Short story: Pakt

 I wrote a short story, a little LDS romance.  It turned into a gesture of remembrance for the September 11 attacks, just in time for the 20th anniversary.  Here it is.

PAKT

We lie side by side, silent.

In love? No. In fear then?

I feel her body heat and I hear her breathing.

Together but not touching.

Could these work as song lyrics? A poem?

Footsteps approach and I feel fear. She probably feels relief.

Well we all agreed to this.

I take these kinds of things much too seriously. But I should feel relieved, like I expect Sherry does. I don't think she expected that I would be the first to find her. I know I didn't. And I almost turned away when I did, meaning to avoid the others in their search and come back later when a couple of them had joined, but she told me to get in here, and for the past couple of minutes I've been trying to figure out what she meant by her tone of voice.

Right now she almost sounds like she could be sleeping.

The footsteps draw nearer and stop. Now another voice:

“Well well well, what have we here?”

Torgersen crouches and looks in. “Hola, Macmillan.” She pronounces the double-l Castilian fashion.

“Torgersen.” I pronounce the g Castilian fashion too.

Not “Hermana,” not any more.

“Oh that's right,” murmurs Sherry, “the mission buddies.” She clears her throat. “Get in here April, and everybody keep quiet.”

Torgersen clears her throat too, sits down while she puts her hair up, and then lies down and slides over to my side.

A man lying with two women, in the dark. I can hear the polygamy jokes now.

“Comfy?” whispers Torgersen.

“Sh!” hisses Sherry.

“Okay.” And we're lying still again, no moving, no talking, waiting to see if Torgersen's voice carried enough to bring any of the others.




Hush, hush, keep it down now, voices carry . . .




These are the kinds of things that come into my head: frequently distracting and unhelpful. How can I take control of them? I might tell myself something happy, like:

At least nobody is talking about Afghanistan. I’ve had to bite my tongue plenty of times with this bunch. Invade Afghanistan? Have they not learned from history? No, I’m not a History major, I’m an English major. We’re the liberals around here.

So much for happy thoughts. But come to think of it, I haven’t heard Torgersen talk much about Afghanistan either. I wonder what she thinks, how she feels. I know how I feel, I’m still trying to compose my thoughts and opinions. It seems that many of my peers already have these firmly set.

It would be nice if Torgersen and I were alone here, just for the chance of talking about this, and other important things. Come to think of it, maybe Sherry would be up for that, if we weren’t hiding.

Right now the air feels like a blanket smothering all speech. Maybe I’m the only one who feels that, maybe I’m the only one who thinks of the weight of the building above us, of dark cramped spaces under buildings . . .

But besides all that, I’m a 21-year-old man who has the insane and useless luck to be laid out on the floor between two pretty women on a Monday night at BYU. At other universities people like us would be getting drunk – and laid.

You know what? I'm proud of this: that instead of all that we find enjoyment, excitement, meaning, in these games that others might find childish. Torgersen was there when I heard the talk about enjoying simple things as a mark of spiritual refinement. Having since read the Tao Te Ching I believe that even more, also since babysitting my young nephew. I never saw myself as likely to be good father material until recently.

What are the draft rules for married men? Fathers?

See where my thoughts are drawn, lying here between these two women – next to this particular one.

I keep re-directing my thoughts. I am so glad to be in a culture where single adults' idea of a good time is to play childhood games. Just three weeks ago we played Capture the Flag in a park, in the sparse snow. It was the first time I'd done it since I was a Boy Scout, the first time with girls. Torgersen and I were on the same team and she freed me once with a touch on my shoulder. I haven't been at peace since. Continuing to refer to her by her surname is a defense mechanism, for me at least, in my own mind at least. I tell myself she just called me by mine to be funny.

I think I can smell her perfume. Might I ever be fortunate enough to smell her sweat?

Can they smell me? Are we picking up each other's pheromones?

Now she's chuckling, very quietly, and Sherry shushes her again, for we hear more voices echoing in the corridor leading to this hiding place. I know these voices and I know why Torgersen is chuckling. If any two in our group were to defy the rules and pair up to look together, it would be Tim and Darlene. Now I do turn my head to the left and look at Torgersen's dim silhouette, and I take a chance and speak.

“Esos dos se casan dentro del año.”

“A lo mejor.”

“Keep it down, you two!” whispers Sherry. She really is taking this game seriously. But whether it's our noise or just the deductive reasoning of Tim and Darlene applied to the finite space of this building, here they are, and we hear Darlene whisper:

“See? I told you.”

“That’s quite the tight spot.” Tim's vocal cords are vibrating but he’s almost quieter than Darlene.

“Well get in here then, and cozy up.”

“And stop these two from speaking Spanish,” whispers Sherry.

“There are secret combinations everywhere,” says Tim, and Darlene giggles.

“What are you guys talking about?”

“World domination,” says Torgersen.

I'm feeling foolish for what I said to her. Was it useful – that is to say, did it serve a purpose of endearing me to her? And so I don't mention out loud how I notice that she used exactly the same words I would have.

“Scoot over.” Sherry's elbow nudges from my right. I scoot over. Sherry has spent time in big cities where rubbing shoulders with strangers on bus and subway is an everyday thing. The pressure of her shoulder on mine is impersonal. I think she's drawn her hands onto her chest, mummy-fashion, and I've got mine like that too, even though I want to have my left one down, and I want to clasp April Torgersen's right hand, secretly there in the dark. I want April Torgersen to roll onto her right side and nestle in and I'm not going to keep thinking about this right now.

“Tim, you get in here next to me. That way I'll know you two aren't getting up to anything.”

“Boy girl boy girl then,” murmurs Tim, “the natural order.” And with scoots and shuffles, Torgersen is right next to me, with a touch of shoulder and hip that I'm telling myself is not personal, and then we're quiet again, none of us getting up to anything.

Stop us from speaking Spanish to each other? I want to whisper something to April but I can't think of anything in any language. By rights it should be Torgersdatter, or however it goes in Danish or whichever language it is. I haven't asked her which one it is yet. That would have been a good sort of get-to-know-you question when we met out there in the field, but somehow at the time it would have felt like flirting. In truth we barely spoke, and the one time when we exchanged more then polite greetings it was all about how long we'd been out, what areas we'd been in, how the people were there and so on. The only personal question I ever asked her was where she was from and her answer of Perry, and my calculation that she would go home six months after me - and therefore is almost exactly a year older than me - those thoughts were constantly at the back of my mind for the next year. They never quite left in the year since I've been home, but somehow I figured we would never see each other again, and so those thoughts faded into background dreams . . . until that Sunday, in the new year: there she was, her face and arms still tanned from the tropical sun. Bienvenida Hermana. Glad you made it back, after the attack.

