Wachet auf

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I have a proposition.  Some folks in town have a big “Anti-Woke” (aka, “asleep”) flag on their house, along with various Trump paraphernalia.  Since the Republican Party has largely become reactionary and would, admittedly, still prefer to be asleep, perhaps Democrats should adopt Buddha as a symbol.  I know this would be dangerous in a nation that prides itself as being the city set on a hill, but “buddha” means “awoken one.”  I’m not a Buddhist but I have no problem with it.  The Eightfold Path makes a lot of sense to me.  In any case, a good symbol is something to be cherished.  I think of Gordon Deitrich having a Qur’an in his house, even as a gay man, in V for Vendetta.  Symbols are important.  The anti-woke seem to have forgotten Matthew 24.42 “Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come.”  The Bible generally advocates wakefulness.

Photo by Mattia Faloretti on Unsplash

Trump-branded Christianity is a strange beast.  Certainly the use of a Buddha symbol would become a cudgel.  Ironically so, for a faith that promotes nonviolence.  The “foreignness” or “not-Christianness” outweighs the positive outlook it entails.  Any religion that advocates violence should reassess its principles.  Buddhism isn’t perfect—no religion is.  The basic ideas of right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration work well enough with Christianity, as Thomas Merton discovered.  For some, however, the Asian outlook (overlooking that Christianity began in Asia) is a deal-breaker.  Strange for a global religion.  Not so unusual for those who prefer to be asleep because Fox News sings them a lullaby.

One of the most stirring Christian hymns is “Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme,” based on a Bach cantata.  Perhaps better known as “Sleepers Awake,” the words take their origin from Matthew 25, the parable of the ten virgins.  If I recall correctly, the virgins ready to be woke are those who fare better in this tale.  They’re less concerned with condemning other religions and more interested in being able to wake and trim their lamps swiftly when the time comes.  As I told a friend the other day, I’m an unrepentant idealist.  I do believe that we have it within ourselves to treat all people as having inherent worth and dignity.  The real draw to having Buddha is a symbol would be the introspection.  Instead of telling other people how to live, the principles are applied at home.  Of course, a person has to want to wake up for any of this to work.

Holy X

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It took several years, but we finally closed the X-Files.  It was shortly after we bought the house, I believe, when we decided to watch the series the whole way through.  This was prompted by my wife giving me season eleven as a present, and I was wondering if I’d lost track of the thread.  We recently finished the last episode of the last season, with the movies interjected into the correct locations.  It was an impressive franchise.  I didn’t watch The X-Files when it originally aired.  We didn’t watch TV in those days (Nashotah House didn’t have cable and reception was awful), but another reason was that I was unmercifully teased for being interested in such things as a kid, and now it was trendy.  Once I got started, though, I was hooked.

Copyright: FOX; fair use screen capture

A few things struck me this time through, but one of the bluntest instruments to hit me was just how profoundly religion was interlaced with the series.  Many episodes involve religion directly, and others address faith and belief, even if outside the confines of established religion.  Since I tend to pause to reflect, I come a bit late to the table most of the time.  If I’d been on the ball, and if I’d begun writing books on horror sooner, I might’ve found a project in the religion of the X-Files.  As it is, several books have been written analyzing the series.  Maybe that’s where I’ll turn next.

You see, the original projected end for the series was season seven in 2000.  The mythology was wrapped up, and David Duchovny was leaving the show, which was, in essence, the story of Fox Mulder.  Two more seasons were ordered, however, with Fox on the run.  Things again were wrapped up in season nine.  Season ten came to air in 2016 and we watched it in real time, with primitive streaming.  In 2018, however, moving ended up being chaotic, and any watching would have to wait.  It seems pretty clear that, even with endless resurrections of the Smoking Man—Mulder’s Darth Vader—that the crisis of the world’s end (on which season ten ended) had finally been resolved.  That season, however, was eerily prescient regarding the pandemic.  Season eleven was a strong pushback against the Trump presidency with its “fake news” and constantly shifting facts.  Many of the episodes note how dangerous this is.  At the end it seems that the miraculous son, dead and resurrected, immaculately conceived, survives, as do the father and, if it’s not reading too much into it, a holy spirit.

