New Species

A broadened sense of law is important in the botanical analogy of Psalm 1. “He shall be like a tree.” The analogy is elaborated in “tree,” “fruit,” and “leaf.” With the nourishing water these must be understood in the context that the man is viewed as a plant, evident in the statement that “God planted a garden.” (Gen. 2:8) which Adam is enjoined to “dress it and to keep” (Gen. 2:15), The most important trees of the garden, of the knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life, are within the man. The garden outside  is a mirror image of the garden within, the garden that he is. Expelled  attempts at self-germination, growth and harvest miss the point. In his original relation the Creator-Gardener performed these functions for him.

Deity as the  gardener and man his plant views the human relation to God in vegetative terms, seed, root, bough, branch, blossom, bud and harvest. The man symbolized in the tree and specific varieties, as well as the field in which he is grown, suggests many associations from the wooden “tree” of Passion to the Tree of Life of New Jerusalem. He is like a tree and a gardener is the sense of it, and that gardener had a gardener.

Mary Magdalene, standing beside the open tomb, thought the risen Christ was the “gardener.” (John 20:15) Jesus wept in the Garden of Gethsemane for the “plants.” The man whose sight was restored said, “I see men as trees walking.” (Mk. 8:24) Thus the tree of Psalm 1 is a new species germinating inside the man in botanical processes, call it human photosynthesis and transpiration, in short, botanical humanity is nourished by the divine light and water that wells up within (John. 4:14).

If the righteous man is a tree, what kind? Evergreen, his leaf does not wither. Drought cannot occur beside the stream. “Root” strong, his “trunk” withstands the flood. The fruit of this tree occurs “in season.” The unwithering leaf represents constancy against changing seasons. He is said to “prosper” as evergreen,  not unique to Psalm 1. Natural botanical cycles occur throughout the prophets as vegetative epic. It is an epic, not merely an image or analogy. The godly evergreens are like living men!

The ungodly have a problem in Psalm 1. They are not like trees, though elsewhere in the psalms, do spread like the “green bay” (37.35). In Psalm 1 they are like “chaff,” switching metaphors to the cycles of the production of wheat. The wicked are dust blown with the wind. No root, no branch, stalk or fruit, no wonder they cannot “stand in the judgment” (5). They perish naturally, but preserve the true grain until harvest. Chaff is  castoff, but necessary to grain production, the outer shell that allows the wheat to ripen perfectly, thus part of the production of the divine fruit, against their will. What can they do, those tests and oppositions that squeeze in the ripening purity even while the elements, the seasons and rough weather, further tests and oppositions, bake the impurities out of the seed. The godly emerge like the wheat head, whole and hardened. This appeared in Epiphany, Fall, 1987.


There is a new species, but old in the maelstrom of oppositions. This directly concerns the righteous who first look like bookworms who meditate “in the law day and night,” rising at midnight to pray, but that “law day” that “will not pass away” is everywhere revealed in the heaven (19:1-4) and earth in natural processes, “He shall come down like rain on new mown grass” (72:6).

So heaven is a speech with implied statutes of Psalm 19; moon and the sun are grand examples of its adjudication.  Law in this greater context is characteristic of the natural but not the human. Those who meditate day and night are not reading words on a page, but seeing and feeling in the universe the natural drama of God’s handiwork. The righteous meditate  the law they are  involved in as outdoorsmen, not as indoor creatures, Wordsworthians who seek worship in a building not made with hands. Humanity is seen within these natural forces.

Begin With Forgiveness, Psalm 32

Add the guiding eye to the still small voice, the inner speech,  hearing ear,  attuned so a glance serves as a command as it does among warriors on patrol. Eye signals, as between lovers, tilted brow, grimace, smile, they read each others’ faces. He instructs this way and guides. The sense of it is following, “be not as the horse and mule that need bit and bridle to come to you,”  they come not by their will.

32. 8 KJV I will guide thee with mine eye. NIV I will watch over you. So guiding is not watching, as the NIV.

How far-seeing, far hearing, far thinking has to do with “great waters,” both natural and adverse, seeing them ahead and getting to the hiding place that is his name, the edifice word. The floods are like previous droughts, 4, that took away  moisture, so he is much a plant because the implicit gardener was heavy in his drying, which must consist of not hearing in metaphor and not seeing the eye because of his silence, 3, even though his bones are roaring. 

