Making Monsters

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It’s not so much I’ve been away from monsters lately, but that life has intervened between them and me.  Life can be scarier than monsters sometimes.  In any case, the summer is when my mind turns back to haunting even as on the breaks during heat waves a whiff of autumn can be caught on the air of a July morning.  Yes, we’ve past the solstice and days are getting shorter.  Slowly, of course, but that’s what builds suspense.  And there are local signs that I need to get my haunting in gear.  It is finally time to get Holy Horror out of wraps and give the book a proper launch.  Being published around Christmas last year was poor timing for a subject so readily coded for fall.

I received the welcome news this week that the Moravian Book Shop—the oldest continually operating bookstore in the country—will be hosting a book signing for Holy Horror in October.  This is a fortuitous turn of events because when I first approached them with the idea the price of the book made the idea look unrealistic.  But we’re now thinking of autumn, and with autumn comes Halloween.  There have been a spate of horror films this summer, all of which I’ve unfortunately missed.  Time, as Morpheus notes, is always against us.  There does, however, seem to be a lively interest in the genre and the curious wonder what it has to say about what we believe.  Horror loves religion, and indeed, thrives on it.  So it’s been from the beginning.

October will also see the Easton Book Festival in this area.  I will be on the program for that as well.  While none of this is earth-shattering, these events represent the first successes in trying to build awareness of Holy Horror.  This was a book written for a general readership, but not priced for one.  Working in the academic publishing world, this is a phenomenon with which I’m all too familiar.  Many colleagues offer to read and spread news about your book.  It seldom happens, though.  Academic presses can’t afford book tours (especially if they have to price books at $45), but these self-driven presentations are opportunities to spread the interest in ideas.  That’s what those of us who write really want—to be part of the conversation.  We’re in the midst of a heat wave here.  It’s the height of summer.  Even so, those who know about monsters can feel them coming, even from here.

Identity Crisis

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Living in Boston can be a heady trip for a budding academic.  Even if you’re across the river from Harvard and MIT, it’s a city known for its education scene.  Like many who studied there, I never wanted to leave.  A fringe benefit of being a student of religion was that a short trip would take you to Peabody.  Why?  Peabody was home to CBD—Christian Book Distributors.  In their showroom they had rock-bottom prices for something theology students crave—books.  That was many years ago now, and over time CBD grew to be the largest distributor of Christian paraphernalia in the country.  In my mind they’ll always be associated with happy little trips that ended in armloads of reading.  What more could you want?

A story by Emily McFarlan Miller explains why the revered CBD is changing its name.  Cannabidiol, a legal derivative of cannabis, is popularly known as cbd.  Lots of things share initials, of course, but these are the days of the web, and an internet search for cbd now pushes the distributor (at least the book distributor) off the first page.  One thing we all know in this online universe is that you’ve got to be on the first page.  CBD’s decision might seem extreme—changing the name of the business to get back on the front page.  Despite the amusing aspects to this story, it emphasizes something of an ongoing jeremiad with me: the web has redefined reality.  Think about it this way: when a digital image is over-enlarged it pixellates.  That’s because it’s composed of minuscule squares of a single color.   When brought together in a pattern, they form images we recognize.  It their basis, however, they are squares.

The earth, however, is an orb.  The natural state of falling liquids—the principle behind the shot tower—is a sphere.  Now, spheres together in a closed space leave gaps—just look at a jar of marbles and you’ll see what I mean.  That’s the order of the natural world.  Reality, if you will.  Tech, on the other hand, is pixels.  They fill the space better, and if done well can create the illusion of a curved line.  They can never, however, fit into a round hole of the same surface area.  The world has gone after the convenience of the internet in a small box.  It has changed the recording industry, the movie industry, and the publishing industry.  And just try to find your way to CBD on it.  You might have to change your search parameters.