Conference Voice

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“Conference voice” is a phenomenon that began with my career malfunction.  While teaching I attended the AAR/SBL annual meeting every year but one.  Even the year that Nashotah House fired me I attended, through the generosity of a seminary colleague who’d left for a parish and who used discretionary funds to help me afford it.  (Churches can actually help people from time to time.)  In any case,  I always met many colleagues at the meeting itself, and had many conversations.  Besides, I taught a full docket of courses every year.  Then the malfunction.  I was eventually hired by Gorgias Press but I had to do adjunct teaching to make ends meet.  I taught up to about ten courses per year at Rutgers, all in the evening.  Then I was hired by Routledge.  The commute to NYC precluded any adjunct work, so I settled into the quiet world of editing.

I also began attending AAR/SBL again.  I came home with “conference voice.”  After going for days, or even weeks, with no substantial conversation, I’d lost my lecturing vocal stamina.  At the conference I had five days of back-to-back meetings, often in a crowded and noisy exhibit hall.  I’m a soft-spoken individual (I can project when teaching) and my larynx was stressed by the concentrated five days of constant conversation.  My voice had dropped in pitch by the time I got home and it took a few days to get better.  I would lapse into cenobic silence for another year.  After the conference I’d return every year with aching vocal cords.  My family sympathized, but I really just don’t talk that much.  Especially at work.

Recently I met a friend for lunch.  I hadn’t seen him to chat for a few years so we spent over two-and-a-half hours talking.  Part of it in a restaurant where I needed to raise my voice.   I awoke the next morning with conference voice.  This bothered me because I’d been invited to do a podcast episode about a horror movie and I faced an existential crisis: what does my real voice sound like?  In my mind, my profession is teaching.  The voice I had at Nashotah House, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, Rutgers University and Montclair State, was my real sound, such as it was.  Life has landed me in a situation where I seldom speak, and almost never to groups where I need to project.  Conference voice is a reminder of what I was meant to do and what I, of necessity, must do.

Influential Horror

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Media has a tremendous effect on society.  We all know that, and every four years elections prove it time and again.  Like an infinite loop or Mobius strip.  The Brits knew this well.  During the Second World War (which we seem eager to repeat), it was against the law to produce horror films in the UK.  Such things can demoralize, don’t you know, old chap?  The first British film to claim horror’s reopening was Dead of Night, released in 1945.  Germany had surrendered in May and Dead of Night, like a breath being held, was released in September.  Although hardly scary by today’s standards, it was an enormously influential film.  It’s an anthology with a framing story that ties all the pieces together.

Walter Craig is an architect called to visit a farmhouse that requires renovation.  Upon arriving, although he’s never been before, all the people at the house are familiar to him from a recurring nightmare he has and vaguely remembers.  He feels that something bad will happen since his dream seems to be a premonition.  Meanwhile, each of the guests tell their own uncanny stories.  Since this is horror, we know that the nightmare will exact its due.  Craig ends up murdering one of the guests before waking in bed.  It was his nightmare.  He receives a call to come to a farmhouse that requires renovation.  When he arrives it reminds him that the nightmare is about to play out in real life.

The movie influenced many others.  The most famous segment—a ventriloquist that goes mad when his dummy takes over—was fuel for many haunted doll stories.  One of the tales was based on a real-life murder than had taken place in Britain in 1860.  As I learned from Wikipedia, however, the most stunning effect the movie had was on cosmology.  You may remember from science class that a debate about the origin of the universe was fought between two models: the Big Bang theory and the Steady State theory.  What they don’t teach in science class is that Fred Hoyle developed the Steady State theory based on this movie of the recurring loop of a nightmare that the dreamer is helpless to escape.  I’ve been saying for years that horror is due a lot more respect than it’s given.  These movies, as an integral part of the media, do have a very real effect on the world around them.  Dead of Night is a good example of that.  And it’s still a bloody good film, after all these years.

Wonderful Impossibility

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I used to tell my students that a semester break without reading a book that challenged your assumptions was wasted.  I tried to lead by example, but jobs are such fragile things.  Since I have no semester breaks I try to read books that push the limits more frequently.  I’d heard about Carlos Eire’s They Flew before the author had settled on a publisher.  (I don’t know him personally, but would be glad to.)  In case the title doesn’t do enough heavy lifting, the subtitle A History of the Impossible might help.  Yes, we’re stepping into the world of the post-secular here.  It’s a wonderful place.  Although much of the book deals with early modern cases of levitation, the study ranges wider than that.  Written by a respected historian, this is a very important book.  For many reasons.

