SubscribeOctober 10th, 2011
rewriting/rethinking divisive history
I follow Ta-Nehisi Coates on twitter and today he posted a link to the video below. In his tweet he asks, “Why do so few black study the Civil War? FF to 36:30 for McPherson’s answer. But the whole thing is great…”
Me, I loved the section between 5:24 and 14:20 discussing why slavery was the reason behind the Civil War and what the consequences of that were when the Republican party (the northern party of the time) came to control the national government.
During this, starting at 7:53 going at least until 1215:, they discuss the reasons that the South, followed by the North, re-wrote history to make the Civil War about something other than slavery – something like state rights versus federal rights. Essentially it comes down to the South finding out that slavery wasn’t well viewed in the world and that countries like Britain were hesitant to recognize it (once it seceded from the Union) because of that history, economic policy and way of life.
Then of course there’s a point at which this agreement to pretend slavery wasn’t the cause of the Civil War was dropped. When asked why, the speaker gives the Civil Rights Movement as the cause.
I have to say though that McPherson’s response to the question about why there wasn’t more Black interest in the Civil War (starting at 36:30) was really good. It had everything to do with the image we have carried of the Civil War as “associated with a neo-Confederate glorification of the Confederacy and they don’t want any part of that.” Uh huh.
It took 100 years to get from the Civil War to civil rights, largely because we agreed to pretend. And even 50 years after we achieved the beginning of civil rights, that pretense still effects our ability to tolerate, understand and accept our past. It’s something to keep in mind once this current political farce and civil war is over with and we begin to analyze what happened.
October 9th, 2011
Timothy Morton/The Ecological Thought, part 2
Having read the first of three substantive sections in The Ecological Thought I have to say that Morton reminds me rather forcibly of a man who upon entering into the process we think of as enlightenment has reached the understanding that a mountain is no longer a mountain but has yet to reach the place where he sees once again that a mountain is a mountain.
Much of the first section (Thinking Big) is written to give you the experience/ knowledge that the universe is not what you think it—to move you, as it were, to the experience of no-mountain.
If you followed that link Cathy included in her comment, there is a moment in Bessler’s video (I downloaded the 3gp file) where she says that bacteria talk to each other, in groups (3:40) and that you, as a human being are only 10% human and 90% bacteria (4:00-4:30); without the ability of bacteria to communicate and act in groups we would not exist and in fact bacteria form 50% of the total biomass on earth. We are not what we think we are.
Morton’s point seems to be that we have to learn to think of the world in these terms and not in the illusory terms of human identity. Yes, but really, a mountain is a mountain and our identity is as present in the world as is bacterial communication. Both are the result of the the physics and chemistry of this spot in the universe we think of as home. Having said that, if his point is to say that both points of view (the immense and the local) are true then I am with Morton. The chapter doesn’t feel that way, but I do have the last two sections to go.
One of the things Morton does in this section is introduce terminology. He uses “mesh” and “strange stranger”. He is trying to give us terms that allow us to break free from the hold our being-centered framework has on us. That is, he wants to help us realize that a mountain is not a mountain.
Mesh is interconnectedness.
Who or what is interconnected with what or with whom? The mesh of interconnected things is vast, perhaps immeasurably so. Each entity in the mesh looks strange. Nothing exists all by itself, and so nothing is fully “itself.” (p15)
In the first chapter he opens the section on mesh by giving a long list of the ways in which things are not what they seem. “A tree includes fungi and lichen. Lichen is two life forms interacting—a fungus and a bacterium or a fungus and an alga. Seeds and pollen have birds and bees to circulate them. Animal and fungal cells include mitochondria…” (p33-34). It goes on, but the gist is that as a human you are actually 90% bacteria.