Tumblin’ Down

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RadioLab (not to be confused with Radiohead) is an NPR program to which my wife likes to listen.  She’s introduced me to a few episodes since, as a person who does a lot of writing, I don’t normally gravitate toward programs with a lot of talk.  It’s part of the writer’s curse.  In any case, she recently played a segment on acoustic warfare.  I’ve known for some time that acoustic warfare is a thing, and that militaries use sound to disrupt enemies’ machinery and human operators.  I didn’t really know how it worked.  The interesting thing about this RadioLab spot was that they took the story of the walls of Jericho as a starting-off point.  Also of interest is that one of the hosts had never heard the story—something that would have been somewhat impossible for many growing up in my generation.  In case that’s you, however, the story goes like this—

God commanded Joshua to take on Jericho, a major, walled city, with a ritual procession and the blowing of trumpets.  After marching around the city several times, the priests blew their trumpets and the walls collapsed.  The story’s told in the book of Joshua.  The question discussed on RadioLab was whether it was possible to knock down walls with noise.  It is, they concluded, but at a noise level beyond the abilities of shofars.  This very discussion, however, raised any number of issues.  One is that the collapse of Jericho’s walls isn’t attributed to the rams’ horn sound, but rather a miracle.  Another is that biblical scholars and archaeologists have long known that Jericho wasn’t even occupied at the time of Joshua, and so the story isn’t historical.

Those who produce educational materials on various media generally don’t consider scholars of religion as interesting or noteworthy speakers.  TED talks don’t feature a category for religion, and, as this RadioLab episode demonstrated, those who understand acoustics have more interesting things to say than biblical scholars.  It’s not so much a rude awakening as it is a confirmation that what has long seemed obvious is indeed true—biblical scholarship isn’t really of general interest.  The Bible, however, retains a certain mystique.  I struggle with this disconnect constantly.  While the Good Book remains an iconic symbol—divine, even—those who know it well have less to say than others who have scientific methods to apply.  Not once was it mentioned on RadioLab that pretty much no biblical scholar would argue that the story is historical, but then, what fun would that be to pick apart?

Digging Well

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Having spent a good bit of the past week in waiting rooms in Ithaca, I fell to reading Tompkins Weekly, the free local community paper.  If you’ve spent any time on this blog you’re no doubt aware that I have an interest in the weird and unusual.  Although I got teased rather mercilessly for this as a kid, thanks to The X-Files such interest has become somewhat mainstream.  In any case, after fumbling with the crossword and finishing the sudoku, I read an article about dowsing.  Now Tompkins County is the home of both Cornell University and Ithaca College, so I was a little surprised in finding such a topic addressed at all.  What’s more, the usual ridicule expected with anything even approaching the paranormal was lacking.

Dowsing is the practice of finding water, or other underground resources, by using a crotched stick or dowsing rods.  A larger version of the quantum “spooky action at a distance,” dowsing is said to produce an effect on the twig or rods that will point to the hidden source.  Like ESP it is decried by mainstream science yet used by some governments when other methods fail.  As an example of “folk wisdom” dowsing occupies a similar, if less conventional, space to religion.  Scientism has taught us not to trust the invisible.  Scientists, however, are well aware that we can’t see everything.  We slide a finger around our collar, however, when something “unscientific” seems to work.  As the dowsers explain, however, there is a kind of science to what they do.  Problem is it doesn’t work for everyone.  Only some people can do it.

Now I’m not a credulous person.  I spent many years and even more dollars learning how to be a critical thinker.  Skepticism, however, leads me to ask how we know that dowsing can’t possibly work.  Have we discovered all there is to know in this infinite but expanding universe?  With finite minds it seems highly unlikely.  Duke and Princeton Universities once studied parapsychology in an academic setting, and the University of Virginia has left some related areas open to investigation.  The real problem is that we’ve been taught to laugh at anything we’re told to.  The US Navy, for instance, has recently revealed that it takes UFO reports seriously (unlike Project Bluebook).  We’ve been laughing so long it’s difficult to take even the military at face value.   Does dowsing work?  It’s difficult to say without all the facts.  Of course, I’ve been sitting in a waiting room, pondering what we don’t understand.

