James E Hartley

Madness or Mockery?

I have, for reasons unknown, a vivid memory of a media sensation from way back in 1991.

About a book. But, not a conventional book by a well-known author.

The book: Griffin & Sabine, by Nick Bantock.

What made this book unusual was that it is a Picture Book.

The story was of a correspondence between the two people in the title. Most of the correspondence is postcards, but there are a few letters.

The gimmick: The right hand page is the front of the postcard, and then you turn the page and the left hand side is the back of the postcard. Get it? Just like a postcard.

For the letters, the right hand side is the front of the envelope and then when you turn the page…try to contain your excitement here…there is an envelope—a real envelope, which you open and inside there is a letter.

As I said, I have vivid memories of the rapturous of joy with which this book was greeted I remember seeing it in a bookstore, picking it up and realizing—wow! There sure aren’t a lot of words for a book selling for $17.95. Sure, lots of pictures, but we aren’t talking Raphael here.

I have vague memories of there being a sequel. Very vague. I haven’t thought about this book for probably two decades.

Then, one day I was at the local library book sale, when what to my wondering eyes did appear? A boxed set of the Griffin & Sabine trilogy. Nostalgia City. The books were in mint condition. Insanely cheap price (I do love library book sales). Done.

Unless you have a story similar to that above, you may safely skip this trilogy. All gimmick.

Griffin is an artist in England. Sabine is a woman on some non-existent island in the South Pacific. Sabine can see what Griffin is painting while he is painting. Griffin is amazed. They try to meet and fail. Many postcards and letters later, what was pretty obvious at the end of volume 1 is obvious.

I’d call this a spoiler, but you won’t ever bother to read this book (or more properly, trilogy) so nothing is being spoiled. Griffin is insane. Sabine is purely a creation of his mind. He goes increasingly mad over the course of the books, and finally vanishes. So, the books are, in the end, a portrait of madness.

I can’t think of any particular reason this portrait of madness rises to the level of being even remotely interesting.

When I was done, I googled the book. Shock.

Much, and I mean much, to my surprise there are two other interpretations floating around the internet.

First, Sabine is real and this is a beautiful love story. You must be kidding me. Some people just can’t read.

Second, Sabine is a malicious demon who ends up possessing Griffin. Oddly, this is more plausible than the books being a love story. That being said, if that interpretation is correct, then these books are even less interesting than if it is merely a portrait of madness.

And, therein lies the real problem with Griffin & Sabine. Who cares which is the right explanation?

But, there is another way to look at Griffin & Sabine. It is a book with pictures and words. It is, in other words, a comic book.

It doesn’t look like a comic book, and it sure isn’t treated like a comic book, but it really is a comic book. And not a very good comic book.

However, if you were reading Griffin & Sabine in public and others saw you reading it, you could pass it off as literature and not be embarrassed at all.

But, if you were reading The Superior Foes of Spider-Man: Getting the Band Back Together in public and people saw you, what would they think?

People would have it exactly wrong. Griffin & Sabine is silly tripe. The Superior Foes of Spider-Man is funny.

You’d probably have to be an aficionado of comic books to get the jokes, but trust me, this is easily one of the funniest comic books out there. A set of two-bit minor villains team up; they think they can be great, but they are really obviously never going to amount to anything. This is a comic book which gets that comic books are supposed to be fun. It is something that knows how to make fun of geeks because it is itself really geeky.

Self-awareness is a rare thing in the modern age.

Even rarer is the ability to laugh at oneself. Why do people take themselves so seriously? Given the choice between the self-mocking world of The Superior Foes of Spider-Man and the madness of Griffin and Sabine, why is the latter the one that gets the accolades?

Tintin vs The Joker

File this in the improbable Good Friday pairing department:

Tintin vs The Joker.

Consider, for example, a pair of Tintin stories:

Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon.

