I Hold Four Hydras IV

I hate
Have I never
Found is the word
Hers is a cruel gaze to see my eyes but not their fear

I, the whole of hell within
Have you, Catullus
Found such a bullet in your ventricle for
Her to parse?

I write on air flowing into the four winds
Have you, Catullus
Found such waves filled with the promises of the Lethe
Her image failing even as it is composed?

I fear all things unpromised
Have fictions unturned
Found I never
Her name

I hold four hydras
Mythic beasts that never bred upon the earth
And their poison runs within me


Special thanks to Dr. Andrew Tadie, the concept of patience, and the irreconcilable unity of envy and disdain.

Tolkien as a Christian Writer

Stephen Lawhead is a fantasy, science-fiction and historical fiction novelist moderately well-known in Christian circles for his celtic-themed and religiously inspired work. In his essay, J.R.R. Tolkien, Master of Middle Earth, he explained that the principle influence Tolkien’s work had on him was not in structure or content but in purpose. He, apparently, was brought up to believe that all of a Christian’s artistic energy must be channeled directly into evangelism, but Tolkein’s work freed him from this and allowed him to be satisfied writing from a Christian perspective without all of his work being the gospel in disguise. In this essay he claimed to have, despite the lack of a Christian allegory or evangelistic message, seen “Tolkien’s Christianity written on every page”; while this is certainly both hyperbole and metaphor a more nihilistic evaluation of Tolkien’s mythology will show the argument to be false, and the entire “Christian” good vs. evil structure to be philosophically flawed.
Many christian writers, many of them quite scholarly, have made these same assumptions regarding Tolkien’s work; their critical, collective, mistake is to focus exclusively on The Lord of the Rings, often referencing its popularity following Peter Jackson’s films, and entirely ignore the Silmarillion and its derivatives. Another excellent source for this kind of analysis would be the Histories of Middle-Earth series, though due to time constraints (it is a twelve volume set) they will not be considered here.
While Tolkien was a Christian, a Roman Catholic, the spiritual themes and underlying divine order present in his work, much more explicit in The Silmarillion than in The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit, are more similar to pagan Anglo-Saxon spirituality mixed with his own post-WWI despair than to Judeo-Christian ideals. What Lawhead emphasized most in his essay, and what many conservatives lament being lost from modern literature, was a clear, even absolute, view of good and evil; and of the triumph of good over evil. And on the surface Tolkien’s work does seem to oppose relativist existentialism (it is nearly always clear who the “good” and “bad” characters are, and the protagonists are almost always “good”). This view of Middle Earth, however, required a rather shallow reading of his works, or perhaps a reading only of The Hobbit (which was a intended as a children’s tale).
In the Christian tradition good always triumphs over evil. In the gospels this is accomplished through love, God’s love overcomes the evil of the world and is victorious in the resurrection of Christ. The idea of love as the supreme force has been imitated in any number of great works of literature, but it is not present in Tolkien. Of his major stories, The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and The Silmarillion divided into four discernible plots - The War of the Jewels, Beren and Luthien, The Children of Hurin, and The Fall of Gondolin, love is a major theme in one of them (Beren and Luthien), a minor theme is three more (LOTR, The Children of Hurin, and The Fall of Gondolin), and the deciding, positive factor in the resolution of the conflict of none.
In The Lord of the Rings the ring of power is destroyed because of chance (or divine will, depending on interpretation). In The Hobbit “good” barely triumphs at all, and when it does it is for no very good reason, Beorn simply appears and saves the day. In the Children of Hurin “good” is decisively defeated, the lies of Glaurung (the doom of Melkor in actuality) overcome the nobility of Turin and Nienor and they die in despair. Love is in fact used against the protagonists, urging them toward their rather Oedipal doom. In The Fall of Gondolin the result is similar, the overwhelming power of Angband destroys the glorious city of Gondolin and the protagonists, Idril and Tuor, barely escape. Again, love is a destructive force, driving Maeglin toward the betrayal of his city.
