(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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>
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--
Daniel Otto Jack Petersen
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