Tintin books are the kind of thing you settle in to read after a long day at work. The Evil guys are dastardly and mean. Tintin is heroic and young. Captain Haddock and Professor Calculus and Snowy and the Detectives are all there for comic effect.

Tintin gets excited when he gets to drive a cool tank on the moon and you can feel his boyish thrill.

The mean guys show up and knock Tintin out.

(Tintin undoubtedly had a serious problem with concussions in his old age.)

Tintin is a little bit clever and a lot bit brave and saves the day with sheer determination. Over and over, book after book, the same basic story unfolds. They are wonderful. (And, they make great gifts for any kid who likes adventure stories.)

Now consider a pair of comic books of more recent vintage, written by Brian Azzarello and illustrated by Lee Bermejo:

Joker and Luthor.

As even a glance a the covers would suggest, these books are not like Tintin books.

They are supervillain books.

The superheroes show up, but are really the side characters in a story about the villain. Both are good and interesting reads.

They are, however, quite different in tone as befits the difference in the two villains. It is the difference between these two villains that intrigues me.

As any good Calvinist will tell you, at our heart, none of us are good. But, that’s just a euphemism. We are all totally depraved.

Yeah, I know people don’t talk like that anymore, but just a little introspection reveals that fundamentally the desires of our heart are evil. “Darkness is a harsh term, don’t you think?/ And yet it dominates the things I seek” is how Mumford and Sons put it.

There is quite a bit of variety in our Darkness, though. And that is where this pair of books comes in.

The test: Are you more the Joker or Luthor?

The Joker is Chaos and Destruction; he laughs at the world and destroys it for the Pure Joy of it.

Luthor is Arrogance and Pride; he wants to mold the world in his own image.

In neither world is there a role for Good or Love. Reading this pair of books was thus, if I am honest with myself, disturbing.

The Joker? Well he has no appeal to me; I am happy to see the Joker fail; I feel no sympathy for him. He is obviously the more popular villain though. Many people like the idea of smashing things.

But, Luthor?

Uncomfortably, I read his tale and realize part of me is just like him.

He hates Superman, hates the idea of a force more powerful than Man, a force which would come to Earth to Save us from Ourselves…Save Me from Myself…well, part of me also wants to resent that idea…it’s is so…humbling. Cue St. Matthew’s Passion.

Now combine these two pairs of comic books. Imagine if Tintin came up against the Joker? Who would win? Sadly, it doesn’t seem like much of a contest.

To beat the Joker, we need a hero much more powerful than a good, decent, heroic lad.

…and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.

The Secret of Wisdom

Charmides by Plato

The subject of this dialogue is a Greek word (which I cannot read (it’s all Greek to me)), which, according to Benjamin Jowett, translator of Plato par excellence, can be translated as Temperance, Moderation, Modesty, Discretion or Wisdom.

In this dialogue, Socrates has a merry time (doesn’t he always?) asking people to define the term, and then watching as all the attempts at definition end up circular or absurd.

Obviously the people to whom Socrates is talking never played Dungeons and Dragons. If they had, then they would have never attempted to define “Wisdom.”

When I was a lad and enamored of the game, I never did understand “Wisdom.” For those not in The Know—in that most intricate game, every character is defined by scores on 6 attributes: strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, constitution, and charisma.

Five of those are easy to define; wisdom is not. I never did figure out what wisdom was.

Clerics have to have a lot of it, but they don’t have to be intelligent. Magicians have to be intelligent, but don’t have to be wise.

So, wisdom is that thing which people to whom you might go to for advice have. And a person who has wisdom will be the sort of person of whom others ask advice. So, wisdom is what wise people have. Which is circular. And I realized this when I was 12.

Thus by the time I hit my teenage years, I would have never played Socrates’ game in this dialogue.

Now, however, I want to play it.

It seems to me now that I do know what wisdom is. But, I still can’t come up with a decent definition of it. My dear friend, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, gives this as the connotation of “wise”: “suggests great understanding of people and of situations and unusual discernment and judgment in dealing with them.” That sounds good.