Strange stranger is Morton’s way of trying to provide us a vehicle to carry the feeling that surfaces when you realize that a mountain is not a mountain. His major idea (and title of the book) the ecological thought “imagines a multitude of entangled strange strangers” (p15). (I do wonder if he read A Stranger in a Strange Land.) In a sense, since the mesh has no center, and what we know of as a “ being” is a piece of the mesh, then a “being” also has no real center but is rather an “intersection in the unimaginably gigantic mesh.” Try to think of yourself that way, not as a being with an inside and outside but as a tangled mesh of chemical structures, themselves tangled structures of particles, and all these tangles stretched far beyond the surface of your skin. You don’t really have an edge. Does weird ass shit to your head doesn’t it? That’s what strange stranger is for.
We should instead explore the paradoxes and fissures of identity within “human” and “animal.” Instead of “animal,” I use strange stranger. This stranger isn’t just strange. She, or he, or it—can we tell? how?—is strangely strange. Their strangeness itself is strange. We can never absolutely figure then out. If we could, then all we would have is a ready-made box to put them in, and we would just be looking at the box, not at the strange strangers. They are intrinsically strange. Do we know for sure whether they are sentient or not? Do we know whether they are alive or not? Their strangeness is part of who they are. After all, they might be us. And what could be stranger than what is familiar?
But a mountain is a mountain, and beings are beings. While it is true that we are a tangled mesh of chemicals, part of the tangle’s product is the belief in beingness (one of the boxes from the quote above), in an inside and an outside, in me versus you. So while I take Morton’s point that in the mesh no “being” is more equal than another, by the same reasoning no product of the mesh in action is more equal than another—my sense of myself as a being is equal to my sense of myself as a part of the mesh.
But what does that say really? It only takes into account a single operational level—if I act in the world as if the beingness of broccoli is is equal to my own, eating is going to become problematic. I am a bag of chemicals equal to the bag that is called broccoli, but I am also an animal that requires the death of other life forms to maintain cellular integrity—as is the broccoli (just because it isn’t omnivorous doesn’t mean humus isn’t made via death). The mesh that constitutes bio-chemical reality is not a plane, not even a simple volume but more like a four-dimensional rubik’s cube that plays itself. As a being in that 4-d cube we are the relatively long-lasting alignment of that green-blue-red set of squares. That (verb-like) alignment is what we translate into the (noun-like) notion of our identity.
But we do translate. That’s what that particular alignment does, how it expresses itself.
Agreed that evolution (at the level of the mesh) has no telos in the way we normally think of telos, but for sure beings do. Telos is an expression of a particular set of mesh alignments. Of course I don’t mean an “assigned” telos. There is no designer, no Nature, nor God, nor any other divine intelligence except in as much as the combined interactions of the bio-chemical and physical world manifest local moments of “intent” (bacteria acting as a group – as a multi-cellular being, for example).
One of the things that makes a being a being (regardless of whether it is “alive” or not) is that its structure has mechanisms to maintain the mesh alignment for longer than it would without that mechanism in place. In other words, I may be a bag of chemicals but I am a bag of chemicals that has tools to keep on being this particular bag for as long as possible. That is what I mean by “intent”. (What we normally mean by “intent”—that feeling of purpose and choice—is almost certainly related to the chemical intent but it is not the same thing despite the fact that we use the same word to describe both—just as 435 nm ≠ indigo, but they are related.)
Telos = chemical intent. And yes, Na and Cl don’t join “in order to” achieve salt. It just happens that this is so, and that that happenstance can be later part of another happenstance that is a cow and a farmer, a field and a salt lick. But do remember that the capacity to think “in order to” is an expression of the mesh meshing. It is not correct, but it is also not incorrect. It depends upon the operational level being explained.
I don’t want to give you the impression that I don’t think the book worthwhile. There are some stellar bits, some wonderful insights, phrases, ideas. And I have yet to work my way through the last two sections so it may be that my reservations will be addressed. The concept of junk space (p 51), the relationship between repetition, the foregrounding of environment and sense of the uncanny (p 50-59) is pretty interesting stuff, but it all feeds into the idea that a mountain is not a mountain.
So on to “Dark Thoughts” (the middle of three sections). I have to say I feel echoes of Dark Green Religion here. Wonder if I’m right?