The plant respires to listen. The mule hears. The horse turns its eye. For this “let everyone who is godly pray when thou mayest be found, 8. The result of waterings, listenings, seeings is that songs of deliverance surround him, 7, as likewise mercy, 10. All he has to do is turn his head, eye, mind. As Isaiah, says, he wakens me morning by morning, wakens my ear to listen like one being taught (50. 4-5).
Have your ear spiritually bored to the Door! Exodus 21.1-6, Jn. 10.9
Not that we want to be unclothed, but further clothed, that mortality may be swallowed up by life. (2 Cor.5:1-4).

The blessing that comes from forgiveness covering is the Uncategorical Fluid of Relation. 

Establishing the Kingdom

Milkweed With Hopes In The Age of Cruelty

What we should do about our children suggests turning to the police is worse. They may kill the child we wanted to "listen to reason." Many mothers wish they never called 911 when the child threatened. When they threatened the police they were taken down. Greater forces than the police occur, nature for instance in the  film "Into the Wild" reviewed for this purpose here. Disrespect of that which is greater likewise impacts Cormac McCarthy's, The Road.  The "come let us reason together" part of Psalm 2  is enforced with "thou shall break them with a rod of iron" (9). A father would wish for his children to  "get along," to live in peace and care for one another. If earth is a  family and there is a destiny of "the son" to rule, the future rebellion  will put all the others to shame.  Psalm 2 holds that the nations, kingdoms and rulers, afraid of one another, have more to fear from the Anointed.

It is argued  if you impose a belief on children they will rebel. Arguing the semantics of "impose,"  government therefore is rebellion's cause. This contrasts all pre-democratic, traditional experiences where the child was raised to belong to a people, ethos and tribe and be governed by it. In China, Japan, Nigeria traditional respect remained, but in the west, rebels were logically right. They were exercising free speech. Rebellion was a step toward diversity, a fight for rights, depending on geography.  It's hard on the United States to oppose the Taliban. The Taliban think they are freedom fighters.  Freedom means, overthrow whatever law troubles the exercise of  whatever "rights." The Supreme Court imposes law and the people submit. Government deems people less who don't know what's best for them. It will tell them. Psalm 2 magnifies this to the nth degree, as if we confront  a principle of perpetual human adolescence, that there can be no law unless overthrown. "Why do the nations so furiously rage together, why do the people imagine a vain thing?" It stands unanswered. Cultural affection goes from Milton to Beckett, from justifying the ways of God to man to Murphy, a dead man sitting in a chair. It did not take long.

Embedded Dialogue

The idea of surrender. The speech of Psalm 2  is a dialogue in heaven before the earth began, embedded in the lyrical narrative. The real Ruler speaks, "I have established my king" (6). But who speaks  next and says, "I will tell of the decree?"  It is Messiah, the "LORD said unto me: Thou art My son, this day have I begotten thee" (7). Even if this reads right out of  Paradise Lost the word begotten  signifies the formal installation of divine government in the son. Then the Lord allows: "Ask of Me, and I will give the nations for thine inheritance...the ends of the earth for possession" (8). The rebels want it for themselves, which is to say they have set up a rival, usurping, shadow government. "Thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel" (9).  Those kings are admonished to be wise, to "serve the Lord with fear" and "do homage." Otherwise they may "perish." This is not a contract of partial blame.  "Suddenly his wrath is kindled" (12) suggests little warning except that the whole of Psalm 2 is a warning. Who listens to warnings? Give credit for one last effort. He says, "take refuge in Him."

What happens to those people who live in the belly of the beast  and think they are in the kingdom of God? Who would fight for their country in patriotism, who cannot think it Babylon? The question is of scale, the timeline of a trend. For instance it took many years of jawboning "irrational exuberance" for the Fed spokesman...to bring down the tech bubble. The financial fall of the west has been rehearsed three years now. What happens to people in the belly of the beast is they begin to believe what is told to them. News shows and commentaries self-fulfill. This has the characteristics of a trend, bigger than the consciousness of an individual. Trends occupy all history, but the historians make the trend, not the history. We must however hold out for the opposite case, where events proceed by design while at the same time they are counterfeited and co-determined. That is how the nations so furiously rage together. That is how liberty is the tool of tyranny, impossible to reason.