In the greater story of the Silmarillion, the War of the Jewels, love is likewise absent, Feanor and his sons do great evil in the cause of revenge and are utterly defeated. The victory of the Valar over Melkor is accomplished by sheer might. Only in the story of Beren and Luthien does love even approach the dominating force it is in the Christian gospels. Love is clearly the motivating force behind the actions of Beren and Luthien, and because of that supreme love they are eventually able to be together. Their victory however, is minor: it is “joy in midst of weeping,” a defiance of evil but not a triumph over it. Thus, thematically, Tolkien’s work is not Christian in nature. While the protagonists are often very loving, romantically (Beren and Luthien, Aragorn and Arwen, Idril and Tuor) or platonically (Frod and Sam, Turin and Beleg), they are never victorious because of their love. Or rather, evil is not vanquished by love. It is vanquished by the will of Illuvatar, by the order of Eru over the chaos of Melkor.
Contrary to the view presented in The Lord of the Rings films, elves, though immortal, are neither perfect nor sublime. Many times in the Silmarillion elves are shown to be just as malevolent, rash and greedy as men or orcs. Thus, while certain characters can be said to be good or evil, the distinction is not as clear as many reader seem to assume. Or rather, there is an absolute evil, orcs can be nothing else and neither Sauron nor Melkor has any underlying “good” motivations, but there is no equal (or greater) and opposing good. One can assume that Illuvatar, the creator god of Tolkien’s cosmogonic myth, is far greater in power than his creations, but he is absent from the rest of Tolkien’s work. Acting in Illuvatar’s stead are the Valar, created beings on the same level as Melkor - principally Manwe, Ulmo, Aule, Orome, Mandos, Tulkas, Varda, and Yavanna (also Lorien, Nienna, Este, Vaire, Vana, and Nessa). Unlike Melkor, whose will is the definition of evil, the Valar fall somewhat short of the good they champion, while always intending well they are capable of failure and are quite nearly defeated by Melkor on several occasions.
Both in the Silmarillion and the Lord of the Rings “good” is ultimately victorious over “evil”, but at a cost few other fantasy authors are willing to admit. Even after Angband has been destroyed and the Silmarils recovered the sons of Feanor again attack and commit a kin-slaying to reclaim the jewels, before being killed themselves. Christianity, and Christian inspired literature, always portrays a solution to the ills of the world. A messiah myth, a conquest of evil or some other crucial change that promises to produce a better future. The Lord of the Rings is in this vein, the last evil lord is defeated and destroyed, his servants are scattered, the kingdoms of the Numenorians are re-built, and everyone is supposed to live happily ever after. This is very different from the conclusion of the Silmarillion, where it is written that everything has passed into darkness and ruin and that this was ever the fate of the world and if there is a solution even Manwe and Mandos do not know of it. Even in the Lord of the Rings though, and this is mirrored to a lesser degree in The Hobbit, the very thing the protagonists wanted most to protect is despoiled. The world is never exactly as it was, there is no new heaven and new earth. Not all scars heal, thing are never truly made right again.
All of this, the misunderstanding of Tolkien’s work by Christians, may be more the fault of a misunderstanding of Christianity than of Tolkien. It is doubtful that Tolkien, living in the era he did, would agree with this interpretation of his work; informed as it is more by post-modern literature than medieval epic poetry. The problem lies in an understanding of the Christian narrative, the unfinished story of the Hebrews. According to the prophecies of St. John the legions of heaven are coming to wage a final war just as the Valar fought the War of Wrath, but just as the Valar attacked not the unfaithful Morquendi but Angband itself, Christ, garbed in white robes dipped in blood, is coming to enchain Satan, not to destroy the evil nations of the world. Thus from a Christian perspective the war between good and evil must be seen as completely above the actions of ordinary men, apart from any narrative that occurs within it. In neither tradition are men (or elves) ever victorious over evil (even in The Lord of the Rings, where men come to closest to victory, it is a chance misstep, not the goodness of Frodo, that defeats Sauron). Men are utterly outmatched by evil, only through divine intervention - the War of Wrath, the destruction of the Ring of Power, the resurrection of Christ - can victory be achieved. Authors like Lawhead and the vast majority of fantasy and science-fiction writers, in whose stories ordinary men defeat evil, are deluding themselves; such stories do not reflect the essential nature of the world we live in, and thus, unlike Tolkien’s work, are essentially false - fiction in the truest sense of the word.

