He entered Jericho and was passing through. And behold, there was a man named Zacchaeus. He
was a chief tax collector and was rich. And he was seeking to see who Jesus was, but on account
of the crowd he could not, because he was small in stature. So he ran on ahead and climbed up
into a sycamore tree to see him, for he was about to pass that way. And when Jesus came to the
place, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your
house today.” So he hurried and came down and received him joyfully. And when they saw it,
they all grumbled, “He has gone in to be the guest of a man who is a sinner.” And Zacchaeus
stood and said to the Lord, “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor. And if I have
defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold.” And Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has
come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to
save the lost.”
The story of Zacchaeus is a story full of ironies, full of things one does not expect. First we learn that Jesus is passing through Jericho, which gives us our first bit of textual irony. In Jericho, the City of Palms, the city of desolation and curses about whom it was written, "Cursed before the Lord be the man who rises up and rebuilds this city, Jericho. At the cost of his firstborn shall he lay its foundation, and at the cost of his youngest son shall he set up its gates.” In the city of cursing, Jesus finds one whom others call a notorious sinner, and his house finds salvation. Long ago, Rahab the harlot was such a one as this, and she found salvation for her house as well, though all others were destroyed.
But Jesus goes to the cursed city on his way to Jerusalem, the city of David, the city of those who inherit the promise. In Jericho, Jesus stops to restore a sinner to life and to bring salvation to his house, but in Jerusalem, despite the procession of joyful hosannas, he stops only to weep over the city, saying, "Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation.” In Jericho, the word of salvation is preached, in Jerusalem, a word of condemnation.
Zacchaeus himself hardly looks like the model convert. He seems to be unfaithful to the Jewish nation in every possible way. He takes a Greek name though he lives in the heart of Palestine. He is a tax collector, a Roman collaborator in the employ of the Empire. He is chief of the tax collectors, and has become rich because of it--rich because he has unrighteously harvested from the labor of men less fortunate than himself. Perhaps he has taken bread from the mouth of the poor, and one would be likely to think that the God of justice would reckon Zacchaeus his enemy.
But, somehow, Zacchaeus really is the model convert. His is the heart that both shows receptivity to the gospel, and the "fruits in keeping with repentance." His is the good ground upon which the seed is sown, where that seed grows and blossoms into a true harvest of righteousness. How can such a thing be, in the midst of such obvious sin? Why is Zacchaeus' heart not irrevocably closed to the Lord? Why does he greet Jesus with great joy where the Pharisees only envy and conspire to kill him? Why is the tax collector more righteous than the Pharisee?
Sin can do one of two things: it can break the heart or it can harden the heart. Sometimes, in the Providence of God, God lets a sin go on and on in the human heart, not that the human heart be lost forever, but to break that heart, to humble that heart, to prepare that heart to receive grace and mercy and salvation. As Jesus says, only those who are sick go to the doctor. Sometimes it is only by sinning, or by being lost in a sin, that a human being comes to know she is lost and in need of healing and salvation. It is hard to think too well of ourselves when our sins are very obvious, so the sin of greed might in fact be a kind of proof against the sin of pride. Other times, of course, sin can be a hardening, a blindness that does not lead one to God. But the tax collectors and prostitutes were public sinners--their sin was public, communal, universally condemned. It is harder for them to be so proud as to not consider themselves in need of help, redemption, healing.
Not so the Pharisee. The Pharisee has spent his entire life in being instructed in the Law. He has either learned to keep the parts of the Law that can be observed from a real zeal and a real moral strength, or else he has learned to fake it, or else he has learned a deeper form of humility: he has learned that it is impossible always to love one's neighbor as oneself and love God with everything one has. Having failed, the Pharisee will find that true righteousness consists only in faith and repentance, not in perfectly keeping all the inward and outward works of the Law. But how easy it is to be deceived! And how tempting to protect and perhaps to promote one's reputation for holiness, for moral strength! How easy to sidle past true Biblical righteousness into a real self-deception, into very dangerous pride, vanity, vain-glory, self-righteousness. If the tax collector is going to think well of himself, he will probably glory in his ability to have power over someone else, but he isn't too likely to be securely deluded that he is a good person. In this way, greed and graft can be less dangerous than pride and vanity. He has the power of a rich man, but not the power of a rich man upon which society dotes its approval. I am not sure that the prostitute has much to glory in, he or she will find it perhaps in a successful rebellion against society.
Against, then, what we might imagine, Zacchaeus' heart is open, wide open to the chance of salvation. He must have heard of Jesus before, must have wondered about him, wondered whether he would ever actually see him with his eyes. So when he hears of the crowd and hears of Jesus' coming, he runs ahead to better see Jesus. Running--an undignified pastime for a respectable man in the Ancient Near East, but Zacchaeus does not care about this at all. If running isn't respectable, I imagine climbing a tree must be far more disreputable, but Zacchaeus is up and away. He doesn't try to overpower the crowd, he doesn't posture or threaten or use his position as leverage to get ahead in seeing Jesus. Rather, he employs his wits so he can just get a glimpse of the Lord.
And then, curiously, he doesn't say a word. He doesn't try to get Jesus' attention, he just watches. Maybe he thinks Jesus won't notice--maybe he even hopes no one notices him up in that tree. But then Jesus looks up to him and knows his heart. He knows his heart and speaks words of impossible welcome and blessing: "Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today."
Why "hurry" and why "must"? Why must Zacchaeus hurry and why must Jesus stay with him? Salvation is the thing at stake and no time must be wasted: and Zacchaeus' response is perfect obedience. Jesus says, "Hurry, and come down," and thus Zacchaeus' hurries and comes down joyfully receiving Jesus' word. He is the perfect disciple who does not question his master's word, he only obeys and does so with joy. "All of them," everyone, grumbles, everyone speaks against the Lord's visitation to this sinner. No one speaks for Zacchaeus, not a one considers he might be a worthy man, that there might be some treasure for the Lord to harvest.
