FALSE MYSTICISM

It has been noted before now that the states above and below normal experience sometimes bear an uncanny resemblance. It is therefore necessary to distinguish between those Saints who have attained noetic vision of the things of God in Theosis, and those conditions which may in some way resemble this, but in reality have nothing to do with it.

First of all, there are those many who may have read of real mystical experience in the Fathers, and know that it transcends the merely rational, but attempt to emulate this in their lives by the suspension of their faculties of discernment, becoming one with the New-Agers in the suspicion of anything at all resembling reason, consequently accepting anything which enters their fancy as the fruit of mystical spirituality. Others actually do attempt to practice the disciplines, but without ascetical rigor or sobriety. The point is, demons lurk on the path of spiritual vision; the unwary cannot but fall into their clutches.

There are also religious traditions which rigorously practice a mystical technology similar to that of Orthodox ascetic practice, but do not take it in the same direction; this is, in fact, true mysticism, but it is not the mysticism of Truth. There are those who attain exalted spiritual vision, but their spirituality is of the World, and is therefore not truly spiritual, but delusional; the Fathers warn that the non-Orthodox should not even try to practice the advanced spiritual disciplines. Those that can't understand this simply don't realize what Orthodox baptism does.

These caveats I consider necessary, having written of Mysticism in the previous post; I wouldn't want anyone to just say "Cool!" and go to it with out caution or instruction. I should also mention that my own experience is negligible; mainly concerning my memory of Baptism. This memory has, however, helped to steer me away from what I consider to be deadly errors in my personal prayer life; at various times, as I was praying, I would fall into an "ecstatic" condition, in which a fire would be lit in my breast, and I would be filled with great, passionate excitements, very emotionally stimulating. What saved me was the memory of the spirit I received at baptism; a very clean, rigorous spirit. The "Passionate Prayer" did not follow upon any special seeking or preparedness for worship, and it wasn't followed by any great freedom from temptation; in fact, it tended to come when I was struggling with sin, and the "passionless flame" of true Orthodox spirituality was receding from me. It made me feel great, and righteous, and that my sin didn't really matter to God; it was, in fact, a variant of the "Good Buddy Jesus" spirituality of my Evangelical upbringing. Anyway, it was recalling the purity of my baptism (which I didn't retain very long) which helped me identify my error.

The knowledge that Truth is beyond knowledge should lead us to humility; if we are humble, we will recognize how weak we truly are, and therefore how vulnerable to the deceits of the Enemy. This realization should make us appropriately cautious, to the point that we barely dare to raise our eyes to Heaven, let alone consider ourselves worthy to attain any exalted degree of spiritual perfection, but rather cry out constantly, "Lord Jesus Christ, O Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner".

THE MYSTICAL SUN

I have just returned from spending a month-and-a-half at St. Anthony's Monastery in Florence, Arizona; I had intended to post something explaining what was up, but that was one of the many things that didn't get done before I left home. So now that I have lost the few readers that had persisted through these mad, muddy meanderings, I will continue the futile exercise of writing posts for a few weeks, until I leave home for good to wander the face of the Earth in search of my spiritual home.

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That in the heart of Man which gives light, that knowledge of meaning and purpose which is as the voice of God, continually prodding and nudging one toward Truth, giving no rest to any but those who have willfully blinded themselves out of hatred for light, this is the mystical Sun which lights the landscape of our lives, unspoken and unspeakable. Because it transcends all rational categories, it is expressed by way of paradox; the incongruity between two material explanations of the same truth provides the binocular vision by which it may dimly be seen. When, by Faith, the two halves of the inexpressible truth are accepted in entirety, this divine sun rises in the space between, shedding the spiritual illumination which is beyond the reach of reason; the rationalist who thinks he eliminates paradox by intellectually forcing a juncture between the truths that are accessible to him has really only succeeded in manufacturing a half-truth out of the two halves of the whole.

WORLDS ENOUGH

Here's more of my doggerel; I had already selected the piece before I realized it was thematically appropriate.
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Worlds Enough

Time sits on us like a brooding hen,
Making all things come to fruition,
And we, inside the ellipse of albumen,
A safe and closed frontier,
We live our lives in frantic haste,
Will not willingly see our small affairs
Come to an end of futile waste,
Knowing soon will come the cracking of the egg.

We fully know the smallness of our lives,
Know too, that it is death which sets us free;
Yet we sweat blood and gash ourselves with knives,
Calling on our gods to move both Earth and Heaven
Only to retard by a single hour
The step into the larger universe.
We would stay huddled, closely packed
If it lay at all within our power.

Nothing well done fails to bear fruit,
Extending beneficence into the greater Kingdom;
Nothing evil ever can take root,
Torn out, swept up, cast away with the stubble.
A World of rotten eggs is insufficient to pollute
The fragrant air of yet-enchanted Eden;
Earth's highest virtue nothing to salute,
The greatest blessedness is but a good beginning.

-Don Comfort


Send poems to ddcomfort@gmail.com

ETERNITY

This is sort of a continuation of the previous post, but it gets a brand new title anyway.
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But basically, what is Time? I visualize time as a sort of envelope enclosing the material universe, creating the possibility of an entirely different mode of existence within the all-encompassing Being of God. Time is measured by motion, (preferably regular) and motion is sequentiality; even if nothing material existed, if there was a human-like intelligence, and it thought something, then time would be divided into the epochs before the thought, and after the thought. And, of course, as thought elicits thought, soon there is an entire intellectual history, a long, sequential chain of before and after; Time exists as soon as there is sequentiality.

But then, what is Eternity? Certainly not sitting on clouds strumming harps, as in the popular image of Afterlife. We cannot imagine anything that is not sequential, except stasis, and cannot imagine stasis except as tedium. Surely the Life of God is beyond that, or we could not truly desire it.

C.S. Lewis has an interesting image in the book "The Last Battle". Aslan, standing at the doorway, calls for "Time", and the giant who had been seen sleeping in a cavern of the Underworld in "The Silver Chair" stands and throws his shadow over Narnia. Aslan says "While he lay dreaming, his name was Time. Now that he is awake he will have a new one". Those words intrigued me when I re-read the book recently, though I had never particularly noticed them before. In this image, Time and Eternity are seen as the same entity, but Time is unconscious, a state of diminished energy. What it will be like at the awakening is unimaginable, but it will be real Life. No doubt we will then realize that all our previous life has been a working our way through the rind, and only now for the first time getting a taste of the real fruit. To participate in the Life of God will be a dynamic, not a static experience.