October 8th, 2011
Timothy Morton/The Ecological Thought, part 1
I found these two books through Cathy (Thanks!). I’ve got both The Ecological Thought and Without Nature (they arrived yesterday afternoon) and although he wrote Without Nature first, I am reading his “prequel” The Ecological Thought first. Timothy Morton, English prof at UC Davis is the author. His CV shows that his interest has long been in the intersection of narrative and the material. His doctoral thesis was called “Re-Imagining the Body: Shelley and the Languages of Diet”. Poetry and the body: cool.
So I am predisposed to like him. Of course the idea that we need to dump the Romantic notion of Nature is a plus that only enhances my anticipation. I’ve mentioned this recently, but I’ve been trying to find a way to re-think the magical aspects of our human narratives to re-site them in the body, to find ways to think about our narratives in ways that allow for their efficacy but do not need to do so by projecting the characters onto the world where they do not belong. It does us great damage to continue doing this.
His main philosophical starting point seems to be OOO (object oriented ontology – catchy huh). WTF you say?
Ontology is the philosophical study of existence. Object-oriented ontology (“OOO” for short) puts things at the center of this study. Its proponents contend that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally—plumbers, cotton, bonobos, DVD players, and sandstone, for example. In contemporary thought, things are usually taken either as the aggregation of ever smaller bits (scientific naturalism) or as constructions of human behavior and society (social relativism). OOO steers a path between the two, drawing attention to things at all scales (from atoms to alpacas, bits to blinis), and pondering their nature and relations with one another as much with ourselves.
The Ecological Thought appears to be the theoretical foundation for the practical application in Without Nature. This is why I am starting with The Ecological Thought. And about the premise of OOO—OK, but human narratives, which are built into the way we perceive, act, reason, are not going to let go of the idea of special status. All life forms (and almost certainly non-life forms as well) have an existence imperative – some mechanism or other that fights basic entropy to stay intact and operational (what we living call “alive”). That imperative is the belief** that not all things are equal. How the frack can OOO make a practical difference if the essential quality of object forms is non-equality? (An aside, but I would love an answer.)
As predisposed to support the author’s apparent intent as I am, I nevertheless go in with feelers warily blinking and waving around in an agitated manner. My experience of people seeking to shatter our Romantic narratives in favour of the truth is that usually they end up reifying some other concept they like better. His idea of interconnectedness (I think he calls it “mesh”) seems to me to be the next likely candidate, but as I said, I reserve the right to read the two books before I get too worried. Still, after reading the introduction, he writes in what I call prophet-speak and I do not like that at all. So I have to say, going into the body of the work, my “like” has turned from thumbs-up to a horizontal wariness.
I’ll keep you posted.
** On belief—I see feeling and belief as the perceptual aspect of a bio/mytho catalyst (some material bit) at work. So, just as an electromagnetic wavelength of 445 nm is perceived by human beings (through the agency of material bits called eyes and visual processing centers) as indigo, and thirst is the perceptual form of dehydration, so the “bits” in action are the belief. This does not mean the “bit” must be alive, nor does it imply that the perception is any less “real” than the wave.
October 7th, 2011
more on Hecate, part 4 / “narrative gradients”
To summarize:
Hecate has been big in my life, and currently is bounding through dreams. She is a goddess of transitions, of ghosts and magic. She is both dangerous and beneficial. She is especially important in the lives of girls and women in role transition. She acts as a social catalyst in her role in the Persephone myth, creating a new possibility, that which was previously only transitional could become the life a woman lived. She paves the way to have both the power of girlhood and the power that comes with an adult life and adult mind.
Early on in this thinking about Hecate it became clear that I was seeing Hecate’s activity in the individual woman as a kind of mental/material catalyst and I explained that this had come to me based on the metaphor of Na+/K+-ATPase, the sodium/potassium pump and its actions as a biocatalyst. The regulatory work done by this enzyme in the bodily context seems to me to reflect the work Hecate does in the social. It cannot be a perfect metaphor of course, but I suspect it might help the process of thinking of a psychopomp as something other than ” creatures, spirits, angels, or deities” and that is a very big part of why understanding this matters to me.