I am glad to see Yale University Press joining with Chicago and some noted others (Rowman and Littlefield, for instance) in challenging a paradigm that is no longer upheld by science.  I can hear the howling already, but if you read carefully, with an open mind (which is required by science) you’ll quite possibly learn something here.  Our minds do influence our reality.  We haven’t figured out how because secularism ends the discussion with scorn.  That was true of the study of UFOs as well, until the U. S. Navy said, “Nope.  They’re real.”  (It only took about seven decades, so don’t expect instant results.)  We cut off our possibilities when we mock things out of habit.  I remember the Turok comic where one character said to another (give me a break—this has been five decades and I can’t recall all the names) “Fools scoff at what they don’t understand.”  Truer words have never been penned.

The impossible happens when scientists aren’t there to witness it.  It sometimes happens when they are.  Doubt that?  Read about the Pauli Effect.  Or call it gremlins, the choice is yours.  It’s real in either case.  Academics are often among the last, with the exception of Trump supporters, to see what’s been staring them in the face all along.  I’ll say more about this book on Goodreads, but let me float a hope here.  I want to go back to that indefinite article in Eire’s subtitle.  This is A History of the Impossible.  May more follow.  Others, such as Jeff Kripal, have been doing similar work for many years now.  We can ignore it, or scoff at it.  But I think that character in Turok got it right, even if I can’t remember his name.

Happy Beltane!

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They creep up on you, these holidays with no official recognition.  I’ve been so busy that it didn’t even occur to me that today was Beltane—May Day—until my wife mentioned it to me before I headed up to bed last night.  Why is that important?  It’s not a day off work, so why bother?  Well, for one thing it’s the fuel behind my book published in the summer of last year.  Or, according to the Celtic calendar, the fall (just before Lughnasadh).  In other words, this is the first May Day for The Wicker Man.  I should’ve been trying to drum up a little interest, but things have been busy.  Besides, my profile hasn’t grown since its publication.  Nobody even cites it on the Wikipedia page for the movie, although it takes a distinct angle.  So I’ve been busy with other things.

I’ve been trying to find a publisher for my next book.  A couple friends know what it’s about but mostly nobody else because it’s time-sensitive.  Agents haven’t nibbled.  Well, one did.  He had me rewrite the book and then decided he couldn’t sell it after all.  Back to square one.  Even presses that publish mostly non-PhDs weren’t even interested enough to respond to queries.  Nothing like writing a book to make you realize how insignificant you are.  Like Sgt. Howie, I’m caught on Summerisle.  Ironically, I didn’t even think of writing a post for my book today when I was jogging yesterday and a haze over the moon (I know the movie ends with the sun—I’ve seen it a time or two) made me think, “That sky looks like the ending of The Wicker Man.”  Well, when I get back from my jog I have to start right in to work.  And Beltane’s not a holiday in these parts.

May Day used to be celebrated, even in the United States.  Now it’s just disappeared into the haze of work days.  And we don’t have time even to watch movies on work days.  That’s a weekend activity.  Of course, my weekends are full of trying to find publishers.  Two are currently considering my unagented book.  Four have already rejected it.  I’m thinking that I could use a trip to the Green Man with Howie.  At least on Summerisle they know how to celebrate May Day.  Of course, it’s the ending that makes it horror.  And Beltane snuck up on me this year.  Without it, The Wicker Man wouldn’t even exist.

Facing Fear

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The relationship between fathers and daughters is intangibly profound.  (I can’t speak for fathers and sons, from either side of the equation.)  That was the angle that Georges Franju took when approaching Eyes Without a Face.  I have to confess that I knew the basic idea behind this movie and it took years to build up the courage to watch it.  I’m squeamish, and the fear that the film might show too much was a very real fear.  After you watch a movie, it can’t be unseen.  Still, it is a classic of the horror genre (although that is disputed) and it gets referenced all the time.  In case you haven’t heard about it, a plastic surgeon is attempting to graft a new face onto his daughter after she’s mutilated in an automobile accident.  Things, as you might guess, don’t go as planned.