A Decade

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Please pardon my being sentimental, but today marks one decade of blogging on Sects and Violence in the Ancient World.  I realized, thinking this over, that I used to make some interesting, perhaps even quotable statements back then.  Why not, I thought, farm those older posts to celebrate what I was thinking when I was a tenth-of-a-century younger?  So for today’s post, I’m presenting some quotable quotes from July 2009, starting with one of the zingers from my very first post.  For convenience, I’ve even provided the links to the posts so you can see them in context, if your July has somehow not filled itself up already.

Sects and Violence in the Ancient World, by the way, was the name given when one of my nieces thrust a recorder in my face and asked me what I would call a blog, if I had one.  She subsequently set this site up for me.  One aspect of the title may not have been evident: it’s a quasi-anagram for my initials.  It has been, from the beginning, mostly metaphorical.  Without further ado, then, a few of my favorite lines from a decade long gone:

“He had a sidekick called Cypher (sold separately), and arch-enemies with such names as Primordious Drool and Wacky Protestor. I marveled at the missed opportunity here — they could have called them Text Critic and Doctor Mentary Hypothesis!” First post: Bible Guy, July 12, 2009. <https://steveawiggins.com/2009/07/12/bible-guy/>

“Technology has outstripped reality.” Asherah Begins, July 13, 2009 <https://steveawiggins.com/2009/07/13/asherah-begins/>

“Black and white are not in the palette of serious religious studies.”  God is Great (not)?, July 14, 2009 <https://steveawiggins.com/2009/07/14/god-is-great-not/>

“When he [Aqhat] refuses to release it to the goddess he is unfortunately pecked to death in a hitchcockian demise by a swarm of buzzards with attitudes.” Sects and Violence, July 15, 2009 <https://steveawiggins.com/2009/07/15/sects-and-violence/>

“Indeed, one may think of them [religion and monsters] as fellow ventricles in the anatomy of fear.” Vampires, Mummies and the Holy Ghost, July 16, 2009 <https://steveawiggins.com/2009/07/16/vampires-mummies-and-the-holy-ghost/>

“Better to consider it [weather] human than to face unfeeling nature.” Changing Faces of the Divine, July 18, 2009 <https://steveawiggins.com/2009/07/18/changing-faces-of-the-divine/>

“As the gods are drinking themselves senseless (how else can the latest Bush administration be explained?)…” Drunken Moonshine, July 20, 2009 <https://steveawiggins.com/2009/07/20/drunken-moonshine/>

“As usual, we kill off what we don’t comprehend.” Not Lion, July 22, 2009 <https://steveawiggins.com/2009/07/22/not-lion/>

“A bonobo was recently documented as uttering the word ‘yes’ to a keeper’s question, officially making her more articulate than some clergy I’ve known. Even today there are churches that still call their leaders Primates!” Religious Origins, July 23, 2009 <https://steveawiggins.com/2009/07/23/religious-origins/>

“I never used a computer regularly until I began my Ph.D., and then it was only a glorified typewriter, qwerty on steroids.” Who We Were, July 27, 2009 <https://steveawiggins.com/2009/07/27/who-we-were/>

“I grew up in a blue-collar household where paying ladies for favors was itself considered a sin.” Yes, Mammon, July 28, 2009 <https://steveawiggins.com/2009/07/28/yes-mammon/>

Where do you suppose we’ll be a decade from now?

The Joy of Techs

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Those of us with Luddite tendencies prefer to hide them.  Tech is the ultimate good, right?  You’ve got a smart phone in your pocket or purse and it contains the entire internet and what more could anyone possibly want?  Besides an upgrade, that is.  I recently misplaced part of the charger for my old iPhone 4S.  Yes, a phone that old can still work, no matter what they tell you!  I went to the store to replace said part only to find that you had to purchase an upgraded replacement that costs twice as much as the old part did.  Why?  It had a new type of USB port, in addition to a “traditional” USB.  Pardon my ignorance, but I thought the U stood for “Universal.”  Now even vocabulary has to change to meet the demands of tech?  Whoever the tech god is, s/he is extremely mercurial.

