Beyond the Singing Flame
or, Monsters Are Not Going To Come Out Of The Sky And Eat You.
BETWEEN SUBTLE SHADING AND THE ABSENCE OF LIGHT LIES THE NUANCE OF IQLUSION
-- Kryptos
For I am persuaded neither life nor death
Nor angels nor powers nor things yet to be
Can separate us from our Father's love
There's nothing no nothing can come in between
No walls can be builded to fence in the soul
No cavern of darkness can hide me away
I'm sure that He loves me, He lives in my heart
For I am persuaded that He is the way
-- hymn
I've had my head in strange spaces recently.
On the one hand: my life as a mid-level IT geek and a member of a small Anglican church and a neighbourhood association.
On the other hand: involvement in web forums to do with an enigmatic physicist at the heart of the UFO mythos and the intersection of spirituality and the paranormal.
On the third hand: ideas I'm playing with for an experimental programming language which might or not ever be useful, but for the moment is a fun mental toy.
On the fourth hand: my involvement in the Interactive Fiction gaming subculture.
This journey of mine is largely what this blog is about - because I think it's important to document, even if for my own future reference - but sometimes the path gets more emotionally intense than I can put into words on screen. And sometimes I have to rethink what I am trying to do and how I am trying to go about it.
The two 'spooky' boxes that I have opened up - the psychic communities which for want of a better name I'll call the Townsend Brown cluster and the Stephen cluster - are familiar to me because I first came across them back in the 1980s. But there's a lot of unresolved emotional baggage associated with both of them.
Stephen has been called a demon, for instance, and it's not quite clear just what kind of machine Townsend Brown was building in the 1950s but there were claims that interdimensional... something... was involved. Both are the sort of people who have been accused of being the Antichrist, summoning the devil, causing the end of the world, etc, etc. Or else - with a sigh of relief - they were both safely frauds and everything said about them is utter lies.
Except that I now personally know people involved with both of these mystical gentlemen and they don't seem to be either liars or demon-summoners, and last I checked my delicious soul was still safely uneaten. For now.
Most (though not all) of my gamer friends consider everything to do with the paranormal or the soul safely nonexistent (as Science teaches, praised be Science), and happily play and write games set in H P Lovecraft's bleak nihilistic universe of cosmic terror and scientific rigour where mad alien gods eat the Earth when the stars are right.
Which is all good clean fun except that it's now becoming obvious that there really, truly is stuff out there that we don't know what it is.
You can see, perhaps, how this sort of thing can get complicated. There's fiction. There's reality. And the two... sometimes get confused.
Like, for instance, reading Clark Ashton Smith and going 'hmm, he's cribbed that from actual psychic accounts of the next dimension, because I recognise what he's talking about'.
It was as if we no longer existed, except as one divine, indivisible entity, soaring beyond the trammels of matter, beyond the limits of time and space, to attain undreamable shores. Unspeakable was the joy, and infinite the freedom of that ascent, in which we seemed to overpass the zenith of the highest star. Then, as if we had risen with the Flame to its culmination, had reached its very apex, we emerged and came to a pause.
My senses were faint with exaltation, my eyes blind with the glory of the fire; and the world on which I now gazed was a vast arabesque of unfamiliar forms and bewildering hues from another spectrum than the one to which our eyes are habituated. It swirled before my dizzy eyes like a labyrinth of gigantic jewels, with interweaving rays and tangled lustres, and only by slow degrees was I able to establish order and distinguish detail in the surging riot of my perceptions.
All about me were endless avenues of super-prismatic opal and jacinth; arches and pillars of ultra-violet gems, of transcendent sapphire, of unearthly ruby and amethyst, all suffused with a multi-tinted splendor. I appeared to be treading on jewels, and above me was a jeweled sky.
Presently, with recovered equilibrium, with eyes adjusted to a new range of cognition, I began to perceive the actual features of the landscape. With the two moth-like beings still beside me, I was standing on a million-flowered grass, among trees of a paradisal vegetation, with fruit, foliage, blossoms and trunks whose very forms were beyond the conception of tridimensional life. The grace of their drooping boughs, of their fretted fronds, was inexpressible in terms of earthly line and contour, and they seemed to be wrought of pure, ethereal substance, half-translucent to the empyrean light, which accounted for the gem-like impression I had first received.
Translucent, gem-like vegetation. Check. Sights which can't quite be translated into 'three-dimensional' language. Check.
Except Smith's tale is just a 'weird fiction' story from the 1930s.
Except if you read that review, it's more than that - it was actually born from a personal spiritual experience of the writer, it had a huge impact on his life, and as a story it's a wonderful allegory of the imaginative or spiritual life (and are they the same thing or two quite different things?), and the fear and wonder of facing that inward journey. Which suggests it's something more than 'just' a story.
There's more to be said, I think, about how the explosion of 'mediumship' in the late 1800s and early 1900s fed into first Theosophy in its multiple cults and factions and then the 'weird fiction' and then 'science fiction' scene and then the original somehow vanished, so that what we're left now in a lot of fantasy and speculative fiction is actually the fossils of preserved ideas from a former era. All washed up on a beach without cultural context and polished up as fictional tropes.
Take superheroes, for instance. Most superpowers from, say, the X-Men make no scientific sense whatsoever as 'physical mutations' - say Storm's ability to control the weather, or Wolverine's magic 'healing factor' which can withstand a bullet. But they make perfect sense from the 'mind over matter' perspective of a monistic-idealistic philosophy like Christian Science. If the mind creates the body, then of course it can repair it - that's how psychic healing works. So it looks to me like the ideas that fed into the 'superhero' fictional trope - now just a tiny petting zoo for growth-stunted American national gods like Superman and Batman - arose from a wider body of thought swirling around in a whole soup of mystical/scientific dreaming a hundred years ago.
And see, the wider point is that some of these very much out-there ideas, like monism and idealism, weren't fiction then and aren't fiction now. Any more than the things which Project Sign looked at in 1947 and concluded weren't any kind of illusion. Even though they got the Hollywood treatment, even though most of the truth has been wrung out of them. We don't know what these things are, but we know that they exist. Even though we've spent much of the last century denying it - to the point that we're still confused about exactly what went down.
So what kind of world does that put us into, here in the 21st century? One with wonders in it and a lot of fear... and what happens to the firmly materialist science we thought we had, which was going to save us from our nightmares of spirituality, but seems to be opening the doors to everything again?
Weird fiction isn't as fun if you know for a fact that there are actually are shadows in the dark. You tend to be always looking over your shoulder, even inside your own mind. But on the upside: shadows don't necessarily mean danger. They might be friends you've already met coming to say hello.
What we need is a new genre of 'weird fiction' which isn't weird, but points out that yes, we live on the shores of a vast sea, but it's actually a lot happier and more friendly out there than it is here.