But, then I ask: how does one know if one has discerned and judged correctly? Who can evaluate wisdom? And the answer is obvious: wisdom is the ability to discern wisdom. And suddenly I am playing both Socrates and Charmides in my own mind.

I flip the question a bit. Suppose I wanted to become more wise. What would I do?

If I spent more time reading books, I could become more knowledgeable, but knowledge is not the same as wisdom.

If I practice giving advice, that does not make me more wise unless I have the ability to discern whether my advice is wise or not, and I would have to be wise to know this.

Solomon had to pray for wisdom, was given more wisdom than anyone in the land, and then went out and made some really stupid decisions.

Socrates was declared to be the wisest man alive by the Oracle at Delphi, but concluded that the only thing that made him wise was that he knew he wasn’t wise.

So here we have a desirable characteristic, something to which it seems everyone should aspire to acquire. But, we can’t define it or figure out a way to acquire it. Puzzling to say the least.

Does the World Fit You?

John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces is one of the books I recommend to people the most often.

This book is funny, very funny. And thought-provoking.

It is interesting, well written, and has some of the most memorable characters you’ll ever meet.

The main character, Ignatius J Reilly is a modern day Falstaff. Take Shakespeare’s character, put him amongst the working (or non-working as the case may be) classes of New Orleans in the 1960s and you would have this book. Brilliantly done.

The cast of supporting characters are also worthy of Henry IV. No small feat, that.

It’s a sprawling book, with, I suppose, something akin to a plot line, but really a series of minor plot lines weaving in and out.

Uniting the plots is Ignatius’ attempts to navigate a world in which he doesn’t quite belong.

A slothful holder of a Master’s degree in English, holed up in a room in his mother’s house, we see Ignatius simultaneously trying to write the grand philosophical work to end all philosophical works—he runs out of steam every time he gets a paragraph or two of random musings down on paper—and looking for a job to help pay the bills so his mother doesn’t lose the house in which he resides.

Reilly is unsuitable for work—in exactly the same way the Falstaff would have been unsuitable for a desk job.

Reilly is larger than work. He is larger than life. There is simply a vast Too Muchness about him.

You would not want to know Ignatius J Reilly. You would think he was an Absolute Loser because, well, he is one.

He Dreams Big, can’t muster the energy for even the most mundane tasks, and yet, despite being everything you would not want your kid to become, it is hard not to secretly, very secretly (you wouldn’t want anyone to hear you think this), admire him a bit because he just doesn’t care that the world does not fit him.

He chalks his misfortunes up to Fortuna, and…well, I was going to say moves through life, but “moves” conveys a bit more purpose than Ignatius is wont to display.

Throughout the book, the other characters serve as a foil for the problems of Reilly—we watch others struggling or giving up the struggle to fit into the world, none of them terribly successful. As Reilly muses toward the end of the novel:

Once a person was asked to step into this brutal century, anything could happen. Everywhere there lurked pitfalls like Abelman [a customer of the factory in which Reilly briefly worked], the insipid Crusaders for Moorish Dignity, the Mancuso cretin [a policeman], Dorian Greene [a rather campy homosexual], newspaper reporters, strip-teasers, birds, photography, juvenile delinquents, Nazi pornographers. And especially Myrna Minkoff [a wannabe 60s radical]. The consumer products. And especially Myrna Minkoff [yes, he repeats that sentence—Myrna is a real problem for Ignatius].

It is interesting to think at the end of a novel like this: how much do I try to fit into the world? How much of what I do is a deliberate attempt to shape my life so that I seem at home here?

What would be different if I simply woke up every morning, firmly convinced, that the world should fit me, that world should modify itself so that it was at home with me?

Imagine that you really believed that, that you really did wander through life unaware that there was something odd about your attitude toward the world. You are totally unaware that it was singularly odd that you actually didn’t understand why you should adapt yourself to the world.

It’s a strange thought experiment.