I actually said that, and she laughed, and I’ve spent the following weeks telling myself I should have hugged her. I know I’m still recovering from that shock, those towers collapsing. Right as it was happening I heard someone quote from the hymn: “Babylon the great is falling, God shall all her tow'rs o'erthrow.”

In a moment of shock I cast about for security and grasped at moral superiority, but then we saw and heard all that happened. Now? Again, I know how I feel, but how do I think? Nothing is certain. I don’t like the country involved in another war. Pray for our troops, they say. One of my companions is over in Afghanistan now. Here’s a prayer for all of them:




For heathen heart that puts her trust

In reeking tube and iron shard

All valiant dust that builds on dust

And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,

For frantic boast and foolish word –

Thy mercy on Thy people, Lord!




With this world the way it is we should all be hugging each other, touching each other more.

The first time I saw April Torgersen in jeans was that Capture the Flag game, and even after being home for six months and going out on dates and walking around campus surrounded by pretty women, I was not ready for that. Those jeans looked like they'd been tailored.

I guess it made it easier to call her by her first name though. We've used first names with each other about half the time since then, back and forth, I haven't figured out what's making the rhythm yet.




I remember the rhythm, oh, the rhythm we made . . .




No, I don't need that song in my head right now. I want to turn my head, put my right hand on her face and kiss her, so I think I ought to dispel the tension by elbowing her in the side and saying something chummy. But nothing's coming. It's not like we were old pals, we were just in the same mission and saw each other a handful of times, that's all. There was that time I heard her speak and didn't tell her how it impressed me. I told my companion: I turned to him and said: wasn't that a great talk?

I loved Elder Harner: he just nodded, no smirk, no eyebrow quirk.

I worked with several sister missionaries, and I felt comfortable saying I loved several of them. I spent two years in my sexual prime focused on dividing out the different kinds of love, sifting them out of carnal appetite. Sure, Torgersen had a nice face and voice, but like all the hermanas she wore roomy, utilitarian jumpers. Tonight she's wearing those jeans again.

Should I try to write songs? I'm an English major after all. You know, the people who don't know what to do with their lives. What is April Torgersen going to do with her life? I haven't even asked her about her major. Would she find an English major good enough? Would I change it if she asked?

And now more footsteps approach. How many more can we fit in here anyway?

“After years of waiting, nothing came. And you realize you've been looking, looking in the wrong place.”

“Is that Radiohead?”

“Shhh!” hisses from all around, and now it's Torgersen's elbow in my ribs.

“Sorry,” I whisper. “Was I really that loud?”

When I was a boy I played hide and seek at my friend’s house. His older sister, who was about 10 years older than us, came into the room where I was under the bed. She was eating something and she made such loud smacking sounds I burst out laughing and gave myself away. I’m not very good at games like this.

I read somewhere in one of those motivational philosophy books that God’s more of a Sardines player than Hide and Seek.

The guy who just found us crouches, still humming. I know his face but forgot his name. I didn't know he listened to Radiohead: “Pakt like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box,” from their latest. I'll have to talk to him more.

“Hi guys, looks like you've got a good crowd already. Should I stand outside and point?”

“No,” whispers Tim, “get in here.”

“Everybody roll onto your left sides,” whispers Torgersen.

“Ooooh,” croons Darlene.

“Sh!”

“Okay, I hope we all like each other. Sherry, are you okay back there?”

“Yeah, I wanna snuggle Luther.”

I did not expect that.

“Come on then, don't be shy.”

Sherry's hands press on my spine, her knees touch the backs of my thighs.

A whisper from in front: “Ready, Luther?”

“Come on in, April.”

What else is there to do, except to keep my hands in front of me, no matter how badly my right hand wants to stretch out and encircle her waist as she snuggles in? And now is that her bra strap pressing into the backs of my hands? What's going to happen with knees and thighs? Her figure is generously curved, particularly behind.

“Oops! Sorry.” She shifts forward an inch.

“'Ta bien.” I grit my teeth. How much more can I adjust my own hips? Now I'm ready for this game to be done.

“Can't you guys make any more room?”

“Not unless you want us to break the Law of Chastity,” says Sherry from over my shoulder.

Darlene laughs: a full-on peal of echoing mirth, and then it's all up: each of us is laughing and the sound must carry through the whole building.

Also when I was a boy, my family used to make laughing lines, heads laid on bellies. It only took a little chuckle to start us off. For the moment I can forget anything specifically about April Torgersen and imagine we’re all in the huddle of chicks under God's own wings.

And I know I'm laughing from equal parts humor, tension and grief.

Of course it's not long before the rest of them show up, and with more laughter and jokes they start pulling what's-his-name and Darlene out of our hiding place.

“Clever hiding place, Sherry!”

“Dusty!”

In the hurly-burly, April pushes her back more firmly to my hands for a good three seconds. Then after scooting toward the entrance, she rolls over to face me and extends a hand.

“Make a chain. Grab my hand and Sherry's.”

We make our way out and it still feels like family. Except, when we've stood up, April grabs my shoulders and turns me around. “Let me get the dust off you.” Swat, swat. I'm a suspect and an officer is frisking me, or my big sister is dusting me after playing outside.

No, April Torgersen is using her hands to remove dust from my clothes. The movements of her right hand are precise and efficient, but some are targeting my backside, and her left hand is planted firmly on my shoulder, with no hesitation.

After her deft task is done and proper, she lets go my shoulder.

“Now you do me.”

There are pivotal moments in life that don't come announced with fanfare – this is another bit of wisdom from our mission president – nor do they give much time to decide. You have to be ready when they come, so you can just act.

Maybe time is slowing down, like song and story says, but however it is, I don't hesitate, I don't even think twice about her words. Brace hand on shoulder, then . . .

Of course the dust is not only on the side but on the back too.

So my world narrows: in this moment, my task is to move my hands with such precision that the unavoidable contact with that ample bottom is utilitarian, above reproach.

“Hey, is that allowed?” I don’t remember this one’s name either.

“Come on Tim, dust me off too!”

“Someone needs to get Sherry, she bore the brunt. Look at her!”

“Oh, you're looking at my butt, are you?”

“Stacy, you do it!”

Darlene's sudden loud cackle startles me as I'm finishing April's left calf, and I stumble. Her hands are up, letting her hair down, and her reaction syncs with my balance correction to make a scene I wish I could see. I get an elbow on my head, some softness that I'll be thinking about in boring classes and late nights . . . The confused tangle ends with us holding each other's forearms, and as I look in her brown eyes I see the laughter that I hear from the others.

“Oh, just hug already!” says Sherry. “Here! Stacy?”

I don't pay them any attention: I'm watching April, so I see the split second where her mouth quirks, she drops my arms and starts moving in. I still get my arms around her first.

We hold each other for a moment amid cheers; I feel her body relax and lean in. I look over: Stacy the Radiohead fan and Sherry are locked as tightly as Tim and Darlene, though instead of kissing like those two, they're looking our way and grinning.