But there is such a treasure. This small man, this sinner, has his heart lit on fire by Jesus' taking notice of him. God sees Zacchaeus, Zacchaeus knows he is known by God, and knows he is given a gift of the presence of God and the beginning of the kingdom, and he also knows what the proper response to all of this is. Repentance. Zacchaeus is a sinner, and the mean of his sin has helped him see his own need for salvation, and to see Jesus and his Gospel as the means and end of that salvation. He sees his own sin, and takes on the character of his Lord instead. In following the Lord of Jubilee, he restores not only what he has taken unrighteously, he also has mercy on the poor. He sees in himself what the Pharisees do not see in themselves, and this sinner in the city of destruction finds salvation that they do not find. For all that the Pharisees live in the city of kings and priests and that the Law and the Prophets are their inheritance, they do not see Jesus and they do not receive him with joy.
The Son of Man is the Good Shepherd who seeks and saves the lost, who is perfectly able to restore sinners to repentance and amendment of life, to reconcile those sinners to God, and to give them a new life. Part of the good news is believing that God is capable of restoring, in his own ways and in his own timing, absolutely anyone whom the Lord goes out to bring home. Ours is the part to have faith in the Lord's goodness and hope for all to come to repentance and newness of life. It is also our part to understand how small we are. Not that human beings are insignificant: we aren't insignificant to God and that's the only measure of significance worth having. But we are small--we don't have much strength or power or intelligence or goodness of our own. The angels excel us in every way, and our sacred history starts with humans beings deceived and naive, fragile and mortal. Our lives are gifts of grace that are in God's hands, not our own. We are, like Zacchaeus, quite small. But we are loved and we are imprinted with the image of God, which is a great dignity. There is something to being mindful of what we lack and how we fall short as a protection against the greater evils of thinking we have no need of any help or saving.
Tuesday, June 18, 2013
Monday, June 17, 2013
Author Stalking: Mercedes Lackey and the Diana Tregarde series
(Spoilers Alert!)
I happily confess to what I call "author stalking", that is, having enjoyed a book, I assume that the author of said book has some skill transferable to other novels, and I presume I might like those books as well. So I tend to pursue the acquisition of new (to me) reads, which are most often fantasy and science-fiction novels, but I follow this pattern with non-fiction as well.
That being said, Mercedes Lackey has been one of my favorite fantasy novelists since high school, and has obliged me by writing dozens and dozens of novels, many of which I like, some of which I really love and have read multiple times. (Mostly, I've read nearly all of the Heralds of Valdemar books, and it shouldn't take me too long to polish them all off.) I will write about some of those later. Last week, I encountered a new-to-me set of books by Lackey, featuring the character Diana Tregarde, and thought I would give them a whirl. Part of the reason I went on the war-path to read some new novels was to study them: I'm trying to get more serious about my own fantasy writing and it helps to pay attention to what works and what doesn't work (or just what I like or don't like) in the writings of others.
Typically, I encountered the books quite out of chronological order. What I encountered was the most recent Diana Tregarde book, which was actually a novella published in Trio of Sorcery in 2010. But it was a prequel to the other novels, set years in the past, when Diana is a freshman in college and first working out what it means to be a "Guardian", that is, a magic practitioner with the special calling to aid those innocents who find themselves in the clutches of dark magic either against their will or out of ignorance. Complication: the job doesn't pay at all, and the only reward is knowing you've done the right thing. I'm fairly certain Lackey is a Kantian ethicist, she likes duty, which is only intrinsically rewarded by satisfying one's calling and one's conscience. It doesn't provide, doesn't pay the bills, duty isn't interested in your personal life, though maybe the gods remember your good deeds in the next life.
In some ways, this is a coming of age story--Diana transforms from being a lonely teenager trying to embrace her new Guardianship by herself (her parents are dead and her grandmother has recently died, too) into a capable adult with a circle of friends who want to support and help her. She learns to operate in the world "on her own"--without the support of her parental figure--but with a group of friends. She even gets a boyfriend at the end of the story, which is something she was sure she'd be denied, since everyone in high school avoided her because she was so strange. In any case, I liked the story--the characters were dynamic, most of the supporting characters contributed uniquely and interestingly, and Diana is a likable and interesting heroine who knows how to employ a good sidekick.
Thus, I decided I would go back and read some of the earlier published Diana Tregarde novels, of which there are three, published in 1989, 90, and 91. With such a heroine and a sufficiently interesting magical world, what could go wrong?
Well, lots of things, apparently. Now, I've read Lackey's Arrows of the Queen trilogy, which were published just before these novels. Those I thought rather good, so I don't think my dislike was a matter of it just being a "stage" of Lackey's writing. I read Burning Water and Jinx High and probably I will not go on and read Children of the Night. But here are the things I thought went wrong and some things that went right.
#1 Characterization. In both Burning Water and Jinx High there are at least two characters other than Diana who narrate a good deal of the story. But none of them, including Diana, are what you'd call dynamic characters. No one changes significantly. Each of the supporting characters, Mark in Burning Water and Larry in Jinx High have contributions to make to the story, but even those contributions are passive. The reader knows from the start of Burning Water that Mark is a medium and thus one assumes this will play in the climax of the story in one way or another. It does, but it isn't terribly interesting because the medium's role is essentially passive, and although Mark makes some risky decisions about the role he will pay, it isn't presented in a way that preserves the dramatic tension of those decisions. One might contrast this with a parallel role that Karal plays in the Mage Storms trilogy. In that story, Karal is revealed to be a "channel" for magic, though otherwise a very poor mage, but in those stories, Karal's role is an interesting one because of all the moral and religious discernment and decision making that Karal has to make in order to use this gift of his. He uses it at a very great risk to himself, he's also very young, which makes him more sympathetic to the reader. (Karal is probably my favorite Lackey character.) Larry is in a similar position as Mark in Jinx High, though he doesn't have near the role in that story as Mark does in Burning Water. Larry's son, Derek, is one of Lackey's narrators, and is revealed to be psychic (as is one of the other minor characters), but Derek never does a single useful thing with his gift, and other than being duped, plays no interesting role in the climax.