When the Fathers say that Time is an aspect of the Fall, I do not take it to mean that there was no sequentiality in the first-created world; in this sense, there are two aspects of Time, one the law of sequentiality, which applies to all material things, and the other the condition of Corruption, in which decay is the universal principle, and all things are subject to change, for nothing can endure. What the Fathers mean by Time in this sense is this condition of ceaseless change, but there is a transcendence of Time which is beyond the simple overcoming of the Corruption our First-Father was made subject to, and that is in the experience of the Uncreated Light of God, in Eternity.

TIME

This post really should have appeared earlier in the series; I think I'm getting a little tangled up in the roots, if not yet strangled by them.
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One of the things I think as Human Beings we get most confused about is Time. In the Evangelical/Community church I used to attend, one of the things that made up the theological ping-pong matches of the various Faith traditions represented was, "Free Will!" (smash) "No, Predestination!" (volley), back and forth, and back and forth. Even at the time, I thought I could hazily discern the form of a reconciling position in the No-Man's Land between the contending parties; when I came to Orthodoxy, I recognized, in a much clearer form, many of the hazy intermediate positions I had begun to articulate in the Orthodox teaching.

The substance of the confusion was that it seemed if God foreknew everything, then the events of a human life couldn't really be determined by the choices that the individual makes, for good or ill. It was this that led my Calvinist friends to say that the Damned were damned from all Eternity. I knew that didn't sound right, but given their starting presuppositions it was hard to argue with them; I had heard the position argued that though God forsees everything, he does not control, and though for a time, I accepted this, it seemed to me unsatisfactory. I didn't want to say that there was anything beyond God's control! For me, the key to the dilemma was realizing that, in essence, the entire controversy was a confusion over the nature of Time.

Imagine that you are inside a train, standing at one end of a long line of connected cars; each car having one large window looking out on the surrounding countryside. As you walk from one end to the other, you see various scenes through the windows; here a brook, there some trees, here a cow scratching itself against an old wooden fence, here a pleasant meadow, there a herd of feeding pigs, there a muddy bog. To you, all these scenes are disconnected, and sequential; the one coming after the other in order. But to someone sitting on a hill overlooking the same country, all the scenes which you see sequentially are seen at the same time, and the relations between the objects are clear; he will see that the herd of pigs is heading to the bog, that the cow is about to escape through a gap in the fence invisible to you, and that the patch of trees are on the bank of the stream, and overhang it.

God's foreknowledge isn't like prophecy; it's not knowing what will happen, it's knowing what happens. Lest this distinction seem too obscure, (is that possible?) I will try to further elaborate. One reason I didn't like the idea of God not compelling anyone to take a certain course of action, but just knowing beforehand which course they will choose, is that it still made it seem I wasn't free; that everything is already set in stone, and I am just walking a path already laid out. This is because I am thinking of God as an entity entirely inside of time, who sees the path that is already there, but in reality, God sees from an eternal perspective, because He is not encompassed by Time, as are we; so Past, Present, and Future are not separate, they are just Now, or rather, (since now is a designation of Time) they are just what is. God's being outside of Time means that, although he sees the path that, to me, I have yet to walk, this does not mean that these paths yet exist for those inside of Time. Furthermore, God's being outside of Time means that His control over the unfolding of events in Time is not threatened by free will, or, conversely, that free will is not threatened by God's continuous control over events unfolding in Time. The Fathers say that many aspects of our present world are because God knew Man would sin, and therefore made provision for it in shaping His Creation; Adam was not forced to sin by a capricious God who then punished him for it, but allowed to sin by a God who in mercy prepared the world for this eventuality. So we also must believe that many of the circumstances of our present lives are provisions for choices we have not yet made.

Of course, we must believe that God is not entirely outside of Time, or we will be Deists, and will not save our souls; though God is outside Time, He nevertheless walks with us through the long, dreary corridors of Time, to counsel, help, and heal us.

MOST LIKE AN ARCH THIS MARRIAGE

This was sent by Mehitabel, along with a bunch of others. I had forgotten to mention it previously, but I would prefer to receive submissions one at a time.
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Most Like an Arch This Marriage
by John Ciardi

Most like an arch—an entrance which upholds
and shores the stone-crush up the air like lace.
Mass made idea, and idea held in place.
A lock in time. Inside half-heaven unfolds.

Most like an arch—two weaknesses that lean
into a strength. Two fallings become firm.
Two joined abeyances become a term
naming the fact that teaches fact to mean.

Not quite that? Not much less. World as it is,
what's strong and separate falters. All I do
at piling stone on stone apart from you
is roofless around nothing. Till we kiss

I am no more than upright and unset.
It is by falling in and in we make
the all-bearing point, for one another's sake,
in faultless failing, raised by our own weight.

Send Poems to ddcomfort@gmail.com

FAITH

When I was growing up Evangelical, I thought I knew what faith was. Faith meant things that should never, ever be questioned; that it would be impious, even blasphemous, to drag down into the sordid arena of inquiry. Consequently, as I grew to the age of inquiry, it seemed to me that Faith and Truth were necessarily in conflict; in late adolescence I decided that I couldn't have Faith, because I wanted Truth.

But I discovered that Faith isn't closing your mind; as "The evidence of things not seen, the substance of things hoped for", it is instead that particle of information which causes Truth to emerge from the disordered sea of fact. When I went out "Looking for (Truth) in all the wrong places", I could not find it until I returned to Faith; all the truths I laid my hands on added up to a senseless universe. I had been bashing my head against the solid wall of materialistic determinism, not noticing there was a door in the wall the whole time close by. Faith is the golden key which opens that door. The wall is just as solid as before, I have not stopped believing in matter or reason, but the wall no longer obstructs my passage to the enclosed garden of the soul.

Perhaps I should speak a bit more of the precise nature of this revelation. What closed the door of Faith for me was that I identified reason so closely with the techniques of modern Science; though it established for me many things as true, it could not point to a purpose behind all the universe of marvels it paraded before me. So I sailed the vortexes of nihilism with the lodestone at the center of my soul spinning crazily, but when the Pole Star of Faith rose above the horizon, my direction lay clear before me.