“Gracias, MacMii-yan.”

“Gracias, hija de Tor-kher.”

She laughs and squeezes hard for a moment, then we draw apart and April says all right everybody let's go get hot chocolate.

Maybe the Castilian was a retreat, as is her taking the lead of our group now. But I keep pace as we walk out of there and I remember the squeeze and the flash in her eyes, and I'm not going to let myself doubt what they meant.

Coats on and out into the frozen night, the talk turns to the Olympics up in Salt Lake. Stacy and Sherry aren't walking together, neither are the other two, but of course Tim and Darlene are holding hands.

I look over at April and see her breath steam in the night. She looks at me and our eyes meet again.

“Come on Luther, I'll race you to the car.”

Thank you Sardines: you’ve done your job.

First corn

This is the second year in a row that we have planted a garden in the yard of our new house - for which we are and will ever be grateful.  Last year we had some tomato plants and herbs.  This year we have tomatoes, peppers, melons, cucumbers, corn, beans, squash, herbs . . . and a cabbage.  I'm constantly making plans for improving, and since I'm doing a no-till approach for most of it, I've got cardboard boxes laid down over more land to expand.

We have two kinds of corn growing: Painted Mountain and Hopi Blue.  I timed their planting so they wouldn't cross-pollinate, and it worked: the Painted Mountain, which I planted in April, came up in the beginning of May, and its ears are ripening as the Hopi Blue is just starting to pollinate.

This evening I picked the first two ears of the Painted Mountain corn, and here are some pictures.

Thanks to my sweetie for taking this picture.

These were the early birds.  The rest of the ears will probably be ready in a week or so.  We'll hang them up to dry, use some as decorations in the fall (along with the blue), and then . . . 

We will eat it!

If you want to see a little tour of our garden as it looked about three weeks ago, you can watch the video below.  The tomatoes and blue corn have grown a lot since then.

Magic and Religion: an LDS Perspective

I wrote these two blog posts for the Jung Society of Utah; unfortunately their website seems to have just gotten hacked and I can't link to my posts there at the moment.  Also, I had to cut the length of my second post to publish on their site.  Here I'm posting its original version.

Magic and Religion: an LDS perspective, Part 1

Far away, across the fields
The tolling of the iron bell
Calls the faithful to their knees
To hear the softly spoken magic spell
-Pink Floyd: “Breathe (Reprise),” Dark Side of the Moon

Christianity has an uneasy relationship with magic, to greater or lesser degrees among its branches. Mormons are some of the wariest of all, which is ironic when you consider the origin of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The regions of North America that nurtured this faith have also hosted folk magic practices for hundreds of years. Since the rise of various new age movements, notably Wicca and Neopaganism, modern aspirants to magic have been attracted to these homegrown systems. In response to this, people who work to preserve these traditions take pains to point out that they are firmly based in Christianity, and are not to be taken for any kind of crypto-paganism. The purpose of all these charms, incantations and concoctions was to bring about miracles – usually healing – by the power of God.

Along with this went a very real belief in and fear of witchcraft: if God could give power through special rituals, then so could the Devil, and much of the work of a Cunning Person (of whatever tradition) is to protect against evil enchantments. (As a side note, the notorious “heavy metal sign” with the index and little fingers extended comes from an Italian gesture of protection against the “evil eye.”)

Mormon attitudes to magic range from dismissive to fearful, with a healthy dose of defensiveness along the spectrum. Such defensiveness is perfectly understandable: the difference between “faith” and “miracles” on one hand and “magic” on the other looks entirely relative from a psychological perspective. Much depends on what words are chosen to describe phenomena and experiences – and who chooses those words. Any given group may identify its practices and rituals as religion and others' as magic – and in so doing, project its shadow.

And it came to pass that there were sorceries, and witchcrafts, and magics, and the power of the evil one was wrought upon all the face of the land
- Mormon 1:19

These are they who are liars, and sorcerers, and adulterers, and whoremongers, and whosoever loves and makes a lie. These are they who suffer the wrath of God on earth. These are they who suffer the vengeance of eternal fire.
Doctrine and Covenants Section 76: 103-105

Church members should not engage in any form of Satan worship or affiliate in any way with the occult. ‘Such activities are among the works of darkness spoken of in the scriptures. They are designed to destroy one’s faith in Christ, and will jeopardize the salvation of those who knowingly promote this wickedness. These things should not be pursued as games, be topics in Church meetings, or be delved into in private, personal conversations.’ (First Presidency letter, Sept. 18, 1991).
-Handbook 2: Administering the Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints

Official teaching holds that Satanic minions do in fact roam the world seeking to do mischief, and in popular understanding, “messing with magic,” even experimenting with common divination tools like Tarot cards or Ouija boards is a perfect way to open the door to such mischief. While Joseph Smith canonized instructions on how to tell if an otherworldly messenger is trustworthy or not (Doctrine and Covenants Section 129), and the early days of the Church were noted for angelic visitations and dramatic manifestations of spiritual gifts (like speaking in tongues), in today's church that sort of thing is greatly downplayed.

Still, from a psychological perspective many rituals and practices still exist in the LDS Church that could be considered magical. The Mormon version of the Eucharist lacks the dogma of transubstantiation but is still seen as a potent renewal of baptism, itself a ritual that enacts a transformation of the soul through a symbolic enactment of death and rebirth.

Mormon fear of magic goes along with a general unease with ceremony. For the most part the really important thing in Mormon ordinances is the faith and worthiness of those taking part. As such, the working of miracles through faith in Mormon belief might not look very magical: “no foolish wand-waving or silly incantations.” Though there are points of mechanical procedure that are prescribed with some precision, in the non-secret rituals these are minimal to the point of austerity.

The secret rituals are another matter (and Mormons get touchy about the use of the adjective “secret” even though it fits). These are understood as a gift of power from heaven which enable a soul to reach its final destination in unity with God. And then there is the remarkable “Patriarchal Blessing.” The title, so unfortunate to modern ears, is a metaphor of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and their prophetic blessings to their sons. The practice offers an individual a private prophecy to help direct their life, given by a man with a special calling (in the early days of the Church, such men were referred to as “evangelists").

Describing these rituals as “magic” might seem very disrespectful or offensive to those who identify strongly with the tradition. While a psychological imagination can see the kinship between magic and religion, some believers find this hard to take: Dr. Jung constantly defended himself against accusations from Christian clergy that he reduced the message of our faith to nothing more than a working of the mind.

Jung's work gets it from both sides: believers who resent their faith practice sharing any names with what they regard as devilish counterfeits, and skeptics who despise magic and religion alike as a pathology unbecoming enlightened and civilized people.


Since Jung's great work was the reconciliation of opposites, I write in service of that goal.