In both novels, you see the perspective of the "good guys" and the "bad guys" and there is at least one good guy and one bad guy other than Diana whose perspective you get to listen in-on. But none of them, including Diana, are very dynamic characters. Mark is a passive agent throughout the climax of the first book. There's some inner struggle for him about being Catholic amidst a seemingly pagan universe . . . but he confesses at the end of the book that he's happy with his Catholicism and it isn't obvious how he's learned anything. Diana herself is by no means a "perfect" character--she makes the kinds of mistakes that a normal human would translated into a supernatural setting, but she's not dynamic either--it is hard to discern how she has changed from the beginning to end of either novel. Likewise, in Burning Water, Diana encounters an interesting healer whose powers seem fascinating and different, but she is whisked off-camera before you can learn much about her. The villains in both stories are also "passive" in a way--both plots revolve around villains who are doing the same thing in the present as they have done in the past, and they aren't changed by the action of the story either.
#2 Camera-angle. Another problem of the books is that the reader sees exactly what the villains are up to, start-to-finish, and the fact that the heroes don't catch on until the end of the story makes the heroes seem incompetent. From nearly the beginning of Burning Water, the reader knows who the villain is and more-or-less what he's up to. The same with Jinx High--the readers know the gimmick, which is a great gimmick, but the characters don't, and in the case of the latter book, the characters never figure it out. This is an unsatisfying way of telling a story, or else Lackey doesn't quite pull it off here. She does something similar in the Mage Winds Valdemar series, but there I think it works, possibly because the reader has a better handle on Valdemar's world and magical system. Falconsbane, the villain, is impossibly evil, but his back story is so complex that it is no surprise that none of our characters realize what they are up against. Also, those characters have had plenty of time to have their abilities and competencies fully established by the author. With Diana, we don't so much see for ourselves how competent she is--we are supposed to take other people's words for it. Except in Arcanum 101, where I do think one gets a good feel for how good the young Diana is at her job. Oddly enough, I think Lackey does a better job showing us her villain than she does showing us her protagonists.
#3 Lecturing. Diana lectures. I suppose Diana is a writer, so maybe it is fitting that she lectures, but I find her moralizing disingenuous. I don't think people like her pause to moralize and give their personalized moral creed--what Diana calls her Ten Commandments--to their friends. Diana is neither a prophetic figure nor a philosopher, though she's intelligent and a bit of an academic, but I'm not quite sure why she lectures. Diana spends a lot of time spouting off advice for how to live in the crazy, complicated world that she and her friends find themselves in, but to a reader, her reputation as a "wise woman" hasn't been established. She still seems too young to do that sort of thing just out of a stereotype of middle-age, and I am hard-pressed to buy that as a part of her personality. Again, Lackey handles these kind of characters better in her Valdemar books. The Shin'a'in are sources of proverbial wisdom, and characters like Kerowyn aren't afraid to throw them in people's faces. But it works for them, partly because it is an established part of the Shin'a'in culture and partly because the Shin'a'in proverbs are short--it isn't annoying because it doesn't take up that much time.
But I suppose I should say a bit on what these books do well. They have fascinating backgrounds that are complicated enough for me at times to be confused as to what part Lackey made up and what part really is based on some bit of Aztec mythology or ceremonial magic. They really have a fantastic lot of detail, and are suitably complex--which is something I always love about Lackey's magic and Lackey's worlds. Her characters are readable and likable and interesting people even if they don't do interesting things (except maybe for the teenagers in Jinx High). Mark is an especial favorite of mine, which is probably part of the reason I was annoyed that he didn't get a good climax or character transformation. The Diana of Arcanum 101 is very likable and interesting, and I would really like to hear more stories about her, from her perspective, in a way that makes her dynamic and shows how she learns from her adventures. Maybe "the seasoned magician" who is neither Sherlock Holmes nor Hercule Poirot wasn't the easiest character to write.
Also, I think Lackey was trying to make a statement by the way both of her novels ended, even if it was a statement that I don't think works very well in a story. And I think the statement was something like, "No matter how good you are, you don't and you can't know everything, and you're not always going to be able to save the day." In some ways, the endings of these novels are the sort of realistic endings of everyday life. Sometimes you get a partial victory over the evil powers-that-be, sometimes you only win at great cost. Sometimes you never figure something out and you have to do the best you can and only time will tell what you didn't accomplish (which is how I interpret the ending of Jinx High). Those are worthwhile themes to meditate on . . . even if in this case, they didn't provide very effective denouement.
Author's Note: The earlier Diana Tregarde novels (by publication date, not by internal chronology) are what you'd call dark fantasy. The evil characters really are evil and they do all sorts of evil creepy things that you'd hardly want to imagine, and a lot of their evil surrounds sexual practices, which is unfortunate. This is a motif in Lackey's writing in general, so if bothers you a lot, I would be careful about these books. It's definitely possible to skip or skim over these parts of her novels, and ironically there is no sex at all in the parts of the novel about "the good guys". Only the evil people, or the occasional stupid persons, are having sex.
I happily confess to what I call "author stalking", that is, having enjoyed a book, I assume that the author of said book has some skill transferable to other novels, and I presume I might like those books as well. So I tend to pursue the acquisition of new (to me) reads, which are most often fantasy and science-fiction novels, but I follow this pattern with non-fiction as well.
That being said, Mercedes Lackey has been one of my favorite fantasy novelists since high school, and has obliged me by writing dozens and dozens of novels, many of which I like, some of which I really love and have read multiple times. (Mostly, I've read nearly all of the Heralds of Valdemar books, and it shouldn't take me too long to polish them all off.) I will write about some of those later. Last week, I encountered a new-to-me set of books by Lackey, featuring the character Diana Tregarde, and thought I would give them a whirl. Part of the reason I went on the war-path to read some new novels was to study them: I'm trying to get more serious about my own fantasy writing and it helps to pay attention to what works and what doesn't work (or just what I like or don't like) in the writings of others.