What caused me to be able to accept the faith I had rejected in adolescence was firstly the realization that Faith was not contrary to Reason, but was rather the very Soul of Reason. The soul of the Body is different from the Body, and invisible; but it is not contrary to the Body, and it is the Soul that makes it live. So Reason lives only when in possession of its soul. Secondly was the place that Beauty gained as an indicator of purpose. I had previously followed the teachers of modernism in regarding beauty as irrelevant to the search for Truth; I have written previously of Being as an absolute value, which cannot be argued either for or against. This realization changed everything for me; before, I was at war with my heart, and felt that as I valued Truth I must put everything that I intrinsically felt to be valuable to trial before the august tribunal of Reason, which my training had taught me to regard as brutally materialistic. Now I thought, for the first time, "Why not? Why should not my perceptions of beauty be regarded as the central datum which influences the ordering of all other information? Why must the eyes of the body be regarded above the eye of the soul?". I suppose it was a persistent regard for Truth which saved me from abandoning truth altogether at this point, (as many do) thereby becoming degenerate, but it really never occurred to me that a beauty which was not simultaneously true could be truly beautiful. All the modern world regards Truth and Beauty as a duality, but they are one.

Dostoevsky wrote that Beauty would save the World. On the face of it, that is an absurd thing to say; certain it is that many are damned by it. Perhaps it is true only for those who have themselves lain in the pit of Nihilism, on whose benighted brains it finally dawns that, perhaps if the world is only beautiful it is meaningful; and the dark tormented dreams disperse, leaving one free to walk in the morning of a new day.

When at the high-tide of youth and health I went looking for purpose, I had no hope, I wanted to die; now that I am not so young, and not completely healthy, I am sustained by Faith, and I believe I could rejoice in my being if I could see but one ray of light. There are times when I have thought that if I were deprived of all my faculties except the ability to breathe, it would be enough; I could rejoice in the possession of my life in the joy of breathing. If Love is the affirmation of Being, then Faith is the surrender to Love; it is this surrender which led me to the God who is Love, and from there to the Christ who saves, and on to the Scripture which records the truths of our Faith, and the purposes of God, and from thence, in the fullness of time, to that Faith "Once delivered to the Apostles".

REVELATION

It does not appear to me likely that we are going to be able to figure things out all by ourselves; by our own effort, we have two strategies open to us for attempting to make sense of the universe: the painstaking analysis of each grain of phenomena that enters our experience via our senses, or the articulation of general principles which we perceive to be behind all the various permutations of the phenomenal universe. These general principles, of course, are a kind of revelation; what the Apostle tells us is written on the heart of every man. If we depend only on the analysis of phenomena for our truth, we are like a child on the beach, examining the soil where he sits, justifiably concluding the entire universe is made of sand; of course, our senses are also a kind of revelation. Why else should we consider our senses as portals of Truth? If our senses are the result of random processes, why should not their report be equally random? It seems to me, we can trust our senses to the extent we regard them as endowed by a beneficent Creator; One who gives them for our instruction, not our confusion, but we cannot rely on them utterly. They are for the verification of truth, not its discovery. 'The Heart knows its truths, which Reason may not know".

Were it not for the grace of the beneficent Father, we would be sightless; deaf, dumb, and blind. The Creator of the Heart of Man is also the Lawgiver of Sinai, reinforcing these truths almost to the point of redundancy for the benefit of His dull children. Then, lest the point of these precepts be lost forever in the legalistic multiplication of irrelevant minutiae, Christ came as Teacher to remind us, "To Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and to love your neighbor as yourself....this is the whole of the Law". Lawyers may be workers of evil, but the Law itself is a thing of beauty.

UNTO THE AGES OF AGES

This in from Sophocles:
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Unto the Ages of Ages

He who has conquered Death and is alive forevermore, unto Ages of Ages.

O humanity, having left your first estate, having become mortal, you are dead. Death is your reward. Death is the fabric of your existence, it holds you, it defines you, you breathe it as air. It you run from. It you strive to postpone. It you define life by. What is life but not death? What are you, o humanity but a slave to not death? Why, o death, do you hover over me? Why do you stick closer to me than a brother? Why do you separate me from love? Why, o death, do I have to not be? Sin is conceived in me, o death, and I die more so, and yet you are not satisfied. Die more you want me to. I sin and die once again.

And when this mortal frame expires, I will continue to die, o death, forever. I will forevermore not be in Him who is Life. My God, my God, who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to you, o LORD. I a sinner, am to span eternity with You. You who have conquered death and who can die no more, I am to be found in You. You, o Lord Jesus Christ, in the community of Your Father and the Holy Spirit, forever, from eternity begotten by Him, you were when there was not any save You, o Triune God.

Thou hast been always loved by Thy Father, o Lord. Forever Thy Father has sent Him who testifies of Thee, proceeding from Him, the Fount, hovering above the waters, the earth null and void. And I, a worthless sinner, who has broken all Thy commandments, whom You have loved, but because Your love burned me I ran, seeking my own way, am called by Thee to dine with Thee. This brokenness only I have to offer Thee, o gracious Master, I have nought else, my beautiful Lord, lover of mankind. But I am undone, I am a man of unclean lips.

Holy, Holy, Holy art Thou, o LORD

Unto the Ages of Ages,

Amen.

Lord have mercy on me a sinner.

-Sophocles Frangakis

Send poems to ddcomfort@gmail.com

MORAL CERTAINTY

How do we know the truth; where are the deep springs of certainty? In the depths of the heart of Man, the Apostle tells us, are things we just know, and ignore at our peril. Of course, sinful Man chooses to evade these things by obscuring their truth, arguing that we don't know these things, that they are not proven, that they are not logically necessary. The history of Modernity has been the history of the attempt to divorce Truth from its foundations planted by God deep in the heart of Man. When once Truth is located in things that Man can verify independently, then Man is the master of his own Truth, and hence of his own being. The senses having been selected early on as the location of ascertainable truth has led only to philosophical doubts of the instrument. The modern experiment should have ended there, but there came a crafty weaver into town by the name of I. Kant, who offered to clothe our noble Empiricist in a gown of superior quality, in which he has been strutting and parading the streets of Academia ever since, deaf to the cries of the children proclaiming his essential nakedness, though lately he seems to at least have developed the ability to blush.

