The story is told, in "The Silver Chair", of Aslan giving the two children a series of "signs" which they are to remember throughout their journey/assignment. Scrubb and Pole keep forgetting the signs, which they are supposed to recite day and night. Thus they always mess up, in the manner in which we all do, "continuously, continuously...."

Nonetheless, they are rescued from their mistakes and faults and doubts eventually. And we never hear again of the signs. Like the giants above ground and the underground kingdom under theirs, they have served their purpose--a purpose of which no one was really aware, excepting The Lion. The giant stone blocks at Harfang which declare,"Under Me" are never mentioned again, nor is the giants' castle from which the words were seen by the trio as they languished in captivity. Rather like Giant Despair and Diffidence...

So it is that the mysterious signs, for all practical purposes, disappear. They had one purpose, relating to 3 people in the flesh, as a schoolmaster to and about the flesh and as much about overconfidence in the flesh as anything. They are not like, "The Law" of Ezra and Nehemiah, which even after it has served its schoolmasterly function as a precursor to The Lion by Another Name, still persists. The Ten Commandments refuse to go away, even in the breach--maybe especially in the breach, and in our tendencies to slide back to the beggarly elements of our understanding; until the time comes when we, like the publican in the temple, admit our beggarly standing and beat our breasts because we have no hope of justifying ourselves before God or even before the Pharisees/Sadducees who run the place as if they owned it....

What I am trying to say by way of illustration, is that this blog is over. I have come to the point wherein I believe I have made my point, and have therefore gone beyond my focal point into mere stream-of-consciousness meandering. The blog has blogged down because it has overextended itself.

What was the point, then? Simply that the universe is person-based, not arbitrarily governed by chance or dance or any of so many confederacies of dunce-dances. And that when the Holy Spirit departs because we insist that everything has to make complete sense to us (logically a fool's errand of course), then one is left with a void only because we have so chosen a void--which does not even exist, as I recently hypothesized; that we prefer nihil and an-nihil-ation to Full-Orbed Reality. First and foremost, "being and nothingness" is an evasion of somewhat difficult assignments, as was the case with Pole and Scrubb. We also use entropy to excuse our laziness and the preference of our wills for, as AA puts it, some "easier, softer way." Which always crumples in the face of testing, and is not even personally satisfying; and we can eventually get to Screwtape's desires to see that we get to the end and see, in delectable despair, that we did "neither what we ought NOR what we liked."

I may have mentioned early in the blog that I was inspired to start this by a literal sign; one which I always intended to share herein, but is now irrelevant. Because it had a purpose, for me, and not for anyone else in the formation of Bassocontinuo, it would be only an embarrassment to my limited readership. It is also a sign that would be mocked because the context was unique and because the world only accepts miraculous signs if they portend what McWorld wanted in the first place; false prophets are always preferred by the majority. While I am not a prophet, I have great sympathy for Jeremiah, who was attacked by several prophets at once who cried "Peace, peace.." at a time when there was only war and more war. I have often majored on O'Connor because her voice was prophetic and because if people can't or won't hear what she said so well in both her fiction and esp. her letters, why in the world would they believe me?

That is another thematic element of the blog which never was developed properly, like so many of my dangling one-sided conversations. To wit, "They have Moses and the prophets; if they do not hear them, then they would not believe even if one should rise from the dead." Are my frail and trailing-off words to be compared in any way to the words of Moses and the true prophets, much less to be compared to the fulfillment Words/Logos of Christ, in whom is the Fulfillment of the Law?

"A Prophet, and more than a prophet, is here." "Of which Moses spoke." "Moses would not do" what most people were/are doing, neither in 33 AD or now. Will "religin an' polly-tickin" really save the day? Will philo-sophy, or sophism itself, suffice, even at the end of the day, much less at the end of our lives, not to even imagine an extension to the "end of the Age"?

"This is my Beloved Son in Whom I am well pleased...hear ye Him."

"The air we breathe is...."

Is it reasonable--these days--to have faith in nothingness (from Nirvana to Nietzche)?