Typically, I encountered the books quite out of chronological order. What I encountered was the most recent Diana Tregarde book, which was actually a novella published in Trio of Sorcery in 2010. But it was a prequel to the other novels, set years in the past, when Diana is a freshman in college and first working out what it means to be a "Guardian", that is, a magic practitioner with the special calling to aid those innocents who find themselves in the clutches of dark magic either against their will or out of ignorance. Complication: the job doesn't pay at all, and the only reward is knowing you've done the right thing. I'm fairly certain Lackey is a Kantian ethicist, she likes duty, which is only intrinsically rewarded by satisfying one's calling and one's conscience. It doesn't provide, doesn't pay the bills, duty isn't interested in your personal life, though maybe the gods remember your good deeds in the next life.
In some ways, this is a coming of age story--Diana transforms from being a lonely teenager trying to embrace her new Guardianship by herself (her parents are dead and her grandmother has recently died, too) into a capable adult with a circle of friends who want to support and help her. She learns to operate in the world "on her own"--without the support of her parental figure--but with a group of friends. She even gets a boyfriend at the end of the story, which is something she was sure she'd be denied, since everyone in high school avoided her because she was so strange. In any case, I liked the story--the characters were dynamic, most of the supporting characters contributed uniquely and interestingly, and Diana is a likable and interesting heroine who knows how to employ a good sidekick.
Thus, I decided I would go back and read some of the earlier published Diana Tregarde novels, of which there are three, published in 1989, 90, and 91. With such a heroine and a sufficiently interesting magical world, what could go wrong?
Well, lots of things, apparently. Now, I've read Lackey's Arrows of the Queen trilogy, which were published just before these novels. Those I thought rather good, so I don't think my dislike was a matter of it just being a "stage" of Lackey's writing. I read Burning Water and Jinx High and probably I will not go on and read Children of the Night. But here are the things I thought went wrong and some things that went right.
#1 Characterization. In both Burning Water and Jinx High there are at least two characters other than Diana who narrate a good deal of the story. But none of them, including Diana, are what you'd call dynamic characters. No one changes significantly. Each of the supporting characters, Mark in Burning Water and Larry in Jinx High have contributions to make to the story, but even those contributions are passive. The reader knows from the start of Burning Water that Mark is a medium and thus one assumes this will play in the climax of the story in one way or another. It does, but it isn't terribly interesting because the medium's role is essentially passive, and although Mark makes some risky decisions about the role he will pay, it isn't presented in a way that preserves the dramatic tension of those decisions. One might contrast this with a parallel role that Karal plays in the Mage Storms trilogy. In that story, Karal is revealed to be a "channel" for magic, though otherwise a very poor mage, but in those stories, Karal's role is an interesting one because of all the moral and religious discernment and decision making that Karal has to make in order to use this gift of his. He uses it at a very great risk to himself, he's also very young, which makes him more sympathetic to the reader. (Karal is probably my favorite Lackey character.) Larry is in a similar position as Mark in Jinx High, though he doesn't have near the role in that story as Mark does in Burning Water. Larry's son, Derek, is one of Lackey's narrators, and is revealed to be psychic (as is one of the other minor characters), but Derek never does a single useful thing with his gift, and other than being duped, plays no interesting role in the climax.
In both novels, you see the perspective of the "good guys" and the "bad guys" and there is at least one good guy and one bad guy other than Diana whose perspective you get to listen in-on. But none of them, including Diana, are very dynamic characters. Mark is a passive agent throughout the climax of the first book. There's some inner struggle for him about being Catholic amidst a seemingly pagan universe . . . but he confesses at the end of the book that he's happy with his Catholicism and it isn't obvious how he's learned anything. Diana herself is by no means a "perfect" character--she makes the kinds of mistakes that a normal human would translated into a supernatural setting, but she's not dynamic either--it is hard to discern how she has changed from the beginning to end of either novel. Likewise, in Burning Water, Diana encounters an interesting healer whose powers seem fascinating and different, but she is whisked off-camera before you can learn much about her. The villains in both stories are also "passive" in a way--both plots revolve around villains who are doing the same thing in the present as they have done in the past, and they aren't changed by the action of the story either.
#2 Camera-angle. Another problem of the books is that the reader sees exactly what the villains are up to, start-to-finish, and the fact that the heroes don't catch on until the end of the story makes the heroes seem incompetent. From nearly the beginning of Burning Water, the reader knows who the villain is and more-or-less what he's up to. The same with Jinx High--the readers know the gimmick, which is a great gimmick, but the characters don't, and in the case of the latter book, the characters never figure it out. This is an unsatisfying way of telling a story, or else Lackey doesn't quite pull it off here. She does something similar in the Mage Winds Valdemar series, but there I think it works, possibly because the reader has a better handle on Valdemar's world and magical system. Falconsbane, the villain, is impossibly evil, but his back story is so complex that it is no surprise that none of our characters realize what they are up against. Also, those characters have had plenty of time to have their abilities and competencies fully established by the author. With Diana, we don't so much see for ourselves how competent she is--we are supposed to take other people's words for it. Except in Arcanum 101, where I do think one gets a good feel for how good the young Diana is at her job. Oddly enough, I think Lackey does a better job showing us her villain than she does showing us her protagonists.
#3 Lecturing. Diana lectures. I suppose Diana is a writer, so maybe it is fitting that she lectures, but I find her moralizing disingenuous. I don't think people like her pause to moralize and give their personalized moral creed--what Diana calls her Ten Commandments--to their friends. Diana is neither a prophetic figure nor a philosopher, though she's intelligent and a bit of an academic, but I'm not quite sure why she lectures. Diana spends a lot of time spouting off advice for how to live in the crazy, complicated world that she and her friends find themselves in, but to a reader, her reputation as a "wise woman" hasn't been established. She still seems too young to do that sort of thing just out of a stereotype of middle-age, and I am hard-pressed to buy that as a part of her personality. Again, Lackey handles these kind of characters better in her Valdemar books. The Shin'a'in are sources of proverbial wisdom, and characters like Kerowyn aren't afraid to throw them in people's faces. But it works for them, partly because it is an established part of the Shin'a'in culture and partly because the Shin'a'in proverbs are short--it isn't annoying because it doesn't take up that much time.
