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

Daniel Petersen danielottojackpetersen at gmail.com
Wed Nov 28 14:39:50 PST 2012


I look forward to your analysis.  (Again, I note that Lafferty had similar
slightly bemused and sceptical reactions to not only the hippie/post-hippie
movement in general but the 'Jesus Movement' within that.)

-DOJP

On Wed, Nov 28, 2012 at 5:23 PM, Marc Aramini <marcaramini at yahoo.com> wrote:

> 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<http://us.mc1607.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=dstockhoff@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<http://us.mc1607.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=dstockhoff@verizon.net><mailto:
> dstockhoff at verizon.net<http://us.mc1607.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=dstockhoff@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<http://us.mc1607.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=dstockhoff@verizon.net><mailto:
> dstockhoff at verizon.net<http://us.mc1607.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=dstockhoff@verizon.net>
> **>
>         <mailto:dstockhoff at verizon.net<http://us.mc1607.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=dstockhoff@verizon.net>
>         <mailto:dstockhoff at verizon.net<http://us.mc1607.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=dstockhoff@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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-- 
Daniel Otto Jack Petersen
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