There are currently two forms of transmission of truth from the past; Tradition and Scholarship. Originally, the two methods were one, scholarship being intensely tied to tradition, and used as a kind of filter to distinguish authentic tradition from its more spurious forms, but in modernity, the two have separated into hostile camps. The method of modern scholarship is apparently to adopt as a prejudice something immensely flattering to ourselves, and to always look at any actual evidence that may exist through the lens of our pet prejudice; Chesterton wrote of the scholarship of his time that it involved scrapping supernatural stories which have some foundation in favor of natural stories which have no foundation.

Scholarship and Tradition might be compared to two people, one who studies a rock known to have originated from a distant mountain, the other having a distant, hazy view of the mountain itself. If you study a rock intensely enough, you can probably tell a lot about the kind of soils, and therefore the kind of vegetation, which might prevail on the mountainside; of course, this involves a couple of key assumptions. One, that the data you possess is not something erratic, and therefore is truly indicative of conditions on the mountain, and Two, that it is in fact prevalent all over the mountain. The two methods should obviously be used in conjunction, but it is the one who has sight of the actual mountain who should have the controlling authority; modern scholarship is somewhat given to informing us authoritatively that there are no pine trees on the mountain, when they can be seen quite plainly standing out on the ridge.

Anyway, we live in the world of totalitarian scholarship, with its own epistemology, and a dedicated corps of amateur police tirelessly striving to enforce its decisions; but for one who heeds the voice within, these things are meaningless as the wind, which may shriek with all its voice, yet never compel one to surrender. It seems to be the role of the modern schools to create a race of individuals who simply cannot think outside the box of contemporary scholarship, baseless though its dictates may be.

MORAL ORDER

Condolences to poor Ochlophobe for his recent illness; that's a problem I don't have, my lungs having been developed while growing up on the high Andean plateau, but I know many suffer from it tremendously.

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So; Truth being so complicated and all, is there a real, discenable right and wrong? There is a persistent tendency in Modernity to say that all values are arbitrary; at this point, all categorical imperatives and all merely pragmatic moralities are quite exploded. They were minimally functional (yet still socially corrosive, in my view) as long as there was a sufficient social memory of a more forcefully articulated, and indeed, more natural morality, but now that these things have receded into the near-legendary past, what can be said against those who choose to regard their own immediate pleasure, or even inclination, as of more value than the good of other people, or the eventual good of society? I am going to say that, if you are an atheist, or even an agnostic, there is nothing. If your neighbor decides to torture your dog, rape your daughter, or burn down your house, you can certainly say that you will do everything in your power to prevent them, including appealing to the relevant social authorities to aid you, but you cannot say he is doing wrong, in any absolute sense of the word. You may say that right is defined by what the majority of the people want, as if when the majority of the people decide that it's o.k. to rape your daughter it makes any difference in the morality of violating a young girl; it is also the case that certain peoples historically have found themselves outside the circle of concern of their community. People may be quite positive that they don't want anyone raping their daughter, or the daughters of the people they are accustomed to associating with directly, and yet be blithely unconcerned over what happens to your daughter. It seems usually to go unnoticed that the minimal protections provided by a traditional ethics for those outside of society's circle of concern have been quite eroded away by today's politically-correct ethicists; Jews, Blacks, and Homosexuals would have had no hope of a hearing, if the society of the early 20th century had been founded on the ethics of the 21st century. The politically-correct mentality has no tradition of mercy towards its opponents; for those who fall out of its circle of concern, the future is indeed bleak. Late modernity has already proven a continual holocaust for those who, through no choice of their own, occasionally invade the bodies of women, thereby threatening to impose responsibilities on them; later on, no doubt, the holocaust will extend to all those who offend against its totalitarian ethics by holding on to more traditional moralities, and have the temerity to regard them mandated by Divine authority.

The ethical imperative of late Modernity is that all individuals are self-determinative; any factor that serves at all to impose limits on the ability of an individual to absolutely determine what kind of creature they are to be, and what kind of responsibility (if any) they have for the happiness and well-being of another, is seen as a gross imposition on the rights of the individual. I will engage in sexual activity, and I will regard the being that comes in the course of nature to be a hostile invader, to be expelled without guilt or consideration from the womb; I will jump from this high building, and I will bring a lawsuit against the ground for smiting me.

The only refuge from this lunacy that I can see is to believe in a Creator; that being given, all else proceeds rationally. Because I am not my own creator, I do not determine my own nature. Whatever rights I may have spring from this nature; that being the case, I must know my nature in order to determine what kinds of demands I may justly make on my universe. Because the Creator created me, His knowledge of me is much greater and much more intimate than my knowledge of myself. All my operations, physical and spiritual, are a mystery to me; I must appeal to my Creator for the key to the understanding of my being. If I choose to make up my own rules of conduct, it is the same as if the owner of a new automobile were to say "The manufacturer demands that I put oil in the car before driving it, but I choose not to do so". In one sense, he is free to make that decision, but obviously if he does so, he is not free to drive a smoothly functioning automobile, and very soon will be unable to drive at all. Similarly, he may choose to put the oil in the gas tank, and the windshield wiper fluid in the crankcase, but if so, he must accept the naturally occurring, deletrious results.

Obviously, any complex entity such as a man or an automobile has a vast number of processes which must be complied with to maintain functional integrity. Some have major consequences, some minor; some consequences of wrong behavior may not reveal themselves for years, or be such that they are not apparent at all until suddenly manifest in catastrophic circumstances.

Because Modernity believes in physical reality, it knows, when building towers and bridges, that there are designs which work, and those that don't, materials which will withstand particular stresses, and those which will fail to do so; because Modernity does not believe in spiritual reality, it regards Man's spiritual nature as infinitely manipulable. This is why the spiritual towers and bridges erected in early Modernity are collapsing spectacularly around us, to the ruin of families and communities, and the eventual dissolution of the social fabric itself.

A SECOND CHILDHOOD

O.K. People, you're not doing your part on this Poetry thing; I'm not going to keep it up all by myself. So far, all we've had are a couple of poems sent in that were written by other people; I had originally hoped to have more original work sent in. Why should I be the only one to embarrass myself publicly? I had thought that everyone wrote poetry; there's no need to be shy, I've been around the block, and have already seen most of the standard varieties of ineptitude. If you don't know how to write a poem, learn! Start with rhythmic babbling, and work up from there.