But I suppose I should say a bit on what these books do well. They have fascinating backgrounds that are complicated enough for me at times to be confused as to what part Lackey made up and what part really is based on some bit of Aztec mythology or ceremonial magic. They really have a fantastic lot of detail, and are suitably complex--which is something I always love about Lackey's magic and Lackey's worlds. Her characters are readable and likable and interesting people even if they don't do interesting things (except maybe for the teenagers in Jinx High). Mark is an especial favorite of mine, which is probably part of the reason I was annoyed that he didn't get a good climax or character transformation. The Diana of Arcanum 101 is very likable and interesting, and I would really like to hear more stories about her, from her perspective, in a way that makes her dynamic and shows how she learns from her adventures. Maybe "the seasoned magician" who is neither Sherlock Holmes nor Hercule Poirot wasn't the easiest character to write.
Also, I think Lackey was trying to make a statement by the way both of her novels ended, even if it was a statement that I don't think works very well in a story. And I think the statement was something like, "No matter how good you are, you don't and you can't know everything, and you're not always going to be able to save the day." In some ways, the endings of these novels are the sort of realistic endings of everyday life. Sometimes you get a partial victory over the evil powers-that-be, sometimes you only win at great cost. Sometimes you never figure something out and you have to do the best you can and only time will tell what you didn't accomplish (which is how I interpret the ending of Jinx High). Those are worthwhile themes to meditate on . . . even if in this case, they didn't provide very effective denouement.
Author's Note: The earlier Diana Tregarde novels (by publication date, not by internal chronology) are what you'd call dark fantasy. The evil characters really are evil and they do all sorts of evil creepy things that you'd hardly want to imagine, and a lot of their evil surrounds sexual practices, which is unfortunate. This is a motif in Lackey's writing in general, so if bothers you a lot, I would be careful about these books. It's definitely possible to skip or skim over these parts of her novels, and ironically there is no sex at all in the parts of the novel about "the good guys". Only the evil people, or the occasional stupid persons, are having sex.
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Dreamform Three: Zombie Apocalypse and the Doctrine of Providence
I never watch horror movies. (I only watched Cabin in the Woods because it was written by Joss Whedon and I knew it would be a satire or critique of some kind.) The closest I get to horror is the X-Files, and probably nothing on network television should count as horror. I have never particularly liked vampires or zombies or ghost stories. I have either found them unbelievable, or or too gory, or fixated on death and fear--and who wants to be fixated on death or fear? Not only are they unbelievable, they are also undesirable--who wants anything in horror movies to actually happen? I am perfectly reconciled to the fact that part of my love of superheros, science-fiction, and fantasy is wish-fulfillment. But there is no wish being fulfilled for me in the genre of horror.
As such, I was rather surprised when I had a dream that was more or less about a zombie-apocalypse (even though that's the in-thing right now). Now, my imagination tends to be apocalyptic, but it doesn't tend to be full of zombies, so I thought it was unusual when I first woke up. But I will get on with telling the dream.
In the dream, I found myself at a fancy party on the top-floor of a fancy building. It was a large room, with low-lighting and candles. Later, I would notice the sun-setting, so apparently it was early evening. There were all sorts of important-looking people milling around--it was clearly a professional-class event of some kind. There were small tables dotting the room, bedecked with candles and wine-glasses. There were high-to-do buffet tables of some kind lining the far walls, perhaps just with hors d'oeuvre. People were busy talking, but despite the evening attire, it was all the talk of academics and professionals going about their business. No small talk. A current of anxiety was sweeping through the room--people were talking in small groups and they were problem-solving.
At some point, I wandered out of the room with my companion for the evening, into a front-room of some kind, the western wall of which was entirely made of slanting glass. I went out in the room to look for a mirror--something was wrong with my dress. But when I went outside, I could see out the windows over the western part of the city, and I saw the whole horizon of buildings aflame. Los Angeles, I think, was burning. And then I knew--the plague that had swept the world in a matter of days was finally here. It was here sooner than we had expected or hoped, and things did not look good.
My companion said something to me about the city burning, and I remember looking in the mirror. My eyes were starting to change color--one of the initial signs of the plague. Soon--perhaps in 24 hours--they would turn entirely red, and in the course of that 24 hours, I, too, would be turned by the plague into one of the raging, pillaging, burning maniacs out there trying to destroy the world. I remember praying in the dream for help--saying to God that surely if the 21st century ever needed divine intervention, it was now. I was met with a curious kind of silence--the kind of silence that feels like you're being deliberately ignored because you're asking the wrong question. I remember the feeling distinctly--and I've certainly had that sensation in waking life--but thinking how odd it was to have that impression under the circumstances.
I hurried back inside to find a group of professor-scientists talking. Everyone knew now--and knew because we were also changing--we could tell by eye color and by other signs. One woman, who was a biologist or medical doctor of some kind, was talking. "I have the cure," she said. She waved a vial in her hands. "I have it, beyond a shadow of a doubt, I have it. Now all we have to do is get the military to deploy it. We're going to have to do it in the water--in the oceans, but we have it, it will work."
Whatever the woman said, whatever her position was--we all believed and trusted her instantly. She was one of the few people in the dream I recognized--in real life, she's one of the most intelligent women I've ever met, an Indian woman and PhD I met at the University of Pittsburgh. But in the real world, she doesn't study life sciences--far from it. Here, she was playing a medical doctor, but I think she was a useful dream construct--because I believed her and believed she knew what she was talking about.