 Psalm 2 is Messianic and relates to parallels of the poetry, simultaneously with  the individual speaking, the greater person spoken of, the nation itself, David, Messiah, Israel. A number of these Psalms contrast Virgil's Fourth Eclogue which sets up the rival of Messiah in the kingdom Rome/Egypt/Babylon. 

It's a conundrum how 1 becomes 2, how the botanical man of Psalm 1 arrives so quickly to greet his opposite anti-man archetype of Psalm 2.

Insight Statutes

Forewriting

These ideas occur as  a kind of forewriting in the Messianic Psalms and Isaiah especially. Maybe Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53, Ezekiel 28, Job 40-41,  are the most astonishing examples. In the meditation of  botanical humanity of Psalm 1, the dialogue in heaven before the world began of Psalm 16, beginning as early as Psalm 2, the setting up of the boundary stones of the human of Psalm 8, the speech of David is like the fore edge paintings on some books, a symbol of a kind of writing in, below and above the text.

 Dialogues, Landscapes

The notion of Insight Statutes  comes from Psalm 119. Herein  Root and Branch is a background inquiry into Psalm 1, Shekhinah how David lies down to sleep in Psalm 4. Psalm 2 is opposite Psalm 1 as the rebel ( of 2) is opposite the righteous. It prefigures the opposition of astronomers' pipe dreams in Trick or Treat in Space against Psalm 8.  Psalm 8 is  an embedded metaphor of the cosmos which The fingers of God and the human hand denote as an essential human domain here. 

The embedded dialogue of Psalm 16 between the Father and Son before Creation is not set apart by paragraphs or quotes. Further embedding occurs with an implicit landscape in the traditional order of Psalms in the 20's and 30's. This suggests a topography of  mountains and valleys of an inner terrain. Here, in the guise of David in his extremities, Messiah walks foregrounding man and woman.The plateau is surrounded by mountains when we leave the valley below.

Insight Statutes

 Call these insights therefore understandings reached on the plateau, after climbing, which is to say that the writer heard the Psalms read aloud each morning  in a two room public schoolhouse. Students would read from the front of the class at the beginning of the day: Lift up your heads O ye gates! Like a hummingbird drinking from a hose, but now, listening, as Isaiah says, that  wakes the ears to listen "as one being taught," the earlier they are heard the more they speak. Psalm 119 says, I have more insight than all my teachers, for I meditate upon your statutes. This is a revelation in words and not words, more insight than all my teachers because you have exalted above all things your word and your name (138.2). Such matters transport to an extraordinary undertaking of the inner world.

An account of the writing of the Psalms of David is here.

Note

This is a poetical reading. It takes the poetical for granted, hence  when Young (Introduction to the Old Testament, 313) cites Beriatha in the Babylonian Talmud, Baba Bathra (14b) that David wrote the Psalms with the help of ten elders, Adam, Melchizedek, Abraham, Moses, Heman and Jeduthun, Asaph and the three sons of Korah, it claps with delight, the more so if Adam wrote Psalm 139 and Melchizedek Psalm 110. Young of course rejects this view, but he is a scholar.  Singers, poets are not harmed by history. It is idiotic to read poetry and question its existence at the same time. It is right there in front of your eyes!

Spirit and Body, Life and Death, Root and Branch

Spiritual Tree

If we say that herbs, humans, flowers and trees inhabit spiritual ground and we are all the time bodies  also physical. What is spiritual ground besides contradiction? 

 Viewing the effects together, the Garden is human; trees inhabit the human, we do not inhabit trees. Indeed who knows if trees, herbs and flowers have an inner world? The tree of life, the knowledge of good and evil, the trees of the garden are within the human even while they are outside. Psalm 1 says,  "he shall be like a tree," but he is a tree in this domain where all properties of vegetative growth apply to the maturation of being. Old and young trees describe the human spirit  in their slowness, saplings

Time bent with age, the gnarled tree

increased the girth, made rough the skin.