It seems that the whole concept of nothingness is the result of a sustained yet transient ignorance. The ancients-- those that weren't having a nervous reaction to a full universe and whole pantheons of "gods"--did not believe in "nothing" i.e. a total void somewhere. Science proves--no, it suggests--that there may be no such thing as a void--what is not full of photons is full of matter or neutrinos or strings perhaps; not to mention the difficult subject of dark matter. Even "space" is not "nothing" for it has at least four dimensions to its name and likely much more. We once thought--not too long ago-- that we could produce a perfect vacuum, when in actuality all we can do is suck out some gases, leaving tons of energy and particles behind.

What is "seen" by man or even imagined by us is quite puny compared to what is "unseen"--hence every person, who lives and moves and has his being in Utter Something, lives by faith in what is unseen. But does what is unseen become therefore "nothing"?

There has been a brief intermediate stage of man wherein the concept of nothingness has taken hold--but the secondary gain of this hypothesis is an overwhelming temptation that makes every such belief-impulse highly suspect, smelling a lot like "teen spirit." Teens are well known for their enthusiasm to evade the terrors of personal responsibility--how well I recall--(ow!)...but one could argue that "adults" are merely children with more narrow and well-practiced defense mechanisms-- and that what is most desired by them, i.e., utter independence, owes more to the idea of nothingness as opposed to the fact of--and "the habit of"-- being. Having once again observed this first hand over the past year, I am struck much more this time than last time about the fact that our home was/is actually fairly well grounded in reality as we brought up our own children, whereas those overexposed to or enamored of "McWorld" do have a hyperconvenient nihilism--beyond even relativism-- underlying their many excuses. And, saddest of all, is to apply the rubric "Christian" to what is the hypothesis most distant from the axioms even of deism.

Hence O'Connor's observation about nihilism is quite true--and the obvious question is then, well, isn't nihilism something? An idea? And do not our ideas have concrete consequences? Watch that neuronal sequencing stuff!!!

To me this habit of insistence is somewhat akin to a smoking addiction that masses of people just won't quit even in the face of heart disease, emphysema, and loss of limb and life besides the aggravation and sustaining of chronic pain syndromes. We force upon ourselves the desirability of nirvanas to escape a world of pain so often self-engineered by choice when the alternative is, "the bleeding obvious" (insert crux here). Thanks again to Dr. Freud for naming the forms and formats of childishness.

So we can't have our nothingness, or eat it either. We only "duck-duck-goose" (ahem) ourselves silly.

"Entirely too silly."

"Parshas Truma"

Some complained--those that were too old or weak for such work.

"I--I--can't take it anymore."

"Worthless Jew!" Katzen hits maus on head w/ rifle.

"If you're unhappy--go back to the P.O.W. camp."

"It's ok--we'll help you when no one is looking."

We tried to help, but--what you think?--some went back to the tents to freeze and starve. But what happened to them, I don't know.

Still, eighty per cent stayed. There was enough to eat, and a warm bed. It was better to stay.

Always I went to bed exhausted. And one night I had a dream.

"Don't worry--don't worry, my child..."

A voice was talking to me. It was, I think, my dead grandfather. It was so real, this voice....

"You will come out of this place--free!...on the day of Parshas Truma."

I woke up right away. And when I went to sleep, again it was, "Parshas Truma! Parshas Truma!"

--from, "Maus" pp 56-57 Not exactly your Tom and Jerry tale....tbc

9-ll----38

Given "Maus" by Art Spiegelman by our reporter friend Allison--I have read numerous excerpts but I don't think the whole thing, which presents no mere philosophical matter but is rather more historical and autobiographical in a rather unsentimental way.

Also resumed reading Eric Metaxas' bio of Dietrich Bonhoffer, and have just read of the 9/ll of 1938 known as Kristallnacht. There will never be any way from our "kultur" to recover from, much less be unaffected by, Hitler and the Holocaust as the prime mark of the 20th Century and maybe in fact the crowning failure of humanism, scientism, secularism, atheism, religion, politics, and more. Who in fact trusts these "isms" any more but fanatics? Yet daily we are loaded up, "over, under, sideways down" with their nihilistic debris. It's kind of like a post traumatic stress syndrome that keeps reproducing itself...

I do keep tabs on the BBC which I find to be probably the most impartial news source I have found. Certainly more so than NPR and The Wall Street Journal, eh, wot?

The international coverage is far better, as one might expect, but a less jaundiced view of America is also worthwhile. The Brits understand us much better than you might think! I get Bangkok news faster than Mark does!! Speaking of whom, it is my understanding that internationally some Jewish commentators, including even from the NY Times at one point, that Christians in the third world are the "new Jews...