Magic and Religion: an LDS perspective, Part 2

In 1994 the journal Dialogue published an article by Dr. Lance Owens: “Joseph Smith and Kabbalah: The Occult Connection.” One of Owens' sources was Early Mormonism and the Magic World View by D. Michael Quinn – who had been excommunicated the year before. Quinn's work had been used as source material for the popular anti-Mormon comic book The Visitors, so Owens was hitting a nerve.  The mid 1990s in the Utah Mormon culture zone were also marked by lingering fears of Satanic cults (anyone who lived in Provo at the time probably heard all sorts of urban legends about goings-on in the old Academy building before it was renovated as the new city library). The word “occult” had picked up plenty of negative baggage through popular media already, and the use of it in such a context at such a time was bound to ruffle some feathers, as Owens himself anticipated.

In 1996 William J. Hamblin wrote a footnote-laden dressing-down of Owens' article. In pointing out its scholarly shortcomings he elegantly missed the real point, because after all the purpose was not only to deflect suspicion of any “occult” connection to Joseph Smith's experience or mission but to continue deprecating and depreciating any similarities between the two at all – similarities which I for one came to find inspiring rather than alarming. It took another nine years for the Mormon establishment to come around to admitting Joseph Smith's magic background, after a fashion: in Richard Bushman's authorized biography Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling we read that “Magic and religion melded in Smith family culture” (p. 50) and there is even a frank admission of the seerstone “blending magic with inspired translation” of the Book of Mormon (p. 131). Even so, Bushman downplayed the association, casting magic as a “preparatory gospel” for Smith's prophetic calling (p. 54).

The original meaning of the word “occult” after all being “hidden,” it would behoove us Mormons to consider how often our unique scripture mentions hidden knowledge. One striking example comes from the “Word of Wisdom”:

And all saints who remember to keep and do these sayings, walking in obedience to the commandments . . . shall find wisdom and great treasures of knowledge, even hidden treasures (Doctrine and Covenants Section 89:18-19, my emphasis)

We might consider Alma's sermon to the Zoramites, with a beautiful metaphor of a Tree of Life growing in each individual soul (Alma 32), the gnostic experiences of several Lamanite rulers (Alma 19, 22), and disciples of Christ at the time of his visit (3 Nephi 26, 28). Sometimes people shared what they learned through their experiences, sometimes they were told to keep it a secret, like Nephi (1 Nephi 14:28), Alma the younger (Alma 12:9), Mormon (3 Nephi 26:11), the Brother of Jared and Moroni (Ether 4).

Our religion is of God, their magic is of the Devil – this is too easy an accusation to make. Even in the Book of Mormon there are several instances of the true prophets being accused of deceiving people by their “cunning arts” (1 Ne 16:38), “the power of the devil” (Alma 15:15), and “the cunning and the mysterious arts of the evil one” (Helaman 16:21). Accusations, labels, meanings, are so easily used as weapons against those whom a group fears or distrusts, that an earnest truth-seeker can't afford to take such words at face value.

A psychological understanding, or a psychological imagination, helps us understand that magic and/or the occult is a way of engaging with the unconscious or the realm of the imaginative (one modern practitioner calls it the science of experiencing Truth). To recognize this means to admit the close kinship of magic and religion as branches from the same root – indeed interchangeable depending on one's point of view. There can be two ways of dealing with this: 

1. a fundamentalist rejection of any religious expression outside one's own, 
2. or a curiosity about the different ways that Truth is perceived and sought from different perspectives.

If the theologian really believes in the almighty power of God on the one hand and in the validity of dogma on the other, why then does he not trust God to speak in the soul?  Why this fear of psychology?  Or is, in complete contradiction to dogma, the soul itself a hell from which only demons gibber?  (Jung: Psychology and Alchemy, Collected Works Vol. 12, p. 19)

In a series of lectures on the gnostic myth of Sophia, Dr. Owens talks about this secular age and its intolerance for transcendence. Fueled in part by absurd fundamentalist insistence on impossible dogmas as fact, a rationalist attitude has grown which pathologizes myth and gnosis (an attitude reflected by Korihor, one of the most notorious figures in the Book of Mormon). To believe in any religion or myth in light of modern scientific knowledge requires setting aside or overcoming both the rationalist dismissal of myth and the fundamentalist dismissal of fact.

When we open our mind to the possibility of revelations of something from outside the secular or even religious ego – and if we also open our minds to a pragmatic means of measuring the claims of such revelations based on the criteria given in Alma 32 – then we have the opportunity to see the dogmas of our professed creeds with new eyes: to recognize their value as myth (here I would also recommend Dr. Owens' lectures on Tolkien's mythopoeia). This means ceasing to disparage or even define myth as false distraction from truth, and instead seeing it as a way to approach Truth. This is how we can truly recognize the value of others’ myths, and our own.

No matter what the world thinks about religious experience, the one who has it possesses the great treasure of a thing that has provided him with a source of life, meaning, and beauty and that has given a new splendour to the world and to mankind. He has pistis and peace. Where is the criterion by which you could say that such a life is not legitimate, that such experience is not valid and that such pistis is mere illusion? Is there, as a matter of fact, any better truth about ultimate things than the one that helps you to live? (Jung: Psychology and Religion - Collected Works vol. 11, p. 113)


We might evaluate the ways our neighbors engage with myth and the psyche by truly perceiving the fruits of their actions rather than relying on rumor or applying the yardstick of dogmatic correctness like a punishing rod. We may still have the option of holding out faith in metaphysical facts concerning the “ultimate things,” but even if that loses traction to a more pragmatic approach, might we not find that the humility, empathy, respect and compassion we gain in return is after all the treasure our faith enjoined us to seek?

Those who found these posts interesting might also be interested in a pagan's view of Joseph Smith in this article.

Typecast: Pipe organs in Utah Valley

Quest cooking: Rice pilaf

Yesterday I decided that too much time had passed since I'd used my rocket stove, so I cooked a simple meatless pilaf on it.  It had been a while since I'd done rice on this stove.

Here's what I put in:
About a tablespoon of ghee
Half a yellow onion, sliced
A carrot, sort of julienned
Salt
Cumin (about a half teaspoon?)
Two cardamom pods, shelled and ground
Red chile (a teaspoon or two, my hand slipped) - in honor of a departed sister of mine who used to live in New Mexico, may she rest in peace
1 cup basmati rice
1 2/3 cups water

Here are some pictures, taken by my sweetie.

Tending the flame while sauteeing the onions.  For the initial hotter flame I used twigs cut from our quince bush earlier this year.

Carrots and spices waiting to go in

After frying the dry rice with the vegetables and spices for a bit, add water . . .

. . . stir, and simmer over a lower flame for about 15 minutes.  For the lower flame I used dead branches cut from our plum tree, about half an inch thick, two at a time.