From there, one gets to wondering why the world is the way it is. There is a logical progression from Faulkner to Toole.

And yet…is the world really all that bad? Is fitting into a world of work and polite social interactions really all that bad? Are we really living lives of quiet desperation (OK, that’s a Northerner’s line, but even still, it fits)?

I’m not so sure. I like my computer and my iPhone and the easy ability to buy books. I like microwave ovens and cordless drills. And is modern industrial life really such a high price to pay for the marvel of being able to read news about the Raiders on the internet while living on the East Coast?

But, Ignatius J Reilly just sits there and I can’t help wondering why I admire him so much.

My Daemon Made Me Do It

She Has Funny Cars.

Some books are nearly impossible to review.

I started listening to Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealist Pillow to help me write this review.

That should tell you what is to come.

It should probably also make you stop reading.

Your mind’s guaranteed/ It’s all you’ll ever need/ So what do you want from Me?

Let’s pretend I just said something deep.

If you read a book written by a drug-addled 1960’s wannabe poet (I’m looking at you Jackie Kerouac), you probably shouldn’t complain about what you find.

But, if you read a book written in 1925 by a German guy and you realize that it is like a novel from the fevered brain of a drug addict in the 1960s and if you wanted to read a novel like that you would have picked one to read but you didn’t pick one to read because you picked a 1925 German book, then can you complain?

Don’t You Want Somebody to Love?

I spilled my coffee. That probably isn’t relevant. But maybe it is a Sign. You’ll never know. Because I won’t tell you. Because I don’t know. I had a dream about coffee. It had milk in it and I hated it so I took out the milk and then I liked it. I didn’t really have that dream. I just made up that dream. But, I did really spill my coffee.

The life of a repo man is always intense.

Repo man should drink more coffee.

Oh, the book. When I spilled my coffee, some got on my book. That probably also isn’t relevant. You just never know.

If you met yourself, would your recognize yourself? What if you just met your Real Self? Is your Real Self more or less You than the You that you think is You?

To be any more than all I am would be a lie.

Wait. What?

So, getting back to that Real You. Would you even recognize that Real You?

Let’s call that Real You your Daemon. Then, let’s spell it Demian. Then let’s write a whole book that may or may not be about Demian and Demian’s mother and some bird.

The Bird Fights Its Way Out of the Egg

I dreamed about that bird. Well, no, I didn’t. Somebody else did. Well, no, somebody else didn’t. A character in a book dreamed about that bird. Well, no, a character in the book didn’t. Characters in books can’t dream. They aren’t real. So, nobody dreamed about that bird. But, the bird is real and the egg is real. So let’s all go worship Abraxas.

A transparent dream beneath an occasional sigh

Most of the time I just let it go by. But not this time. This time I…what? Don’t let it go by?

I saw you. If that sounds creepy, it is. Life is like that. I just made that up for fun. I didn’t see you. My daemon saw you.

I once thought I should read a lot of Herman Hesse. I didn’t know what I was doing. I should have stocked up on LSD first. I think Herman Hesse was meant to be read while taking LSD.

I have never had LSD, so I don’t really know if that is True. But, I have read books about people who took LSD. And I have listened to the Beatles. Does that count?

LSD didn’t exist when Herman Hesse wrote Demian. I looked it up. On Wikipedia. So, it must be true. Herman Hesse must have travelled through time to the 1960’s, met Timothy Leary, written Demian, traveled back through time to 1925 and published his book. He must have done that in a dream. Time travel isn’t possible. My future self told my present self that it is not possible to travel through time. In a dream. Because Time Travel isn’t real. But dreams are Real.

Dreams are more real than Reality. So, why do we call it Reality? We need to stop that.

Demian’s mother doesn’t really exist.

D.C.B.A.-25

Is there any point to exploring a Jungian mindscape? If Jung was right, then what is the reason to explore the minds of others? Am I more liberated when I see that Emil Sinclair is insane? Or am I more liberated when I think that Emil Sinclair isn’t insane, when I think he is more sane than the Sane because the insanity is the Reality and the Reality is the insanity?

