconnectedness of the world began to be dropped from discussion.  Why?  Because science grew in cultures based on the biblical view of humans as exceptional.  If biblical events occurred here, on this planet, to us, we must be pretty special indeed.  Even as science has become more materialistic, its cultural matrix remained largely unchanged.   Ironically that matrix now excludes the interconnected world.  Life is pervasive, and who are we to say that stones, or this entire globe, are excluded from the party?  We’re all connected and there is wisdom in rocks and metal, if only we could see it.  If we believe.

Release the Wicker

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One of the many fascinating things about The Wicker Man is that even its release date can cause confusion.  There should be nothing so simple as to look up when a movie first hit theaters, but especially in trans-Atlanic efforts the dates are often different between the UK and the US.  The Wicker Man had a limited UK release on June 21 (quite close to Midsummer, it turns out) of this year.  It’d been released before, of course.  The initial UK release date was December 6, 1973 (twenty days before the US release date of The Exorcist).  Making its way to the US, it was first released on May 15, 1974—not long after May Day.  One of the features of the curious history of the movie is that it lacked support from its own studio.  Not surprisingly, it performed better overseas, particularly in America.

Release dates can be important, and can make a difference in a film’s success.  Again, the quirkiness of The Wicker Man reveals this—although set in late April-early May, it was filmed in November.  Actors had to suck on ice chips to prevent their breath from being visible.  And who’s thinking about May Day when getting ready for Christmas?  All of these factors swirl around in a mythology that the movie has developed.  My book went to the printer yesterday.  It should be out in August-September, hopefully in time to catch the interest of those who’ve gone to see it in theaters again.  I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve seen it.  I’ve watched all three released versions.  It feels like an old friend.

From the beginning, the plan was to release my book this year, due to the fiftieth anniversary of the movie.  It’s funny how simply surviving half a century can make something interesting to people.  There are plenty of 1973 movies that aren’t getting any particular boost this year.  The thing about The Wicker Man is that it became a cult classic.  Although it was never a mainstream hit, it has sent out its tentacles far and wide.  I notice references to it is unexpected places.  If you’re attuned to this you say to yourself, “that movie really made an impact.”  And it did.  When I first pitched this book idea to the editor of Auteur, I told him I’d do whatever I could to make a 2023 release.  Of course, I started writing it before Nightmares with the Bible came out.  My next book after the Wicker Man doesn’t have an anniversary release in mind.  That’s good, because like a moon-shot it’s nerve-racking to aim for such a narrow target, years in advance.

Sleepy and Hollow

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There’s a kind of charm to Chronicles.  I don’t mean the biblical book, but rather Chronicles of Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow, a book published in the 1890s by Edgar Mayhew Bacon.  A somewhat poorly organized volume, you get the sense that Bacon had more curiosity than literary ability, but that didn’t prevent him from leaving a valuable record.  What’s more, other accessible books like it tend not to exist or be easily found.  There’s definitely a reason to write so that the average person can read your work.  I didn’t spring for an original edition on this one, as much as I love old books.  Nevertheless, the material’s still old and that’s what counts.  At least to someone with an historian’s point of view.

What really caught my attention here was Bacon himself.  Who was he?  His book was from that era of “you should believe me because I wrote a book about it,” but modern critics want to see credentials.  Although search engines are often good, if you’re looking for information on an obscure author (such as yours truly) they’re going to try to sell you something first.  Books, in the case of those of us who write.  If you scroll down far enough you’ll learn that Bacon was born in the Bahamas in 1855.  He wrote, it seems, five books.  He doesn’t have a Wikipedia page and I looked him up because (in addition to basic curiosity) he at times appears to be a bit of a curmudgeon.  He was only about 42 when this book was published, however, but writes like a long-time resident, slightly jaded.

Bacon was mostly a place writer.  His non-fiction books focus on places he lived or knew.  His educational history isn’t easily discovered, and again, the modern reader wants a degree (preferably three)  to show that one can be a proper historian.  He lived in an age, however, where gumption to write and complete a book likely meant finding a publisher.  The internet has changed that, probably forever (or at least as far as we can see).  It’s a buyer’s market for publishers.  But still, Chronicles of Tarrytown was brought back into print and was made available again, in an affordable paperback.  It contains some second-person history, closer to the events than we currently are, and a few legends as well.  It can’t be relied upon for history as we know it, but it can still offer a bit of charm for those curious about yesteryear.

