Beyond the Labyrinth

In Episode Six, we beagle about Alfred’s new novella, A Push of the Pendulum. The novella opens as its reluctant hero, Julian Drake, is dislocated – emotionally, because his parents are divorcing and selling his childhood home, but also physically, as they have enrolled him in boarding school – St. Eligius Episcopal School, to be precise. The novella traces Julian’s process as he adjusts to boarding school, learns to use an enchanted clock, saves the school from the evil intentions of trustee Stryker, and, yes, finds place and home in his universe.

Alfred talks in this episode about influences from earlier fantasy writers (think John Bellairs, not J.K. Rowling) to thinkers, especially the neo-Platanists. He also talks about the human need to transcend the self and find connection – or home – in the universe, themes in the novella. And then there’s the tension between idea and story – Alfred’s background in theology and Hannah’s in literature make for some lively discussion in this area.

An avid reader of fantasy literature since childhood, Alfred embarked on the project of writing his own fantasy story partially from frustration. He wanted to show that it’s possible for magic to make sense in a story – to create an internally and metaphysically consistent representation of magic in a fantasy novel. Alfred argues that he has done just this in A Push of the Pendulum.

Read the entire novella or download a pdf version.

Grave marker reminiscent of the great mother archetype. (Photo by Alfred Reeves Wissen)

In Episode Five, we beagle about in a topic–plague–that seems very close to home, but at the same time will take us far and wide, all the while showing us the universality of human experience.    We explore the eerie similarities of Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (published in 1722 about the last round of black death in London in 1665) and our own experience today with COVID.  Then, in attempt to plumb what it all means, we turn to Hermann Hesse’s 1930 novel Narcissus and Goldmund, with its exploration of creativity in medieval Germany includes a chapter dominated by an outbreak of plague.

Plague mask.

A bit of color from Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, read by Andrew Cullom.

Both Daniel Defoe and Samuel Pepys remark on London streets empty of carriages during the worst weeks of the Great Plague of 1665. (17th-century Flemish, by unknown painter)

More On Plagues and Pandemics

Discover Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year.

Marvel at Samuel Pepys and his million-word Diary of life in the 17th century.

Explore Hermann Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund.

Nine images of the Great Plague in London in 1665 (http://catalogue.wellcomelibrary.org/record=b1052653, See page for author, CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons).

Artwork by Samuel Keesee.

Join us today as we beagle about in questions of belief, starting with total denial – Douglas Adams’ electric monk from Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency! We’ll also look at the more serious side as we consider the filters we all use to protect ourselves through our discussion of Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, and The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows.”

Published in 1987, Adams’ Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detection Agency is a departure for Adams from The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series.  He had finished So Long and Thanks for All the Fish  and was turning to something new.  It’s a very clever and funny novel in which the basic premise is that since in theory everything is interconnected with everything else, solving a crime – or more likely – the location of a lost feline – can involve literally anything, like a trip to the Bahamas, and any expenses associate therewith.  The novel involves time travel, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” and, most importantly for our purposes,  an “Electric Monk.” This monk is an appliance, like a dishwasher or washing machine.  But instead of doing the tedious cleaning of dishes for you, an electric monk saves you from the tedious task of believing all the things the world expects you to believe.  One of the plot threads is driven by a malfunctioning electric monk whose belief in absurd things has driven it to need a new motherboard, and it’s been put out to pasture, so to speak, since it’s cheaper to upgrade to a new model.  Adams is poking fun at consumerism run amok, to the point where we even buy labor-saving devices to handle what our culture challenges us to believe about “reality.”

In The Doors of Perception Aldous Huxley suggests that we filter out most of what our senses are capable of perceiving. Huxley was an English writer – many of us remember him for his dystopian science fiction novel, Brave New World.  Grandson of 19th-century biologist Thomas Huxley – known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” for his advocacy of Darwin’s theory of evolution – Huxley was born just before the turn of the 20th-century to a family with a history of exploring evolving understandings of the relation of humanity to the universe accompanying rapid advances in all the sciences.

In May 1953, Aldous Huxley was 59 and had an abiding interest in mysticism. He had been following the literature in the emerging field of psychedelic drugs and self-transcendence when he took advantage of an opportunity to play “guinea pig” with a dose of mescaline. Mescaline, a psychedelic drug like LSD, is derived from the peyote cactus and is used in Native American religious observances. Huxley’s short book Doors of Perception recounts his experiences on mescaline and explores interpretations of the sense of self-transcendence that can occur under its influence.  More to the point of our discussion today is the passage from 19th-century poet William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, to which the title of Huxley’s book refers: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”

If Huxley explores the idea of bypassing the filter that insulates us from reality of Being, John Lennon embraces the paradox of existence in Tomorrow Never Knows. Taking the listener on a musical “trip” he explores ideas from Timothy Leary’s The Psyc...

N. C. Wyeth, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In this episode, we nose around in a loosely gathered suite of ideas arising from Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur and some modern interpretations, including the film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Malory’s book is a reworking of legends and tales of Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Arthur may have been a war chief in the fight against the Saxons, but Malory’s gathering of the legends does not capture the sense of purpose implied by that mission and instead presents the knights’ activities with a jolting randomness.