Am I more knowledgeable when I realize that Demian’s mother is real and that she is Emil’s mother and my mother and your mother and nobody’s mother and the bird and the egg?

Is my life richer and fuller when I stop trying to live my life in these walls which surround me and I run in circles on the lawn screaming “I am running around in circles” with no other intention than to run in circles on the lawn screaming “I am running around in circles” because the lawn is a stage and my life is an act until that moment when I realize that the lawn is the grass and the grass is out of the seed and is reaching to the sky which is filled with invisible birds screeching that they are flying around the lawn in circles and I am merely the egg and My Real Self is the Bird and You and I and Her are One and we are Four? Tell me how do you Feel?

I am running in circles on the lawn. I am dreaming that I am typing in my office.

Some books are nearly impossible to review.

If you enjoyed reading this, then I have a book to recommend to you.

Tempting the Church

What would an update of C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters look like?

The Wormwood Archive, by T. G. Brown

Who should read it?

Anyone curious or worried about the state of the Church in America.

Seriously—anyone who fits into that category would benefit from reading this book. It’s short (143 pages) and a quick read. It is deeply insightful about the nature of the modern evangelical church.

C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters is one of the pop classics of the modern church.

If you haven’t read it, it’s typical Lewis. Screwtape is a senior devil giving advice to a junior devil (Wormwood) about how to corrupt a man.

It clever and interesting and mostly good fun.

Brown’s book updates Lewis’ book. Wormwood is now trying to corrupt an entire church. It is an easier task.

The concept is what makes the book so insightful. There are many complaints about the state of the modern evangelical church. Many.

Many of these complaints they fall into the “See how Horrible those Church Growth/Vineyard/Seeker Sensitive types are” category. There is also the opposite: “See how Horrible those Old-Fashioned/Stuck on tradition types are” category.

What Brown does well here is imagines that this isn’t a case of Terrible, Horrible people trying to do Terrible, Horrible things. What if we have a case of good, well-meaning people who end up doing Terrible, Horrible things because they were seduced into thinking they were doing the Right Thing? What would the temptation of the Whole Church look like?

This book is, in other words, a lot like Whitaker Chamber’s masterpiece, “The Devil.” (Life, 1948, reprinted in Ghosts on the Roof). If you haven’t read it, you should.

(That advice is for everyone; the Chambers’ essay is worth reading for anyone who enjoys Great Books and Ideas.)

What tempts the modern church? As the devils in this book indicate, the church is tempted by the desire to become more efficient at what it does.

It wants more customers—because after all a happy customer is a saved soul, right?

It wants a better market image—after all a better image means more customers which means more saved souls, right?

It wants more direction and a better management structure and a more contemporary feel. It just wants to be a better, more improved version of itself.

The Church has to change with the times, don’t you know? It can’t stay stuck in the past. Read the media, won’t you? (And there is another problem—why did I just write “read” the media? Who reads anymore? Watch the media. And add some videos and PowerPoint slides to that church service while you are at it.)

Christians are so old-fashioned, stuck on outdated principles. If we want to reach the modern generation, then we need to figure out what the modern generation wants.

And before you know it, the church is no longer recognizable. Spending all its time thinking about what it looks like, the Church forgets what it is supposed to actually be. It is not that thinking about all the ways to modernize the church are necessarily bad. But, what happens when that is all the Church thinks about?

This idea that the church has been seduced is surely correct. For anyone attending a modern church, evangelical or otherwise, there is a disturbing regularity with which the shock of recognition hits

Who hasn’t felt this temptation, the temptation to help improve the church a bit, just a bit, because God, well, he can be so Old Fashioned sometimes, and if only He were around today, then He would probably want this change too, and after all, I’m supposed to be helping God out with the Church things, aren’t I?

The Road to a Heretical Church is paved with Good Intentions.

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