Feathers and Flight

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Bird identification must be one of the trickiest activities known to humankind.  My office window overlooks a small segment of a porch roof that is popular with birds.  Whether it’s pecking at some invisible specks on the shingles or dipping a sip from the gutters, they stop by often during the day.  Maybe my brain wiring is odd, but since I was a child I wanted to be able to identify correctly any animal I saw.  We had a few of those Zim Golden Nature Guides that I poured over like a second Bible.  I would study page after page, repeatedly, until I could identify just about any critter I came across.  It seemed, in those days, that all birds were sparrows, starlings, or robins.  There was the occasional blue jay or cardinal, but usually it was the more ordinary, less colorful variety.  Birds are symbols of hope.  Their lightness and ability to fly are what human dreams are made of.

I’m not an avid bird watcher, but I do try to identify them.  I see bald eagles occasionally, several times a year usually, and plenty of red-tailed hawks.  Once in a while, however, a smallish bird hops by that resembles nothing in my field guides.  In frustration I turn to Cornell University’s bird identification app, Merlin.  Almost never can they find anything like what I saw.  Maybe it’s because the app asks the wrong questions.  Never do they say “was the tail long, medium, or short?” for example.  Things you’d actually notice.  They do ask where you saw it, and “on the roof” isn’t an option, let alone “on the roof overlooking my porch.”  I saw an interesting bird the other day that was all gray.  Bill and all.  I saw it next to a starling, from which it was clearly distinct.  It wasn’t in my book and it wasn’t on Merlin.  What could it have been?

This isn’t the first time this has happened.  Strangely, bird color isn’t always a reliable indicator of species although this is what the viewer tends to notice first.  To make positive identification takes close observation of details most people don’t immediately catch.  The more common species are seldom an issue, but the less showy kind are often more difficult to identify.  This strikes me as a life lesson.  We may all know who the showiest are, but those more modest of our avian friends likely live lives of greater satisfaction without people constantly chasing after them.  At least I imagine it so, since I can’t find a write-up about them in my identification guides.  But I can still watch them and gain hope.

Employment Opportunities

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It’s important to be reminded that stories can also be told by what’s not said.  Non-narrative fiction can be a little tricky to follow, but often contains admirable aphorisms.  Such as “I believe in the future.  I think you need to imagine a future and then live in it.“  This is from Olga Ravn’s The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century.  One of the many things driving me insane at the moment is where I found out about this book.  I know I ran across a recommendation somewhere and I can’t recall the place.  It would be helpful to know since I wonder what it was about the description that convinced me I had to read it.  In any case, there will likely be spoilers below since it’s difficult to describe the book without them.  I’ll start off by saying it’s classified as science fiction, but it’s not your typical 1950s kind.

The story’s told via a series of employee statements to the company that owns a space freighter.  The ship has a mixed crew of humans and humanoids—androids that aren’t easily distinguished from biological humans.  They discover some mysterious, perhaps organic, objects on a new planet and the humanoids begin to request, or even demand, equal treatment.  The outlooks from the two perspectives, human and non-human, are quite different, but they argue that fair treatment is only, well, fair.  The situation gets out of hand and the company, as such entities often do, decides on the economical solution of killing everyone aboard the ship but preserving the exotic objects.  Though generally described as “comic,” I picked up on the seriousness of the issues of prejudice and inequality.  The quote above is from the very last statement from the ship.

Ravn has established a reputation as a poet and that shows through in this novel.  The quote above is an example.  According to the article about her on Wikipedia, she graduated from the Danish School for Authors.  That made me wonder why we don’t have such things.  This isn’t the same as an MFA program.  Indeed, the nordic countries seem to have abandoned their viking ways for literature.  There’s a deep wisdom in this.  Costs of living are high in such places, but so are happiness levels.  What’s not to like about a school option where budding poets and novelists can become acquainted with one another and imagine a better world?  Writers sometimes give us challenging stories but the reason, I believe, is that we can learn from them, view a better future, and live it.