There is a randomness, too, to the adventures in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, one that rings true to the “original.”  The 1975 film has become a classic, with legions of fans who can recite the entire movie.  Yes, it is funny, if you like Pythonesque humor.  But there is something deep going on in the film, a juxtaposition between modern and medieval thinking that gives the film a depth that, even if unintentional, is very real. 

From the Episode

What surprises me about the Arthurian legend is just this compulsion to keep retelling these stories which might not have any factual basis at all – and not just retelling them but investing them with portent.  Every retelling, including Malory’s, seems to have an agenda. – Hannah Grachien

Did life seem more random to medieval people because of the chaos they were subject to? And do we want to see order because we’re spoiled by a more or less settled civilization (though it seems to be becoming more and more unsettled by the day)? – Alfred Reeves Wissen

In the case of Elaine in Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, there’s sinister magic being done by a bad, bad woman doing bad, bad magic, messing with all the good, strong, good men doing good things. – Hannah Grachien

We have lost something. As Descartes said, “we have made ourselves the masters and possessors of nature,” and in doing so we’ve lost a sense of transcendence, of things larger than ourselves – a deep sense of loss of meaning. – Alfred Reeves Wissen

Mentioned in this Episode

Le Morte d’Arthur by Thomas Malory

The Once and Future King by T.H. White

Monty Python and the Holy Grail

The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Tim Powers Photo by Roberta F. Used under a Creative Commons license and is unmodified from the original.

John Keats

“He knew that he was about to change his world forever, rob it of all its glamour and adventurous expectancy and what Shelley had once in a poem called the ‘tempestuous loveliness of terror.'” – Tim Powers, The Stress of Her Regard

In this episode we nose around in a loosely gathered suite of ideas arising from Tim Powers’ fantasy/horror/alternate history novel The Stress of Her Regard and one of the Romantic poems that inspired it, “Lamia” by John Keats. Powers’ novel is a strange one, but then so are the poetry and the events that inspired it.

Tim Powers:

“I look for a situation or historical character or place that looks likely to have elements that will make a good book. … And then I read extensively: biographies, journals, ideally contemporary travel guides, things like that, always looking for something that is too cool not to use. … I think ‘what was really going on there?’ I know what the history books say, but why did this guy really do that?” — From “Tim Powers: ‘I don’t have to make anything up,'” The Guardian.

Read more

What is a “lamia”?

Female demon, late 14c., from Latin lamia “witch, sorceress, vampire,” from Greek lamia “female vampire, man-eating monster,” literally “swallower, lecher,” from laimos “throat, gullet” (see larynx). Perhaps cognate with Latin lemures “spirits of the dead” (see lemur) and, like it, borrowed from a non-IE language. Used in early translations of the Bible for screech owls and sea monsters. In Middle English also sometimes, apparently, mermaids — from The Online Etymology Dictionary

Read more, including a definition from 1398: Also kynde erreþ in som beestes wondirliche j-schape, as it fareþ in a beest þat hatte lamia, …

“Lamia” by John Keats

Read it on Project Gutenberg.

Morris at age 53

In 1894, William Morris wrote a tract for the Socialist Democratic Federation journal Justice called “How I Became a Socialist.”  While the article mostly concerns social causes, Morris at one point makes a remarkable statement that captures the essence of our interest in this brilliant Victorian:

“Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilisation.”

While few have heard of Morris today, if one reads around in the 19th century, in poetry, essays, fantasy, or the various writings of the Arts and Crafts movement, Morris is a towering figure who remains fascinating.  The two impulses in this statement–the desire to produce beautiful things and the hatred of modern civilisation–reflect his varied interests.  He was a leading figure in the British Arts and Crafts movement, not only designing furniture and textiles but using and teaching traditional craftsmanship in his own manufacturing company.  His company and his intellectual pursuits constituted a revolt against the growing use of mass production and indeed against the whole of the modern civilisation. They are a driving force in his writing, for instance in the deliberate medievalism of his novels, through which he became the first recognized fantasy author in the English canon, and in his social criticism, where he advocated for common people and for a socialist revision of modern life.

We live in a time when the verities of modern life seem less and less reliable, a time when our shared assumptions about how society works seem one by one to be proven wrong.  When we consider the fact that many of the bedrock ideologies of our time–mass production, global free-market capitalism, and consumerism, to name a few–date from the 19th century, we are not surprised to find our own doubts and discomforts foretold to us by Morris.  His unease mirrors our own.

Today we aim to explore Morris, and especially his novel The Wood Beyond the World which he published two years before his death in 1896.  We are no experts, but find his work interesting and evocative of many questions and connections in literary and social history.  Let’s explore a few . . .

Learn more about William Morris:

Many of Morris’ writings (including The Wood Beyond the World) are available for free at Project Gutenberg.

The Wikipedia entry on Morris is helpful.

The William Morris Society (U.S. affiliate)