By moving the pot around the stove every so often I hoped to avoid getting a burned spot in the middle.  I still got a darkened spot, but despite what it looks like here it wasn't really burned, and didn't adversely affect the flavor of the dish.

At church we've been attending a meeting dedicated to emergency preparedness (something that Mormon culture can sometimes take to extremes).  With recent events reminding us both of the necessity to be prepared for disruptions of all kinds and the appropriateness and limitations of different strategies for this, I want to keep my skills up in strategies not only for preparedness where we live, but also self-reliance and voluntary simplicity.  I'm glad we have neighbors on our street who are also interested in this kind of thing.

Quill/brasscast: Thoughts about roots, cut short

I wrote this with a quill and with two metal nibs, trying out some "new" old paper, while keeping track of a two-year-old.

Fictional foods: apricot experiment update

So last month I posted about salting a bunch of apricots.  I've done some more work on them.  A few days after I started, I saw that the brine was slowly leaking out from the bags, and so I combined both batches into one and put them in a pickle jar.  So much for trying out different kinds of salt.

This is what they looked like after sitting for a month.

 The umeboshi recipe I was working with said to sterilize the vessel with vodka before putting them in it, but we don't keep vodka in the house, and besides, I kind of thought the whole point of people discovering how to preserve food in salt was so that you could, you know, put it in things like jars and barrels without it spoiling?  I've made sauerkraut before in glass jars after just washing them in hot water, and my dad grew up making sauerkraut by packing the cabbage and salt into the barrel with the end of a baseball bat.  So I took a risk: as long as my jar, cup and rocks (to weigh the fruit down and keep it in the brine) were clean, I'd see what happened.  As you can see, they looked fine, and as you can't smell, they smelled just like vegetable matter fermenting in brine should smell.

The next step was to dry them in the sun.  Since I currently have Wednesdays off from work, I decided to let them sit out that day last week and see how dry they'd get.  After all, strictly speaking I'm not making umeboshi, just something very close.

Just out of the jar, drying on a cut-up old undershirt (washed, of course) and paper bag.

At first I kept moving them to stay in the sun while keeping them close to the house, and then when my sweetie had finished running errands, I put them on top of the car.  I thought they might dry out more at the end of the day, but after bringing them in, I decided to pack them into a clean dry glass jar and see what happened.

After a day in the sun.

After a few days in the jar, after drying.  You can see the thicker brine that's seeping out in the bottom.

So they've been sitting in their jar for a week, and so far they're doing fine.  I used one in a bowl of beans I took to work, and I have to say they work very nicely with pinto beans.  Their flavor is not quite like umeboshi: its almost metallic, and is taking some getting used to, but I'll keep experimenting to see what they go well with.
 I'm looking forward to tasting them in a few months and finding out how the flavor develops.

More heart's blood

I mentioned in a previous post a regrettable decline in pioneer values that I perceive in the developing towns along the Wasatch Front.  Where I live you can see a curious mix of old houses in reasonably good shape, decrepit buildings where closed businesses once stood, and newer stores, office buildings and roads built to accommodate and encourage the post-industrialist consumer lifestyle of today.  It is always sad to me to see how often the older buildings with a cozier, more human, more convivial spirit to them get left to decay and then swept aside, or re-purposed: along one length of a principal street are several lovely old houses that now hold retail businesses (existing perhaps tenuously) or professional offices.

To me this is all a betrayal and defeat of the vision that settled this area, and to my view an honest assessment of the current social and economic order of the Mormon heartland must confess that we have a sad state of affairs.  Land that could be productive, used to house people in modesty, industry and communal self-reliance is regularly parceled out to build luxurious dwellings at obscene prices.  Small businesses feel they must curry favor with the trendy whims of indifferent consumers in order to survive: it is harder and harder to count on a robust spirit of 2 Nephi 26:30 to keep any enterprise afloat (and you can just forget about verse 31).

An unreflective enthusiasm for a gospel of growth and prosperity gives carte blanche to expressions of arrogance and greed that are embarrassing and insulting to an idealistic viewer.  I think it no coincidence that Hugh Nibley wasn't allowed to fulfill a career of scholarly inquiry and social criticism in peace without his persona and legacy being yanked into extremes of adulatory folklore and allegations of the most sordid private sins: our culture has little tolerance and less use for principled and consistent critiques.  And attempted critiques regularly veer into reactionary political stances, which I also find very sad and self-defeating.

But I realize too that self-reliance is hard, and not exciting or sexy.  I think a great deal of the consumer mindset that produces such callous effects worldwide in fact is rooted in the desire for miraculous deliverance: how wonderful it is, after all, to see something like a new restaurant arise from the ground, and to spread its large printed advertisements across the land for miles, with no effort from me!  Is it not something like an experience of grace, to be able to simply walk into a clean, climate-controlled, brightly-lit and fragrant space, with nothing required of me other than to be served, to make my selection, and then have the freedom to leave in search of another similar environment?  Granted, we have to pay for the things we get here, but beyond the money we part with for specific goods and services, the larger message is of this abundance from above and afar: these brands, these buildings, this infrastructure comes to us, lifts us up, and asks nothing more of the worthy among us other than an attentive duty to the specialized abstracted tasks laid out before us in yet another climate-controlled and brightly-lit space.

I think that all this truly fees like heaven to many, many people, in an unconscious or at least little-examined way.  My conscience, in exercise with my intellect, is still set against it, but I have a clearer understanding of it now.

Fictional foods: experiments with apricots

I've spent a lot of time building my world, and part of the process of making it as rich and realistic as I can is thinking about what people eat there.  Over the years I've done quite a bit of experiments in the kitchen as I've concocted and invented recipes that I imagine might be on the tables of various lands and peoples.  Something that I'd like to do some day for LTUE would be to help organize a potluck meal with participants bringing dishes from stories they liked - or wrote, or are writing.  M.K. Hutchins, whom I met at the 2014 meeting, had that idea, and I need to talk to her about it again.

You should read her blog: she puts recipes up there, for fictional foods as well as for authentic Aztec chocolate.  And you should read her stories.

So it's apricot season here in Utah, and a nice neighbor let us go and pick from her tree.  This was last week, and the fruits were only just starting to ripen - everywhere I drive I see trees loaded with fruit and it makes me sad.  There's more than I can ever pick or use, and apparently more than most people want to pick or use - one more lamentable loss of pioneer values.  I'll make a quick plug here, to any readers in the Wasatch Front area, for the Glean Utah and Glean Provo Facebook groups.  They need a lot more attention, as do the fruit trees around here.

So, in my tiny attempt to do my part, and enlisting the help of a zealous seven-year-old, I ended up with a lot of apricots that are not quite ripe.  I ate as many as I could, and I still had all these others sitting here, and outside there are still more and more ripening.  I thought about what I could do with these, and I decided that with the ripest ones I would make freezer jam.