I’ve been on a kind of quest to find ways to think about inner narratives that seem to be humanly universal, and if not that, at least socially ubiquitous. The supernatural explanations do us more harm than good, and it does no good at all to deny the veracity of the narratives as they effect human thinking. What we seem to need is a way to understand narrative truthfulness that also does not need to project onto our inner characters a humanity that is not theirs. It’s, in a sense, the worst kind of anthropomorphism.
If the basic tenets of embodied philosophy turn out to hold theoretical water, then our thinking processes are based on metaphor, and the capacity to translate one form of embodied logic into the “language” of another is foundational to our logic, whether rational or social. So the physical logic of grasping things, is applied to the “grasping” done by our reason. We all know that ideas are not the same as physical objects and yet the metaphorical translation works. We only get into trouble when we go past the limits of the metaphor and reason that since an apple and an idea can both be grasped, ideas should therefore be physical in the same way that an apple is physical.
Having made a note of the limits of metaphor, lets keep that in mind with respect to Hecate as a narrative catalyst. Na+/K+-ATPase works by moving Na and K across a membrane against the current, so to speak. Where left alone things tend to even out, cells stockpile things that help it work and maintain its separation from the larger environment. It takes energy to make that happen. So if the metaphor holds at all Hecate must do the same thing within the social environment, working to keep the organism (in this case what we think of as the mind) in balance mentally and emotionally.
Where the Na+/K+-ATPase traffics in sodium and potassium, Hecate appears to traffic in identity markers. Negotiating the human social environment requires a sense of where one fits, who one is, what is possible. By necessity these status markers are limiting. One cannot be everything; one must be something. To fall in between is to die socially. It is to become a ghost in the world. In the cell, without the isotopes is to equal death.
The balance of sodium and potassium is critical to health. So is the balance of identity. One must not only have a place, but must have a place where human needs will be met. To eat and to be honoured are both needs. For women in Classical Greece this meant becoming a mother in a familially sanctioned marriage. Anything else was considered “incomplete”, not in balance.
What Hecate did is create the psychological dynamic that kept Greek girls moving toward cultural balance. The inner prompts, the terror and desire, battled the social limitations placed on them. Some got hustled into the psyche, some were hustled out, primarily, I suppose by feeling and ritual.
Today Hecate serves a similar purpose but since the outer environment differs (we have broader choices, less social limitation), the inner prompts also differ. The idea is to keep the inner and outer in balance, not to maintain a specific state.
I suppose Hecate’s goal must be something akin to maximizing mental productivity, what we think of as freedom to be our selves. What interests me is the kind of biological mechanism that must be in place to enable such a balance. Like water moving across a plain, all the attributes, abilities and perceptual systems that constitute our various selves, always move toward the lowest ground (in social terms this would be the social place that gives the individual the most satisfaction for the least amount of energy expenditure) and do so without us being required to think about it, or even be aware of its occurrence. If you live with the necessity of social invisibility you build a way of expressing self in something safe – the embroidery on your under skirts, the quality of your infant’s clothing. Something. You find something. If you have more choices you might become a blogger. Or a chemist. Or a philosopher.
I haven’t finished thinking about this, and I expect more over time, but a good place to start I think.
What material mechanisms might be in place to enable such selving in the world? I think it might be found in the same area where cognitive researchers look for the mechanisms that enable human mental mobility with respect to memory and identity. For example, a person converts to a new faith. That person, despite huge protestations of solid faith in the past, will now claim to have never really believed. There is a mechanism there, protecting the image of self, but there is also a mechanism working, pushing the person out of the old beliefs and into the unknown looking for a new mental home.
Since the body is only really good at knowing what isn’t working, it would have known the old belief wasn’t meeting the mental need, but would have no way of knowing if the new belief would function. Hence the terror of the liminal and the need for Hecate to keep functioning. If the new belief doesn’t work, or works for a while and then stops (i.e. the environment changes and requires a new explanatory narrative), then Hecate feeds the mental system with new terrors, new impulses to shift, to change. She drives Persephone over the field and into change and, of course, against the natural gradient – the desire to stay safe, and the same, to stay at home, not grow, not give up one’s protected status for that which could prove deadly.
