Huge and Ravenous

A long time ago now, I conducted a little literary experiment. The purpose of the experiment was to see if my students were 'awake' to mythological or magic-realist imaginings. The means by which I tried to do this was to post — every day for roughly six months — a short piece in an ongoing narrative, and capture their responses.

The narrative was about two ravens, named after Odin's companions Huginn and Muninn (or Thought and Memory), and described their combined musings in dialogue and short poems. Thought was characterised as an intense bloke, while Memory was always a more reticent lady.

You can find that experiment here. What you do, if you want to try it out, is scroll to the bottom and then read the posts in reverse order. They come in groups of three — a short poem with a numbered title (e.g. 'Two Ravens 001') and two dialogue posts. By the end of the 181 posts, think about what it all means... and above all, have fun!

Today

It is today, says Wolff to himself. Today is the last day of a wicked age. Incompetence rewarded, arrogance cosseted, silliness encouraged — these were the things of that age. It was not always so. And he remembers.

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What is that blade you bear, Sir Wolff?

It is named Perdurias, milord. It was sanctified by Bishop William.

What are its properties? Know you that no blade may be brought into the Citadel without our inspection?

I had not heard that, milord. As to your question on its properties, it is perdurable. And hence, the one who forged it called it 'Perdurias'. It is merely an instrument, although somewhat potent.

Put it away. This is a new age, and a better one. We will not have relics of the past in our way, where we might trip over them.

I shall hang it up next to my door, then, milord.

Better you hang it behind the door, Sir Wolff.

But that is where I hang the shield of my ancestors, milord.

You call us 'milord' and yet you disobey us?

Milord, by virtue of your office, I call you thus. But by virtue of it being true, I tell you what I tell you. For that is the nature of truth, milord.

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And in Wolff's mind, he weighed two things. Primus, Wolff was no longer Sir Wolff. Secundus, 'milord' would never be anyone's lord again. Looking up at the ravens, he smiled.

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Note: The fictional adventures of Sir Wolff do provide much that is of interest. You can find them linked here. Just ignore the one about earwax. That was an accident.

St David's Day (2010)

I've made it a habit to remember St David's Day, the first day of March in every year. It is a day with great significance in the calendars and journals of my kinsmen. St David is the patron saint of Wales, and one of his most well-remembered sayings there is this: "Do the little things in life." It sounds very different from the modern axiom, "Don't sweat the small stuff."

However, there is a point at which the two are reconciled. Perhaps the gospel of Luke says it well:

[Jesus] said to them, "Take heed! Beware of covetousness: for a man's life consists not in the abundance of the things which he possesses.

And [Jesus] spake a parable unto them, saying, "The ground of a certain rich man brought forth plentifully; he thought within himself, saying, 'What shall I do, because I have no room where to bestow my fruits?' And he said, 'This will I do: I will pull down my barns, and build greater; and there will I bestow all my fruits and my goods. And I will say to my soul — Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry.'

"But God said to him, 'You fool, this night your soul shall be required of you: then whose shall those things be, which you have provided?' So is he that lays up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God."

And [Jesus] said to his disciples, "Therefore I say to you, Take no thought for your life, what you shall eat; neither for the body, what you shall wear. The life is more than meat, and the body is more than raiment. Consider the ravens: for they neither sow nor reap; they have neither storehouse nor barn, and God feedeth them. How much more are you better off than they?"

It's true that we shouldn't sweat the small stuff, then. But it's also true that we should continue to do what good we can in the little things, the small things, the despised things, the 'sai kang' warrior's stock-in-trade. We are ravens, we are the fingers of God's hands in the world of men.

It is not for us to build larger and larger barns, storehouses, churches, schools, monuments, statues and other things of wood and stone, steel and glass. Some will say, "But this is how we glorify God." Yet these are not the sacrifices that He wants. He wants less of that, and more of us.

What the Welsh remember of St David is somewhat abbreviated. This is what he really said:

"Be joyful, and keep your faith and your creed. Do the little things that you have seen me do and heard about. I will walk the path that our fathers have trod before us."

If the children of the wyvern — if those whose blood runs red, and blue, and gold in the valleys of the nightmare — can do the small things well, then the grand endeavours that we cannot see will succeed. God is not mocked; men will reap what they have sown, and the harvest will be great indeed.

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[ Other St David's Day posts ]

Five Years Ago

Five years ago, this post came up on Two Ravens:

Huginn: What the Three Sisters said to him had two meanings.