Spiritual Sky

This difficulty with the physical, as much as its corporeality in this life, is that the afterlife assumes there is life apart from the body, sometimes called the resurrection (of the body).  The sign that the dead live is their reanimation when their bodies rise.  Death is equated with dust and sleep two different ways; they dwelt in the dust who were buried in it, but they were also made of it. “Your dead will live; their bodies will rise. You who dwell in the dust, wake up and shout for joy. Your dew is like the dew of the morning; the earth will give birth to her dead.”  (Isaiah 26.19f). Implicit buried seeds are wakened by rain (dew). Their waking enlivens the dust.  Earth gives birth.

We therefore want to know more about the dew, which seems a continuation of Isaiah 18.4: “for so the LORD said unto me, I will take my rest, and I will consider in my dwelling place like a clear heat upon herbs, like a cloud of dew in the heat of the harvest.” The resurrection of the body has a likeness to this herb, both  hold in common the broadcast of light that pseudo-botanist Erasmus Darwin saw in flashes from the marigold and in the idea  implicit in ‘eseb, the word for herb bearing seed of Genesis 1.29 of a glistening green, a reflective dewy surface. That implication of glistening increases in the ‘owr of Isaiah 18.4 which connotes  generation of light, not by reflection but, a being made luminous, set on fire. "I will take my rest" is full of light. This rest produces the essence of oil in the herb, but the herb, being luminous, is a battery of light. Later in  Isaiah 26.19f, the feminine of ‘owr  is ‘owrah, or “herb-light,”  that is, further brightness in the plant, or seeing the luminescence of resurrected bodies revived by the new implanted breath. They are luminous because resurrected. That dew of the herb-light is a supernal revival of decayed bodies, a new Adam coming from dust by Breath  (Genesis 2.4). Dew, breath, mist, wind and water resuscitate. The dew that waters the dead, like the dew of the herbs, is light, and so “the earth shall cast out her dead.” Good metaphors are so convincing. We mostly don’t have empirical detail.

Human Photosynthesis

It seems necessary to say all this in order to establish that human photosynthesis occurs by the "rivers of water" in Psalm 1. Human photosynthesis is a means of understanding the human psycho-spiritual growth that is righteousness. Botanical cycles  posit themselves in the metaphor of  law in Psalm 1, but also involve the heavens. Astronomical and botanical  together literally intend Heaven as a speech of inner terrain, more than a phrase, a whole statute. Celestial plant or terrestrial star? Sun and moon are  examples of  the rhetoric of this speech the righteous meditate, but not by reading words on a page, seeing and feeling everywhere in a universal natural drama God's handiwork. The human existence within these natural forces meditates a worship not made with human hands, a  law that insists everywhere in heaven and earth that it is revealed  in natural processes. "He shall come down like rain upon new mown grass" (Ps. 72.6). The more obvious aspects of  Psalm 1 are paired with this one overriding notion that involves an entirely new species that grows in the human according to  natural and botanical principles. Human photosynthesis makes a botanical humanity.

Corporeality

Psalm 1 introduces this new species where our interest is still in the central image of the righteous man. It is ourselves to be sure, not an animal, to compare a tiger eating with an ear of corn growing. Chuang Tzu says of the tiger, "they do not dare to supply them with living creatures, because of the rage which their killing of them will excite" (216). So he warns that  "people are at first sincere, but always end with becoming rude" (213)..."the body seated and the mind galloping abroad" (210). It is why he recommends "fasting of the mind" (209), because "virtue is dissipated in the pursuit of the name for it" (204). The point of this is that the word for virtue and the reputation for it are not virtuous. To bring us back to the corporeality of the human, these are due to the animal spirit, the instant flare of emotion, the immediate demand for fulfillment. It could be tiger, mantis or horse, or monkey tied to a stick (216), but Chuang Tzu says, "give over approaching men with the lessons of your virtue" (221). He doesn't say be a corn of wheat and go out to your patch and die, but wait for the tassel, the ear to form in yourself. Compared to the tiger's instant rage of need it is like an age to an instant. The tree grows a little but it lasts. This new species recognizes that the spiritual  grows within. First the seed, then the sprout, then the transplant, then the growth, necessary pruning, increased girth, nests of birds, insects, flower, fruit and limbs extending over.