But by that time, we had another problem: Though we purportedly had a cure, no one wanted to use it anymore. The change had already begun, and even with the initial symptoms came a sort of giddy confidence and intense thirst for the rage, madness, and power that one could sense coming. I don't remember feeling that way myself--I more felt numb or neutral. I knew we had to stop the plague, but I didn't really care which way what happened. But the others were wavering. They had the cure, but they were no longer interested in using it.
At this point, our building was attacked by the front wave of the victims of the zombie plague. I remember the group of us heading outside on the roof--although no one wanted to stop the change, no one wanted to killed by the fully changed either. But outside on the rooftop I stopped everyone and got their attention.
"I know you don't want to stop this, but we have to do it anyway. We have to. Not wanting it to stop is part of the disease, but we just have to stop it no matter what we feel." I remember pausing for words, searching for something elegant or persuasive to say and coming up short. But to my surprise, they listened. They all listened. They listened and agreed, and then we were off to save the human race somehow.
Saving the planet involved going down to the Navy shipyards or the docks. I remember thinking the entire time that there was no way for this plan to work. It simply wasn't. The military personnel were waiting for us. Our doctor had the cure, and there were another few vials in existence, but basically our next few hours were spent preparing hundreds or maybe thousands of decoy units--so the zombies wouldn't be able to distinguish the real vial from the fake ones.
Finally, we suited up and went underwater. I remember diving underwater in deep-water diving gear with a metallic cylinder tucked under my arm. And there were hundreds of us divers and thousands of zombies following. I still didn't think this was going to work. I thought we were all going to die and the world was going to go out in a way I had least expected it to. I think there were some underwater fights of some kinds, and some of the fake capsules were destroyed. And maybe a couple of the real ones. But it didn't matter. By the time I surfaced, the sky and the water were already turning green--and green was good. Green was the sign that everything had worked according to our doctor's plans.
Before my eyes, things were turning back to normal. The change was stopping in me and my companions, and the zombies were turning back to normal. I think maybe I shook my head as the sky changed color and the world return to normal and Los Angeles stopped burning. It took less than 24 hours, and all was restored. I promptly woke up.
This dream was primarily about two things I have discerned thus far. The first is about the genre of horror itself, and the second is about the curiously unanswered or curiously answered prayer in the middle of my dream. First things first: horror, etc. As I said in my introduction, I don't really like horror that much and I really don't like fear. I'm probably one of those counter-phobic persons you hear about: I detest being afraid so much I usually try to run out and both meet and master my fears before they can get the better of me. The sooner confronted, the sooner conquered, and then you can go back to your peace of mind. But I don't normally go courting superfluous stress or anxiety or fear, especially in my leisure life of reading or t.v. and the movies. So I've always looked down on horror as the one obviously pointless and irredeemable aspect of contemporary human entertainment. God can meet people anywhere but here, I thought. Surely God is not interested in the imaginations of those preoccupied with enlarging our fears and bringing them to life.
But he is. Or at least, he is interested in meeting and engaging every aspect of human experience, and what humans do with fear is certainly an important aspect of human experience that God will engage. I never expected my imagination to engage with fear very much, and I especially never expected God to engage with me there in a very imaginative way.
The truth is, I suppose, the further one goes in acknowledging the darkness in human life, the more things appear monstrously or supernaturally bad. Evil disfigures the human psyche and deep down inside most of us are afraid of some aspect of the mystery of iniquity--but what if that evil and disfigurement were made physical--the opposite of sublimation, which is deposition. (In chemistry, sublimation means moving from a solid to a gas without stopping over in the liquid phase of matter. Deposition means going the other way.) In any case, for the first time I felt in my flesh and bones how the genre of horror is capable of speaking to or about our fears by embodying them. This is something worth doing.
But there was also the issue of my curiously answered prayer. As I said before, when I prayed in the midst of my dream for a supernatural deliverance from the zombie horde, I had a curious sense that God was smiling wryly at me, letting me know with a glance that my prayers had already been answered, had already been provided for through normal means. What I thought needed supernatural attention, God had already attended to naturally. Sure enough, through the gifts and talents of our medical doctor, a cure was given though hope had seemed like folly.
This was a helpful reminder to me. In our age of complex problems, where difficulties that surround human life seem on the surface to be such complicated jangles that they can hardly be solved through normal human effort (I think of international conflicts, ecological difficulties, fossil fuels, the national budget, cancer, AIDS, etc), things are not quite so impossible as they seem. So often we hear anxious reports, or reports so anxiously given, that this or that issue or calamity is of such and such a difficulty level that we can hardly have hope of solutions to problems. No doubt some of this is reactionary against the optimism (at least in the United States) of the 50s and 60s. Technology did not solve all ills nor even the ills it promised to resolve (since it promised time-saving, making life simpler, making life "easier"), so there is some pessimism in response. There is a greater pessimism, though, from the collapse of the cheerful Enlightenment ideologies of clear and distinct ideas paving the way for universal peace and concord among human beings, and a complete mastery of nature. Having realized our goal to be untenable, we despair of it, and despair not only of a sure and certain victory, but also of our own competence to vie with our difficulties at all. We have come of age in the cosmos, and found ourselves unequal to the challenges of adulthood, and thus we dither in anxiety and fear and security-mongering and despair.