Muninn: Or six, if I remember correctly.

H: He wants to be King Hereafter and also Afterhere.

M: He is making his world into his own image. It will not be as we recall.

H: But he has said he does not want the kingdoms of the world.

M: Of course not. He only wants his own.

It's turning out to be true, as the two ravens have often been. I remember that when I left the old place two years ago, two large ravens up in a tree looked at me and said their usual, "Ark!"

The signs are everywhere, and all you have to do is listen. After all, the patriarchs and prophets worked with the ravens too.

Two Ravens (Redux)

Recently, TIME magazine called the last ten years 'The Decade From Hell'. At the end of the last millennium, the Gnome called the last century 'The Age of Violence'. By all accounts, then, what we've been living through would seem to be the worst of times. And yet, human life has never been so valued, so extended, so enriched.

It isn't a paradox. The human condition is such that when we are exposed to pain, suffering and hardship, human life becomes correspondingly more valued as long as there is a reservoir of capital (human or material) to measure that valuation against. We have become more aware of, more sensitive to suffering simply because we can be.

It's been almost a year since my last maintenance upgrade to Two Ravens. I suppose I said it all there, and there isn't much need to go on.

Two Ravens

Over the last three days, by some strange synchronicity, several very different and probably unrelated people have expressed interest in the little project I designed and implemented at the end of 2004. It's an odd little project, combining as it does threads from C S Lewis, Neil Gaiman, various mythologies, modern technology and computer science, and half a dozen other peculiar things that have been known to run through my head.

The project revolves around two entities of dubious provenance who call themselves Huginn and Muninn, or Thought and Memory. On one level, they are the two ravens said to accompany Odin All-Father. On another, they are two angelic beings neither fallen nor unfallen; on a third level they are powerful archetypes and key elements of the universe in which we live. In fact, there are other levels, and part of the interesting thing about these levels is that Thought, of course, doesn't remember very well — and Memory sometimes lets Thought do all the thinking, or not.

The form is unusual; there is a short poem followed by two snippets of dialogue. This doesn't vary, although the style and shape of each triptych does. A lot of it probably requires explanatory notes, but it's more fun to just read through the whole thing in the way prescribed (that is, scrolling up from the bottom of the very long page). There are 180 proper entries. You can ignore all the embedded links if you want — they're not particularly interesting or important.

I think it is possibly one of the best pieces of work I've ever created. Some of you will realise from this how limited I am, while others might be kind enough to say nice things. But it's mine and I like it. So there. Heh.

Stuffing

Just yesterday a friend of mine remarked, "How do you know all this stuff?" Without going into all that 'how do I know I know' business, it's of course a comment on how much clutter seems to have accumulated on the shelves of my brain.

It's also the kind of comment I've heard a number of times before. I've wondered about that myself. My conclusion is that the sheer mass of bits and pieces in the storeroom comes from two tendencies. One is the corvid tendency to go (as Khayce might say), "Oooh look, shineeeeeeee!" and pick up yet another piece of mental bling. The other is the corvid tendency to go, "Eh, what's this..." and end up spending hours of a perfectly useful day delving deep into some esoteric subject.

The two things are related in some ways, but the former tends to increase breadth and the latter depth. It's acquisitiveness and inquisitiveness, or (to the more sinister-minded) acquisition and inquisition. Or Memory and Thought, but that's another thing altogether.

There is a third thing, the urge to deliberately fill in spaces in one's education that seem to be void for one reason or another. This is relatively rare; I'm happy with some of those voids, never having had the urge to try things like colonic cleansing (for example).

I think that all these put together make me a good research partner to have. I tend to do all the random-correlation, what-if, how-about-this stuff while someone else does all the heavy lifting. It's not that I can't do structure, but that I can more or less do the basic stuff and the value-added stuff too. I'm far less efficient than other people, though. Too easily distracted...

"Eh, what's this... oooh look, shineeeeeeee!"

Two Ravens

Recently, I received a spate of communications from various students who wanted to know more about epistemology. It was all very mysterious to me, since I thought that (at least for this season), all of them had finished dealing with that part of the syllabus.

I would have continued in that blissful state, except for one event. That was when one of them spilt the beans. She said, "Errrm, we were supposed to submit our drafts but some got carried away."

What got carried away? The students? The drafts? I didn't really resolve the answer to that question, since it became a confabulated mishmash of "the teacher took it away and didn't give it back" (how likely that is, I leave it to you to determine), "my classmates wrote one essay for each question" (I call that insanity), and "I spent all my holidays writing this 4000-word monster thingie, how could I be bothered with 1600 words?"