Special thanks to Wikipedia, Emily Smith, and Scholastic Inc.

I Hold Four Hydras III

I know I cannot swim and still I dream of diving deep into subterranean waters where the world is lit by flowering polyps, those who
Have never seen the ocean floor nor felt its membranous sands might still have
Found any of its treasures for white and deadened they drift to
Her like vapor in the currents of the farther waves

I know I cannot swim and
Have never seen the ocean floor nor
Found any of its treasures for
Her like vapor in the current

I know I
Have never
Found any of
Her like

I hold four hydras
And one slips from my grasp
Three hydras to demarc the tide


Special thanks to Rachel Carson and, as always, Seattle University Housing And Residence Life

I Hold Four Hydras II

I am aridity, I am the cracked and the dry
Have you no moisture?
Found you no well?
Hers is the water and the life and the glory

I scratch the seared earth until I
Have ten bloody fingertips
Found are the wet sands
Her power, the moon, hid before dawn

I, amid red sands fine
Have, feet worn grey and splayed
Found, upon the blasted heath
Her. And know no road to the city or the temple

I ache and sting and
Have
Found no dwelling place beyond my crystalline spheres
Her sight etched there ‘til all goes to dirt

I hold four hydras
Dead and limp
Reeking of all necrotic things


Special thanks to St. Matthew, Chiori Miyagawa, Mark Moffett, and, once again, Seattle University Housing And Residence Life

Books I Read Over Winter Break

Cat’s Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut (re-read)
I wish I could be a Bokononist.

Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut (re-read)
Anyone who thinks that WWII was a just war should read this book.

Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut
Possibly the most wandering, tangent-filled, anti-novel I have ever read. Should have been a collection of short stories. At least half of the paragraphs had no direct relationship to the plot, and instead were personal anecdotes relating, often but not always, to the unsuccessful first attempt at the novel. Discussed free-will, the general terribleness of life, and how humans can live in such a pointless world (much the same as every other novel he has written but more explicit).

War Dances - Sherman Alexie
Alexie, again, describes the lives of half a dozen, mostly half-indian, men I would not want to be. With lives that are dumb and pathetic and semi-autobiographical. Like with Vonnegut, one has to be constantly wondering if what one is reading is fiction. David Shields would have a cow.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz
The story of a nerdy, morbidly obese, second-generation Dominican whom no one ever loves, except for a middle aged, married, part-time prostitute, sort-of. His life is brief, sort-of. and wondrous only if one considers the stories of his mother, sister and grandparents, which Diaz does at length. Oscar de Leon (Wao is a nickname) is born an american, lives to adulthood as an american, yet somehow dies a Dominican after realizing that he is doomed.
Moral of the story: the two best things for a man are to kiss a woman and be beaten to within an inch of his life.
The Tolkien references are the highlight of the story, especially his more obtuse ones from the Silmarillion. “Speak, friend, and enter” is definitely going on my dorm room door.
On a personal note: up until part III I felt a considerable kinship between myself and Oscar (I have the extra 200 pounds in my tongue instead of my waistline and the thousands of role-playing hours in Legos instead of D&D shit), but when he lost weight he ceased to make any sense as a character. Unlike his previous infatuations, I don’t have a ton of sympathy for his last love and I can’t tell if he was resigned to his doom or just being stupid. Also: he is a immigrant, I am not, this matters; I’m not sure why or how but it does.

The Lacuna - Barbara Kingsolver
Kingsolver does the Kingsolver thing to great effect. Her imagery is blatant but not ugly. Her use of multiple voices is without equal, thought not to the same effect as in The Poisonwood Bible.
It has been a very long time since I cried at the death of a character (I was dry-eyed at the end of The Road, For Whom The Bell Tolls, and Oscar Wao) and, despite my knowledge of its historical inevitability, I cried when Lev Trotsky died.
The story loses momentum after the aforementioned assassination but somehow manages to end in a manner fitting of its first pages.
I have never hated the 50s as much as I did when reading the last fourth of this novel, whatever their flaws, the hippies did the world a great service.