Meeting Places

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It’s one of those quirky British television plays that’s its own movie.  It was part of the Play for Today series.  I turned to Penda’s Fen after receiving some very distressing news, as a means of self-healing.  (I may seem distracted for some time, please forgive me.)  Sometimes considered folk horror, it really isn’t a horror film although it may be treated as one.  The dialogue is heavily religious, involving a lot of theological discussion of Manichaeism, the “heretical” belief in the struggle between the powers of light and powers of darkness.  It plays out through the maturing of Stephen Franklin, son of the local vicar who is, unbeknownst to himself, adopted.  He also discovers his homosexuality as he begins to rebel against the strictures of his private school education.  Underlying all this is the fact that he lives in Pinvin, in reality Penda’s Fen.

The story deals with the past interrupting into the present as Penda’s pagan kingdom never really fell.   A local writer claims that there is an entire escape city beneath the British landscape to which those deemed “important” to the government are to be evacuated in case of emergency.  In reality, the kingdom beneath, and overlapping, Pinvin is that of Penda.  Penda was an actual Anglo-Saxon king and here he encourages Stephen to know himself—one of the mottos of the school.  That knowing involves coming to question the conservative, Christian belief system he has wholeheartedly embraced.  His adoptive father, the vicar, has broader beliefs, including the reality of other gods.  Stephen discovers this and learns of his adoption, making for some heartfelt religious dialogue.

My reason for watching, apart from the much-needed therapy, was that it had been recommended as a piece of religion and horror.  There are some horror moments, but generally it’s difficult to say whether they’re hallucinations of Stephen or they’re really happening.  One is presented outside his viewing, which suggests that they are meant to be real.  One involves a demon, but not the scary kind of The Exorcist, which had been released just a few months ahead of Penda’s Fen.  In all, it’s a thoughtful movie, the kind you might expect when based on a play.  Given the themes, I’m not sure it was the best therapy, but it did engage the religion and media dialogue.  I hope to come back to it some day under better circumstances.  The dialogue is worth engaging with more depth than I’ve been able to muster here right now and there’s much I still don’t understand.

Liking Everyone

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I’m not really interested in politics.  Powerful people deciding the fate of the rest of us seems inherently depressing.  We could use a good laugh.  I’ve been curious about Will Rogers for some time now.  He’s a name that everyone in my generation seems to recognize but few people know anything about him, beyond some of his famous quips.  So I read Gary Clayton Anderson’s Will Rogers and His America.  It was an eye-opening experience.  Rogers died in 1935, the year my mother was born.  What a difference less than a century can make!  At the time of his death he was one of the most famous people in the country, personal friend of U.S. Presidents, an international traveler, and widely syndicated newspaper columnist.  He was also a film actor and comedian.  When he traveled internationally world leaders gladly met him.  Not bad for a poor boy from Oklahoma.

Anderson’s book is a good introduction to who Rogers was, but it does tend to focus on the politics.  Arguably that’s where one’s greatest impact in life might reside.  Still, there’s a lot more to an individual than politics.  I’m curious about Rogers’ career as an entertainer.  He started out as a Vaudeville roper—literally, a rope act.  His noted wit, however, made him famous.  At various points he was one of the highest paid entertainers in the country.  His sympathies, like many of us born in humble circumstances, tended to be with the average person who, it seems, is always struggling against an economy that favors the wealthy.  See?  There I’ve done it myself, gone and got political.  It’s difficult to avoid.

Perhaps the most widely read columnist in the country, who influenced political opinions and could rake in the money at just about any form of comedic enterprise, Rogers nevertheless faded from view after his death in a plane crash.  He was part American Indian.  He never completed college.  He was homespun and yet influential around the world.  Fame comes with no guarantees, of course.  I guess it would be helpful to know what Roger’s motivations were.  Was he, like most people, simply trying to secure his future for himself and family?  Was he trying to change the world?  Can anyone manage to do that for very long before things come along and everything’s suddenly different?  (Think AI, for example.)  I’m glad to have met Will Rogers through Anderson’s book.  Even though I’m not really interested in politics, I learned something about them too, along the way.