Well, when the 1600 words in question have as much weight as the 4000-word monster, perhaps priorities should be adjusted, no? A good way to adjust priorities is really to go back and look at an old literary project of mine that I've mentioned before. After reading Two Ravens in its entirety, you will probably have a better grasp of epistemology, confabulation, romance, theology and priorities than you had before.

Just a note of explanation: the two ravens of this project are Thought and Memory, or as the Norse sagas have it, Huginn and Muninn. In the invented mythology of this narrative, they are a pair of angels who are close friends and perhaps lovers. They did not disobey God but were too involved with humanity to listen to Him when Satan rebelled. For that, they were given a unique fate, which is alluded to in parts throughout the story. They also mix around with other powers that 'the Highest' allows to operate in Middle-Earth (or Midgard) and in general make comments about everything they see.

The second post was written on 11/11/2004 and, taking a cue from T S Eliot, was titled What the Thunder Said. You can find it here. The first post is of course Two Ravens 001, which is at the bottom of the blog page, and can be found here.

Morning Has Broken

This morning, I had the privilege to hear from the 12th chapter of the Gospel of St Luke. Luke's gospel, I must confess, has not been a book I've read for some time. As the resonant words echoed in my head, I appreciated once more the beauty of his words, and the skill with which King James's translators turned them into English.

This is of course one of the three synoptic accounts of Jesus' teaching regarding 'the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy'. What is interesting is that you can tell quite often whether a person has read this passage (and other like passages from the synoptic gospels) from the way in which that person views Jesus' response to the world. In Luke 12, as in other parts of this gospel and the other gospels, Jesus shows his role as social catalyst in the original Greek sense of the word 'catalysis', the agent of a sudden breaking-up of the status quo.

He came not to bring peace, but a sword; he came to kindle a fire, to baptise with water, to make the power of the Spirit more freely available. His is not, has never been, should not ever be, the way of incremental and plodding change and shifting ground; rather, as he says elsewhere, his is the way that establishes the past and fulfils it in for the future. In doing so, he avoids the twin traps of sticking to the uninterpreted and misunderstood past, and of charging into the future without the firm foundation built by those before us.

The term status quo is often misunderstood. In this exact form, it means 'the state of things which is'; it does not mean 'the state of things as it has always been'. Quite often, a rude shock to the system is required to shift it out of the low depression into which it has sunk and stalled for a while; sometimes, the state is one of physical and material expansion but spiritual degradation. It is the case in Luke 12: this chapter mentions the fate of a rich man who had so much that he did not know where to put it, and so tore down his barns to make way for larger barns. As the story goes, that night, God required the man's soul, and so sic transit gloria mundi.

We are then enjoined to consider the ravens, who neither sow nor reap, and yet are provided for by their Father in heaven. It isn't that ravens are faithful, quiet, innocent birds; ravens are inquisitive and clever, possibly the most intelligent birds on the planet. What the message here seems to be, throughout this morning's reading, is that God gives us all certain gifts; use them wisely and it will result in a fair provision. And just as in the story of the manna in the wilderness, greed and a desire for more than what God provides results in a messy state of affairs. I like the punishment inflicted on the Israelites here: when they complained about a lack of meat (notwithstanding that God gave them quail to eat), God fed them a huge superfluity of meat till it came out of their nostrils. Beware what you wish for: you might get it!

Concrete

In the grey stone canyons I saw the wolf. It was hard to see his pelt against the smoke and haze, but he was there. He was for a moment more concrete, more solid, than the aggregate of civilisation's experience. And then he winked, and was gone.

I stood for a moment in surprise. Then I heard a mocking caw, the cry of ravens since Noah, "Ark! Ark!"

I looked up, and for a moment there was an amber eye laughing in the darkness. There were amber eyes laughing in the grey. And I felt almost like an insect trapped in that amber. Until I too saw wolf and raven clearly, and was free.

Raving

Long-time readers of this blog, and those who know such things, will appreciate this post.

Ah, we were all young once. I began to grow old in the winter of 2004.

Read the blog. The story might have ended, but thought and memory go on, world without end.

Strangers In Paradise

There was something like Eden in the place. It had sprung up overnight, and in the first days of its being, the Powers That Claimed Power installed a woman and a man to look after it. It wasn't Paradise, for this was many thousands of years after the Fall, and it was already Winter. But it was a nice little garden, nevertheless. And two ravens flew by...