But I think there is a middle way, or at least, a third option of how we ought to conceive of human fitness and capacity to deal with what comes our way. Hubris and cynicism are both false paths and false idols that lead to the shipwrecking of cultural wisdom and identity. A Christian, I think, ought to be properly confident that human beings were made by God to fit well with the universe around us. It is neither too big nor too small for us, with God's help. But his help doesn't have to be what we generally think of as supernatural. God doesn't actually need to rescue us from every skinned knee--or even from global epidemics. He will provide, as he always has, and the human race will go on, and he will provide, most of the time, through natural means--through the natural application of human intellect and wisdom to the problems of the world that confront us. This does not mean that God is not active. Rather, it means that most of God's activity is providential rather than miraculous. (Which in turn is why double agency matters as a theory of causality, but I'll write about that some other time. Hopefully.) Recognizing the power of God's providential care is just as important as recognizing when God acts miraculously, and if you aren't grateful and attuned to the former, you won't be spiritually prepared for the latter--which is the story of Israel and the story of the human race in general. The example par excellence of this occurs in Moses's admonitions to the Israelites concerning gratitude in the early chapters of Deuteronomy. When Israel segues from miraculous provision (manna in the desert) to general provision (normal food from the Promised Land), he warns them not to take the latter for granted or think of it as something they had earned for themselves, rather than a gift given to them from God.
Naturally, this is all complicated by the presence of sin and death in the cosmos, which makes the universe a much more difficult place to live in. (This essay, of course, is not at all an attempt at theodicy). But this isn't because human beings' natural capacities are not fit to take on the universe--of course they are, they were built to be--but rather because these capacities are warped and distorted by sin. So, instead of a "comfortable fit" with the cosmos, we have an uneasy, toilsome fit--our work in the world is marred by hardship and tragedy that need not have been there. But we were meant to be reconciled to the cosmos as well as to God, and wisdom and knowledge concerning the natural world can do a lot to bridge the gap. But it is not that the world is too big for us, it is that we are at odds with it, and it with us, and all of us now subject to futility and loss.
So my prayer was answered, and had been anticipated by God's provision. And so much of our prayers are both answered and anticipated by God's provision. We don't always have to look for miracles or what we think of as divine intervention, but we can expect to see the hand of God everywhere.
As such, I was rather surprised when I had a dream that was more or less about a zombie-apocalypse (even though that's the in-thing right now). Now, my imagination tends to be apocalyptic, but it doesn't tend to be full of zombies, so I thought it was unusual when I first woke up. But I will get on with telling the dream.
In the dream, I found myself at a fancy party on the top-floor of a fancy building. It was a large room, with low-lighting and candles. Later, I would notice the sun-setting, so apparently it was early evening. There were all sorts of important-looking people milling around--it was clearly a professional-class event of some kind. There were small tables dotting the room, bedecked with candles and wine-glasses. There were high-to-do buffet tables of some kind lining the far walls, perhaps just with hors d'oeuvre. People were busy talking, but despite the evening attire, it was all the talk of academics and professionals going about their business. No small talk. A current of anxiety was sweeping through the room--people were talking in small groups and they were problem-solving.
At some point, I wandered out of the room with my companion for the evening, into a front-room of some kind, the western wall of which was entirely made of slanting glass. I went out in the room to look for a mirror--something was wrong with my dress. But when I went outside, I could see out the windows over the western part of the city, and I saw the whole horizon of buildings aflame. Los Angeles, I think, was burning. And then I knew--the plague that had swept the world in a matter of days was finally here. It was here sooner than we had expected or hoped, and things did not look good.
My companion said something to me about the city burning, and I remember looking in the mirror. My eyes were starting to change color--one of the initial signs of the plague. Soon--perhaps in 24 hours--they would turn entirely red, and in the course of that 24 hours, I, too, would be turned by the plague into one of the raging, pillaging, burning maniacs out there trying to destroy the world. I remember praying in the dream for help--saying to God that surely if the 21st century ever needed divine intervention, it was now. I was met with a curious kind of silence--the kind of silence that feels like you're being deliberately ignored because you're asking the wrong question. I remember the feeling distinctly--and I've certainly had that sensation in waking life--but thinking how odd it was to have that impression under the circumstances.
I hurried back inside to find a group of professor-scientists talking. Everyone knew now--and knew because we were also changing--we could tell by eye color and by other signs. One woman, who was a biologist or medical doctor of some kind, was talking. "I have the cure," she said. She waved a vial in her hands. "I have it, beyond a shadow of a doubt, I have it. Now all we have to do is get the military to deploy it. We're going to have to do it in the water--in the oceans, but we have it, it will work."
Whatever the woman said, whatever her position was--we all believed and trusted her instantly. She was one of the few people in the dream I recognized--in real life, she's one of the most intelligent women I've ever met, an Indian woman and PhD I met at the University of Pittsburgh. But in the real world, she doesn't study life sciences--far from it. Here, she was playing a medical doctor, but I think she was a useful dream construct--because I believed her and believed she knew what she was talking about.
But by that time, we had another problem: Though we purportedly had a cure, no one wanted to use it anymore. The change had already begun, and even with the initial symptoms came a sort of giddy confidence and intense thirst for the rage, madness, and power that one could sense coming. I don't remember feeling that way myself--I more felt numb or neutral. I knew we had to stop the plague, but I didn't really care which way what happened. But the others were wavering. They had the cure, but they were no longer interested in using it.
At this point, our building was attacked by the front wave of the victims of the zombie plague. I remember the group of us heading outside on the roof--although no one wanted to stop the change, no one wanted to killed by the fully changed either. But outside on the rooftop I stopped everyone and got their attention.
"I know you don't want to stop this, but we have to do it anyway. We have to. Not wanting it to stop is part of the disease, but we just have to stop it no matter what we feel." I remember pausing for words, searching for something elegant or persuasive to say and coming up short. But to my surprise, they listened. They all listened. They listened and agreed, and then we were off to save the human race somehow.
Saving the planet involved going down to the Navy shipyards or the docks. I remember thinking the entire time that there was no way for this plan to work. It simply wasn't. The military personnel were waiting for us. Our doctor had the cure, and there were another few vials in existence, but basically our next few hours were spent preparing hundreds or maybe thousands of decoy units--so the zombies wouldn't be able to distinguish the real vial from the fake ones.
