(urth) Claw = Fang? off-topic-ish
Marc Aramini
marcaramini at yahoo.com
Wed Nov 28 09:23:06 PST 2012
Interestingly enough, Hour of Trust is where my short story survey has stalled for a few months, but it will be back on track soon. I have some problems with that one and I have put off writing about it for a very long time.
Marc
--- On Wed, 11/28/12, Daniel Petersen <danielottojackpetersen at gmail.com> wrote:
From: Daniel Petersen <danielottojackpetersen at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) Claw = Fang? off-topic-ish
To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
Date: Wednesday, November 28, 2012, 8:01 AM
Lafferty felt himself just slightly distinct from mere 'white': he said in an interview that he avoided being a WASP by the narrow margin of being instead a 'ruddy Irish Catholic' or something like that. I think he identified slightly more with the nation's 'minorities'. For what it's worth.
I find Wolfe's novella 'Hour of Trust' a fascinating self-conscious take on 60s/70s counterculture. The rest of that decade (70s) Wolfe was practically participating in and helping create aspects of said counterculture - but somewhere within it he seems to have went 'wait, what's this? interesting, let me document that and critique it somewhat'.
-DOJP
On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 1:43 PM, David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net> wrote:
Yes, it is amazing. McKenna may have read Wolfe, but I have zero doubt that Wolfe never heard of McKenna.
I know little about Lafferty himself, but I agree---it would be easy to lump him with Beefheart, assuming perhaps that they were both products of the '60s and the beat poets. Or drugs. There is indeed something about those white Catholic male authors.
On 11/28/2012 8:24 AM, Daniel Petersen wrote:
It's the same phenomenon with Wolfe as with Lafferty - these conservative Catholic blokes happen to have such boundless imaginations (with philosophical/theological gridwork to hold their wild speculations firmly in place) that they (mostly) unintentionally have lots of overlap with hippy, trippy, psychedelic, counterculture themes and ethoi (plural of ethos?). It's fascinating. E.g. I often call Lafferty the Captain Beefheart of s.f. (spec fic), but he would have HATED Beefheart's music and approach, ha!
-DOJP
On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 12:44 PM, David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net <mailto:dstockhoff at verizon.net>> wrote:
Those are cool too. But it WOULD make a great band name.
The way McKenna wonders whether the hyperspace elves are also the
elves of the "magic light of childhood" also reminds me of the
Wolfean transformations of the Fay and the classical gods into
whatever he needs---Faerie into Olympus into Yesod---even when
writing space opera.
On 11/28/2012 7:13 AM, Daniel Petersen wrote:
ha ha! I thought maybe it was 'nuncio' and 'Aeon' and such.
Someone should start a band called that (S-T.M.E.o.H - er, St.
Meh?).
-DOJP
On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 1:05 AM, David Stockhoff
<dstockhoff at verizon.net <mailto:dstockhoff at verizon.net>
<mailto:dstockhoff at verizon.net
<mailto:dstockhoff at verizon.net>>> wrote:
What? no takers? I thought it was an easy question.
The phrase that caught my eye was this:
SELF-TRANSFORMING MACHINE ELVES OF HYPERSPACE
!!!!
On 11/27/2012 9:21 AM, David Stockhoff wrote:
On 11/26/2012 11:45 PM, Jeff Wilson wrote:
On 11/26/2012 3:40 PM, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:
I've never heard of this test -- one prophet was asked
to put a hot coal
into his mouth which then became The Word Of The Lord
for him to speak.
That's about it.
Isaiah 6: "6 Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a
live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from
the altar. 7 With it he touched my mouth and said, 'See,
this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and
your sin atoned for.' "
Speaking of visions (sort of), I encountered the following
description of a "prototypical" hallucinatory (DMT) experience
in Sam Harris' response to the new book "Proof of Heaven" and
found some parts to be quite familiar (note the date):
Under the influence of DMT, the world becomes an Arabian
labyrinth,
a palace, a more than possible Martian jewel, vast with motifs
that
flood the gaping mind with complex and wordless awe. Color and the
sense of a reality-unlocking secret nearby pervade the experience.
There is a sense of other times, and of one’s own infancy, and of
wonder, wonder and more wonder. It is an audience with the alien
nuncio. In the midst of this experience, apparently at the end of
human history, guarding gates that seem surely to open on the
howling maelstrom of the unspeakable emptiness between the
stars, is
the Aeon.
The Aeon, as Heraclitus presciently observed, is a child at play
with colored balls. Many diminutive beings are present there—the
tykes, the self-transforming machine elves of hyperspace. Are they
the children destined to be father to the man? One has the
impression of entering into an ecology of souls that lies
beyond the
portals of what we naively call death. I do not know. Are they the
synesthetic embodiment of ourselves as the Other, or of the
Other as
ourselves? Are they the elves lost to us since the fading of the
magic light of childhood? Here is a tremendum barely to be
told, an
epiphany beyond our wildest dreams. Here is the realm of that
which
is stranger than we /can/ suppose. Here is the mystery, alive,
unscathed, still as new for us as when our ancestors lived it
fifteen thousand summers ago. The tryptamine entities offer
the gift
of new language, they sing in pearly voices that rain down as
colored petals and flow through the air like hot metal to become
toys and such gifts as gods would give their children. The
sense of
emotional connection is terrifying and intense. The Mysteries
revealed are real and if ever fully told will leave no stone upon
another in the small world we have gone so ill in.
This is not the mercurial world of the UFO, to be invoked from
lonely hilltops; this is not the siren song of lost Atlantis
wailing
through the trailer courts of crack-crazed America. DMT is not one
of our irrational illusions. I believe that what we experience in
the presence of DMT is real news. It is a nearby
dimension—frightening, transformative, and beyond our powers to
imagine, and yet to be explored in the usual way. We must send
fearless experts, whatever that may come to mean, to explore
and to
report on what they find. (Terence McKenna, /Food of the Gods/,
1992, pp. 258-259.)
Can anyone guess which four or five words in particular caused
me to post this?
If nothing else, this description suggests that mystical
visions experienced by different people are more the same than
they are different. This commonality might even explain much
of the deep attraction some readers feel to the Solar cycle
and Severian's account in particular.
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-- Daniel Otto Jack Petersen
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