Difficult Passages

I love this phrase: it characterizes many parts of my life.

The first 'difficult passage' in my life must have been my birth. This, fortunately, leaves me with little sense of guilt because my mother maintains that I was an easy birth (no, not an easy lay; my mother is not a hen) and that I "wanted to come out and look around". She was well pleased, as most people think the first birth is the most difficult. But that, I suppose, was not really that difficult a passage to her; it was a difficult passage to me and I am glad I remember none of it.

My mother, however, delights in telling the story of my midnight birth, at which the doctor delivered me and (as was then traditional) was about to whack me on the bum in order to start my breathing. According to her account, I twisted around, looked him in the eye as if to say, "Nothing doing, buster!" and shocked him into almost dropping me. I am sure there is a lot of exaggeration there, but I'm not sure where.

The second kind of difficult passage is the familial trait of spending too much time reading and thinking and thus developing a bad case of the piles, those dreadlocks of the annulus with the spiffy Greek label of 'haemorrhoids'. I am not so unfortunate, but I have had moments of near-misses. (Yes, I am conscious, dear reader, that this post so far has been nothing but an exploration of the nether regions and the odd problems that flesh-and-blood is heir to.)

The third kind of difficult passage is the kind of passage you find in a text which leads you to believe that people are selling you a load of codswallop wrapped up in a tender sheath of baloney. I remember the time I came across this passage in the Bible, in which the hosts of heaven are gathered to the left and right of God. God asks for one of them to volunteer to deceive Ahab into going to his death, and they discuss it. Finally, one brave (and unnamed) spirit of the Host volunteers to be a lying spirit in God's service. God says, "You will persuade him, and prevail; go forth and do so."

That's when I realised that the sons of men are not supposed to bear false witness, but God may do what He wants because he is God. We are told to accept both good and evil from him, but there is no darkness in him. Neither is He a man that He should lie: the answer is given in the form of Balaam's question, which is ambiguous to say the least. The point of all this, which I believe most bible scholars miss, is that the lesson of the Book of Job is the most important lesson. God is never constrained. He has no rules that make any sense; who would set rules for God? You either trust human sense and logic (or faith, or wisdom, or whatever) or you accept that He gave you some rules and never set any for HImself.

The first kind of difficult passage gave me life; the third kind gave me a deeper kind of life. The point of all that stuff is that God has never made it easy; in fact, the easier it looks, the tougher it gets. Those people out there who are happy to receive material wealth and call it the blessing of God are right; but they must also realise it is the poorest blessing of God. Those who receive wisdom and power, likewise. The best gift is the gift of being able to accept that God is God, and every man who says more is a liar.

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Yeah, I realise that some people out there will take offence. But what is beyond doubt is that God allows us to be deceived. In fact, in at least two cases, He allows angelic beings to tempt humans into self-delusion or self-deception. Job wins by sheer stubbornness, Ahab loses by the same but in the wrong direction. No, God never lies. But He certainly makes use of deceivers and other villains: Moses the murderer, Jacob the deceiver, Abraham the Machiavellian warlord, the list is a long one. God is not one for the Pharisees much, He is the God of you and me, the painfully and morally 'normal' members of the human race.

The Alice Riddle

The riddle to which I allude is of course the one taken from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. It's the one which goes, "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" As the author himself pointed out, it was a riddle designed not to have an answer. But such riddles frustrate readers, who often read too much into any given text. I suppose the best answer is that both are covered with inky quills.

A lot of false etymology and grammar goes this way. Is it 'an uncle' or 'a nuncle'? Is it 'an (h)istorian' or 'a historian'? Does 'grammar' itself come from 'grandma' and what she taught the grandkids? Whatever it is, a raven does not rave; neither does the craven crave. The depraved has nothing to do with abstinence from pravda. And so on.

I am vastly amused by the contortions we inflict on ourselves when we try to attribute meaning where there is none, or to make a false meaning fit the facts. It is human nature, made so by the fact that neurobiology is like that and our brains are deceptive. The human heart is desperately wicked – but so is a candle when you urgently need it to catch fire. It is all a matter of being careful with your speech.

So, why is a raven like a writing desk? Follow the link I supplied above, and if you don't like those answers, come up with your own.

The Greater Trumps: (25) The Moon

Above all things beams the Moon. No innocent face this, but a face both wise and winsome, half in darkness and half in light. Twin pillars frame a gateway beneath it, and a river, its tide both rising and falling, runs through it. At the edge of vision, wolves howl, and odd creatures respond in their own peculiar ways. Everything is secret, and yet everything is seen; everything is possible, and yet everything seems impossible. This is the secret of the White Goddess.

Whether Selene, Diana, or Artemis, the moon in its phases has often been a symbol of fortune and of womanhood. But it would be unwise to see it as unrestrained and random fortune. Rather, just as womanhood is the source of birth, and the moon goes through both waxing and waning phases, the moon is generative and cyclical. You can ride it towards insanity or genius. In this light, the Moon therefore stands for Delusion (Deception?) or the creative productivity of the unfettered Mind.

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When I think of the Moon, I am irresistably drawn to the nightmare quality of Robert Graves's scholarship. In his odd anthropological opus, The White Goddess, he sculpts an image of mankind's religious history that is unsettling, and perhaps a little deranged. But oddly enough, I am drawn also to Khonsu, the Egyptian power of the Moon. Unusually, he is male, a god of knowledge and time. He was also a power of healing, and of madness. I think of Khonsu because, quite often, people tend to think of men as sane, stable and boring - hysteria, for example, comes from the Greek hystera, which means womb. But Khonsu shows that a male power can be pretty odd too.

Dylan Thomas was one for the odd visions. Here he is, in an excerpt from I See The Boys Of Summer:

But seasons must be challenged or they totter
Into a chiming quarter
Where, punctual as death, we ring the stars;
There in his night, the black-tongued bells
The sleepy man of winter pulls,
Nor blows back moon - and midnight as she blows.

It's hard to imagine that he could say more about the moon. But he did. You'll have to see for yourself.