Ender’s Game - Orson Scott Card (re-read)
Good idea, bad writing. Card’s prose does not match his vision. The slang especially is annoying and unauthentic. His racial profiling is also aggravating, he assigns attributes to a race, comments on them, and then makes them central to his two dimensional minor characters. The protagonist, a white male, has three side-kicks, one ethnic, one female, one very short, his enemies are arrogant europeans that are bigger than him but not smarter. Could this be more cliche?

Night - Elie Wiesel
The best holocaust account I have read. Wiesel does not try make something good out of his experience, he is not trying to find redemption in it, he is simply bearing witness. Recording the reduction of a people, both physical and psychological.
I have read more horrific accounts but none that chronicle the process as well as this one, the practiced, expert annihilation. Night emphasized more than others that the goal was not enslavement, it was liquidation. The cruelty to the living is almost extraneous. That anyone escaped at all is astounding.

On Gods

All primal human cultures assume the existence of higher powers, that is entities with our reasoning and decision-making capabilities, but without our animal characteristics, present within the world (god-like entities outside of the physical/chronological universe are a later invention [largely out of logical necessity], and will be considered separately). Although there is no direct evidence for the existence of such beings there are myriad phenomena attributed them and despite a long history of philosophical, academic atheism the vast majority of the world’s population continues to place great faith in them with no apparent ill-effects.
Religious and spiritual people are not, on average, any more or less happy with their lives than irreligious people. And although religious justifications have been given for many acts generally thought of as heinous and unjust (although actually just brutally self-serving) the irreligious have shown themselves to be just as capable of such atrocities (Hitler, Stalin and Mao are roughly on par with Cardinal Richelieu, Hernando Cortes and the Knights Templar). Thus a consideration of the existence of higher powers should refrain from calling upon consequential examples - no way of thought so essential can possibly result in a necessarily better life, for the truth, which is the ultimate subject here, is something a great many people are perfectly content without.
It must be noted that what is being dealt with here is probabilities. Religious texts may be considered but will not be given an authoritative status, for nothing nearly as specific as a name or physical attributes can be given to such higher powers. These will be hereafter referred to as gods - this term is used to simplicity’s sake, it is meant to imply nothing as to the sexuality or plurality of said being(s).
Assuming then that such gods exist, the question becomes what, if anything, can be said about them. The fundamental attribute of a god, found in all conceptions of them, is immortality. This shall serve as a premise or definition, rather than a point of discussion. Positing mortal spiritual entities would imply a whole field of study (celestial biology, chemistry, physics) that no one is in any position to study. It is also a matter of the burden of proof, death as we think of it is a peculiarly animalistic trait, for the rest of the universe, including some other forms of life, the distinction between the living and the non-living is not nearly so clear (a severed limb is dead immediately, a flower may be kept alive in water for days before it begins to wilt, all its life systems apparently intact and unless cut down or otherwise destroyed trees of certain species may live for millennia). Thus unless evidence is presented otherwise one must assume that gods do not live and die as we do and are thus immortal; immortal not in the sense of Tolkien’s Quendi but in the sense of the hydrogen molecule or mathematics.
Following from this, the immortality of gods, is the limited quantity of gods. Which is highly useful, as it contradicts the “god as universe” pantheist fallacy. If gods are defined as everything than the attributes of said gods are no different from that of everything, and referring to them as anything other than the universe personified is pointless. The tendency toward this in certain academic circles can be traced to a valid reaction against Indo-European anthropomorphism, but it is not the only escape from it. Therefore, as gods cannot be everywhere and everything, and are immortal, they must be of limited quantity. The arguments of panentheism would offer a logical counter to this, claiming that god is not everything, but everything is contained within god, this however, does not avoid the essential problem, which is a confusion of topic: in speaking of such “gods” one loses any cohesion to the concept. If such an entity which contained all the universe can be called a god, the beings within the world that have been thus-far discussed must be called something else (or vice-versa).