And with the unripe ones, I got this crazy idea: what would happen if I packed them with salt and let them sit?  My Japanese cousins had introduced me to umeboshi years before, and I remembered that those aren't really plums but a certain variety of apricot.  Would plain old apricots work?  I did a search and found exactly what I was looking for: yes!

I thought to myself: this is Japanese, but the ingredients - apricots and salt - are plentiful in Utah, and of course also in the environment where much of my work in progress takes place (one of the states there owes its wealth to the salt trade).  So why wouldn't the people in my world preserve some of their apricots in this way?  How they might use these pickled fruits in their cuisine?

So I got started: washed the fruits and picked out the unblemished ones,

packed them in bags with salt (and a bit of vinegar)

I used sea salt for the one on the left, and Himalayan pink salt on the right.  I didn't have enough Real Salt (from Redmond, UT) left to use on this.

and put the bags in a dark cupboard where they'll sit for the next month.

Meanwhile, I also found out that Mexico has a similar food tradition: saladitos and chamoy.  After all, why not?  If you have certain ingredients available, people are going to figure out different ways to combine them.  It just goes to show that while we might identify certain foods or ingredients with a certain culture or place, the world is wide and varied, and the human imagination even more so.

Happy Pioneer Day!

Zhneshtotmatlitszeth-n'

Today I'm feeling grateful for not taking a bad path in my life.

This has to do with the kind of music I listen to. Music is such an important part of life for so many of us that it's important to be mindful of what music we're listening to and why. I feel good about the music I listen to, which gives my life more richness than I can know. I know I take it for granted most of the time, especially now with the internet.

When I was young I was in danger of going down a wrong path with my music, allowing other people to shape my listening choices in regrettable ways.

I'm talking about rock and roll.

Specifically, I'm talking about how some people tried to stop me from listening to rock and roll, and for a while I was in danger of following their misguided warnings.

I was young and impressionable when I first heard scandalized reports of the evils of rock music: bands with names like Black Sabbath and The Grateful Dead – horrors! It wasn't quite like the movie Footloose – I didn't live in a small town and the church had no problem with dancing (of the right kind), but the knee-jerk fear of the strange and different was just as strong at home and at church. I remember telling my younger sister that rock and roll was devil worship and that I wasn't going to listen to it.

I didn't keep that resolution for very long, for two reasons: my older sister's discovery of MTV and my older brothers' record collection that they left behind when they went away to college. It was a treasure trove, full of Led Zeppelin, Rush, Yes and the like. And as my sister continued to sneak views of MTV at night, she started buying more records of the bands she was hearing: mid-80s stars like Ratt, Cinderella, Poison, Def Leppard, Guns n Roses . . . my parents were very worried. I could tell that there was illicit subject matter in some of the stuff, but I had no clue that “Pour some sugar on me” was supposed to be a sexual metaphor, and I thought that Van Halen must be heavenly messengers after I watched the video of the Blue Angels stunt flying to “Dreams.”

This went on for some years, and as adolescence eroded my innocence I did sometimes suffer pangs of conscience for listening to some of the music that I did. Every once in a while I had to confront some explicit warnings from the authorities. Some I could shrug off without too much guilt, like my youth leader who thought that Queensrÿche's nifty logo looked Satanic. Others were harder to ignore.

One Sunday when I was 17, the Priests' Quorum lesson consisted of a recorded talk by some minor general authority about the perils of inappropriate music. I don't remember the who or when or where the talk had been recorded, but I had heard plenty of this kind of thing over the years, and progressing through my youth I had developed quite a selective ear for the rock music I liked so much. I knew the Rolling Stones were right out, of course, because of the story of Gene R. Cook talking to Mick Jagger on an airplane and hearing out of Mick's own mouth that their music was calculated to drive teens to have sex. (You can read about this in several places, for example here and here.)

In truth, I've always found the Rolling Stones a bit boring, so that wasn't really a problem. I had put aside a lot of rock and especially pop music that I decided was not worth my time – in fact, my 18^th year of life was when I was most heavily into Rush and Queensrÿche, and had decided that a lot of other rock music just didn't measure up to those standards. Not to mention that I could see how many of my youth leaders, in being worried about heavy metal, completely missed the more blatant sexual messages in the more mild-sounding pop music they listened to.

So I was feeling pleased with myself as I listened to this talk, and allowed myself a bit of arch amusement at this old guy's immoderate hysteria about rock music, and then he dropped the bomb. He mentioned a song that everybody knew about which had the hidden lyric “Here's to my sweet Satan.” He mentioned this as an example of the really dangerous rock music out there that we just couldn't afford to dabble with.

But he didn't name the song or the group!

I was seized by doubt. Who was it? I didn't ask if anyone in the room knew; I wasn't that outspoken. Besides, I was truly afraid of finding out: what if it was a band I really liked? What if it was Rush? I could already tell that Neil Peart was skeptical about God, and there was that 2112 album cover with the pentagram. I had come to terms with Neil's expression of his beliefs in his lyrics, and I didn't listen to "Ghost of a Chance" or "Anthem."  I could forgive Neil for not believing in God, I could even forgive him from preaching selfishness in his youth, but what if . . .

No, it couldn't be Rush. Could it? Well then who? Maybe it was Black Sabbath? I didn't listen to them, only “Iron Man” when it came on the radio.

The question sat at the back of my mind for years. I wanted to know who had done it, but at the same time I didn't, just in case I might find out that I really had been dangling from the devil's hook unknowing for years. So over 20+ years of the World Wide Web I've never looked it up online – until just a few days ago.

Actually, I stumbled across it, as I was reading about something else, viz: the recent lawsuit brought against - and won by - Led Zeppelin for copyright infringement, for the opening riff of “Stairway to Heaven.”  (I won't discuss that in this post.)

I feel like I'm late to the party in discovering this weird little nugget in The Greatest Song in the World, but, it's sad to admit, I have a history of unease with “Stairway to Heaven” and Led Zeppelin generally. The first time I heard it (I was young and impressionable) was with a family member who was analyzing the lyrics and mentioned the possibility that instead of being a song with a Good Message, as seemed plain to me, it might actually be a song with a Bad Message. In other words, what if that “piper” were really the Devil? She never said anything about the supposed hidden message in the recording; I don't think she had heard about it.

And that album cover – well, it was certainly mysterious, wasn't it? Kind of spooky, with those arcane-looking sigils. My due respect for Led Zeppelin was retarded by that initial suspicion, so that the timeless wonder and quality of their music took a long time to erode my wary defenses. On the way, of course I heard a bit of schoolyard and lunchroom rumors (though never the one about the backmasked message): “dude, they wrote the song while they were high on some drug.” “Isn't that song about the devil or something?” “Didn't they sell their souls to the devil?” In the pre-internet information-scarce environment of public schools, any scandalous rumor seemed as likely to be true as the next. It didn't help that I saw a record-burning on the news with Led Zeppelin albums prominently displayed.