So I was in a meeting the other day.  A guy older than me was talking about the future of tech.  It occurred to me that guys my age (who didn’t get to take early retirement) are trying to act like those half our age, as if we really understand technology.  Growing up with something is the only way, it seems, to adapt to it in any kind of naturalized way.  There are kids today, if the internet’s to be believed, who don’t understand that you had to lift the receiver on an old-style telephone before dialing.  And if that dial is rotary, well, let’s just say the pizza’s not going to be delivered anytime soon.  Those who grew up with the internet and smart phones have a native understanding that people my age lack.  I still write ideas down on paper.  I prefer DVDs and CDs to streaming.  And I believe books should be made of paper.

Changes in the tech world vindicate me.  I heard that iTunes is going to be retired.  This is after I’ve spent plenty of money downloading songs that I could’ve bought on DVD and have in “hard copy.”  Indeed, friends are telling me to back up my MP3 files on some kind of storage device before iTunes goes the way of UltraViolet.  And we’re supposed to trust tech.  I’ve lost ebooks by switching devices.  Some of my tunes have been licensed away because I downloaded them on an older computer.  What’s one to do?  Buy them again.  In a new format.  On a platform that will eventually be retired so you’ll need to repeat the purchase a third time.  Or you can buy it once in paper or plastic and have it for good.  Now there’s a radical idea.  If only I had something to write it down on.

Selection, Natural or Not

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Darwin is extinct, it seems.  At least in the UK.  Perhaps I ought to explain.  I do not travel to England often, and I’m not always good about changing cash before I go.  Usury doesn’t sit well with me, and someone taking a cut just because I have to travel (usury actually doesn’t sting so much when you make a trip by choice) seems unethical.  When I discovered I was required in Oxford, my wife suggested I take some cash.  I went to the attic and rummaged through papers from a trip sometime within the last decade (my passport is still good, so it had to have been in this time frame), and found some ten-pound notes with Darwin on them.  They didn’t smell bad to me, so I said “I’ll just take these.”

I suspect that, like most people, I keep a pocketful of change as a souvenir when I travel to foreign shores.  So I had a few bank notes that hadn’t seemed worth changing back at the time.  Bread cast upon the waters, and all.  I had to make a small purchase in Oxford and the clerk said, oh so politely, “That’s old money, I’m afraid I can’t accept it.”  Interesting.  I had no idea money had a sell-by date.  She said “The bank will change it for you.”  Banks handle all kinds of money.  I walked to the nearest bank and the polite young man (all the bank tellers carry tablets here, like iPads at the Apple Store) told me that banks don’t do that service unless you’re an account holder.  “The good news,” he said, “is that the post office will do it for you, and it’s less than 300 metres from here.”  I was up to a 300 meter walk, so I went.  The British post office isn’t just a place to mail letters, I knew from living here years ago.  The woman at the counter frowned.  “I don’t know why banks send people here,” she said.  “We can’t exchange pounds for pounds.  I can change it into dollars for you.”  Of course, there was a charge to do so, just as there was a charge to change the notes from dollars to pounds in the first place.

Sadly I handed Darwin over and received American faces in turn.  Such is natural selection.  Ironically, just a few days ago I was at a farmer’s market (in the United States).  The man next to me received a silver note in change—he commented that these bills are somewhat more valuable than a standard Washington.  They are still accepted however, as legal tender.  In fact the last time I went to a US bank to turn in change, the bank officer looked at some very eroded coins and said, “As long as I can verify it’s US currency I can accept it.”  I still find occasional old coins in circulation.  Updating currency and then charging for having old money seems like it ought to count as usury.  But then, perhaps my ethics are simply outdated. 