Half Full

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Is the glass half full or half empty?  Perhaps trite, this is the textbook example of optimism.  In times when hope is important—and that may be always, but at times it’s really much more keenly felt—we need to see the glass filling again.  Emily Dickinson famously wrote “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers.”  Although published posthumously, many refer to this poem when the glass starts to look empty.  Recently a friend pointed us to a more realistic version of this by the contemporary poet Caitlin Seida titled “Hope Is Not a Bird, Emily, It’s a Sewer Rat.”  It’s easily found with a web search but I’m hoping to buy Seida’s book because most poets have a difficult time of things.  The gist of it is that hope is a scrappy, gritty rodent that knows how to survive in a dark, noisome world.

Of course, the Bible has a lot to say about hope as well.  Sometimes we tend to see the half-empty glass of the judgment verses, but what truly makes it Scripture is the hope.  In fact, hope is all around if we look for it.  For example, I recently had to get a new set of glasses.  I really liked my old frames and they had stopped being produced.  I had to try something new.  This pair, instead of screw-hinges holding the arms on, has a mechanism that uses tension between the two pieces of metal so they retain their shape but can also be folded.  The end result is they don’t have a solid fixed “normal” position, but one which can be slightly adjusted because they’re more pliable than fixed screws (it’s clear why I’m not a technical writer).  In any case, their ability to adjust is a sign of hope. If things don’t look right, literally, a nudge can fix it.  You can find resilience even in your eyeglasses.

In times of difficulty doubt can be the thing with feathers.  What we need is one of those water-drinking birds.  You know, the kind that’s made of glass filled with a red liquid that bobs its head up and down into a glass of water.  (It turns out they have their own Wikipedia article under the title “Drinking bird.”)  Here is the ultimate symbol of hope that spans both Seida and Scripture.  The bobbing head always dips into the glass even though it can’t actually drink.  We might be tempted to say it’s a foolish waste of time.  With the correct perspective, however, it shows the glass to be half full. At least when seen through the lenses of hope.

This bird knows hope! Photo by Matt Flores on Unsplash

Parthenogenesis

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It’s only a matter of degree, isn’t it?  I mean between reptiles and mammals.  While our common ancestor was quite a bit older than Lucy, we’re still fam, right?  I’m not the only one, I’m sure, who read with interest the New York Times story about the female crocodile who recently gave birth without the help of a male.  It’s called parthenogenesis and, according to the article, it’s not as rare as we might think.  Birds and amphibians do it.  Some fish even change gender under reproductive pressure.  And if you’ve seen Jurassic Park you know the implications might be larger by an order of magnitude or two.  My mind, however, wanders to mammals.  Then primates.  Then humans.  If our distant cladistic cousins can do it, can we?

The key appears to be males leaving females alone long enough.  As Malcolm says, “life will find a way.”  Life amazes me.  While we can’t count on it happening for each individual, life has a way of reemerging when you think it’s gone.  Previous owners of our house neglected a green ash tree growing in a location far too close to the house itself for many years.  Granted, it was on the north side where you seldom have any reason to go, but that tree sent out progeny that I’ve had to try to eradicate for five years now.  As much as I love trees, when they’re growing into the foundations of your house, they’re a bit of a problem.  I snip off the water shoots whenever I find them but they keep coming back.  I’m sad to cut them but I admire their persistence.  Life’s persistence. It’s will to carry on.  It continues even when we think it can’t.  Never forget the water bears!

Just a few days later the Times ran an article about the strong possibility of life on Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons.  Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised.  I’m absolutely certain there’s life elsewhere.  It makes no sense for it not to be.  Life evolves to a point, it seems, where the “intelligent” variety seems to become arrogant.  I embrace our reptilian and amphibious and piscine cousins.  Even our insect and arthropod family.  Our plants and fungi.  Life is amazing and we seldom stop to ponder just how wonderful and mysterious and resilient it is.  A lonely female crocodile decides to have a family.  Phosphates spewing from an ice-cold moon whirling around a colossal planet that wanted to be a star.  Life!  How can we not be stunned into trying to admire it in its many, many forms?