In the case of Na+/K+-ATPase, energy is required to push sodium and potassium against the density gradient. Just so for human change. But where as in a cell energy is found in the form of phosphate bonds, in Hecate’s realm that energy is found in feeling. Terror propels, so does desire. Emotions are the ATP of the social level.
October 1st, 2011
more on Hecate, part 1
In this post I mentioned that Hecate has been a mythological mainstay in my life, and that partly because of a poetry reading I attended on the subject of Demeter and Persephone Hecate has become active in my subconscious again. Since then, I’ve been actively listening for Hecate, for that part of myself, that constellation of attitudes, behaviours, and perceptions which I give that chthonic archetype’s name.
I have learnt that one cannot rush listening and so it has been several days since Cathy asked me what Hecate said when I asked her to speak to me.
As for methodologies – I “speak” to my non-linguistic mind in much the same way other people do. I attend to the signals, the signs, that part of the body/mind “speaks” with: feelings, sensations, desires, hunches. I have some experience with Hecate from old dreams and so I already know the kind of environments that she constellates in dreams. Such environments are always liminal in some way and so I go to a shoreline, or wait for a day that is neither wet nor dry. Then I add things I sense Hecate likes: lavender and mustard; human silence and crow calls; safe harbours like a niche between two rocks or a pocket in a large tree. Then I wait. And listen to the world around me, and the world within.
It’s no science, but usually something comes and this time it was a question that quite startled me and based on that, and other, reactions, I “knew” it was Hecate speaking. The question was What would Hecate do with my body were she to take over? The sense of humour (I mean really WWHD instead of WWJD), a bit biting, a bit mean, told me she was present and attentive to my questioning even if she thought I was being obtuse. (Is there any better way to insult an atheist than compare one’s questions to a Christian icon?)
The question was asked a couple of days ago and since then I’ve been trying to answer it. I’ve been reading (and compiling a list of Hecate references in Classical literature). I’ve been paying attention to those little phrases that arrive through my fingers on a keyboard.
More on this later, but the very first answer that came was that she’d be (in my body) out walking the roads for the next decade or so. Even one as weak as I have become can go a very long way in 10 years of walking. The second thing that became clear is that Hecate is not human. This is critically important because I am human and so can only accommodate some of what she “needs”.
What she appears to be is a kind of mythocatalyst in the way the Na+/K+-ATPase is a biocatalyst. So for those of you whose eye’s just glazed, I’ll explain how that might work with respect to the narrative function in humans (it’s not that complicated) in the next Hecate post. The critical thing here is that Hecate seems to me to be a chemical/biological function that exists to regulate narrative expression and/or density or more simply she’s a pattern regulator—she keeps us snapped to the much larger world outside the (realistically still minor) conscious aspect of mind that delights in confusing narrative and reality. Of course since we often would rather slide away on a narrative stream instead of dealing with what is, she can be a real bitch when she does her utmost to force us back into a more stable (realistic) conformation with the world. But, to be honest, her ‘tude is much of what I like about her. And like the Na/K pump, without her we’d swell up and ultimately stop functioning.
Later.
September 24th, 2011
calling for Hecate help
I’ve dreamt about Hecate many times in my life but not recently. She is always dangerous, but like a “pet” lion, purrs something fierce and when she loves you, will crawl right up into your lap. Of course she, like a lion, is a bit big for a lap-kitty, but love is love.
I went to a poetry reading the other night. The author was reading from a new work of hers in which she explores the relationship between Demeter and Persephone and the consequences to each of them of Persephone’s capture, rape and later marriage to and by Hades. And does it in the setting of the contemporary world.
No comment on the poetry except that it was great and the reading was fun. But the poet’s perspective excluded Hecate, and while is perfectly fine to concentrate on two of the three women involved in that myth, I haven’t been able to let go of Hecate’s absence. In other words, she’s baaaaaaaaaaaack.