By the time I was 17, I had shed almost all of my unease or guilt at listening to Led Zeppelin – I had taped just about all of their songs that got regular radio airplay, and I spent my senior skip day listening to my brothers' old Zep LPs (including #4) on a friend's turntable. Never let your schooling get in the way of your education.

If I had been told at that age that “Stairway to Heaven” had the hidden message “Here's to my sweet Satan” in it, I don't know what I would have done. I mean, I might not have been able to play it backwards for myself to check, but knowing how credulous I was I might have believed it. And that might have caused me even more psychic retardation. As it was, I got rid of a CD I bought of symphonic arrangements of Led Zeppelin songs when I was in my early 20s partly because the artwork made me uncomfortable. It was too . . . magical. I regret getting rid of that CD, partly because of my silly squeamishness, partly because the crushing rendition of “Kashmir” was worth the price alone.

Because the thing is, of course, Led Zeppelin is magical! Good British lads, they tapped into the same rich soil of Faerie that J.R.R. Tolkien did in their own way – after all, Tolkien was one of their big inspirations. I've written already about how much I loved fantasy fiction and role-playing as a teenager, and during that time I vehemently defended these hobbies against the accusations of Satanism that came from “ignorance andprejudice and fear.” I assuaged my feelings of guilt at listening to “Stairway to Heaven” with the thought that a new day dawning with laughter echoing in the forests could be understood not only as an image of the Millennium but also sounded like Bilbo and his buddies having a great time in the Shire (I'd be willing to bet my lunch tomorrow that Plant was thinking of something out of Tolkien when he wrote that line). Forests echoing with laughter sounds like the kind of world I would like to live in.  I want to pack my bags for the Misty Mountains!

If I had had cause to believe seriously that all of this was really tainted by an earnest profession of allegiance to Satan I might have turned decisively and ventured too far down the path away from all that: away from the color, vitality and wonder found in so many creative expressions influenced by or alluding to magic, whether labeled as fantasy or otherwise. I might never have picked up Robert Bly or Joseph Campbell or Carl Jung; I might have decided to really sever my relationship with fantasy fiction for good and all, I might have never started listening to King Crimson . . . who knows, I might have even decided that Harry Potter was of the Devil.

I don't like to think of myself in such a state.

Fortunately, my exposure to this strange and amusing sonic coincidence has come at a stage in my life where I'm more skeptical than I've ever been and also seldom shocked or offended by anything I see, hear or read. And I had already been inoculated against taking backmasking seriously. When I first heard about the “my sweet Satan” hidden message I thought the man was talking about a subliminal message that you might have to turn the sound up or speed up or slow down to hear, not a silly backwards thing. I don't know if I misheard or misremembered, or if the speaker was misinformed and simply took his bad information as a reliable report not needing any questions. I'm more inclined to believe the latter.

Being curious, I've still done my own investigation. I've heard the section of “Stairway to Heaven” backwards, listened to it slowed down, made phonetic transcriptions, heard multiple versions and gotten to the bottom of how that vocal line can sound like “my sweet Satan” backwards. Because I do have to admit: hearing it for the first time was unnerving. After all, hearing any human speech backwards gives an uncanny effect (as David Lynch exploited to hair-raising effect in Twin Peaks). If your mind is primed to hear “Satan” it's possible to assign that word to three utterances in the clip. This whole thing has been a good chance for me to reflect on what I learned in Linguistics about the brain's way of picking meaning out of sound, and the weird things that can result when we impose our need for pattern recognition on random stuff (think of A Beautiful Mind, for example). For years I've enjoyed reading mis-heard song lyrics, and the other day I just about wet my pants laughing to this video of Orff's “O Fortuna.”

Back to "Stairway."  Listening closely and repeatedly – as digital technology makes possible – shows that only the first utterance that you might parse as “Satan” really comes close to having all the right sounds. The others are really just “say” - reversed from “yes” and “fiy” reversed from “if” pronounced with a diphthong. But the glottal stop that Robert Plant started each does sound like a hasty N in reverse, giving those backwards utterances a resemblance to the Standard American pronunciation of “Satan.” In the first (or the last) Robert Plant led off from the glottal stop with a little nasal hum before articulating the dental fricative in “there's still time.” On the reversal that sounds like an N, giving the backwards “there's” a really close resemblance to “Satan,” priming the ear for the “yes” and “if.” Since he pronounces “time” more like “tom” the vowel keeps its purity in reverse and can sound like “my” or “mah” instead of “miah.” That makes it easier to hear “sweet” instead of the “tleet” that's really going on. The L is slightly rounded too, and with some aspiration (the common leaky articulation) of T forwards, there's your SW resemblance backwards. Also the background instruments obscure the vocal sounds, giving an even more vague input for the mind to try to process into something. With such mushy uncertainty, the pattern-making mind could fill in all sorts of weird things – like the nonsense of the rest of the supposed hidden message.

If it had been recorded today, someone might have parsed the reversal as “jest my tweet Satan.” Whatever meaning anyone might extract from that could make as much sense as that silly toolshed. (Now if it had been seeing something nasty in the woodshed, we might have a case here. Though I can't think of any lyrics that would make any sense to backmask “I saw something nasty in the woodshed.” The closest I can get is “the stove and tea, it's on, meat sauce, yeah.”)

Now why anyone would think that the mind's desperate attempts to make sense of backwards singing should mean that those improvised meanings are actually assimilated unconsciously going forward is hard to imagine . . . until you remember that people who come up with these kinds of scenarios aren't generally in the habit of thinking scientifically or even critically.

I feel silly admitting a need to have done so, but feels good to fully debunk this rumor through my own sonic/linguistic analysis. Like a Hogwarts wizard dispelling a boggart, I say “Riddikulus!” and laugh.

And I play the song for my children, glad that they are hearing it in its glory, without prejudice.

The Provo City Center Temple

This afternoon my sweetie and I attended the dedication of the new Provo City Center Temple.  It was done in three sessions and we attended the third, broadcast into a meetinghouse in the town where we live that isn't Provo: I don't think there were regular church meetings anywhere in Utah today, at least not along the Wasatch Front.

They made such an effort to let as many take part in the dedication because this temple has a unique history.  It was built in the shell of an old building that used to be a tabernacle.

The old Mormon pioneer tabernacles are some of my favorite things.  I don't know how many survive now, but for years I've thought I'd like to take a tour of them.  They're essentially large meeting halls, with two levels of seats, and are often used for cultural events as well as church meetings.  The big dome-topped Tabernacle on Temple Square is probably the most famous, and the biggest (at least before the humongous conference center was built).  But the buildings I'm talking about are more like the smaller Assembly Hall on Temple Square.  Several of them were built with Gothic Revival architectural style or influence.