Solstice Wonders

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It’s difficult to tell where summer begins and spring ends.  Transitions are like that.  Today’s the summer solstice.  Since I’m an early riser I keep track of when the sun comes up so that I can go for a jog.  Actually, I tend to get out just before sunrise when twilight is enough to see by.  You see, the solstice is a day of hope.  My jogging path is on the edge of town and it borders some woods that, all things considered, are quite shallow.  There’s development on the other side of the river, although you can’t see it from here.  As I’m out before most other crepuscular exercisers I often see critters along the trail.  I’m not sure I can catalogue all the animals I’ve seen but a partial list includes fox, coyote, raccoon, bald eagle, raven, ducks, herons, and the ubiquitous rabbits, squirrels, and deer.  Last month I saw a doe giving birth as I jogged by, something I felt it inappropriate to watch beyond a passing glance.

At times when it’s too dark to go before work I have occasionally gone on a slightly later schedule.  Then I’ve seen groundhogs, a snapping turtle, and red efts (newts).  The thing is these woods are rather thin and they support (along with the towns, I’m sure) a variety of creatures, many of which I don’t see.  Appearances can be deceptive.  Things that appear certain are often wrong.  Those who wake later and don’t spend their evenings on the trail (and animals, I expect, are shy after people have been out all day) may not believe there is so much fauna in the area.  I know there’s even more: opossum, bear, and frogs among them.  I believe they are there.  And believing is just as important as knowing.

Summer is thought of as a more relaxed time, but that’s really only an appearance as well.  It’s actually quite a busy time—what’s relaxed is our capitalistic drive for work.  We realize the warmer days (hopefully not too rainy) afford us the opportunity to do the things the long, dark, cold months prevent.  And those of us in northern latitudes tend to think of it as a magical time.  Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream captures the traditions of fairy activity during this short night with long, sunny days either side of it.  A family member recently reminded me of this connection, and it seems to me that we should be reminded once in a while of the miracles that surround us.  The solstice is one of them.  It’s a matter of believing and a cause for hope.

Optimism

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On the homepage of my website (of which this blog is a part) is the statement that jaded optimism lurks here.  I’ve been thinking a lot about optimism and hope lately.  Trying to change the way you think is difficult.  Musing with my wife the other day I realized—and this should’ve been obvious—that my optimism became “jaded” when I lost my job at Nashotah House.  You see, our lives have been uncertain since then.  The steady income of an academic job with a retirement plan, a future mapped out (at least a little) with summers free for research and travel, the flexibility to have time to contemplate; all of this fits my neurodivergent way of thinking.  Having suddenly to cope with finding an apartment, finding jobs (not vocations), losing retirement options, all of this has led to a turmoil that has lasted going on two decades now.

I need to challenge my jaded optimism into becoming real.  I keep coming back to Mark 9.24, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”  I’m not a materialist, although academia led me close to it a time or two.  The universe, however, is an untamed place.  We don’t know the trillionth of it, let alone the half.  We’ve figured out a good bit of the physics of this world and think that it applies the same everywhere in this infinite, expanding space-time.  Then we discovered quantum physics and quantum entanglement which looks more like religion than science.  It seems to me that optimism—hope—lies in a combination of what science tells us and what is traditionally called religion tells us.  You may call it “belief,” “intuition,” or “hope.”  Yes, when Pandora’s box was opened, only hope remained.

John William Waterhouse, Pandora (1896), public domain, via Wikimedia commons

There’s a parable in the story of Pandora.  As told by Hesiod, Pandora’s jar contained the gifts of the gods which escaped when Pandora opened it.  Thereby evil entered the world.  Yet one gift of the gods remained for humankind, and that was hope.  Arguably the most valuable gift of them all.  I have been letting my career malfunction at Nashotah House dominate and drive my outlook for far too long.  It will never cease to hurt, I know, but it’s time I learned the meaning of what the Pandora myth teaches us.  Myth, please understand, functions like religion.  It provides insight and guidance.  And the tale of Pandora, especially when things turn unexpectedly frightening, reminds us that hope is the only necessary gift of the gods.

