Oddment and Tweak: Inroads Into Dante

It seems like the more I read, the more all roads lead to Dante, but many people are wary of paths through dark woods. A quick list of ways in.

In the beginner pile goes Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Grandpa is Virgil and every child dives into their own circle when the hand of restraint is removed.

Read Stopping By Woods (Frost) for an exploration or English terza rima. He is playing with the style and has many thoughts himself on dark woods he can't explore yet.

The next three are my Inklings in Arms - Lewis, Tolkien, and Charles Williams with Descent Into Hell, Leaf by Niggle, and the Great Divorce. Each deserves its own post (or has one already)

Then comes the fun of plunging headlong into the comedy - Sayers translation recommended

Roald Dhald: A Draft in Stuffy Room

I didn’t read Roald Dahl growing up. I think they were too full of rude noises and overdrawn grotesque adults. Can a story be good when the adults are the worst?

I saw a snatch of the movie Matilda and was instantly enchanted, then read the book while babysitting years later. It brings up the point, what to do if everyone is dead to the magic of the world and the grown ups are being controlling or petty or mean or just disinterested. And it is the adults because they couldn’t live up to the world as it is. The adults have sin all grown up in them. They are completely themselves and are taken over in their self obsession.

Charlie is Inferno in a chocolate factory. Each child becomes the thing he is given to when the hand of restraint is removed. The glutton drowns in a chocolate river; the greedy explodes with her grasping.

My current favorite is the Fantastic Mr. Fox. Because Dahl does believe there can be great courage and resourcefulness in man, if the world is against him, if he has to save everyone, and if the man is actually a fox. Boggis and Bunce and Bean are as comedic, petty, and cruel as everyone is in their own sin.

They're destroying their own land for spite.

And they are matching in this by the valor of Mr. Fox working by tooth and claw to feed his family. They nearly starve to death – children included, but it all ends in the feast where fox serves rabbit carrots. Natural enemies become friends. And in the world of the English countryside the lion laid down with the lamb.

Dahl also wrote trash for adults, but I think – sight unseen, mind you – he began to resemble his own remarks. What is one to do after writing parables and Proverbs, fairy tales of the modern kind? He has broken innocence and does not know what to do but go full bore into filth himself. Tragic, he sails a fiery fetid sea.

Burn the pornography – yes.

But don’t change a word of the rest of it. Struggle. It is more true than it is comfortable.

Retroactive edits are a sneaky way to rewrite the past so it always validates our modern feelings. It leaves no room to see past our present errors. He isn’t so far in the past that he has joined the Clean Sea Breeze of the Centuries. We are in a room stuffy with ideology and someone popped open the window and Dahl floated in and everyone was irritated we didn’t keep the air envelope closed and turn on the AC.

Our only problem with Dahl is that we’ve grown up to look like his adults.

Further up and Further in

Limits and Luddites

Lets get down to definitions - A Luddite is someone who will actively pursue the destruction of new technology for job security.

“Trash those electricity things, whale oil is the bee’s knees!” - a direct quote from a Luddite

I am not one of those. I hope to see the day when nannites will brush my teeth without the risk of eating my brain. Let the day come.

How this happened

Once upon a time I deleted an email from my former school without opening it only to be called on the carpet.

I told my mom she skewed her data set; she said she didn’t care, she wanted a high open rate. I confessed - I don’t like being emailed. And that was the point where I was labeled.

If you aren’t the church bulletin or my pastor, my open rate is spotty. In the pushback I compared email to a squirt gun in the face.

The day moved on with a machete discovery and a chicken lice incident, and so did our chat. But the question stuck, I have a Facebook account,a blog, enjoy a couple chat groups, and still can be classed as a Luddite. How?

How on earth did this happen

The technology revolution hit fast, so fast that I remember having dial up and my little sisters wouldn’t. My dad told stories of computers that took up rooms, his first Mac, and typing a report onto a floppy disc. When I was a child, I grew up with tapes, then cds and computer games, and right around twelve or thirteen it swapped over to MP3s and my iPod Nano. A couple years later iPhones made their advent. I was late to the game because I never had MySpace, but at 17 in January I got Facebook.

It boomed and we were all learning it alongside. I was heaven blessed in navigating the internet without oversight (SafeEyes was not a threat), but the flow of information itself was leveling.

If we treat it as a library, tapes and cds have natural limits, you can’t easily glut yourself. Even a tangible library, where I could blow through a stack of books in a week had physical limits, my capacity to carry a stack and read them and not get more until I returned. There was a reaction to what you did, push back.

Suddenly, in the digital realm you had all the information before you. There were books, music, technical information, and movies, the only limit was your capacity to absorb. And that even twisted to an odd half life, neither awake or asleep, where you

absorbed and absorbed and absorbed.

Facebook and the socials in general maximized this with the infinity scroll. The longer they kept your eyes, the more money they could make selling you.

And we sit now in a world much the same, just better at it. So we were trained up to be sold.

The Internet

The internet itself is neutral, like books, guns and belladona, it is how we use it. And how ruling entities direct it.

In the nineties there was the brainfood craze, everyone was eating almonds and blueberries. Real brainfood, the things that build our minds and souls, are narratives. To constantly eat a narrative, is to make yourself vulnerable to it.

Media and the Socials are an integrating entertainment. They tell you a story over and over limited by its own increasingly narrow lens and send you in reactive feedback loop towards the other. Brainwashing techniques are constantly used to degrade attention, increase receptibility, and manipulate emotions. And we voluntarily show up for the event that is a more consistently like a weird pizza night in high school than a salon that marries thought and delight. They don’t need logic because they have the rhythm of a punchline.

This isn’t normal. This doesn’t make a functional human which is evidenced in the epidemic of loneliness, the skyrocketing rate of violence, and the porn rate.

On Limits

I am not God and do not aspire to omnipotence or omnipresence. Dipping my toes in those waters actively prevent me from my life’s work. Some things simply try to burn time, but most cultivate inattention, consumption, and receptivity like a bouquet of ragweed.

The motto in our house is “Hobbits can’t handle the Palantir”. We also have a comic strip needing to be drawn of Denathor talking to the boys, sneaking off into the bathroom to stare into the Palantir, before coming out dazed with his hair blown back.

So, I do think we need to reclaim ground, but the thing to do is not to give a bunch of cokebabies crack. We have to be trained to hold ourselves outside it, understand the movements of it, and wield the thing.

For that I need a mind, hence the books.

So I am both not a Luddite and can’t be certain places online. If a place encouraged Lust, everyone knows you shouldn't be there. Sloth is not a serious social problem.

Further Up and Further In