The questions of science fiction generally center around 'what is man?' and very often are about 'can man create or destroy man?' It is obvious man can kill man, but this does not necessarily destroy him. About creating man, if we view man as micro-cosmos, it becomes a question actually of 'can man create?' as opposed to being a mere arranger or constructor. Can man from 'nothing' as it were, create a new micro-cosmos? This is the true question of Artificial Intelligence; can we through artifice re-create what man has by nature, that is, his intelligence? But in reality, man both already in some sense creates his intelligence and his life; but the method is not by our own choosing, that is, procreation and development. So to the question, can man create a man, I think we have a tentative yes, since we already do this. However, the act is synergistic: the trouble is that we do not do it alone. What many want to know, even though they have lost the words and faith to ask the question is: will God grant a soul to a man-made man? I do not know the answer to that.

A short oration in four septrains.

I want to write
A thousand-man militia
Of spirit and swords
In endless fight, in endless fight
As atomic inertia
Full music and words
Of charging smite!

I want to write
A great starry host
Of skiffs and schooners
Anon to alight, anon to alight
With bright-proud post
Cannon-blast crooners
In fearsome smoky sight!

I want to write
A sky-free airship
Pure sound by stick
Careless kite, careless kite
Whose mere slip
Shout-shook quick
quiver-dread at night!

I want to write
A red rocket-bomb
Searing salt wake
Breaking the night, breaking the night
In bellow-loud gong
Of wonder and yellowcake
Beauty, truth and light.

We are told that even ordinary pleasure is in essence, painful, because its coming creates a remembrance of its future cessation. We know it will cease, and this pains us. A terrific example of how this is, is in W.B. Yeats, "He Remembers Forgotten Beauty":

WHEN my arms wrap you round I press
My heart upon the loveliness
That has long faded from the world;
The jewelled crowns that kings have hurled
In shadowy pools, when armies fled;
The love-tales wrought with silken thread
By dreaming ladies upon cloth
That has made fat the murderous moth;
The roses that of old time were
Woven by ladies in their hair,
The dew-cold lilies ladies bore
Through many a sacred corridor
Where such grey clouds of incense rose
That only God's eyes did not close:
For that pale breast and lingering hand
Come from a more dream-heavy land,
A more dream-heavy hour than this;
And when you sigh from kiss to kiss
I hear white Beauty sighing, too,
For hours when all must fade like dew,
But flame on flame, and deep on deep,
Throne over throne where in half sleep,
Their swords upon their iron knees,
Brood her high lonely mysteries.

There is both a thought of that which is gone, i.e. of things past, and of things which are going to pass, 'For hours when all must fade like dew.'

This poem is truly 'Indigo'!

In general, getting what you want through side-effects is more costly and less effective than doing so directly. If you want to stop crime you have to stop it where it begins, that is to say, in the erosion of trust and sociability on the level just below the law; the level of personal interactions in that constant state of low-level anarchy. This is another way of saying society requires sociable people; and a virtuous society requires virtuous people. Technocrats can spend forever trying to manipulate people like bits. It will mostly result in people, like bits, being selectively 'turned off'. I make lots of mistakes when I write code. What would you say if each mistake might cost people's lives?

Another disadvantage to the use of natural philosophy; we might conflate terms for the sake of abstraction. Simulations must replace real people with simulated people, that is, automatons (even ones programmed to do 'random' things). People are not interchangeable with automatons. To the technocrats I would simply say, society is perhaps not a puzzle to be solved?

Let's also not forget 'determinism for thee, but not for me.'

Once I thought of repudiating Hallowe'en entirely, seeing as while it may exist as a celebration that precedes All Saints Day, it is in its absence a bit of a pagan farce.

Firstly, I think the most important thing to do is to spell it correctly, Hallowe'en. There's a tendency to lose all of the good articulation marks (God help us all at the abuse of the apostrophe-s) for whatever reason, and it ought to stop. We're saying, 'hallow eve' or 'hallow even(ing).'

'Eventide' for instance means evening; so the 'even' we can reckon is an old way of saying 'the time where night approaches' Likewise the morn is the time when day approaches, its peak being noon, after which it begins to recede. Evening is not precisely after-noon, since it seems to indicate the coming of night, which is not evident until dusk. Evening is the time of night's advance, which ends at midnight.

So to be perfectly correct, hallowe'en is a colloquial saying and has little accuracy linguistically. All hallow's evening, that is, the time proceeding midnight, is actually All Saints Day liturgically. (The evening, and the morning, the first day.) Secondly, most accounts of hallowe'en in legend make more of the coming of dawn than midnight, or midnight than twilight, so as to make our modern name for the holiday vis a vis the legends and stories, quite a mess.

What is funny, though - and something I will be taking advantage of, is that liturgically (while not civilly) Hallowe'en in terms of its celebration (which is always after-dusk and usually strictly before midnight, making its name match its modern observance quite well) is All Saints Day.

Now, I have no problem that the Orthodox church does not celebrate All-Saints on November First, as I'm in no position to change such things. But it is revered still by our more Catholic countrymen, and thus so long as it is on the civil calendar, it seems like an appropriate time to celebrate any saint of your choice.

Right, so whenever I read the Fantasy writers (that is, the Fathers of the Genre; MacDonald and his apostles) I always wonder if they believe what they write. With later writers, it is clear they don't believe what they are writing about has happened, or in the case of Fantasy's sibling, Science Fiction, could happen. Jason in Space is never going to happen. But it does entertain.