I loved the Provo Tabernacle, ever since moving back to Provo in 1994 and attending various concerts there.  When I heard the news of the fire that gutted it in 2010 I was devastated, as were countless others.  And I thought: the Church should restore it, but it probably won't.  So I was also glad with countless others when the plans were announced the following year to not only restore it, but to turn it into a Temple.

We went through it during the open house, and I have never been in another Temple that I have found as beautiful or moving.  The stained glass windows, the decorative motif of four-petaled flowers, quartered circles . . . dare we even say, crosses?  And all the wood!  There's wood everywhere, stained a rich warm homey brown.  We call Temples the House of the Lord, and this one really does feel like God's living room.  The pictures linked above don't really do it justice.

I can't deny feeling a certain sense of loss at this beauty - flawless and immaculate, but cozy - being reserved for a Temple instead of in a building kept open to public access.  I comfort myself with the thought of the other tabernacles still standing.  And it's also comforting to see a Temple displaying more hobbit-like charm than the cold white-on-white austerity that has been the norm for so long.  I like to think that it's a sign that the culture of the Church is changing for the better.

It's slow though.  There are complex meanings and signals I see in a place like this.  Mormons love luxury, even when they're indulging in pioneer fantasies, and I see a perfect example of that in the interior of this building.  I believe in comfort, in abundance, in wealth, even - but I believe in it as an ideal to be socially made and shared.  And as I see it, that was the ideology that drove those pioneers to make such improbable structures in their frontier settlements.  For a group of people in a place with no infrastructure to speak of to pool their resources and coordinate their labor to raise the most beautiful buildings they could, in brick or even granite, instead of slapping up cheap board facades . . . I understand and share the indignation that Mormons felt when the railroads brought the Gentile rabble from the east with their piddly, trashy saloons.

The tabernacles stand to me as a signal of hope in the promise of collective and cooperative enterprise, an ideal that our culture has for the most part turned away from with a multitude of blindly individualistic sneers, simultaneously gentrifying and uglifying what was supposed to be a Zion society.  To see those empty brick walls held up and filled with something that is so obviously a tribute to the spirit of those early days (even if the work of building was done by hirelings instead of by community effort), and offered up to God, is another sign of hope in my eyes.

I can't quit science fiction: LTUE 2016

(This post is quite unpolished, but I'm putting it up anyway, because if I wait too long it won't be as relevant.)
I just got done with another year of Life, the Universe, and Everything, the annual science fiction and fantasy symposium held in Provo every February.  I've been involved with this on and off over the years ever since attending my first one in 1995.  While in college in the late 1990s I served on the planning committee, and now that I'm living in the area again I hope to serve on the committee for next year's meeting.

This thing has been going on since 1983.  It's a symposium, or supposed to be.  I haven't observed it continuously for the past 20 years because I've been away for such large gaps, but when I think back on the times I attended in the 1990s and the last few years, I perceive some differences.  Subcultures of science fiction and fantasy appreciation have grown immensely since I was a teenager, with people scrambling to claim the title of "geek" as a badge of honor.  My memory might be distorted, but from what I recall, this did not happen in 1994.

Now there are multiplying fandoms burgeoning with eager new geeks.  I have relatives who number among these, but they're nowhere near as hardcore as the people at LTUE.  Here you see the older generations of nerds: people who were nerds before it was cool.  And now they bring their children.  Fandom and geekdom might be getting popular, but these people are the real deal and they still don't blend in to the mainstream.

I'm reminded of a Cory Doctorow essay I read:

Standing in Melbourne airport on the day before this year’s World Science Fiction convention, I found myself playing the familiar road-game known to all who travel to cons: spot the fan. Sometimes, “spot the fan” is pitched as a pejorative, a bit of fun at fannish expense, a sneer about the fannish BMI, B-O, and general hairiness.
. . . 
Looking for fans isn’t just about looking for heavyset people, or guys with big beards, or people who are sloppily dressed. Looking for fans is about looking for people who appear to have given a great deal of thought to how they dress and what they’re doing, and who have, in the process of applying all this thought to their daily lives, concluded that they would like to behave differently from the norm. It is about spotting people who are dressed as they are not because of fashion, nor because of aspiration, but because they have decided, quite deliberately, that this is the best thing for them to wear.  ("A Cosmopolitan Literature for a Cosmopolitan Web," from Context, available here for free download)

I've thought a lot about wearing costumes to LTUE - some people do.  It's nowhere near as extreme as, say, DragonCon.  It's really not a convention, but I perceive an entropic sort of impulse to devolve it into simply a time and place for misunderstood people to geek out.  I've seen these forces operating since I started attending, and that's part of what drives me to want to stay involved: I want to help maintain its academic mission, keep it focused on and aspiring toward academic rigor.  Along with that goes a recognition of what Cory wrote, and a realization of why I can't stay away from speculative fiction: in its purity, this isn't about pumping out infinite pulpy repetitions of predictable escape fantasies, it's about exploring ideas - and for me, ultimately, it's about imagining how this world might be different - better.

Mormon SF/F fandom - the old kind - is a strange and wonderful subculture.  I don't wholly fit in, and I have my frustrations with it, but I feel at ease there (more at ease than in mainstream Mormon culture for sure).  Despite the many ways I see the culture falling short of what I see as its potential - or because of them - I am drawn back again and again, and after attending LTUE this year I feel even more strongly oriented to who and what I am.

"It's hard to be humble . . . when you're Danish"

I'm still working on my grandmother's research notes.  Today I'm in the local library, with a carrel by the window and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing Schubert on my headphones.  It's nice.

I just found some notes she took from William James - I like William James.  I had started to read The Varieties of Religious Experience a couple of years ago, and this reminds me I ought to try to finish it.  (You can get it for free on Project Gutenberg.)

These notes were bundled with some drafts she had written about Danish history.  My great-grandmother was born in Utah to parents who had recently immigrated from Denmark - Scandinavia supplied a huge number of Mormon immigrants in the early days.  My great-great-grandfather, in fact, was called as a missionary to southern Minnesota (where I also lived for 12 years) and met many fellow Danes there.

So my father has one Danish grandparent, and my mother does too.  And I can feel a certain pride in that heritage when my grandmother wrote: "Denmark came to appreciate and give worth to peace.  She developed ways by which peace could be maintained without aggressiveness in conquest and control of other nations."

I have felt a lot of pride in my Danish heritage and hope to go visit Denmark some day.  I continue to be curious about what Grandma thought and wrote concerning the history of Salina.  Many times I've reflected on what a shock it must have been for inhabitants of a prosperous green low land bordering the sea, to find themselves in a dry landlocked country with red cliffs towering over their new homes.  I think that's one of the distinguishing oddities of American history in general: how many groups of people have tried to adapt ways of life that evolved in certain environments, to new environments that are radically different.