Finally, we suited up and went underwater. I remember diving underwater in deep-water diving gear with a metallic cylinder tucked under my arm. And there were hundreds of us divers and thousands of zombies following. I still didn't think this was going to work. I thought we were all going to die and the world was going to go out in a way I had least expected it to. I think there were some underwater fights of some kinds, and some of the fake capsules were destroyed. And maybe a couple of the real ones. But it didn't matter. By the time I surfaced, the sky and the water were already turning green--and green was good. Green was the sign that everything had worked according to our doctor's plans.
Before my eyes, things were turning back to normal. The change was stopping in me and my companions, and the zombies were turning back to normal. I think maybe I shook my head as the sky changed color and the world return to normal and Los Angeles stopped burning. It took less than 24 hours, and all was restored. I promptly woke up.
This dream was primarily about two things I have discerned thus far. The first is about the genre of horror itself, and the second is about the curiously unanswered or curiously answered prayer in the middle of my dream. First things first: horror, etc. As I said in my introduction, I don't really like horror that much and I really don't like fear. I'm probably one of those counter-phobic persons you hear about: I detest being afraid so much I usually try to run out and both meet and master my fears before they can get the better of me. The sooner confronted, the sooner conquered, and then you can go back to your peace of mind. But I don't normally go courting superfluous stress or anxiety or fear, especially in my leisure life of reading or t.v. and the movies. So I've always looked down on horror as the one obviously pointless and irredeemable aspect of contemporary human entertainment. God can meet people anywhere but here, I thought. Surely God is not interested in the imaginations of those preoccupied with enlarging our fears and bringing them to life.
But he is. Or at least, he is interested in meeting and engaging every aspect of human experience, and what humans do with fear is certainly an important aspect of human experience that God will engage. I never expected my imagination to engage with fear very much, and I especially never expected God to engage with me there in a very imaginative way.
The truth is, I suppose, the further one goes in acknowledging the darkness in human life, the more things appear monstrously or supernaturally bad. Evil disfigures the human psyche and deep down inside most of us are afraid of some aspect of the mystery of iniquity--but what if that evil and disfigurement were made physical--the opposite of sublimation, which is deposition. (In chemistry, sublimation means moving from a solid to a gas without stopping over in the liquid phase of matter. Deposition means going the other way.) In any case, for the first time I felt in my flesh and bones how the genre of horror is capable of speaking to or about our fears by embodying them. This is something worth doing.
But there was also the issue of my curiously answered prayer. As I said before, when I prayed in the midst of my dream for a supernatural deliverance from the zombie horde, I had a curious sense that God was smiling wryly at me, letting me know with a glance that my prayers had already been answered, had already been provided for through normal means. What I thought needed supernatural attention, God had already attended to naturally. Sure enough, through the gifts and talents of our medical doctor, a cure was given though hope had seemed like folly.
This was a helpful reminder to me. In our age of complex problems, where difficulties that surround human life seem on the surface to be such complicated jangles that they can hardly be solved through normal human effort (I think of international conflicts, ecological difficulties, fossil fuels, the national budget, cancer, AIDS, etc), things are not quite so impossible as they seem. So often we hear anxious reports, or reports so anxiously given, that this or that issue or calamity is of such and such a difficulty level that we can hardly have hope of solutions to problems. No doubt some of this is reactionary against the optimism (at least in the United States) of the 50s and 60s. Technology did not solve all ills nor even the ills it promised to resolve (since it promised time-saving, making life simpler, making life "easier"), so there is some pessimism in response. There is a greater pessimism, though, from the collapse of the cheerful Enlightenment ideologies of clear and distinct ideas paving the way for universal peace and concord among human beings, and a complete mastery of nature. Having realized our goal to be untenable, we despair of it, and despair not only of a sure and certain victory, but also of our own competence to vie with our difficulties at all. We have come of age in the cosmos, and found ourselves unequal to the challenges of adulthood, and thus we dither in anxiety and fear and security-mongering and despair.
But I think there is a middle way, or at least, a third option of how we ought to conceive of human fitness and capacity to deal with what comes our way. Hubris and cynicism are both false paths and false idols that lead to the shipwrecking of cultural wisdom and identity. A Christian, I think, ought to be properly confident that human beings were made by God to fit well with the universe around us. It is neither too big nor too small for us, with God's help. But his help doesn't have to be what we generally think of as supernatural. God doesn't actually need to rescue us from every skinned knee--or even from global epidemics. He will provide, as he always has, and the human race will go on, and he will provide, most of the time, through natural means--through the natural application of human intellect and wisdom to the problems of the world that confront us. This does not mean that God is not active. Rather, it means that most of God's activity is providential rather than miraculous. (Which in turn is why double agency matters as a theory of causality, but I'll write about that some other time. Hopefully.) Recognizing the power of God's providential care is just as important as recognizing when God acts miraculously, and if you aren't grateful and attuned to the former, you won't be spiritually prepared for the latter--which is the story of Israel and the story of the human race in general. The example par excellence of this occurs in Moses's admonitions to the Israelites concerning gratitude in the early chapters of Deuteronomy. When Israel segues from miraculous provision (manna in the desert) to general provision (normal food from the Promised Land), he warns them not to take the latter for granted or think of it as something they had earned for themselves, rather than a gift given to them from God.
Naturally, this is all complicated by the presence of sin and death in the cosmos, which makes the universe a much more difficult place to live in. (This essay, of course, is not at all an attempt at theodicy). But this isn't because human beings' natural capacities are not fit to take on the universe--of course they are, they were built to be--but rather because these capacities are warped and distorted by sin. So, instead of a "comfortable fit" with the cosmos, we have an uneasy, toilsome fit--our work in the world is marred by hardship and tragedy that need not have been there. But we were meant to be reconciled to the cosmos as well as to God, and wisdom and knowledge concerning the natural world can do a lot to bridge the gap. But it is not that the world is too big for us, it is that we are at odds with it, and it with us, and all of us now subject to futility and loss.
So my prayer was answered, and had been anticipated by God's provision. And so much of our prayers are both answered and anticipated by God's provision. We don't always have to look for miracles or what we think of as divine intervention, but we can expect to see the hand of God everywhere.
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