Old Age

His leaf also shall not wither. Chuang Tzu, even if a rough contemporary of David, would at first seem not to have much in common with the Psalms, except for the tree that in both portrays human existence entire. He shall be as a tree planted by rivers of water, says David, but Chuang Tzu really only gets cooking about the age of 70. Long life is his central concern, always distinguishing the immature dove of youth from the discernment of the spiritual man. This man of age, who feels the tides wash in and out, may also feel awash in uselessness, his biological purpose being gone, but this is the great Chou meditation, that none are so developed as in I, iv (James Legge, II, 217f) as the great oak tree that is "good for nothing and hence it is that it has attained to so great an age." Whether from deformity or crookedness the question is, "how is that you a useless man know all this about me a useless tree" (218)? That exactly addresses both the tree of the Psalm and the feeling of the discarded man abandoned after he lived his life to support others.

Of course to be used is to needed, and uselessness would be an  anxiety for it would not be famous or to be accepted by the schools. Chuang Tzu holds all this acceptance as a negative, transparently artificial. Real human relations are the "unavoidable obligations, this is the highest object for you to pursue; what else can you do to fulfill the charge (of your father and ruler). The best thing you can do is to be prepared to sacrifice your life; and this is the most difficult thing to do" (214). The mature man beset with obstacles within and without needs to find a joy of life to counter the pain of age, ague, bone loss, dissolving muscle and failing emotion, being no longer a hero in his own eye. Chuang Tzu says, good enough, go on from there. This is the end of the corporeal. If that one wants a hope they may read Psalm 1.

These propositions get exposed in the homilies, whole books on each, none greater than those considering meditation in the law of the Lord.

Blessed is the man. 

His delight is in the law of the Lord. 

He meditates day and night. 

He shall be like a tree planted by rivers of water.

He brings forth fruit in his season. 

His leaf will not wither. 

Whatever he does will prosper.  

The tree, the river, the leaf, the law, the Lord, the man, book upon book, the pages of the law are not for turning; it is the whole natural world itself. One stays up late to view it, but whether awake or asleep never stops contemplating the wonder. This is what Chuang Tzu continually does. The man has a purpose, a reason for being. It is to delight. When he takes to bed, not needing as much sleep, he meditates, he dreams, he listens  and hears, he believes and walks, his constant companion, as though his perception were cleansed and he saw everything as it is, infinite and holy (to borrow a phrase). The thought that we might compass this in words is itself a great faith. That law is not words precisely, but the speaking of it is. Psalm 1 brings before us the meditation that from youth we learn to feel in the greatness of its expression.

If we come to contemplate that law from the commentaries of Isaac Luria, Me'am Lo'ez, Rabbi Israel Meir Hacohen, Rashi's Perush on the Torah, the Babylonian Talmud, esoteric books pile up around us in the study. There be many. Be up early. The light is on.  Not to deny the written among writers.  Is there another? Yes! It is the Law of the LORD!

There's no use pretending the physical is the  spiritual. The spiritual however has physical consequences. People may think that their identity is physical, which has spiritual consequences. 

The outer garden being an image of the inner (or the other way round), a spiritual garden, there are also spiritual mountains, rivers, sky and heavens. The main thing for the human plant is the gardener. Psalm 1 takes the human relation in  terms of  a seed, root, bough, branch, bud,  blossom and harvest. 

"...you many hence infer
Your resurrection if you but recall
In what way human flesh was made the day
That both of our first parents were created." Paradiso, vii, 145f

Trick or Treat in Space

Scientific idealists believe a last resort rescue of civilization from space not only imminent, but will realize the hopes of European civilization, the good of mankind. Salvation from without, a kind of mechanized choice, always comes from those with less inner life. The aliens will be Social Democrats! So earth will be saved  from pollution and overcrowding.

Stephen Hawking however worries about the contact. Hawking's fear takes the older survival view that the aliens will raid us for our resources, that outer space capitalists are like the Spanish and the English, seek earth the way Europe pillaged South America, that they are unreconstructed social democrats! Hawking may fear big ships from depleted solar systems, but billions have been spent and years to make Contact. But even if his ancestors were not felled by smallpox like Indians, and even if this most famous living stellar star fears contact, at least Hawking endorses the alien presence. To prepare for this biologists have begun to revise the view of survival of the fittest and now say that Darwin never meant it sound like zero sum game, that social cooperation was always the pattern of prehistoric man.  Go figure. It is as unthinkable to them that aliens do not exist as it is that the Lord of Heaven and Earth does.  Be ready for the undocumented messiah.