Individuals All

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When things grow stressful and distressing, it may help to remember how others had it worse.  It’s cold comfort, perhaps, but Juneteenth, although a celebration, reminds us that our African-American siblings have had, and continue to have, a struggle to be permitted to exist on equal terms with everyone else.  Racism is an ugly thing.  Getting over prejudice is often difficult, but it’s generally the result of getting to know people as individuals.  All my life I’ve learned anything I may know from small samples.  I’m not famous and I don’t know a ton of people.  I grew up in a small town that was mostly white.  But even so, one of my early childhood friends was Black.  I liked him a lot and his being different was only all the more intriguing.

You see, I grew up in a rural area that struggled (and still does) with racism.  Yet even there, those who got to know the few African (and some Asian) Americans liked them well enough.  It’s the mob mentality that’s often the problem.  And it is easily stirred back into action when prominent individuals espouse it.  We need to hear a much simpler message—get to know those who are different individually.  No race is superior.  We need to change the narrative.  It’s not easy to do, but as someone who’s always dealt with small samples, I know it can work if we give it a chance.  Mob mentality makes people feel included but it’s decidedly irrational.  It seems best to try to see the person in front of us rather than fear those who are different.  Being “white” doesn’t equate to sainthood.

Photo by Lawrence Crayton on Unsplash

Our Black friends and neighbors have had a difficult time being given rights and respect as Americans.  Most of their ancestors were brought here unwillingly and carefully honed attitudes were taught to ensure that they were seen as inferior.  I’ve often thought that making ourselves more homogeneous (and homogenerous) would solve a great many social ills.  Xenophobia is no excuse, but it does seem to have its hooks deep in us.  Questioning such assumptions just might help to make us all more humane.  I can’t claim that my experience or ways of thinking are normative, but it seems if we get to know individuals—my small samples—we can begin to see that we all deserve fair treatment.  Traffic offenses or taking a walk after dark shouldn’t be capital crimes for anyone.  Welcoming the stranger is even biblical.  Juneteenth is an important day and it reminds us that there’s still much work to be done to ensure justice and fair treatment for all.

Sailing Away

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Out on the open water on a sailboat large enough to be categorized as a sloop.  We’re on the Hudson River learning about both sailing and the environment.  I’m here with a a Girl Scout troop, otherwise I wouldn’t have known about the sloop Clearwater at all.  The origins of the Clearwater go back to Pete Seeger, who, apart from being a famous folk artist, was also an environmentalist.  Based in Beacon, New York, the Clearwater is used in educational programs and it represents the only time I’ve been on an actual sailing ship.  Call me Ishmael.  Or not.  You see, I was there as a volunteer.  Specifically, a driver.  My daughter’s troop had scheduled the trip and I was afforded free passage as chauffeur.  I’d pretty much tucked this away into old memory banks until recent reading brought it to the surface.

Photo by by Anthony Pepitone; under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license, via Wikimedia Commons

I support environmental causes in the ways a guy in my position can.  We compost in our back yard.  We recycle anything that we can figure out how to.  We throw away one thirteen-gallon garbage bag every two weeks, and that’s sometimes half-empty.  Being vegan helps.  We don’t have a lot of money to give away, but lifestyle is the biggest way to try to help the planet.  So I’m out here soaking up my Melville vibes on a river wide enough to be a lake.  The Hudson, like all rivers, is worth saving.  I used to cross under it daily through the Lincoln Tunnel, trying not to think of all that water flowing above my head.  There was a reason I read on that long commute.

This blog, I guess, has become a repository for much of my past.  I’m grateful to you indulgent readers who find any of this interesting.  Still, I find human connections to places fascinating.  While I’ve never considered the Hudson home, some of my early relatives likely did (more likely Hessians than Dutch, but I’m told we fought on the right side during the Revolutionary War).  When I’ve had the opportunity to gaze out over the river without being in a rush, I’ve always felt a sense of belonging.  An artwork I made from artifacts I gathered awaiting our turn to board the Clearwater now hangs in our front hall.  Suddenly those twenty-something years feel like so long ago.  Even so, the Hudson suggests something homey to me.  Maybe it’s time to hire out a sloop again, go out on the river, and dream about belonging.

