I have been working through the Revelations of St. John of late, that first century fantasy. I am struck by the dramatic imagery: and he stood upon the sands of the sea, for instance. The noble King James goes with the first person variant and makes the apostle stand on the sands of the sea. Either alternative is striking. I see the red dragon suddenly occupying that liminal space, his first two plans thwarted and the third and most bizarre one to follow. And what an expression: the sand of the sea, which is why I say it is liminal space. The sand belongs both to the land and to the sea, and to neither. One chapter later it is the Lamb who stands on the hill of Zion for a strange interlude in which the 144,000 virgins surround him and learn a song nobody else can learn. I long to hear that song and understand what sort of men these are. To read St. John is a refreshing relief from the tame and unmystical prosaic plodding of contemporary religion which has lost its quality in a profusion of heresies and heteropathic orthodoxies.
***
Such a strange imagination; fantastic beyond conceiving is the imagination—if that it can be called—of God who revealed these things to John hemmed in by the sea. And terrible.
***
How shall we unlock our imaginations to be more godlike and less tame? I have found that endeavoring to write and learning about writing and about criticism has enriched my appreciation of Moses and of John. I do not mean mere dabbling either. I had to write fiction pretty steadily over the course of two years, and then learn to read from the vantage point that earned me, and then I began to understand better the things I had read of criticism and of literary appreciation. Not that Robert Alter did not profit me, and all the books on hermeneutics, all the debate. But I really think a person who devotes his life to interpreting fine literature—a pastor, say, ought to try to write something steadily, and learn to grow in the criticism thereof if at all possible. Many things about literature depend on the cultivation of a taste which is incompatible with a lower taste. Some become eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom, some give up their westerns, their science fiction.
***
Have I forfeited science fiction? I hope that all my life I am in the process of mortifying, of yielding up those things that my heart still yearns for and away from which it must learn to live if it is going to learn to love that which is noble, and lovely, and pure. I am convinced that the love of the base cannot co-exist with a love for the best, and that it is the best one must learn to love, however difficult. I have also learned that things must be evaluated properly, not reflexively, but according to a proper judgment of the ends, also of the means through which those ends are achieved and without which they are often misunderstood. The ends for which science fiction yearns were achieved by St. John on the Isle of Patmos many years ago. But all base and squalid means distort the ends, however noble. How crucial, then, a proper way of judging is.
***
Many set great store on the knowledge and mastery of Latin, but I myself remain unconvinced of its necessity. I have been reading the witty asides Kingsley Amis compiled in The King’s English, and he has frequent cause to allude to Latin. He is very sensible in his remarks and compelling. Among other things he notices the great advantage in learning a dead language such as Latin. The advantage of its deadness lies in the precision that is possible: the vocabulary is not growing or changing and moving around; it is locked into place. The value of translation is the value of learning precision, or picking your words exactly, a value he extols particularly for the poet. But, he is quick to add, any dead language will do. Of course, what language is as convenient as Latin? It seems to me that Hebrew, the old BDB, the immutable text, and our remoteness from the influence of contemporary Hebrew makes it suitable. As suitable as Koine Greek.
***
There is, then, every reason to do the things one should be doing. Last evening I had not only the pleasure that hearing that some young person had at last troubled to read the story I wrote her because she . . . well, she did not have anything else to do, but also that another young person was struck by the possibilities for a sequel to a certain work I have been writing for her. The first found the story was rather deficient in its length. So now I have again the incentive, that audience that is worth more than the attention of all the world and not nearly so lucrative.
***
Not long ago, after the usual sleazy prelude we had a speaker of such egregious and contemptible mein that I fell to wondering about the Revelations and how it was a star that had fallen got to the place where it was given the key to the abyss. It is probably dispensational of me to take it so literally but I began thinking that the star probably made a dent in the ground when it landed. I imagined it lifting itself out of the turf and looking around to see where it had landed and what was in store for it. Then I imagined it lifting itself out an indentation in the wet sand of the sea instead. Then I decided there would be two of them, having fallen as unripe figs fall in a strong wind: one in the turf near the beach and one on the beach itself. Now they have quite different personalities and have been wandering over the land. I have decided they need the companionship of a peevish ghost and am wondering if it is too bizarre for a children’s story to have them accidentally kill the person who will become the ghost (in a casual way—the one who lands on the sand is turning out pretty clumsy, and what do newly fallen stars know of their own strength or of the frailty of human necks?). I wonder, though, if I should not save it for a regular story and not one for the girls. I have to have the guy begin alive, for what makes him peevish is that these complete strangers who are neither man nor woman and know nothing about anything offhandedly kill him.