This was not supposed to be the all-things-Chesterton page, but I had wanted to share my favorite Chesterton poem, then Fred Pfeil sent "The House of Christmas" as a seasonal offering, and Andrea sent Abou Ben Adhem, which I decided to pair with Chesterton's parody, and I still want to include my favorite poem by G.K. Chesterton; so here it is:

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A Second Childhood

When all my days are ending
And I have no song to sing,
I think I shall not be too old
To stare at everything;
As I stared once at a nursery door
Or a tall tree and a swing.

Wherein God's ponderous mercy hangs
On all my sins and me,
Because He does not take away
The terror from the tree
And stones still shine along the road
That are, and cannot be.

Men grow too old for love, my love,
Men grow too old for wine,
But I shall not grow too old to see
Unearthly daylight shine,
Changing my chamber's dust to snow
Till I doubt if it be mine.

Behold, the crowning mercies melt,
The first surprises stay;
And in my dross is dropped a gift
For which I dare not pray:
That a man grow used to grief and joy
But not to night and day.

Men grow too old for love, my love,
Men grow too old for lies;
But I shall not grow too old to see
Enormous night arise,
A cloud that is larger than the world
And a monster made of eyes.

Nor am I worthy to unloose
The latchet of my shoe;
Or shake the dust from off my feet
Or the staff that bears me through
On ground that is too good to last,
Too solid to be true.

Men grow too old to woo, my love,
Men grow too old to wed:
But I shall not grow too old to see
Hung crazily overhead
Incredible rafters when I wake
And find I am not dead.

A thrill of thunder in my hair:
Though blackening clouds be plain,
Still I am stung and startled
By the first drop of the rain:
Romance and pride and passion pass
And these are what remain.

Strange crawling carpets of the grass,
Wide windows of the sky:
So in this perilous grace of God
With all my sins go I:
And things grow new though I grow old,
Though I grow old and die.

-G.K. Chesterton


I hope no one is suffering from Chesterton overload!

Send poems to ddcomfort@gmail.com

TRUTH

In controversies with other people, we frequently find that a point is reached at which any further discussion is unprofitable, each party talking past the other in mutual incomprehension. On such occasions, it is tempting to regard the other as being willfully bullheaded, and sometimes it is so, (I've done it before) but more frequently, both simply lack a context which allows the other to make sense; it's like listening to someone speaking a language with which we are completely unfamiliar. The sounds are mixed up in an order that is unintelligible to us. Others who speak our language do so with such different stress and inflection that it is hard to understand. In saying this, I'm certainly not advancing a philosophy of relativism; one can be completely familiar with the philosophy of your interlocutor, spot the error without difficulty, and be completely right in doing so. Even so, you are left with the problem of how to communicate this in a way they will understand.

There is a point at which productive discourse can take place, and that is at the very point at which the two viewpoints diverge. In talking to almost anyone, there is a point up to which we agree, but after that, our ideas separate. That is the point which needs to be examined; argue very far away from that point, and you are arguing from different assumptions. What irrational prejudice, what rooted dislikes, what kind of intensely personal experiences cause one person to zig and the other to zag at the point of departure? The answers can sometimes be truly illuminating. Progress can sometimes be made by tracing the idea to see, after all, where it truly leads, or what kind of intellectual universe it springs from. Many carry ideas around in their heads that would horrify them if they knew what gave it birth. Compare the growth of ideas to the growth of a tree; branches continually spreading away from the trunk, dividing again and again; it is always possible to find one's way back to the trunk, and hence to the root, by tracing your way laboriously down the branch, exploring each intersection and mapping the complicated networks and tangles of twigs springing from different branches, perhaps originating from the other side of the tree, or even from different trees. Confusion results mainly from false congruences and false dichotomies; two leaves seen growing side by side are usually assumed to be closely related. Perhaps a trained botanist will be able to tell at a glance that these leaves seen presently in such near proximity are in fact from two different kinds of trees; others without such sensitivity have to work laboriously to the same conclusion. Other leaves positioned on opposite sides of the arboreal universe may be demonstrated to be of the same branch. Obviously, this gets complicated; it might seem that there is some justification for those who say either that there is no Truth, or that Truth must remain forever unknown to us. In ultimate things, I consider this indeed to be the case; I have long considered the most sensible thing one can say about the Universe is that, barring revelation from a higher power, man can know nothing certainly about the nature of the universe, and hence ultimately lacks the key to the understanding of his own being. The long search for Human-centered certainty which is Modern philosophy seems certainly to have foundered at this point; most have by now abandoned ship, and the few determined diehards appear more ridiculous with each passing year, but I also believe that, in Itself, Truth is simple. In the clear empyrean which is its true home, it burns as a radiant energy, flashing forth from the Throne of God on its missions of Justice and Mercy; but as it enters the phenomenal realm, its beam is somewhat diffracted, and as this pure white light enters the prism of the human mind, it is broken into all the colors of the rainbow, and then human beings seek to use Truth to promote their own interests, manufacturing truths from Truth, (Truth itself being regarded only as a source for the mining of convenient facts) suppressing some, and enhancing others. Looking for Truth in the currents of human opinion is like walking down a hall of funhouse mirrors, the twisted glass throwing back your image in every grotesque distortion imaginable. Some even become haters of Truth, seeking to uproot and destroy every evidence of it in the human heart, fabricating and disseminating false truths with which to fill the void.

Consequently, we dwell in an atmosphere of confusion; finding Truth is not hopeless, but it is complicated, and the only point at which we can truly address differing opinions is to find the point where two branches diverge; then, with labor, truth can indeed be demonstrated, falsity shown absurd in the light of its own disastrous logic, but this, of course, takes time. Modern people are typically too busy to remember, let alone think, so of course the temptation is to forgo any rigorous examination of their core assumptions, and adopt a sort of "soundbite philosophy" composed of bits and pieces (many of them contradictory) formed of the sweepings of popular culture. They typically won't take time to examine this collage, and can't defend any part of it, but they can vividly dislike those who point out their contradictions, and they do.

I am not primarily talking about uneducated people here; simple people approach truth at a much more basic level, and are often right where their more sophisticated brethern are wrong. I used to think I operated on a higher plane of truth than my parents, (one of the many things that kept me from accessing the parental wisdom) but found as I matured that many of the things I had rejected as excessively simpleminded were, quite simply, true; these truths were inarticulable by those who had my training in their hands, but true nonetheless. Had I been a less arrogant young man, I might have been able to access these silently held, but profound truths.