Critics didn’t care for the movie when it was first released, but, as we’ve seen from time to time, re-evaluation changes things.  It is now considered good enough to be part of the Criterion Collection and ratings on the usual websites are quite favorable.  It’s often cited for its poetic treatment of the subject, and the response of Christiane, the daughter, seems to bear that out as she moves from complicit in her father’s crimes to sympathetic to his victims.  Indeed, the surgeon himself is conflicted, but that father-daughter relationship is something he can’t ignore.  He seems compelled to help her at any cost—it’s the price of parenting, I suppose.  It’s not for the weak.  But we’re in movie-land, aren’t we?

Christiane is sympathetic to the animals her father uses for his experiments.  When she frees them, after releasing the last intended victim, she’s depicted St. Francis-like, with the doves.  Knowing her own suffering, she can’t bear to impose it on another.  Our bodies are how we present ourselves to the world.  We rely on faces to tell us much of what we need to know, even without words passing between us.  Interestingly, even when wearing her mask, Christiane’s eyes tell the viewer much of what she’s experiencing internally.  Poetic, as the critics say.  If there’s a monster here, however, he’s driven out of love in the context of an imperfect world.  Eyes Without a Face works as a horror film and the reported fainting that took place among viewers early on demonstrate that we tend to feel for others, just as Christiane comes to.  And the father?  Well, that’s the unanswered question.  He’s a victim in his own way.

Too Much TMI

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Okay, okay.  I admit I get overwhelmed.  There’s just too much stuff to read.  I currently have 25 tabs open on my browser, afraid that I’ll forget about something that seemed so urgent when I opened the URL in the first place.  (Two decades ago that sentence would’ve been nonsense.)  I limit my time on social media.  This can be a death-kiss for a writer, but for sanity’s sake (and work’s), I look at Facebook for literally about five minutes a day.  (If you want to reach me leave a comment on my blog.)  In those five minutes (or less) I often come away with two or three articles that I want to read but don’t have time just now.  I open a tab and hope I’ll get to it before I lose interest.  There’s a lot of information.  Too much.  Too much TMI.

I’m a slow reader.  I sometimes wonder if I have borderline dyslexia—it once happened on a test and led me to phone a professor at night to explain—but dear reader, it slows me down.  And a writer, no matter how obscure, needs time.  I told a friend the other day that I don’t do things I enjoy, such as painting and drawing, because writing takes up so much time.  (And work does too—it gets the lion’s share.)  But those articles!  They look so important!  Some have health implications and, if you lose your health you have even less time.  The internet gives us TMI constantly.  And this field is riddled with rabbit holes.  Just ask the white rabbit about time.

Image credit: John Tenniel, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

What are the curious to do?  I actually get an insane amount of satisfaction from closing a browser tab.  It’s a sense of accomplishment—I’ve done something that brings closure!  If I do it enough times I’ll get down to the URLs I always keep open lest I forget my place.  Some of these tabs have been open since the Obama administration.  If you’re critical of such as I you might suggest “why don’t you just read an article instead of writing about not having the time to read?”  The interlocutor here is clearly not a writer.  Or at least has different writing habits than me.  There are some non-negotiables in this world of TMI.  I suppose I’m adding to the problem.  At least if anything thinks what I present here is information.  For that I defer to Klima, who, happily, still has some time.

Mr. Bean

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Edamame.  I remember distinctly the first time I had it.  I was at the house of Alvy Ray Smith, co-founder of Pixar (shameless name drop), by the courtesy of Neal Stephenson (another).  It was a book club discussion and although I don’t remember who else was there, I was certainly the least distinguished person in the room.  Someone had brought edamame to share.  I’d neither seen nor heard of it before.   I popped a pod in my mouth and began to chew.  After ruminating a few moments, I figured this cud wasn’t going to break down and when others put their—relatively intact—pods in the discard bowl, a lightbulb clicked on.  Sheepishly, I pulled my mangled pod from my mouth and slipped it, I hoped unobtrusively, into the bowl.  If anyone noticed they were too sophisticated to say anything.  Blue collar through and through.

I repressed that memory, which is strange.  I tend to remember, and replay, the embarrassing things I’ve done.  This memory slipped, however, until our daughter reintroduced me.  She was in college, or recently out, and she showed us how to do it.  When that pod hit my tongue, the memory sprang back.  Edamame has become a standard of our house since then.  In case you’re unfamiliar, you put the pod in your mouth, keeping hold of one end.  You extract the beans, generally by using your teeth as an immovable obstacle—like artichoke leaves.  Discard pod, chew and swallow.  We sometimes dress ours up with a sauce.