The question that bothers? What was Hecate thinking agreeing to (instigating?) that rape and forced marriage? She’s no kindly old lady, for sure. In fact, in some of my dreams she is a rather vicious young woman, at least when bothered or attacked. But kidnapping? By a guy she had to know was lonely, weak and not all that reflective and as a consequence would beat the crap out of his “wife” to be?
The woman I know from my dreams might be violent on occasion (in one dream she pushed this part of me off a spiral staircase to her death), but she is in no way a betrayer of women. A surgeon maybe. Anyway….
The help I am requesting is your knowledge and experience with the Hecate stories. There is something…..
In the comments here or email me—mary@tailfeather.ca
August 15th, 2011
oddities that reveal
Those numbers of last post have receded a little, but there’s another little oddity that surfaced in the quieter clamor of post-nap Mary’s head.
The word “stigma” means “mark”: there’s its sense as a mark of shame, or culturally/socially standing alone, but really the word is about being marked generally. So that makes stigmata (used in the Christian sense), a mark of Jesus. And in Greek, it (stigma) can also mean a tattoo, another kind of mark. But “stigma” is also a letter (
, a mark on some matrix like papyrus or stone) that combines the Greek letters Sigma and Tau.
Don’t you think it culturally revealing that all these things can be carried by the same word?
July 27th, 2011
Umberto Eco’s literary interests
This is from a review of This is Not the End of the Book: A Conversation Curated by Jean-Philippe de Tonnac.
Eco’s collection is more focused than Carriere’s. It is a “collection dedicated to the occult and mistaken sciences.” It contains works, for example, by the misinformed astronomer Ptolemy but not by the rightly informed astronomer Galileo. “I am fascinated by error, by bad faith and idiocy,” Eco tells us. He loves the man who wrote a book about the dangers of toothpicks, and another author who produced a volume “about the value of being beaten with a stick, providing a list of famous artists and writers who had benefitted from this practice, from Boileau to Voltaire to Mozart.” He adores the hygienist who recommended, in his treatise, the practice of walking backwards. Eco does not tell us how many of these books he actually owns, or how much he would pay for a first edition in mint condition.
A library of error and idiocy. What a wonderful thing!
July 10th, 2011
lean and beautiful story
I just finished The Blue Fox. It’s an Icelandic story about a priest, a naturalist and a woman with Down’s syndrome that takes place primarily in 1883. It’s quick read because it’s only 112 pages and many of the pages have very little text. In fact visually the text is rather like the snow crocus. There’s a brilliant patch of linguistic shape and colour surrounded by a snowy field of paper. The set up suits.
The author, Sjón, is a poet and a story teller. Not much is available in English, but his 2008 book, The Marvels of Twilight, is being released next month as From the Mouth of the Whale. I will be purchasing it. I would love to read his poetry but there appears to be only one book translated into English and that (so far) appears to be very hard to find. It’s called Night of the Lemon and was published back in 1993. I’ll have to start a serious search. If his poetry is anything like his prose in The Blue Fox, I am going to love it.
Here are two bits from The Blue Fox.
Four years later Reverend Jakob died, greatly regretted by his flock; he was remembered as ugly and tedious, but good with children.
His successor was Reverend Baldur Skuggason, who introduced a new era in church manners to the Dale. Men sat quietly on the benches, holding their tongues while the parson preached the sermon, having learnt how he dealt with rowdies: he summoned them to meet him after the service, took them round the back of the church and beat the living daylights out of them. The women, meanwhile, turned holy from the first day and behaved as if they had never taken part in the teasing ‘the reverend with the pupil’. They said it served the louts to whom they were married or betrothed right, they should have been thrashed long ago; for the new parson was a childess widower.
- and the last -
The rim of daylight was fading.
In the halls of heaven it was now dark enough for the Aurora Borealis sisters to begin their lively dance of the veils. With an enchanting play of colours they flitted light and quick about the great stage of the heavens, in fluttering golden dresses, their tumbling pearl necklaces scattering here and there in their wild caperings. This spectacle is at its brightest shortly after sunset.
