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

Wed Nov 28 05:24:29 PST 2012

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>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**>> 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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