The last time we had edamame, however, one of the beans shot to the back of my throat while the other two laughed.  I couldn’t tell which way, but it was clear the renegade bean was going down on its own.  I spent the rest of the evening worrying that I’d aspirated a bean.  Aspiration becomes more common as you age—something about nature trying to send us a hint, I guess—but I didn’t cough at all.  No wheezing started.  No pain.  Probably I swallowed at the last possible second.  If I did it was reflex because I couldn’t think what to do.  The next day, with no ill effects, it seemed funny.  Amusing enough to remember a time when really accomplished people were interested in what I had to say.  That time has largely departed, like an empty edamame shell.  But the memory remains.  There are hidden  hazards to eating edamame, it seems.

Which Mountain?

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Disney movies—and I still think of Disney primarily as a movie studio—were part of my childhood.  A small part, but there nevertheless.  We didn’t go to theaters often but we caught some movies on television (do you remember eagerly reading TV Guide to find out what was going to be on that week?).  We did watch The Wonderful World of Disney and some of their series—I recall the one ones on Daniel Boone and Davy Crocket.  Still, I missed a lot.  I didn’t see Mary Poppins, for example, until I was in college.  So the other day I got curious about Escape to Witch Mountain.  I’d not seen it as a child and never saw any reason to watch it as an adult.  I’ve been taking a break from bad movies, and, as it turns out, Disney.  So there may be spoilers below, in case you’re waiting to see it.

I didn’t know the backstory or the plot, so seeing this the first time I wasn’t sure what to expect.  The movie shows its age (I was a mere lad of twelve when it was released), but the story is interesting.  Tony and Tia are adopted but have to be sent to an orphanage.  We quickly learn that they have “powers,” and that adults like to exploit such things.  A wealthy villain has his fixer pose as their long lost uncle to get them to his house, under his control.  The children realize that they must escape to, well, Witch Mountain.  Actually, that takes some time and a sympathetic adult who can drive.  In the end it turns out that they’re aliens, not witches.

Not cheery like many Disney films, Escape to Witch Mountain, although you know it will end well, has a fair bit of tension.  Especially scary is the mob mentality that takes over the locals when they start their literal witch hunt.  Armed and dangerous, those who want to preserve the uniformity of small-town mentality are serious about their convictions.  As usual, they focus on the enemy without getting to know who, or what, they really are.  Obviously, there are larger issues to consider, as there are when anyone has an advantage.  But the kids, aliens, are sweet and mean nobody any harm.  All they want is to get back to their people.  Can humans, however, ever be satisfied knowing that there are others out there more advanced than we are?  Perhaps there’s a reason for cover-ups, after all.  Disney often says more than it’s given credit for saying.  Even if I missed it until now.

Springing

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Life, for everyone, has difficult times.  Katherine May has a reassuring, but not always cheerful way about her.  She calls troubled times Wintering.  The subtitle of her book explains that it’s about The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times.  My wife and I read this one together.  It reminded me, in some ways, of Barbara Brown Taylor’s Learning to Walk in the Dark.  In a society vapidly preoccupied with an often shallow happiness, admitting, even pondering the things that are difficult is an act of courage.  May has a disarming way of writing, a humility and self-deprecation that are an antidote to the brazen self-assurance we too often see in the media.  She looks for lessons in her own experiences of pain and loss, and yes, surviving through winter. 

Winter is often a quiet time of reflection.  In our bright, loud, beeping, buzzing world we don’t take much time for such things.  Indeed, capitalism (which is generally not deep, although deeply engrained) doesn’t encourage it.  “The more you can work,” it whispers in your ear, even while sleeping, “the better you’ll feel.”  Winter slows things down.  Makes life a bit harder.  Think of all those days when you just don’t feel like going outside in the cold, snow, and sleet.  When the chill drives you next to the radiator, covered in lap blankets.  When it’s dark most of the time.  Such are good times to think.  As May shows, when you turn a difficult situation around and look at it from different angles, truths about yourself, about life, begin to emerge.  What is it we’re after that keeps us running all the time, dangerously overheating?  We need winter.