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Huginn: Look, they have made a big place in a small place, and half of it is filled with innocent children!

Muninn: I remember they built a tower almost unto heaven, and it was filled with half-innocent children.

H: There is a mighty tree in the middle, and also some really odd landscaping.

M: I remember we had two trees, and two people, and a lot of animals.

H: Hey, they've made two statues in memory of us.

M: (looking sharply downward) Oh, please! Those are meant to be eagles, and pretty ugly ones at that.

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Another Day In Paradise

She calls out to the man on the street,
Sir, can you help me?
It is cold and I've nowhere to sleep,
Is there somewhere you can tell me ?

He walks on, doesn't look back,
he pretends he can't hear her;
starts to whistle as he crosses the street
seems embarrassed to be there.

Oh, think twice:
it's another day for
you and me in paradise...
Oh, think twice:
it's just another day for you,
you and me in paradise...

She calls out to the man on the street,
he can see she's been crying;
she's got blisters on the soles of her feet,
she can't walk, but she's trying

Oh, think twice...

Oh Lord, is there nothing more anybody can do
Oh Lord, there must be something you can say

You can tell from the lines on her face,
you can see that she's been there;
probably been moved on from every place,
'cos she didn't fit in there

Oh think twice...

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But there are no more days in this little place which was a bit like Paradise, and it is empty now.

Two Ravens (Guest Starring)

They watched the thunderbird rise. Across the golden silver of the desert floor, the irises bloomed in its wake. Its birthing shriek was like a silent fire shivering across a gas range, blue and hot and roaring. Then, the flash of yellow, the knowledge of mortal sin and carbon, and a great and yearning silence.

They watched the thunderbird fall.

Huginn: It looks like a meteor. Look, I can calculate the heat of its re-entry!

Muninn: We have seen this before. It reminds me of him.

H: You integrate it across the period of the fall, every joule shining across the canopy.

M: It disintegrates, and he didn't. We fell with him, from dawn to dusk.

H: (enthralled) Look how black it is! It is darker than the night!

M: (sadly) And so are we, and we were not.

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And to this day, as the old Watchman speaks to his children across the net of stars, he says, "Their story? You can find it, if you have ever forgotten it, at the place they used to be – and are not."

Ravens

When I began the theological and philosophical narrative found here, I was quite certain from personal observation that the eponymous corvids were the smartest birds I'd ever seen. I am glad to see that Scientific American thinks so too!

At any rate, they are possibly much smarter than doves, as a careful reading of Noah's story in Genesis will show. In that story, Noah sent out a raven, but the raven kept flying back and forth and we do not know what happened to it after that. (Maybe it was cursed with a guilty conscience and that is why ravens to this day screech, "Ark! Ark!") But after that he sent out a dove, which returned to him twice. When Noah landed, he made a burnt offering using the some of the kosher animals and birds he had with him. So much for the doves...

Ravens are territorial creatures known to be the most creative and playful of all birds. As it is, they come from the group of birds called the Corvidae or 'crows' – a family which includes the common crow, jackdaw, and jay – which probably contains the most inquisitive and acquisitive birds that we know. Measuring 1.25 metres in wingspan, they are fairly large birds who mate for life and hunt in pairs. They are also very adept at interpreting social behaviours, and are able to remember what other ravens know. They are also able to figure out complex tasks by observation and logic, and then execute them without trial or error.

Odin of the Norse pantheon kept two, named Huginn and Muninn ('Thought' and 'Memory') on his shoulders and used them as his scouts. These are the two ravens which you can go and read about. Just remember what I've said so far about ravens in general.

Transparency

"On a clear day you can see forever," as the old and visionary line goes. But as Shakespeare says in Macbeth, "Hell is murky." Chaos and order, light and darkness; radial, diametric or conceptual opposites - all things come together, and if things can be clearly seen (in the light of reason, in the harsh glare of morning) then it is good. And if unclear and murky, bad.

So why is the system so intent on keeping information in chains? It is as if the free market were to be touted to all, but open to none. The paradox is that those running the system benefit the least - resources must be spent on keeping the information cribbed, cabined, confined. The other members of the system will still tunnel around the obstacles, like stainless steel rats. The opacity will slow them down, make them less efficient, but they will survive.

Meanwhile, the information jailers ossify, and eventually become odd and touristy relics, like the beefeaters at the Tower of London. Their main job is, of course, to feed the ravens.

And on a clear day, some day, we will see forever.