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A Great Fall 

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Most of the time I feel like the poet in “A Lighter Shade of Pale” (the long version with four stanzas (here). He suggests that we can be masters of our own fate, that we can take Neptune for a ride. Yet I suspect we’re more like the woman who responds to him by smiling sadly:

She said, “I’m home on shore leave” / Though in truth we were at sea / So I took her by the looking glass / And forced her to agree / Saying, “You must be the mermaid / Who took Neptune for a ride” / But she smiled at me so sadly / That my anger straightway died.

None of us can take the powers of the ocean below, or the skies above, for a ride. None of us can deny that we’ll be underwater soon, in five minutes or in fifty years, making common cause with the dinosaur, swimming in his underwater lake of bitumen.

Yet who doesn’t hope that a magical Fisherman of souls will pull us up from the inky deep?

I wish all this religious stuff was true. But I fear we’re like the fish swimming below, while the gods above make bargains in a cracked and golden sky. And while they sail off in a convivial convoy to the local sushi restaurant, and get drunk on sake.

Not that I’m complaining. Even the fractures in our lives — what Tom Petty calls fault lines — hint at possibilities of unity. Or, as Leonard Cohen put it,

There’s a blaze of light in every word / It doesn’t matter which you heard / The holy or the broken Hallelujah.

Cohen’s “beauty and the moonlight” sometimes overwhelm me. I just have no clue what it all means. And I doubt anyone else does, despite their claims to holy books and capitalized truths.

You say I took the name in vain / I don’t even know the name / But if I did, well, really, what’s it to you?

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There are at least three reasons why I feel adrift in the cosmos. All of them have to do with being in over my head.

1. During my first year at university I took a course called The Intellectual Origins of the Contemporary West. This course explored a staggering range of ideas, from Plato’s Republic to Sartre’s Nausea. It was taught at 8 AM in a small square room in the basement of the Physics Building at Queen’s University. It was taught by a visiting elderly professor from Paris, Brigitte Dupont. In 26 weeks Madame Dupont took us from myth to quantum mechanics; from Greek democracy to Sparta’s war against Athens; from the Chain of Being to the French Revolution; from evolution and DNA to an alienated Frenchman staring at a slithering black root he refused to call Satan.

Madame Dupont’s course blew my mind. Everything I’ve done after it is a vain attempt to bring it back together again. Which is why I call my scribblings, ✏️ The Collected Works of Humpty Dumpty.

I suspect that I’ll never get over the shock of discovering what so many have already discovered: we think so much of ourselves, yet in fact we’re like tiny minnows drifting in vast ocean currents. I imagine that even when I’m an old geezer, with a web site and a pension, I’ll still be reworking this undergrad revelation as if it was still happening, as if the book in front of my eyes was bought at the UBC bookstore, and as if I was still at my computer writing essays about Hamlet and Prufrock and the meaning of life. Or the meaningless of life, let Camus decide. 

Even when I become a sixty-something codger, with his golf exploits and his irritating stories about remote Italian towns, I’ll still be reworking my early years. I’ll still be traumatized by the combined effects of Madame Dupont’s Intellectual Origins of the Contemporary West and Old Rex’s Foundations of Western Literature. Even though each course had a specific focus, both of them are, at least in part, responsible for blowing my brain apart. Hopefully, I repeat to myself E.M. Forster’s mantra: Only Connect.

Which leads me to the second and third reasons I write about demons and wizards, and fantasy worlds of darkness and light.

2. When I was 13 I was mesmerized by The Lord of the Rings. The beauty and terror of Tolkien’s epic struggle between good and evil was later magnified by the movies, where the orcs of my imagination became Uruk-hai birthing from within the inner membrane of my nightmares. These nightmares required a saviour, a Gandalf who falls into the Hellish Deep yet also rises, stronger for his harrowing journey. Gandalf the White.

The third reason has everything to do with The Lord of the Rings, yet came before I had even heard of Tolkien.

3. When I was 11 years old I went to a summer camp that was supposed to be all about the divine hero Jesus. The counsellors professed to know all about Him, and all about angels, devils, and holy ghosts.

I wanted to know about this Jesus, especially if He had something to do with fighting orcs. Yet the counsellors also wanted to get to know the boys too, in the biblical sense. They found all kinds of ways to get us naked. It was all very confusing. Especially in the middle of the night when I complained and our cabin’s counsellor told me to come into his cot. It was raining and there was a leak in the ceiling and my cot was slowly getting soaked. I was aroused by his hand weighing lightly on the side of my hip. It curled around my torso. A minute later I was angry and confused and hurried back into my wet cot. The counsellors also lined us up naked (to check for tics) and got us to skinny dip en masse. I remember refusing to get out of my swimming suit. I stood there, fuming on the shore.

After my experience at this ‘Christian camp,’ I didn’t want anything to do with their interpretation of theology. Whether they were Presbyterian or ecumenical, nominal or just needed a summer job, they had made it very hard for me to even think of Jesus after that summer. Jesus became mixed in my mind with confusion and anger.

By the time I was 12, I’d revolted against the entire system — Heaven and Hell, priests and politicians, and all manner of golden-tongued liars and institutionalized fantasies. By 13 I was drinking, taking drugs, arguing with Saruman, and wondering if the departing Elves didn’t have a point.

I doubt this camp trauma will ever leave me. Even when I’m a sixty-something codger, I suspect that the only way to bring my brain back together would be to imagine an infinite space, one so large that the fragments that exploded in every direction can be followed to the points at which they slow down, lose momentum, and stand still in outer space. Then I would look around me and feel lost. I would look around me and wonder who to connect to. Who to trust, and how to forgive. How to redeem that image of Jesus I’d rejected so long ago.

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By the age of 13 the heroes of fantasy became my theological heroes. At least they never deviated from their epic quests in order to convince boys to swim in the nude. Tolkien never suggested that his characters were real, and so they could never do the disappointing things that real people do. But it was more than this: he didn’t suggest that his characters held the secrets of our real universe. Gandalf may have had his magic secrets, but these secrets weren’t presented as a Higher Truth in our real world. Prematurely jaded as I was, it was because Tolkien never wrote a Gospel that I believed him. For me, Jesus became Strider, slouching beneath a dark hood, the unrecognized King, in some dark corner of a bar. 

It was because Tolkien never expected me to worship the characters he wrote about that I believed in them. Likewise, with Heinlein and Asimov: however strange and tempting their tales, they never presented them as holy books.

I swore that however much sci-fi I wrote I would never become like Ron Hubbard, and allow my fantasies to turn into theology. Least of all, a theology that had the word science in it. I boiled this down to a phrase: Old Mother Hubbard kicked the dog Ronald Hubbard into her cupboard.

Old Mother Hubbard reminds me of Madame Dupont, and of the square little room at the bottom of the Physics Building at 8 AM. I remember her grey hair and thick glasses, as well as the way she helped us understand Plato’s cave, Pascal’s abyss, Locke’s sense impressions, Voltaire’s revolt, Mill’s liberalism, and Camus’ optimism. She brought it all together somehow, in her old frame.

I wonder if she ever got the credit she deserved.

She went to the cobbler’s to buy him some shoes; / When she came back he was reading the news.

I also wonder what Madame Dupont would think about the stories I write.

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Next: 🍎 The Holy Bin

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