The anecdotes here are deeply personal.  This is particularly difficult for a writer because many of us face rejection frequently.  When you’ve poured yourself into a book, blithe casting aside by agents and publishers hurts.  I admire the bravery and the wisdom of writers like May.  She shows that wintering is possible, and that it is followed by spring.  Lives, she notes, are cyclical.  We can find quite a lot of meaning in that.  I often find myself fearing winter.  The heating bills.  The wearing of many layers of clothes for months at a time.  The dark and cloudy days.  Yet a good part of me welcomes the retreat.  I know that, in the cycle of the year with few days off from work, that if I can make it to Halloween, some rest—some wintering—awaits.  And that is a hopeful thought indeed.

Just Ask

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I see a lot of headlines, and not a few books, that puzzle over something that there’s an easy way to resolve: why do evangelicals (I’m thinking here of the sort that back Trump despite his pretty obvious criminal, predatory nature) think the way they do.  The solution is to ask evangelicals who’ve come to see things a bit differently.  I’m not the only one, I can assure you.  Many professors of religion (particularly biblical studies) and not a few ministers came from that background.  If they were true believers then, they can still remember it now.  At least I do.  I was recently reading a report in which the authors expressed surprise that evangelicals tend to see racism as a problem of individual sin rather than any systemic predisposition society imposes.  To someone who grew up that way, this is perfectly obvious.

I’m not suggesting this viewpoint is right.  What I am suggesting is that there are resources available to help understand this worldview.  To do so, it must not be approached judgmentally.  (I sometimes poke a little fun at it, but I figure my couple of decades being shaped by it entitle me to a little amusement.)  I don’t condemn evangelicals for believing as they do—that’s up to them—I do wish they’d think through a few things a bit more thoroughly (such as backing Trump).  I understand why they do it, and I take their concerns seriously.  I know that many others who study religion, or write articles about it, simply don’t understand in any kind of depth the concerns evangelicals have.  It’s only when their belief system impinges on politics that anybody seems to pay attention.

Maybe this is a principle we should apply to people in general.  Pay attention to them.  Listen to them.  Care for them.  Relentless competition wears down the soul and makes us less humane.  Religions, for all their faults, generally started out as means for human beings to get along—the earliest days we simply don’t know, but there is a wisdom in this.  In any case, if we really want to know there are people to ask.  Who’ve been there.  Whose very profession is being shoved out of higher education because it doesn’t turn a profit.  Learning used to be for the sake of increasing knowledge and since that’s no longer the case we see guesswork where before it would’ve been possible to “ask an expert.”  I often wonder about this, but as a former member of a guild that’s going extinct, I simply can’t be sure.

Panic Inducing

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Many movies appreciate in value over time.  The Devil Rides Out (also known as The Devil’s Bride) was not well received initially, but has become a highly regarded horror classic.  One of the few with a G rating, no less.  It’s also hard to see in the US, due to lack of streaming (at least where I stream) and DVDs coded to Europeans viewers.  Anyway, taken from a Dennis Wheatley novel, and screen-written by Richard Matheson, it features Christopher Lee in an heroic role during the days just before public concern about Satanism would become downright panic.  The story itself, effective if long-winded, develops among the aristocracy in England during the 1920s.  It was released, by the way, the same year as Rosemary’s Baby, which helped play into the Satanic panic.  Movies do influence the way we view “reality.”

I’ve never read any Dennis Wheatley novels, but it’s safe to say the story is pretty Manichaean in its outlook.  A coven of Satanists wants a young man and woman to complete their number but the chosen young man has a couple of older friends who quickly comprehend what is happening and attempt to put an end to it.  The Satanists, however, control real power and the movie is pretty much a tug of war between the young man’s friends and the coven.  This is done in such a way that you see very little blood, no gore, and surprisingly for the subject matter, no nudity or sex.  The Satanists here are old school—they want to worship the Devil in exchange for personal power.  It’s pretty clear that some research was done before undertaking all of this, even if the paranoia born of such things was fueled by largely imaginary scenarios. 