Then the curtain falls; night takes over.
Something huh.
July 10th, 2011
Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth
I was reminded this morning of Mark Twain’s humor. He’s mean at times, and I absolutely adore it. Have you read The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson? Hilarious, even if a true tragedy with respect to American race ideologies. Twain has a large number of smaller texts (letters and the like) which are usually bypassed in literature departments and local libraries, but thanks to the internet are available as mp3 and digital text. There’s Eve’s Diary, for example. Yes. That Eve. A rather different take on Adam and Eve’s relationship than the one normally promulgated. I mean did you know Eve is responsible for most of the naming?
Then there’s Letters from the Earth which is actually the name of a book of mock letters (fragments, essays, short stories) about religious topics, not released until 1960 some 50 years after Twain’s death. A digital version of the material is made available at Sacred-Texts.com.
In this fine bit of fun there are a set of letters from Satan to his buds Michael and Gabriel. He talks, for example, about man’s pretension to being God’s pet. In addition, apparently the commandments were news to Satan, news which he found a bit hypocritical.
He was ordered into banishment for a day — the celestial day. It was a punishment he was used to, on account of his too flexible tongue. Formerly he had been deported into Space, there being nowhither else to send him, and had flapped tediously around there in the eternal night and the Arctic chill; but now it occurred to him to push on and hunt up the earth and see how the Human-
Race experiment was coming along. By and by he wrote home — very privately — to St. Michael and St. Gabriel about it.
Too flexible tongue! What a nice way of putting it.
Throughout the eleven letters Satan gets more and more appalled at what he sees so that by the time number eleven gets written Satan is a mite ticked at His Father. Still, there is humor. One of my favourite letters in number seven. Here’s the first bit:
Noah and his family were saved — if that could be called an advantage. I throw in the if for the reason that there has never been an intelligent person of the age of sixty who would consent to live his life over again. His or anyone else’s. The Family were saved, yes, but they were not comfortable, for they were full of microbes. Full to the eyebrows; fat with them, obese with them, distended like balloons. It was a disagreeable condition, but it could not be helped, because enough microbes had to be saved to supply the future races of men with desolating diseases, and there were but eight persons on board to serve as hotels for them. The microbes were by far the most important part of the Ark’s cargo, and the part the Creator was most anxious about and most infatuated with. They had to have good nourishment and pleasant accommodations. There were typhoid germs, and cholera germs, and hydrophobia germs, and lockjaw germs, and consumption germs, and black-
plague germs, and some hundreds of other aristocrats, specially precious creations, golden bearers of God’s love to man, blessed gifts of the infatuated Father to his children — all of which had to be sumptuously housed and richly entertained; these were located in the choicest places the interiors of the Family could furnish: in the lungs, in the heart, in the brain, in the kidneys, in the blood, in the guts. In the guts particularly. The great intestine was the favorite resort. There they gathered, by countless billions, and worked, and fed, and squirmed, and sang hymns of praise and thanksgiving; and at night when it was quiet you could hear the soft murmur of it. The large intestine was in effect their heaven. They stuffed it solid; they made it as rigid as a coil of gaspipe. They took pride in this. Their principal hymn made gratified reference to it: Constipation, O Constipation,
The Joyful sound proclaim
Till man’s remotest entrail
Shall praise its Maker’s nameThe discomforts furnished by the Ark were many and various. The family had to live right in the presence of the multitudinous animals, and breathe the distressing stench they make and be deafened day and night with the thunder-
crash of noise their roarings and screechings produced; and in additions to these intolerable discomforts it was a peculiarly trying place for the ladies, for they could look in no direction without seeing some thousands of the creatures engaged in multiplying and replenishing. And then, there were the flies. They swarmed everywhere, and persecuted the Family all day long. They were the first animals up, in the morning, and the last ones down, at night. But they must not be killed, they must not be injured, they were sacred, their origin was divine, they were the special pets of the Creator, his darlings.