I'll let that settle for a moment.

There are also a number of atheist commentators who have taken note of the wholesale slaughter of whole Christian villiages and people groups in India, Pakistan, and Burma where genocide goes on unhindered except for a small resistance element. The church bombings and the blasphemy laws have escalated even just this Christmas. Women in particular appear to be targets.

And yet on university campuses our paragons of education and civilization let this pass, without comment. Our media meanwhile has been hijacked by celebrity news. Checked MSN lately?

Many people, some as highly educated as were the Germans, in the East, feel that they are entitled to not only finish Hitler's campaign against the Jews but Heyderich's pogroms against the New Jews. It really stands to reason since Christians owe literally everything to the Jews. The world is just catching up to history i.e. that we have been grafted into the tree that it would destroy if it only could.

As I have quoted Walker Percy before, tho the Jews are unsubsumable--and unassimilatable--"It begins by killing the Jews..." I'll leave it to your reading of WP and The Thanatos Syndrome to finish what he hinted at.

KULTUR-KAMPT REDUX ET REDUX DE NUEVO

I say again,
Let no man think me a fool;
if otherwise,, yet as a fool receive me..........."

1Cor 11:18

(The author here partakes, to make a point, of his weaknesses and includes the elements of which there is a surfeit to be sure, in the terminal stages of our kultur. That would include sarcasm, irony, self-exposure, and the comedy of self-deprecation. This seems epidemic, of necessity, amongst people groups who can no longer boast that they know the difference between good and evil. Which is rather remarkable since this ability was God's creation --and privilege--and Satan's first illegitimate gift. But,as with many stolen items , the thrill of the initial revelation and the pleasures of sitting in judgment of oneself and everyone else, quickly come to ennui. We do suffer from a glut of knowledge--not wisdom--and cannot decide even whether or not to put that tomato in the fruit salad--"because I can" seems to be reason enough for those who are committed to the principle of arbitrariness alone as a basis for life alone--"We got lucky, that's all."

I understand from viewers that the "House" physician goes by the assumption that, "Everybody lies." I wonder how many people-all liars apparently-have actually analyzed this unprovable assumption and massive broad-stroked condemnation. On my view of course, "There is therefore now no condemnation." and the worry of having to know it all and make grandiose assumptions is dissolving as we speak.(and that not fast enough. Look at the time!)

Here's the problem: If lying is a real category, then so is truth. So the fictional House is not only implying that "The truth is out there" but that we can know it after all. This in addition to the obvious moral dimension which is really nothing but recycled Calvinism! (Hobbes is still having trouble getting through-- but, after all, he is just a talking animal-by his own admission--and we all know how much we can trust jungle cats--"we like to cultivate that impression.")

I don't doubt that the TV House, by virtue of his writers who of course haven't done a day's work of medicine in their lives, calls himself a liar and a cheat and one self-deceived as well. But this blanket, if it covers us all, is really just a theme of the ages--Eugene O'Neill comes to mind--so the building blocks of this sardonic comedy are entirely borrowed as a convention and tradition--the only startling part, esp for those who are naif re:history and esp. art history is the application to the current medical scene.Funny doctors we will always have with us. Hugh Laurie has done his share of Shakespeare and does know and use history and the aphorism that we never learn from history. (His skit wherein he plays Shakespeare to his editor Rowan Atkinson is a real stitch-you may have to be sown back together after a viewing!!--available online of course on U-tub)

As we begin 1/1/11 (so easy to write!) I at least will be coming back to this controversy, on the human level, time and again. The best work in my view is still The Screwtape Letters and its ever-so-accurate devil's advocacy. It's portrayal of hell ("she's the sort of person that would find ME funny!) as a poor and backwards imitation of Light that still cannot escape "inconvenient truths' about it's own wholly derivative existence, is also a sort of "Divine Comedy" --such that we who choose by whatever means to follow that Light, with much stumbling due to our hand-made fog machines, may indeed "laugh all the way to the bank"!!!)

(see Ralph Wood's book, "The Comedy of Redemption" , and of course his book on Flannery O'Connor, who said of her own art: "Mine is a comic work, but that does not detract from its seriousness.")