If gods, that is immortal entities possessing conceptual powers akin to that of a man, exist it seems highly unlikely that, given their utter separation form the mammal-primate line of development, they would bear any resemblance to men, even the imposition of human-like thought seems a pretension. Some of the oldest conceptions of gods admit this. The judaic YHWH - I am that I am - clearly defies any attempt at humanization and the later Christian idea of the trinity can, as Nietsche claimed, be said to have killed god. The original Latin and Chinese conceptions of gods were equally vague, prior to their interaction with the Greek and Indian cultures (respectively) neither even deigned to give their gods names and considered them more as immutable forces than as anthropomorphic entities.
In the development of theologies there seems to be a tendency to reduce gods to a simple force of goodness. By the classical era of Greek culture philosophers often spoke of god as a singular entity despite their polytheistic religion (a contradiction Socrates pointed out in the dialogue Euthyphro), by this time the old stories of Zeus’s philandering and Hera’s rivalry with Aphrodite and the like seemed to not have been taken very seriously (anyone trained in critical thinking could tear Helenic religion apart in a few sentences). The resulting religion, emphasizing cults and practical philosophies, eventually morphed over the course of the hellenistic era into a sort of Proto-Christianity. Christianity and later Islam continued this reduction that has been nearly completed by the more liberal contemporary faction of each. “God” has become a embodiment of whatever ideal the culture happens to possess and the scriptures themselves are moralistic enough to be twisted into nearly any message. There are two possible responses to this, one rejects the ethically monolithic basis of the reduction, the other points again to the potential alienness of gods and the unlikeliness that they would follow popular morality so closely.
Indo-European polytheistic spirituality (anthropomorphic or not) is based on a world of competing forces, both in the world around us, the sea contending with the land, and within us, desires for passion, wisdom and glory often seeming to pull in very different directions. In opposition to this monotheistic religions posit one supreme deity, usually either in a patron relationship - the god of the Hebrews, or as a universal force - the Christian god of love. Whether or not love is the ultimate force in the world is a matter for another discussion, but it must be admitted that there are other forces present contrary to love and some that seem to bear no relation to it what-so-ever. Which is how the Greeks and other polytheists would justify gods of love, wisdom, war, the earth, the sky and the sea; though despite its representational superiority to monotheism any sort of spirituality as an explanation of the world suffers from a lack of positive evidence, leading to the second argument against value-centric theism.
Popular religion has created a divinity that is fundamentally humanistic. The first concern of the deity(s) is humans, human concerns, and human morality. Given all that has been stated regarding the otherness of gods, especially relating to the earliest conceptions of them, this seems unlikely. The chances that the will of the supreme power of the universe would fit whatever value society currently holds most idealized are small.
Aside from post-hellenistic religious texts and modern theorizing (which essentially amounts to wishful thinking) there is no reason to believe that gods bear any more relation to us in their values than in their physical appearance. The total otherness of such deities baffles any real attempts to consider their attributes. Issues including their relation to time, human will (free or otherwise), and love presume such essentially human characteristics that the entire discussion is foolish. In short, immortal, bodiless entities may exist, or may not and there may be entirely psychological explanations for spiritualism. Any further development is blind assumption.

An observant reader will notice that this essay, like many platonic dialogues, established almost nothing that it did not presuppose. This was not its intent, but it is a perfectly acceptable result; divinity, like piety or justice, is a problem that defies explanation. All one can do is become familiar with the problem and use the lessons learned in more relevant circumstances.

The Hazards of Fish II

They are binding my hands
Thick cords of leather
And my feet
Around the binding is another rope, thrice-wound and strong, between my hands extended
And lashed to the harness of an ass
My feet as well
They yell curtly and the animals trot each forward
Each their end to me
Dragged through the dirt as the lines goes taut, one before the other
And then I am suspended
And my spine is separating
And the cord is cutting my wrists to the bone
And my stomach tears
And my intestines are in the dirt
And the ass does not stop, pale coils dragging behind
Passing them, my murderers, I see their faces
Mine each one
And the ass too I see is myself, pulling with all the strength of my body
And there are no bindings, I grip the rope my fingers clenched
For no man may be torn to pieces such that he himself is not party