With MacDonald and Lewis - you can't count Williams because he was a Rosicrucian and kind of believed that what he made up in his head *could* be real even if it never happened - there is a suspician that everything is credulous. Reading the descriptions of Lewis' Narnia books is sort of embarrassing to the worldly mind: 'How the lion Aslan created Narnia and gave speech to all its creatures...' but there is nothing affected about it.

Tolkien was intentionally making a painting, his was art. He objected to Lewis' Narnia probably because it isn't art. It is plain storytelling. It may be artful in places (an experienced reader will pick up on Lewis' secret art here and there) but it is not of the level which the academic would notice. Lord of the Rings stands alone in that it is all of those things; storytelling, artful, religious, dramatic, lyric, epic...

Tolkien more or less used all of his nitrous on the first lap. Lewis does not. Chesterton does not. MacDonald does not.

We can, of course, set aside for the moment the much vaunted universalism expressed by MacDonald in Lillith (or so I've been told) which is thought by some to be the 'secret' of his art. I think we can safely say the secret was being George MacDonald; like Jimi Hendrix's secret was being The Jimi.

"I don't like my birth star," said the woman. The sage replied, "get a new one." What is the difference between living in this world and being bound by it? I always see horoscopes. It isn't as though I look for them; God forbid.

I could write horoscopes, probably, in less time than it would take me to find them. I mean, right? Aquarius: You get wet today. Leo: Courage and fortitude are called for today when great duress comes your way. Et cetera. Granted, mine would not share the random inanity of the average fortune cookie (best if finished with, 'in the Bedroom.') but it would have the same effect: giving me some kind of tangible - albeit vague - future to believe in. But of course, this makes no sense.

There is only one future, and it is not of mankind, as is. Interestingly, the notion of Christ as 'the end' seems to have had the least impact on our supposedly Christian culture. The Christian horoscope, all 12 of them, point to Christ and say, "It is later than you think", or "He who endures until the end will be saved", or "The time is near," and so forth. They're not happy, they are not inspirational, they are all dreadful and full of blinding light.

Coincidentally, there is a church somewhere in the Greek or formerly-Greek speaking world where the Pantocrator is surrounded by the Zodiac. He is the father of lights. But seeing this, we might, philosophical Christians that we have become, think that that some kind of syncretism was going on. You know; if there is something other than a cross, it must mean that those other things have become God for them.. except for the cross, for whatever reason.

I recall it being said that it is a mistake to try to make church services for people who don't go to church services. (I think it was Terry Mattingly.) In the same fashion, I think it bears noting that we shouldn't put ourselves into contortions making radio stations - internet or otherwise - for those who don't listen to radio.

So when we argue about styles and and liturgical appropriateness, we're sort of asking for a radio station for people who go to church services (but never liked music radio.) If you can't stand Casey Kasem, Garrison Keillor, Rush Limbaugh or the host of these folks - it is unlikely you'll be interested in any radio show with 'production values'. The values espoused therein are somewhat effected - as medium is a kind of message - but not entirely determined thereby. Regardless, if you aren't a radio listener, you can't expect to find radio shows espousing your values in toto - since one of them is devaluing radio shows.

Then again, there's plenty of radio shows espousing at least one of your values - they aren't playing.

Either way you'll not be a good judge since no matter how well they prevent the medium from becoming depraved, your attitude towards the medium itself renders the judgment poor.

I don't rate news shows, or news blogs. Why? I don't like them or read them. Even if I have something to say - such as their continual bias, bad prose, whatever - I don't read them, I never have, and I really won't be satisfied until they stop posting news.

I have been told by my priest that Anglicanism is not so much an entity in and of itself, as we might say of the Roman Catholic church. It is instead, in the context of England, a series of phases in England's religious life. Thus one generation is raised 'evangelical' and used to low church; and so seeks a deeper experience; their children are used to high church and perhaps don't connect; they desire a low church experience (or cease coming at all.)

The best way to sum up the concern that Orthodox have (who are aware of the potential problem), converts, reverts, cradles and re-treads, is that Orthodoxy in the United States does not become 'a phase in the religious life of America.'

It is this expression alone, I think, that sums up all of the issues. We would not say that Vladimir's conversion was a reflection of a 'phase in the religious life of Russia' - nor again would we look on the conversion of Nina, Gregory (of Armenia,) Paul, Peter, Patrick, Thomas, Matthias, Columba, and so on, as reflections of a 'phase in the religious life' of their given region or ethnicity!

By this I mean one thing; does the motion towards Christendom appear to be a radical departure - whether sudden or gradual - from that people's way of life, from their character? Does it appear to be an action which disdains the world and its concerns, which are reflected in that culture's patterns of life - in general?

It comes down to this, that if we were not Orthodox, and we became Orthodox, if it does not represent a genuine departure, then it most likely represents, like the Oxford movement, simply another phase in our 'religious life' - one that in a generation will disappear.

Can most groups that call themselves Christians substantiate a claim that they are otherwise? What do you suppose is required that we take to heart - in the ancient sense of having it rest in the very center of our being - Christ's commands and the following Apostolic interpretation by John t

Looking at Arrowrock Photography brought to mind this poem, found at Visiting and taking Photographs: