The Library Foyer

Welcome to the Library You See In Dreams. How you found the place or why you’re here, I can’t imagine.

I’m the Librarian, alias LYSID. It’s a pleasure to meet you. The purpose of the library, such as it is, is to give a venue to what I call my philosophy & poetry and other sundry thoughts. See, I once wrote Science Fiction and Fantasy short fiction, but gave that field up as too lucrative and mainstream (/sarcasm) . What I’m trying to do now is build a picture of the world as I understand, to sing that picture. Not because I think this will be some great boon for humanity. Because it seems to be what I do, and what I’m led to do. In an everchanging world of almost eight billion, that’s as good a reason as any.

For now, the foundation of that picture is laid out in the Apologia:

• Part 1: Prolegomena
• Part 2: Towards A Coherent Nihilism
• Part 3: It’s Worse Than You Think
• Part 4: The Acerbic Catechumen
• Part 5: Glory

That’s where you want to start. Part #1 gives a still-current justification for me saying anything at all.

Another philosophical piece is The Problem of Information, a theme on which I shall build in the future. The Unprecedented Era (part 1 and part 2) straddles philosophy and history, shading toward the more straightforward historical view found in my snapshots of American history: Alien Americas.

I have written two juxtagraphs, “a prose poetry form best described as ‘a collage of facts.'” The first was on the Boston’s MBTA mass transit system and the second on the universally relevant subject of oil.

On the lighter side, there’s humor. Here’s one bit of which I’m fond, a filk about public art.

To spice things up, I blog about my dreams. Like the one about Buckaroo Banzai. Or the Armenian activist leader woman.

To all visitors, I tip my hat. Please pray for me, and I shall for you.

Electric Christmas Card 2023: A Charlie Brown Saturnalia

It is December, the tenth month, the second day after the Ides, and a chill wind blows across the lower slopes of the Esquiline Hill in the city of Rome. C. Aurelius Brutus, a child wearing a yellow toga trimmed in jagged black stripes, walks out with his friend, Linus, clad in a crude blue homespun Greek chiton. They come to a wall and stop.

CAB: It’s beyond my comprehension, Linus. This is the season of Saturnalia, a return to the golden age of human existence, but I’m not happy. I don’t feel the spirit of a golden age.

They continue walking.

CAB: I just don’t understand Saturnalia, I guess. I like getting small clay figures in human shapes, and gambling at dice, and upholding the ancestral rites and all that, but a powerful melancholia rests yet upon my genius.

Linus: C. Aurelius Brutus, you’re the only person I know who can take a wonderful time like Saturnalia and turn it into a problem. Lucia’s right–of all the C. Aurelius Brutuses in the world, you’re the Brutus Maximus.

Sermon: Why A King?

WHY A KING?

Christ the King Sunday

Texts:

Ezek 34: 11-16, 20-24

Matt 25: 31-46

Good morning, brethren. Today we come together to celebrate Christ the King Sunday, the last Sunday in the liturgical year before we begin anew with Advent next week. What do we know about Christ the King Sunday? Is it an ancient feast of the church, observed since time immemorial? No, it is not. The feast of Christ the King is less than a century old, instituted by Pope Pius XI in 1925. Why are we Methodists celebrating the feast? Our denomination doesn’t have to listen to the pope. The fact is: I don’t know.

Most of all: why, now, in 2023, would we want to hail Jesus Christ, our Lord, as a King? Kings are obsolete. The idea of kings have been fighting a long, losing battle. Charles I, king of England, stood up for the power of kings, and we, the common people, chopped off his head. Louis XVI, king of France, stood up for the power of kings, and we, the common people, chopped off his head. Nicholas II, tsar and autocrat of all the Russias, stood up for the power of kings, and we, the common people, put him up against a wall and shot him. Why would anyone now want to be or to have a king?

Over the past 250 years or so, the number of kings has dwindled, being replaced by accountable representative governments. This is a good thing. This is great advance in human civilization. Before that, for time out of mind, the great majority of human beings suffered under kings. These kings had many different names: el rey or der König in Europe, negus and kabaka in Africa, raja in India and shah in Iran, tennō and wang and nha vua in Asia, sapa inca and tlatoni in the Americas, but it was all the same thing. There was a man you had to give money, who then used that money to pay soldiers to go to war to get him more power, so he could get more money and more soldiers. If you didn’t give him money, you died. It’s that simple. Anything else is window dressing. Kingship was brutality. That’s the way it was, all around the world, for thousands of years.

Is that what we mean when he hail Christ as King? No.

So we got rid of kings, but the problems of kingship persisted. The replacements were often just as bad. There’s a movie about Napoleon in theaters now. The French people had gotten away from their king and were trying to figure what to do, how to govern themselves in freedom. During that moment of chaos, Napoleon stepped in and got them to make him a new king, an emperor. What was the result? A generation dead on the battlefield, and France under the heel of its neighbors. The new systems produced people just like the old kings. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and so many others, still played games with people’s lives, still acted like their own power was the only important thing, trying to overcome the free people of the world and crush them.

Is that we mean when we hail Christ as King? No.

When we say, today, that Christ is King, we are not only saying something about Christ. We are saying something about Kingship—that is, about power. If we attribute power to Jesus of Nazareth, what do we see? We see the power of a man riding on a donkey, not a warhorse. We see power defined as turning the other cheek, putting up swords, and loving ones enemies. There are no armies here, no banners, no trumpets, no parades or air force flybys. This is not power as we usually think of it. This is strange way of being a king.

It should be noted that there are some who say “Christ is King,” and do not mean it in the new way I have just described. Among our evangelical neighbors, particularly those who call themselves Calvinists, there has recently arisen the idea of “theonomy,” the idea that civil governments, including our own, should be enforcing Christianity, that Christ—or the earthly representatives of Christ—should be kings in the old sense.

I can’t understand that. Have they no history books? Can’t they understand what they’re invoking? The evil one offered that kind of power to Jesus, took him up to a high place and showed him all the world’s kingdoms and said they could be his. Jesus refused. Let us not try to accept what Jesus has declined, not go behind Our Lord’s back and say “He didn’t mean it. He’s just being woke. We accept your kind offer.”

What, then, is Christ’s power? It is the power to make a better world. Not to play the brutal games of history, but to take action to help. To feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, and visit the sick and imprisoned. We do not have to give our resources to making the powerful more powerful. We can use them to make a better world for all people. Power does not have to be used in the service of human pride and greed. A voice calls out in the wilderness, for a new way. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are the merciful. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.

Christ’s new kingship means life, not death. Joy, not fear. Peace, not war. Creation, not destruction. A world in which people are important, not the games of nations. This is true power. Only in the recent past have we come out of the old way, the cruel way. We’re still struggling against it. On this Christ the King Sunday, let us rededicate ourselves to the new way.

Brethren, as we sit here this morning, the kings of this world are in action. In Ukraine, in the Caucasus, in the Middle East, in Sudan, in Myanmar, in Kosovo. They do not rest, they are about their business. Let us be equally busy, about Our Lord’s business. Let us not be quiet about proclaiming the true way of kingship, the way of Christ Jesus.

Worthy is the Lamb! Worthy by its new way, worthy of power, wealth, wisdom and might, honor and glory and blessing! That is why we, this morning, hail Christ as King. A new king, a king who rides a donkey and not a tank, a king who bears a crown of thorns and not of gold, a king of Creation and not Destruction. Hail, Christ the King. Amen.

My Alien America

In 2018, I posted a piece taking as its thesis “Every American dies in a country alien to that in which they were born.” This month I find myself looking down the barrel of my own idea. I have lived one of the fifty-year intervals I described.

What has changed since 1973?

Most importantly, the Cold War is over. It is difficult to remember, even for those of us who there, how it formed the backdrop for all of American politics and culture. The immediacy that we could all die in a few hours never entirely went away. The first question every American politician had to face was “What are you going to do about the Commies?” The world was a game in which we, as a nation, were either winning or losing. My children know nothing of this feeling, which I view as definite improvement.

Once the Cold War ended, the Culture Wars became the focus of American politics, and here too the landscape is vastly different. In 1973, the idea that women could be something besides wives and mothers had barely any traction. The idea of same-sex marriage was inconceivable. America was far more Christian—even the hippies had become Jesus Freaks. In all these things, people voted with their feet, one by one, until what looked eternal slowly became voluntary, and then a minority position.

America is cleaner now. The rivers are cleaner. Los Angeles is not regularly under a blanket of smog. The bison, the eagle, the wolf, have renewed their numbers. Over the interval, environmental issues have zeroed in to the one overwhelming problem of global climate change.

The economy is different. The closing Dow Jones for 1973 was 1031. For 2022, it was 33,147. Forty-four years ago 22% of the American labor force worked in manufacturing, in 2021 9% did. By contrast, in 1970, 2.7% percent of the economy came from the finance industry. At the end of 2022, it was 7.6%. Solid objects have given way to numbers. In the midst of this, the real median income rose from $26,509 to $37,522. Somehow, we find a way to grow richer—yet it is still not enough for everyone.

You may be reading this on a hyperpowerful little computer you carry around in your pocket. In this way, at least, life in 2023 is a science fiction vision of 1973. Fifty years ago music was LPs or reel-to-reel, microwave ovens were cutting edge, and computers large and used exclusively by government agencies and major corporations. Digital calculators were available, but expensive. Now we live in a wealth of silicon, putting ourselves in almost constant contact with one another. Events around the world can be followed in real time.. The effect is complex, and of ambiguous value, but undeniably breathtaking.

The quietest, but most important changes are demographic. The U.S. population has risen by roughly 40%, from 211 million to 333 million. At the same time, the median age climbed from 28.1 to 38.8. We are more numerous, and older. In 1970, whites made up 83.5% of the population, Blacks 11.1% , and everyone else 5.7%. Now Hispanics number 18.7% and Asians 6.2% (including South Asians, a community that barely existed when I was born). All this makes for tectonic effect.

This is my America, the one I have watched happen over my years. Is it alien to me?

You can’t pick your age. It gets handed to you. Yet, having been handed this age, I feel blessed. I feel blessed to have witnessed the fall of the Soviet Empire. I feel blessed to have witnessed the coming of LGBT+ rights. I feel blessed to have lived through the heady days of the 90s prosperity. Many bad things happened, I know. But I was able to witness a small piece of the Unprecedented Era, a time equal to the Axial Age, or greater, in its importance to human history, here in this most crucial of nations. It may that this is the zenith of human prosperity and freedom–and I got to be there. I got to live it. For that, I am profoundly grateful.

I don’t know how much more America I will get to watch. Another twenty-five years, or a little more. May they be good days. May this nation, and this world, pick the right path, the path of peace and justice. I pray that every day. I will keep watching, in anticipation.

First Contact: The Cannibal Temptation

Humanity perfected the Alcubierre drive. First we met the Jarans, mammalian bipeds like us, except with bluer skin. Then we encountered the Ortztz, and they were of insectoid cast. And all was well. Finally, in distant parsecs, we found the Marmarians. They grew from seeds, in careful gardens; they flowered and rooted; they sang and their songs tears did wrench, they were so beautiful.

Until the Marmarians had all decent standards of ethics and morality stood. The Jarans looked like us, invoking taboo. The Ortztz looked like eight-foot high beetles and excreted through their shells; no one wanted to eat them.

The Marmarians had skin smooth and taut like a July tomato. Their hair sprang out like early asparagus. Behind them drifted a smell close to basil. We shook their hand and felt a summerfat cucumber.

We were good. We were good people. Never did we give into temptation. We welcomed the Marmarians to our world, to our city, into our homes, for dinner. We strode the Metropolitan Museum of Art with them, heard their insightful and emotional reactions to our art, listened to the tales of the beauty of their world, of its greenhouses and canals and restaurants.

All was well for the first year, until a Marmarian went missing after a walk into a Greenwich Village twilight. Another, then another. A murderer was on the loose.

They got her. They caught her with the peeler in her hand. They put her on trial, up on the stand, this poor vegan girl from Queens, and asked: Why? In the name of all that is right and good, why?

“I couldn’t take it any more,” she said. “I had to know. I had to know what they tasted like.” She burst into tears. “I’d do it again. I’d do it again!”

Our Marmarian friends were angry and baffled. Why did this happen? Were they safe here?

Of course, we replied. She was a sick, bizarre woman, and she was alone. None of us wonder what it would be taste like to make a sentient being into gazpacho. None of us have ever thought about how we might go about turning an organism that mourns its dead into ratatouille. None of these things could ever be contemplated, no matter how great the temptation.

All was well for another year, until the anthropologists got back, smuggling a walking cargo: like a Marmarian, but with skin like a rutabaga and smelling of licorice. He was a member of the Marmarian undercaste. Our vegetable friends never mentioned this. He begged asylum; the Marmarian overcaste worked his kind to death and planted their young on their rotting remains. Their entire civilization was built on slavery.

In concert with the Jarans and Ortztz, we made a formal demand to the Marmarian global government: free the undercaste immediately. They refused.

Our fleets and armies crossed parsecs to attack. The Jaran rangers, the Ortztz armadas joined with us. The Marmarians fought back, but were hopelessly outnumbered. Our troops overran the enemy, freed the slaves, executed their former masters, grilled their corpses, covered them with sauces, shipped them back to Earth for restaurants. Every mile brought new news of the horrors of the undercaste life, of the evils on which Marmarian culture depended, and made us more determined to keep fighting at long as there were Marmarians to be killed and eaten.

We cannot allow such horrors to exist. We must defend the right. It is our moral duty.

What a relief.

Epigram #40

The purpose of fiction is to allow us to channel toward unreal people those emotions that, given to actual human beings around us, would prove unbearable.

Learning On Your Deathbed

As I proved in “The Problem of Information,” it is impossible to know everything, or even a meaningful proportion of everything.

Which means one is always learning. One can always learn.

In that hospital bed, as your kidneys shut down, as your intestines block, as your cerebrovascular system goes into final spiral, you may still point your phone toward Wikipedia and experience, say, the demographic profile of Laos. And what you learn, even in those final moments, may cause you to evaluate that life now ending.

Embrace this. It is a blessing. Love the world that is bigger than you can grasp. Give thanks to God for the encounter.

Epigram #39

We live in the graveyard of the decisions of our ancestors.

(And our posterity shall likewise inhabit ours.)

Epigram #38

History is a cafeteria serving nothing but irony.

Electric Christmas Card 2022: A United Nations Christmas

Nancy sat on the observation deck at LaGuardia Airport. In the west the last orange light of December 24th, 1962 lay behind Manhattan. The galaxy of the city’s lights began to play, lights that were supposed to be beautiful, but only served to remind her of why she hated this place. Behind her she could hear the P.A. interrupt “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” to announce again that Northwest Airlines Flight 722 to Minneapolis was canceled due to inclement weather at the destination.

There would be no Christmas at home, no haven of warmth and love, no place of safety.

In her mind’s eye, she could see the mushroom cloud climbing above the Midtown skyscrapers.

Epigram #37

Evil exists. It can be difficult to define, but you know it when you see it. Because it burns like a brand.