Baptist to the Future

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Setting aside their smartphones and MAGA hats for a moment, the Southern Baptist Convention voted to exclude women pastors this week.  The photos seem to show a rather dour delegate pool that seems ready to head to the apothecary for some leeches to take care of this headache.  The conservative mind is a curious place.  I can understand wanting to slow change down—it is moving at a scary pace, leaving many of us concerned and confused.  Yet the idea that nothing has changed in two millennia isn’t only demonstrably wrong, it’s something that history demonstrates is a relatively recent, and reactionary, idea.  The fundamentalist brand of religion that elevates the Bible to godhood has only been around for about a century.  It’s a reaction to a hundred-year-old modernism that, in spite of all the evidence, closes its eyes.

Fear is natural enough.  Some of us actually watch horror movies voluntarily, after all.  But when fear overtly drives your religion isn’t it time to stop and ask what you’re doing?  The Southern Baptist Convention ejected its largest church, Saddleback, which had achieved national influence under Rick Warren.  According to the New York Times, Warren himself addressed the Convention citing none other than Billy Graham in his defense of women pastors.  The convention overwhelmingly voted to excise its most successful church for fear of that dreaded slippery slope of liberalism.  We’re fixated at some sexual level, it seems, and afraid of what might happen if we admit that even as AI is taking over our world, things may have changed.  At least a little.

The Bible is a sacred document with a context.  That context was patriarchal and it held considerable sway for about two millennia.  Power is difficult to relinquish.  When you get to call all the shots you don’t want to be reminded that those shots are wounding and killing innocent people.  “It was just better that way,” people think, ignoring the very Bible they worship.  It’s a point of view I understand, having grown up in it.  I remember reading with the juvenile furrowed brow of some tender twenty years how C. S. Lewis simply couldn’t see how women could be priests.  And then noticed how Baptists and other Protestants embraced Lewis although they condemned his idolatrous Anglicanism.  Sometimes it’s difficult to believe we’re actually in the twenty-first century with AI knocking at the door.  And we still can’t get over women wanting to be in the pulpit.

What would Roger Williams say?

A Tumble

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So beautifully shot, Fallen is a movie worth watching despite its disjointed plot.  Worth watching for horror fans, that is.  Apart from the night scenes, this is art house cinematography, and that may be because it’s an independent movie.  What’s it about?  That’s difficult to say, definitively.  The night scenes are so dark that you can’t tell what’s happening and the plot seems to have been intentionally obscure.  (That’s hard to substantiate because the 2022 film hasn’t generated too much discussion.)  This may have been another case of mistaken identity, like The Entity, because my notes only had the title down.  There are at least three movies with this title.  I’m learning my lesson to jot down the year when I add a movie to my “to see” list.  In any case, here goes…

A young priest (?) is warned by an older priest that it is time to take up violence because the darkness has started.  The younger priest is called “Father Abraham,” but he wears a tie in church services, and a small pectoral cross, making identification of the denomination difficult.  Since this is religion-based horror you’d think that that much, at least, ought to have been sorted out.  The heavily accented dialogue is often delivered so low that it’s difficult to follow.  In any case, this minister, after fighting “darkness” for many years, is in an isolated farmhouse with his disabled daughter.  He hunts and traps for their needs and a local boy delivers groceries, and is secretly in love with the daughter.  The minister, who seems to be presented as a tortured soul, isn’t really likable.  At night the house is attacked by physical demons.  There will be spoilers in the next paragraph.

It’s finally revealed that Fr. Fallen (apparently that’s his surname) had killed his wife for being a witch.  His daughter is also a witch, out for revenge for her mother’s death.  She summoned the demons and eventually kills her father and leaves the farm.  Religious imagery is everywhere in this film and begs for interpretation.  The lack of coherence, however, makes that very problematic.  The disabled daughter is the only survivor at the farmhouse, and is healed at the end.  By the demons?  Or because she’s a witch?  The influence of M. Night Shyamalan is evident, but his clean plotting is absent.  Online discussion is minimal, but there could be something of substance here.  If only it were better put together.  If only it were more discussed.