On a Jet Plane

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So I’m heading to England.  Not for pleasure—this is a business trip.  Long ago, back when I worked for Routledge, I discovered that I dislike business travel.  Unlike vacation planning where the possibilities spread out beautifully before you—for this is free time and you decide—business travel is, like Peter was told, “thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not.”  Indeed.  Business travel is at the whim of the man, and you can’t really look forward to the sights, the relaxation, or even being given the choice of where to go.  You’re on assignment.  Or consignment, I can’t recall which.  The carefully honed routine with which you hold back the chaos of the world is blown apart.  It begins with the red eye.

You see, companies don’t like you to make your own travel plans.  You might chose a flight that’s pennies more expensive than some itinerary that routes you through Albuquerque at four a.m.  It’s not like you’ve got anything better to do, right?  And since you’re exempt, we’ll take your Sunday, gratis.  Where’s your team spirit?  As I’ve grown older, I’ve become a creature of habit.  The hour of the typical red eye is when I get up to write.  That can’t be done in an airport, or on a plane, where everyone can see you.  No, this is a private thing.  Everyone else must be asleep.  Most of them, preferably, in another house.  So I’m flying to London and catch a late-night bus to Oxford.

Part of my worry, dear readers, is you.  As this blog approaches its tenth birthday, I’ve been in the habit of posting daily for many years.  Mostly at the same time—weekends and commuting days are exceptions, of course—and when you’re changing time zones you might do well to have Rod Serling with you.  I can’t figure them out.  British hotels, also, do not offer wifi in their rooms unless the boss wants you to pay extra for it.  And considering the mandated flight behavior, that’s best just taken off the table.  So, as I prepare to leave before sunrise on one of the longest days of the year, I don’t know if or when I’ll get to post over the next few days.  I won’t even know what time it is.  Like pay toilets, charging for internet access ought to be criminal these days.  But opportunities to take money are everywhere.  And those of us who travel for business always rely on the kindness of capitalists.

On Target

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Time, especially weekend time, is a non-renewable resource.  Since I barely have enough time as it is, I do my best not to squander it.  Yesterday we had to visit our local Target—we don’t buy at WalMart because there’s an ethics even to shopping these days.  When we got inside it was obvious that a lot of people had the same idea.  I’d never seen Target so crowded, and I’ve been in one on a Christmas Eve.  We had only a small basket of purchases, so before long we headed for the checkout and saw an enormous line.  Not being afraid of tech, we went toward the self-checkout and found that line long as well.  Long and not moving.

Soon it became clear that all the registers were down.  Store employees were handing out free bottled water and snacks, like airports used to do with cancelled flights.  We were in for a good long wait.  When we finally reached the register, which had started to come back online, the manager was helping those trying self-checkout.  Since the system was still not really functioning, you could check out one item at a time—after several tries, each time requiring the manager to enter his pass-code—and pay for it and restart the process for the next item.  We asked about the outage.  He said it was global, all Target stores were down.  “You’ll have a story to tell,” he said.  My mind was actually going toward technology and its limitations.  How much we rely on it.  Without tech this blog would not be.  A lot of famous people would be unknown.  How would we find our way from point A to point B?  Or look up a phone number?

The internet is beguiling in its ubiquity.  We use it almost constantly and it’s always there for us.  So we’ve come to believe.  In addition to spreading the tissue of lies that is the Trump administration’s agenda of using post-truth as a means of power, it must be supported by a whole host of experts—those 45 routinely dismisses as irrelevant.  Clouds were gathering outside, and I had a lawn yet to mow before the day was out.  Indeed, my wife and I had intended this to be a quick trip because weekends and sunshine are a rare mix.  As we bagged our six items and thanked the manager, we could see the line still snaking the length of the store.  Had we more time we might’ve come back another day.  Instead, we had briefly fallen victim to something that an old-time punch register might’ve solved.  And a time when the pace of life itself was just a bit slower.