So the possession of truth and the articulation of truth are different things, but polemics (not a dirty word in my vocabulary) has to do with the convincing of those who have a different view, and that involves the articulation of truth, and that involves forming a fairly clear mental picture of what Truth actually is. Here I return to the analogy of the forest with intent to refine it a bit. Originally, I said that the entire forest was not rooted in anything; now I am going to say it is only our tree which is uprooted, and that it is being supported on all sides by living trees, whose branches are so intertwined with those of our tree that it is difficult to tell which leaves belong to which tree. Uprooted and malnourished as it is, our world is yet interpenetrated and upheld by truths which come from a different universe. A leaf growing right beside another may be from the other side of the spiritual and intellectual Cosmos. There is one profound difference between these leaves; one is living, and the other is dying. A little space of time will demonstrate for all to see which is which; in the meantime, all the leaves have the appearance of health, and to the undiscerning eye all appear to be of the same tree.

The pursuit of Truth involves sorting out the eternal from the transient. One adept at such things might be able to say immediately that this is an oak leaf, and the one beside it is a maple, but he will be hard-pressed to convince his less-discerning fellows of this unless they will undertake the labor of following the branches; typically, they will just stubbornly argue the point, most likely munching on acorns the entire time.

At this point, (If not long before) the insistent relativist will have broken in, saying with his usual benign smile and air of all-knowingness "Ah, but there are many paths to the top of the mountain, my child". It is a point worth considering. First of all, it may be so that there are many paths to the top of the mountain; at any rate, it certainly can be approached from many trajectories, but what an infinitude of other possible routes there are which lead away from the mountain entirely? Would it not behoove one who wished to reach the top of the mountain to at least ascertain what direction the path they are on is pointing in, and not just assume that any old path will do? Furthermore, even if it is possible that there is more than one path up the mountain, could it not be possible that there is only one safe path, and that, in the case of a peak of insurmountable difficulty, the only possible path may be the one that was blasted out of the side of the precipice in order to make the ascent at all possible. As a matter of fact, most mountains I am familiar with do have only one path to the top; it is there because thousands of people have found that this is the best route to the top of the mountain. I doubt if the person who coined the phrase had any experience with mountaineering. Years of knocking heads with these people has convinced me that relativism is the first, last, and only refuge of the intellectually lazy; it wears an appearance of wisdom, and of broad magnanimity, but is really remarkably foolish, and about the most narrow-minded thing there is going, and there's really no way to penetrate the smug superiority of those who hold this view, for it comforts them with the feeling that they are the ones who have seen through everything, when most commonly they are only the ones who have failed to look.

PAIN

I apologise for any confusion that anyone may have encountered; the new e-mail address is ddcomfort@gmail.com. I haven't yet figured out how to make the links work (I'm not sure I ever did figure out how to make the links work).
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When I was very young, (I think about five) I saw a still younger child (unknown to me) being given an ice-cream cone; as the child reached out his small hands for the treat, he tipped the cone, and the ice cream fell off of it onto the ground, and he began to cry. At that, a pang shot through me; I can feel it to this day. It seemed it would have been better for the World never to have existed than for that one event to have occurred; of course, that was a posterior analysis, but that was the substance of the feeling at the time. It is a common enough event; I have since witnessed the very same thing many times without reaction, and had most probably seen it before, (my memories of those far-off times being rather hazy). In fact, unless I am very much mistaken, the very same thing had happened previously to me without provoking nearly as intense a reaction.

At this point, you are all probably looking at me as a complete lunatic, and I don't blame you. What was it that provoked such an intense reaction, making that simple event one of the formational forces in my life? I think it was the combination of the childish intensity of delighted anticipation of enjoyment, the abrupt taking away of the promised pleasure, and the broken-hearted wailing that resulted. For that child at that moment, that ice cream was his heaven, and suddenly, the door was slammed shut; more ice cream may be procured, and the child comforted, but still that bereaved wailing echoes down the corridors of time and space. Of course I know it is silly to place such importance on ice cream, but it is exactly the silliness and childishness of it that gives it such poignancy; I don't at all think that the reaction would have been nearly as strong had it been a reasoned and measured response to some great crisis. The disjuncture between the triviality of the incident and the intensity of the response gives it its pathetic quality, and it is one of the things that in adolescence had me shaking my fist at God, and saying, "You Tormentor! Stop it!!". It didn't mean anything in itself, but a tiny paradise was shattered, and my heart broke; I didn't so much care if a rational creature suffered the torments of Hell, but for a child to shed such tears made the Universe seem like a cruel joke.

The reason I introduce this post with this rather unimportant piece of autobiography is because I have come to suspect that similar reactions lie behind many of the core perceptions of modernity; as modern people, we worship Pain, that dark Taboo before which we make such extravagant obeisances, and perform endless sacrifice of infants and other helpless creatures, and really, is there that much of a difference between my reaction to the child's spoiled ice cream, and the reactions of many to such things as Hiroshima? A difference in scale, to be sure, but at its root, the common perception that pain is intolerable, and that we must remake the world, and if necessary human nature, in striving to rid the world of pain. I cannot concede to the Anonymous One that pain is the most important thing there is; he believes that he has upset everyone else's applecart just by quoting some grim statistics, but I keep my apples in an entirely different conveyance, thank you!

Later on, I began to see pain as a gift of God, warning us of wrongness and danger, and really, a great confirmation of the truth of the Christian Faith; only in the knowledge of fallenness and separation from God does pain make sense. Deep in our hearts, we sense the brokenness of the world, and our souls explore the fracture like someone endlessly running their tongue over the rough edges of a broken tooth. In any other system, pain is an absurdity; we don't know what to do with it. When my wife was seeing a counselor, I was speaking with her of the necessity of making some hard choices, and saying that though they would be painful, it might in the end be a good thing; she immediately snapped "Anyone who thinks of pain as good is a masochist". So much for "Christian" counseling! Not until I became Orthodox did I find a complete theology of Pain, and learn to experience pain as sanctifying, and cleansing; after a night spent in tears of repentance, the sun shines with extraordinary brightness through windows of the soul washed clean of years of accumulated grime. Indeed, it comes to mind that this is an important difference between ecstatic religion, the condition of seeking spiritual experiences and consolations, with the attending auto-erotic characteristics that Ochlophobe has so well outlined on his blog, and religion that seeks only repentance and self-mortification; the latter is clean, but the former is completely tied up in the passions of human eros.