I’d been wanting to see this film for some time because of its clear connection between religion and horror.  There’d be no Satan, as we know him, without Christianity.  Indeed, there’s heavy Christian imagery in the film, in keeping with Wheatley’s outlook.  Crosses cause demons to disappear in an exploding puff of smoke.  Interestingly, however, there’s no crucifixes or holy water.  This is a Protestant view of the Dark Lord.  The Satanists, however, are defeated by the spirit of one of their own who refuses to allow them to sacrifice a young girl.  The ending stretches credibility a bit more than the rest of the movie, but still, overall it isn’t bad.  A Hammer production, it never had the box-office draw of its contemporary Rosemary.  Still, The Devil Rides Out was influential in its own right.  Even if finding a viewing copy requires almost selling one’s soul.

Technologies of Hope

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Having an immediate family member with cancer means that you look for hope everywhere.  Those who’ve brushed up against this family of diseases hopefully know that support groups abound.  Given my schedule, I don’t get out much on workday evenings, but we recently attended a survivors’ event hosted by the Andy Derr Foundation (donations accepted).  Two prominent local oncologists spoke and their tone was hopeful—always hopeful.  What really struck me was how much cancer treatment has progressed even just in the last five years.  The “cure for cancer” does not yet exist, but many technologies of hope do.  I sat there awestruck.  There are women and men spending their lives working to treat what used to be nearly always a fatal condition.  It was inspiring.

On the way home I was musing about how much we could advance in human health care if we had the budget of the military.  A vlogger we follow, John Green, happens to be a bestselling fiction author.  He is now writing a nonfiction book on tuberculosis.  This disease, for the most part, is completely treatable.  His efforts have led to lowering the cost of supplies to treat it for cash-poor countries.  I suspect he knows the same thing.  Our government decides which priorities it will fund.  Our fear—let’s be honest about this—funnels billions and billions to military budgets.  (And you wonder why I watch horror movies?)   I’m a dreamer, I confess.  But what if, world-wide, we put our money into medical budgets?  Can you even begin to imagine where we’d be by now?

I know most medical personnel are paid quite well.  My family member’s cancer medication costs more than she makes in a year, per single dose.  The technologies of hope those doctors were describing would be phenomenally expensive.  If only as a nation we had trillions of dollars at our disposal.  If only.  None of this, of course, should overshadow the tremendous work being done by nonprofits like the Andy Derr Foundation.  Channeling hundreds of thousands of dollars into research and treatment, they are making a difference.  Those beautiful survivors there that night are proof of the lives they’re helping save.  We have the ability to do amazing things.  If we support, and love one another, we can overcome a scourge that many, many families will experience, if they haven’t already.  Good work is being done.  And the good will behind it is cause for great hope.

Planetary Thinking

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It’s Monday, and I’m feeling like a holiday.  Good thing it’s Earth Day.  Many businesses (who still don’t consider Earth Day important enough to make it a paid holiday) are emphasizing being green these days.  Really, with global warming proving itself no myth it’s just good business to try to adapt to sustainable practices.  Those of us who are vegan find more and more companies offering animal-free options—our dependence on beef is a major environmental hazard.  It’s still a challenge finding shoes that aren’t leather based, but things are improving.  And more and more hybrids and electric cars are on the roads.  We are making progress.  We still haven’t, however, gone so far as to declare a day dedicated to preserving our home an official holiday.

I’m not jaded or capitalistic enough to think our only hope is to find off-world parking.  To raise the future of humanity elsewhere.  It’s just that people fall in line after bullies and bullies only think of themselves.  And who, thinking that an afternoon on the links can be counted as work, would consider giving mere employees a day off?  A day when we might shut down commuting schedules to save power?  A day to rest from the brutality of constant commerce.  After all, a typical weekend consists of a day for chores and a day for church.  (Still, that is, for many people.)  And then back to the office not really feeling refreshed but knowing that you can’t long survive in a pandemic-ridden world without more cash coming into the coffers.  Inflation may be going down but grocery prices aren’t.

From NASA’s photo library (public domain)

A day to celebrate home seems like a no-brainer.  Especially when it comes on a Monday or Friday.  Ah well, we’ll do our best to celebrate it around work, shall we?  We’re moving late into April.  There’s been a bit of sun mixed in with April showers, as is typical around here on this planet.  Days are growing longer and the trees are leafing out.  Spring welcomes us back to the outdoors (after work, of course) where green now predominates over brown and gray.  While we may not have the day off, we can at least take a moment or two to consider how we might be better to our planet.  How we might drive less, use less electricity, generate less waste, spare a few cows.  Who knows, it might become a habit?  If that were to happen maybe every day would become Earth Day.