The Lagoon

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My current book project has me watching The Creature of the Black Lagoon again.  One of the Universal monsters—indeed, arguably the last of them—the Gill-man fascinated me as a child.  There was a strange contradiction here.  The creature had evolved in the Devonian Era and remained unchanged into the 1950s.  But the movie opens with a voiceover of Genesis 1.1.  There’s a mixed message here, appropriate for scriptural monsters.  Watching the film again brought back many of the innocent perceptions of youth, as well as the trajectory of my own life.  I don’t often get to the theater to see horror movies anymore, but at the same time the Universal monsters aren’t quite the same thing as modern horror.  As a genre it had to evolve.

Strangely, as a fundamentalist child, the evolution aspect didn’t bother me.  I was after the monster, you see.  The backstory was less important.  Growing up, at least in my experience, means that the backstory becomes more essential.  It has to hold together.  There are, of course, inaccuracies in the story—many of them, in fact.  Still, within the first three minutes Genesis and evolution are thrown together in a happy harmony that belied what I was being taught at church.  The Gill-man is a monster mainly for being a creature out of time.  When modern humans invade his lair, he defends his territory.  The story might’ve ended there, had he not spied Kay.  He doesn’t so much want to kill her as get to know her better.  For a movie posthumously rated G, it has a body count.  Five men die but the Gill-man apparently just wants to evolve.

There’s been a recent resurgence of interest in Creature from the Black Lagoon with both the publication of The Lady from the Black Lagoon and the death of Julie Adams this year.  The Gill-man seldom shows up in the same billing with Dracula or Frankenstein’s monster, or the Wolf-man.  He’s a bit more inaccessible in his watery abode.  Both cold and hot-blooded, he represents how science and Scripture might get along, at least on the silver screen.  The film holds up remarkably well, if a modern viewer can handle the pacing.  Underwater filming was pretty new back in the day, and watching humans swim in many ways suggests the truth of evolution in its own right.  These aren’t the childhood observations of the movie, but rather the reflections of a guy wondering if there might not be some hidden wisdom in the monsters of yesteryear.

Identified or Not

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Okay, so this will require some explanation.  It came about like this: I was in a used bookstore.  (This in itself requires no explanation, of course.)  I noticed a slim book, cover out, called A Pocket Guide to UFO’s and ETs: A biblical and cultural exploration of aliens.  Biblical?  I picked it up only to discover it was from Answers in Genesis.  Please note: I do not buy books or paraphernalia of Fundamentalist groups unless I can get it used.  I don’t want to support this particular weirdness in any way.  Well, the money for this used book was going to support a used bookstore and not a religious aberration, so I figured it would be good to see what the Fundies have to say about a topic that seems to have started to engage public interest again.

The book begins by helpfully pointing out that if there’s life on other planets the Bible doesn’t mention it.  And since the only way it could’ve got there is by evolution—for surely the Almighty would’ve said something about it in his book, if he’d invented it—the whole idea is a non-starter.  Evolution, as everyone knows, is a satanic idea meant primarily to challenge the Bible and secondarily explain the diversity of life forms on earth.  And since earth is the only planet the Bible recognizes, it is the only one with life.  So, UFOs, it stands to reason don’t exist.  Well, that’s not quite fair.  They do exist but most can be explained away and those that can’t may well be demonic.  Since there can be no aliens, and since some sightings can’t be otherwise explained, then demons—which the Bible does mention—must be responsible.  They (demons) can also explain why other world religions exist.

There’s plenty in here to offend just about everyone apart from the Answers in Genesis crowd.  The screed spends quite a bit of time knocking down ancient astronaut ideas, and taking Erich von Däniken to task.  Science is useful in explaining how pyramids were built, but not in how the rock used to build them was formed (it takes far too long to make limestone the old fashioned way; God simply used a variety of different rock types to make the one inhabited planet more interesting geologically).  And those UFO religions?  Inspired by demons, no doubt.  In fact, even reading a little book like this could lead you to become interested in the subject, so be careful!  In fact, the safest thing of all (and I’ve only got your well-being in mind) is to leave it on the shelf.

