(urth) Claw = Fang? off-topic-ish

Daniel Petersen danielottojackpetersen at gmail.com
Wed Nov 28 08:01:19 PST 2012


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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>>
>>
>> --
>> Daniel Otto Jack Petersen
>>
>>
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-- 
Daniel Otto Jack Petersen
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