Pain is not the soul of the Cosmos; at the heart of the Cosmos beats a heart of radiant Joy. In that light, all pain is seen to be illusory, as insubstantial as a morning mist which vanishes instantly at the rising of the Sun. To the modern mind, the fact that Pain exists is the center of the universe, and proves God to be either cruel or nonexistent, and misery blots out the sun. In every soul either Love triumphs over Pain, or Pain triumphs over Love; on this depends whether our life is heaven or hell.

ABOU BEN ADHEM

Andrea Rovney has sent in the much-anthologised "Abou Ben Adhem"; here it is.

Abou Ben Adhem

Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
And saw, within the moonlight in his room,
Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,
An Angel writing in a book of gold:

Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,
And to the Presence in the room he said,
"What writest thou?" The Vision raised its head,
And with a look made of all sweet accord
Answered, "The names of those who love the Lord."

"And is mine one?" said Abou. "Nay, not so,"
Replied the Angel. Abou spoke more low,
But cheerily still; and said, "I pray thee, then,
Write me as one who loves his fellow men."

The Angel wrote, and vanished. The next night
It came again with a great wakening light,
And showed the names whom love of God had blessed,
And, lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest!

-James Leigh Hunt

I can't resist pairing it with this one of Chesterton's:

THE PHILANTHROPIST
(With Apologies to a Beautiful Poem)

Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe decrease
By cautious birth-control and die in peace)
Mellow with learning lightly took the word
That marked him not with them that love the Lord,
And told the angel of the book and pen
"Write me as one that loves his fellow-men:
For them alone I labour; to reclaim
The ragged roaming Bedouin and to tame
To ordered service; to uproot their vine
Who mock the Prophet, being mad with wine;
Let daylight through their tents and through their lives
Number their camels, even count their wives;
Plot out the desert into streets and squares,
And count it a more fruitful work than theirs
Who lift a vain and visionary love
To your vague Allah in the skies above."

Gently replied the angel of the pen:
"Labour in peace and love your fellow-men:
And love not God, since men alone are dear,
Only fear God; for you have cause to fear."

-G.K. Chesterton

Send Poems to ddcomfort@gmail.com

BEAUTY

On one level, Beauty seems to be nothing but order, and variations of order. This is why trees are beautiful; every tree has a different growth pattern, but each tree is substantially the same as other trees of its kind, has the same geometry, repeats the same angles, and trees of a different kind have an entirely different geometry of growth. Absolute chaos has no beauty; neither does a total stasis. Then there are things which just seem to have a deeper meaning, and speak to the soul of things beyond its vision; mountains, the sky, the sea, fields of flowers, etc. Beauty is an introduction to the being of God, the great symphony in Three movements, of which all the created order is but grace notes. We know the Creator through his creation, and know that He is good. No matter what pains we may have suffered, on bright days, or even grey days, with their very different kind of somber beauty, or in the still heart of the night, we may enter into a kind of deep mystical gladness, and know in our hearts that there is meaning in all this, and that Pain is not the soul of the Universe. All created things spring from this deep fountain of essential being; Beauty flows out from the Throne of the All-Holy Trinity, the Godhead dwells resplendent in Love, the rejoicing of Pure Being.

CHRISTMAS MEMORIES

Andrea Elizabeth tagged me to share some Christmas memories awhile ago; since it is almost Old-Calendar Christmas, I'll give it a go. I'm not quite sure what I was intended to do, but this post is my attempt to respond to that request.

1. The Christmases I spent in Peru were very special to me; I remember primarily the deep sense of mystery as the holiday approached, and decorations began to go up. Mystery, and anticipation, as if something too good for words were approaching. These were not our most affluent Christmases, there were no white Christmases, as it was the beginning of summer (or "rainy season, as it was known in that locality). This is something I have often noticed about holidays and vacations generally; the ones I appreciate most in retrospect are not the ones filled with activity, but the ones where there is stillness. Also, the occasions when I had most fun as a child were not when we were going out doing fun things, but when I was able to interact naturally with other children (and, occasionally adults), which is only possible in an unpressured environment. This is the problem with people going bananas trying to make Christmas nice for their kids; people living harassed and frenzied existences increasing the frenzy for the holidays. I suppose in many cases, they are literally destroying peace in a vain attempt to recreate the peace they remember from Christmases in childhood. I'm not saying that if you polled the youngsters, they would give the thumbs up to singing Hymns in lieu of getting their favorite toy or a trip to the ski lodge; I do know that I don't remember many of the toys I got for Christmas as a kid, but I do remember sitting around a lighted Christmas tree in the evening with family and close friends, the house lights off, softly singing carols on Christmas Eve.
2. I remember driving up into the mountains of Oregon to cut our own Christmas tree; we kind of made a day of it. Fun and fellowship, snow, a nice hike through the woods, and the piney smell in the car on the way home. Somehow, using a farmed tree for Christmas always seemed a little sacrilegious to me; I won't even mention the supreme blasphemy of an artificial one.
3. The one Christmas I spent in New England was interesting; for one thing, it was the only time I have had really serious snow over Christmas. That, and having churches with tall steeples with clocks in them all over the place made it feel kind of like living inside the stereotypical Christmas card.

LOVE

I would define Love as "The Affirmation of Being". If that seems absurd (and it does, a little, to me), it is probably because in ourselves we do not fully realize the true nature of Being.

THE HOUSE OF CHRISTMAS

Fred Pfeil has sent in this one of Chesterton's; as it is not yet Christmas for me, I regard it as seasonal. Actually, it should still be Christmas for y'all too; you ought to be up to the drummers drumming by now.

I have a great regard for Chesterton's poetry. It is technically imperfect, but full of something that for lack of a better term I will call humanness; in his day, he was well enough regarded by several very proficient poets that they thought many of his poems would be immortal, but that was before the revolution, when all arts and sciences were captured by nihilists, and Poetry became for the first time an inhuman thing.
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The House of Christmas

There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome.

For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay on their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.
Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
And chance and honour and high surprise,
But our homes are under miraculous skies
Where the yule tale was begun.

A Child in a foul stable,
Where the beasts feed and foam;
Only where He was homeless
Are you and I at home;
We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost - how long ago!
In a place no chart nor ship can show
Under the sky's dome.

This world is wild as an old wives' tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.

To an open house in the evening
Home shall men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.