Time Off

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Perhaps you’ve noticed it too.  Time away from work has an utterly different feel from time on the job.  Those rare individuals who really love their professions probably feel differently about it, but a timid free spirit since childhood, I’ve always noticed a difference.  And it has become more pronounced as time’s gone on.  Recently I cashed in a vacation day near a national holiday (Memorial Day) so that I could drive across the state to see my mother without feeling utterly wiped out from a twelve-hour drive on a regular weekend.  As I slipped back into work mode on Tuesday the change was palpable.  Time was no longer my own.  I tend to work well over eight hours daily—the telecommuter must prove his/her worth—and something about the quality of the time itself was decidedly unlike that of the previous four days (two of which had been spent driving).

That quality, of which we’re not encouraged to speak, is the feeling of freedom.  More precisely, auto-determination.  Okay, I’ve read enough philosophy to know this is just an illusion, but work with me here.  Few and exceptionally fortunate are those who find careers they love.  What the rest of us love is time off work.  Time when we can decide what to do.  How long to sleep.  When to cut the grass rather than waiting until the bell rings at 5 p.m. and the inevitable afternoon rain begins.  Perhaps best of all is going to bed knowing that the next day you don’t have to get up and report for duty.  I’m not dissing employment here, I’m just noticing something.  What I’m reaching toward is a concept of sacred time.  Unstructured time in which creative types thrive.

Early in life the concept of summer was instilled in my soft and malleable psyche.  It said once May was over you have three months to do whatever before facing regimentation again.  I grew to appreciate this schedule.  To love it, in fact.  It was part of why I decided higher education was the best vocational fit for someone of my particular disposition.  Every year when June rolls around I still feel it, like a migratory bird.  The reality, however, is the quality of time changes on Monday morning.  It slows down and feels more like sandpaper than silk.  I can see there’s a holiday just a month away, if I can only reach it.  And it is, perhaps with a dose of unintentional irony, call Independence Day.

Tyranny of Plants

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Notwithstanding what I wrote yesterday, there is a tyranny of plants.  Specifically those which make up lawns—in my case, mostly weeds.  A friend recently reminded me that weed is just a name for a misplaced plant, and I confess that I’m fine with weeds but neighbors may not be so open-minded.  Non-conformity is still a virulent stigma.  If an observer from outer space were to observe us during the spring and summer, they might well conclude that we were in the service of our yards.  The irony here is that yard care is perhaps the ultimate sign of success.  You have really made it if you can keep it neat and trim.  And you’ve excelled beyond that if you can pay someone else to do it for you with their tractor full of buzzing implements.

Because I’m concerned about fuel consumption, we purchased a reel mower when we bought our house.  I never mowed the lawn as a child.  First we rented, and when a stepfather came into the picture he didn’t let the kids mow.  (It wasn’t to be kind—it was a control thing.  If he saw a snake he’d race across the yard to dismember it.  More than once I’d be out playing only to find snake suey, with flies.)  College at Grove City involved carefully manicured lawns done by others, and after grad school we lived on campus at Nashotah House where the students cut the grass.  From there it was back to renting.  In other words, I never had the opportunity to learn how to mow lawns.  My lines aren’t straight, and I’m tempted to sneak out at night, when the grass is high, and leave crop circles at which the neighbors might wonder.  I don’t like being a slave to plants.

The reel mower is like pushing the grim reaper in a baby carriage.  Or at least it must seem so from the perspective of the grass and weeds I call my lawn.  The suddenness with which constant lawn care becomes a major concern has tightened my focus on the fealty we owe to ground cover.  We’ve had a break from the rain for a couple days and after work I find myself pushing that mower like a deadly thurible, releasing the scent of newly shorn grass.  Our particular town retains the right to fine those who let the grass get too long.  As I go along cutting back both grass and weeds indiscriminately, I wonder at the biblical nature of even this.

Leggo My Lego

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Given my proclivity to seek the profound in what is often considered the banal, I have been mulling over The Lego Movie.  Before you cast the first brick, yes, I know this movie is five years old and I know that it has sophisticated intertextuality with other movies and sly humor.  I use banal in the sense that Legos are, quite literally, plastic and they don’t work well in conveying the human form.  Our overactive psyches help here, and we give the characters their necessary humanity, but this is a movie for kids, even with its Trump-like President Business forecast some two years before the last election.  With all of that being said, and the word “forecast” already being used, my “Bible radar” zeroed in on the prophet in the movie, Vitruvius.

Vitruvius is based on a combination of Tiresias, the blind prophet, and any number of biblical characters who forecast the future.  Dressed like Moses, but named after a Roman author and architect, Vitruvius utters the prophecy at the beginning of the film and returns as a character that combines Obi-Wan Kenobi and the prophet Samuel.  (I said there was sophisticated intertextuality.)  Whether any of this is intentional is difficult to say—well the Obi-Wan part is pretty obvious—but it plays into the common view of prophets.  One of the points I make in Holy Horror (which deals with a different genre of movie) is that people understand biblical ideas through the lens of pop culture.  Prophets, through that lens, tell the future.  In the Bible itself they don’t do that very much, but since the New Testament reads itself into the Hebrew Bible (more intertextuality) the idea became pretty fixed that prophets told the future all day long.

Ironically, Vitruvius—a name that sounds like “virtue”—was famous for describing perfect proportions.  Indeed, Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” sketch is based on this idea.  As ideas go, this is a false one against which many of us struggle our entire lives.  There is no perfect, Platonic human body.  Yes, certain people are attractive, but genetics and circumstances make us who we are.  And some of us grew up without Legos, but despite that deficiency we came to know the product.  The Lego characters aren’t in any sense of Vitruvian proportions.  Witty and intertextual, they’re made of plastic and they encourage us to buy for our children.  And one wonders whether Vitruvius is a prophet or a hidden symbol of that word’s homonym.  Let the building begin.

Q

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If you haven’t spent much of your precious time attending to theories of how the gospels were written, you might not be familiar with the dilemma I’m about to describe.  A brief primer: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were not eyewitnesses of the events described in their gospels.  In fact, each of these books is anonymous—the titles were only added on later.  Despite their New Testament order, Mark was written first and Matthew and Luke borrowed from it rather extensively.  Mark is the shortest gospel and Matthew and Luke also share material that’s not in Mark.  Since John was written much later (and doesn’t have these common stories), scholars proposed many years ago that Matthew and Luke used a source—in German Quelle—that no longer exists.  This is called “the two-source hypothesis.”  As scholars are inordinately fond of abbreviations, Quelle is known as simply Q.  Other than in explanations like this you’ll never see it referred to by its full name.

So here’s the dilemma: many websites don’t allow for a single-letter search.  If you’re wanting to learn about Q, and you know no scholar worth their s (by which I mean salt, of course) who will spell it out, how do you search for it?  The same might be said for J, E, D, and P, who, along with R, put together the Pentateuch, but at least there you can search for phrases involving more than one letter.  You see, scholars existed before the internet and its search parameters.  Books and articles used to be written on paper, and the former had indexes, so looking up your sources—single letter or not—was fairly easily.  With electronic searching, it has become more difficult.  That’s not to say that single-letter searches can’t be coded—they can—but apart from biblical scholars and their alphabet soup of sources, apparently most people don’t want single-letter options.

This is the trouble with specializing in ancient things.  The internet was originally designed for academic and military purposes—serious stuff.  But then, like everything else in the world it became commodified.  Like a once pristine countryside it has billboards plastered everywhere after one’s Gelt.  (Scholars also like to throw in random foreign words to show how smart they are.)  And when it comes to searches, why enable atomistic, single-letter searching when it won’t end up in the sale of something?  In any case, my search did not end successfully.  I eventually gave up.  And in the light of the ever-shining internet, I’ve opted for the one-source hypothesis.

It must be in here somewhere…