-G.K. Chesterton

Send poems to ddcomfort@gmail.com

BEING

The most fundamental thing is what is; "To be, or not to be" is not the question. We are, and even an act of self-termination does not resolve the problem of Being; the real question is, what is our reaction to the reality of our existence? What answer can even God make to one who chooses to deny the goodness of being? Every possible act of beneficence, every beauty and pleasure provided to demonstrate goodness would be regarded by such a one as simply bait in a trap designed to reconcile him to the futility of existence. It is this absolute exercise of will which defines the person; to affirm or deny. The denial of Being is the deepest dimension of evil, an insatiate rage against the Creator as the Fountain of Being. "Evil, be thou my Good" is simply its most characteristic expression. All the Author of Life Himself can do is to say, "I set before you Life and Death, a Blessing and a Curse; therefore, choose Life". There is nothing much that can be done for those who don't.

GOD

Since the rest of my family are either Non-Orthodox or New-Calendar, I get to celebrate Christmas twice; since most of our family were in our house for several days, I haven't been blogging. I suppose this isn't the ideal time to launch a blog; it didn't happen intentionally, I was just messing around one evening and said "Let's see what it would take to get this thing set up", and there I was.

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This is a subject I introduce more or less in order to dismiss it, because I don't really think it's a very interesting question; I'm just bringing it up to forestall those who would otherwise say I didn't start with the very deepest things. But to me, the existence of God is not the beginning of cognitive reflection, but the elemental presumption which renders reflection possible; Reason in the Void is not truly reason. Neither do I think it possible to prove the existence of God; none of the philosophic proofs of God's existence meant anything to me when I didn't believe in God, and none of them really mean much to me now. Evidences of God's existence are plentiful, proofs there are none. The eyes of the soul discern the certainty of these things, if we do not put blinders on as we are required to do by Science. What can be said to those who are blind to these things except "Take off the blinders"? It is a question of fecundity; you can mate a horse to a jackass, but the offspring is sterile, the line ends there. Reasoning without God is mating with a jackass; you come swiftly to the place where there are no more possibilities.

"But" you might say, "Are you not that one who professes a special interest in roots, and is not the existence of God the most fundamental root of all"? Yes, possibly; but roots which lie so deep are perilous for poor, weak creatures to probe into. You wander into dark caverns, and dwell in lightless misery, until you come to hate the light of Sun and Moon (gollum, gollum). Wishing only to probe the conditions of our life, oriented to the worship and service of God is the productive form of root-grubbing; you learn why things in the forest do not prosper, and occasionally find tubers, "rare good ballast for an empty stomach".

To expand somewhat on Chesterton's analogy, God is the blazing sun at the center of the universe; we cannot look at it. In fact, so intense is that light that it defeats our vision, and the light of God becomes clouds and darkness for us. All the lesser lines of inquiry disappear into that darkness, all plainly oriented in the same direction, but we cannot with plain sight describe that juncture, we know only by faith that all things are reconciled in God.

POETRY

O. K., after Ochlophobe's endorsement I'm almost afraid to write; keep your expectations low, and you won't be disappointed.

By way of lightening the tone a bit, I'm going to be publishing a small amount of poetry here. You retain all rights, simultaneous submissions O. K.. I don't care if it's been published before or not, if it's anything you would like me and my readers to see, send it in. Also, if you have a favorite poem you would like to share with everyone, send it; just be sure you include the name of the author, and make sure I am aware that it is not yourself. I'll probably only be doing 3-4 poems a month, and maybe a couple of my own. Send submissions to: ddcomfort@gmail.com. If you send them to the comments page, I will delete them. Decisions of the editor are final.

To start things out, here's one of my own:

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Pertinacity

Living branch is grafted to dead tree;

dead tree wilts, the branch salutes the Spring,

the springing lily's bugle calls: Rejoice!

The weeping willow bows to it's decay.

Fruits and flowers fill the leafy branch

as branching beauties sprout on either side;

breeze blows, the tree begins to sway,

the live branch scatters petals to the wind.

Dead tree is lonely in infirmity,

bark sloughs off, the worm bores through the bole.

Blue moon looks down to where the tree still stands,

decrepit, leprous, by an evil fen;

in the drear light, an object lies upon

dark grass, dank with fever and disease,

flowers withered, fruits yet unmatured,

dead branch lies broken, rotted at the base.

-Don Comfort

GOLLUM

I have decided, despite all previously cited reasons, to start publishing my own blog; this will probably be a fairly temporary thing, and if it doesn't work out for me, I'll quit. My reason for starting is that I have thought of a line of questioning which intrigues me, and would like to see what kinds of comments it would elicit. I chose the title "Earl Donald the Bewildered, of Grasshopper-in-the-hole", because I wanted something fairly self-depreciatory to show we are all equals in this arena; "James the Thickheaded" I thought good, and that blog with the title "Absolute Nonsense" or something like that, but I wanted something a little different. Then I came across a site where you could get faux English titles produced by typing in your first name, and have it combined with a title description in overblown heraldic-sounding language. I thought it was hilarious, and produced one for all the members of my immediate family, and then promptly lost the address of the site. My birth-name is Donald (Maxim is my Saint's name, which I go by except in Family situations), so I decided just to use my fake title as the title of the blog.

On this site, I would like to primarily explore some very basic questions of philosophy, mainly by way of retracing the steps that brought me out of secular materialist darkness; these are very simple questions, but my wrong understanding of them made it impossible to break my chains and set out on the road to freedom.

As I have contemplated my life, I have thought it's a little like being born in the upper branches of a mighty tree in a great forest, and one day setting out to discover the unshakable certitudes in which these trees are rooted. As you work your way down the trunk, everything becomes so much more massive and impressive, until finally you arrive at the very base of the tree, and find that the whole forest is literally rooted in nothing; maybe a thin tendril of root or two still connecting it to terra firma, but otherwise unsupported, living off of the nourishment it stored away in the days when it was still connected to the life-giving earth.

This discovery motivated me to set off on a quest for things truly rooted. It is a perilous quest; if you are not careful, like Gollum you may find the deep secrets you expected are only hunger and lightless misery, but it is better than going back to your tree, rootless and rotting from within, for knowledge of roots is what our people are dying for. I constantly run into people who are more intelligent and better informed than I (not difficult), but they seem to have an elemental confusion in all their deepest thoughts, and I have concluded it is usually because they are of the forest, and have no knowledge of roots. So, dear readers, let's do some grubbing around in the roots, shall we?