Lord Rees, astronomer royal, thinks howevesr that this  alien sounds very like the one in whom he cannot believe. Rees warned that nonetheless "aliens might prove to be beyond human understanding" [like God], that “just as a chimpanzee can’t understand quantum theory, it could be there are aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains.” It could be! Talk about reality is embarrassing to these investigators. Having banded and put radio monitors, microchips and cameras onto every species on earth to fathom their intelligence, that is, all except themselves, no one can as proud or deluded as a scientist who thinks to meet the mind of a superior after dismissing every other species of earth as inferior.

Science is superior even to itself. Autonomous processes like the collective unconscious, evolution, and "the market," are argued to exist of themselves just the way deity used. These collectives function beyond influence, of themselves, so that for example, when the unconscious perceives the need of a hero it produces one! La! These scientific autonomies are even superior to Ocean, which is not beyond influence, for it has changed its ph and temperature by externals. Ocean is not autonomous but the stock market is! These elusions mount Babel extrapolate philosophy right out of the void. Hawking at one time under the influence of Einstein believed in a version of the LORD. Now that he finds the aliens a threat however, he says paradoxically that science makes God unnecessary.

Blake Called Them the Eternals. Not they are the Externals.

Hawking, Lord Rees, Carl Sagan hope for life on Mars. Mars, Titan and beyond. Either go  to them or they will come to us. If we go out, as Sagan did in CETI, the presumption is a return. He sent our address so they could come. It was "a sacred undertaking," the payload on Voyager I, and still remains so to the power of a "a thousand million years," "a kiss, a mother's first words to her newborn baby, Mozart, Beethoven...." What  Hawking must worry about is that Sagan and NASA, who believe in the power of natural selection on earth, that survival of the fittest, do not do so in space. Rivers, volcanoes, ice caps and every other aspect of natural science occur in space but not survival of the fittest! They don't believe in evolution there! There there are miracles! Goodman Alien boggles Hawking's mind. Simple romance sells fine.

Alien/Redeemer

It's not that these boys have challenged the existence of a Creator/Redeemer, they repudiate it and substitute  the alien/redeemer mythology. Beaming all sorts of communications continually in hope of making contact is exactly a Tower of Babel. Global thought would climb to heaven and do anything!  Global dismount is self-rapture. The Europeans eat the universe, despoiling earth,  instrumentality science, and leave. But Contact  to find "man's true place in the universe," begs the question. That species could not find its true place on Mars if it cannot on earth:

Spoil one planet and to another go. 

Any fool knows that one and one are two. 

The next is treated sooner than the first.

The Europeans eat the universe

And when they're done spit out the pit and run.

This "Ancient Mariner" says, "we must prevent their escape from earth." Whether going out or coming in, the nearest historical analogy to the "science" of alien arrival is in The Invention of America (O'Gorman) and The Invention of the Golden Age.  But science proves infallible. It corrects its error by means of more science. Every time science is wrong it is right, which beats the tar out of politics and religion, other claimants to the earth throne.

Confusion of Tongues

To counter the thinking of CETI and confuse the alien tongue we have sent another message, a diversion to discourage their landing. Do they want to take the chance and be contaminated by us? Model aliens would have debate this. Space parliament space is like the brain - no end to terrestrial thinking. Science thinks by projection that everything  true of earth is universal, hence cosmic, except of course natural selection. That's how Lowell found "canals" on Mars. They were in Venice. Aliens must "communicate," more earth talk, but do they have a sense of humor, or are they like scientific believers?  At one time 19th century poetry was a kind of religion, now science is. If alien mercy to Earth depends upon alien plurality and diversity, another ambivalence of the projected human, as in the 2009 film District Nine, one hopes they remember the debate of Las Casas that Indians had souls. Revolutions are preparatory. Sartre and the French Resistance, taught by Franz Fanon, will go underground in Montana. Oops. Earth nuke silos, provided by science as the handmaid of business and government, are already underground.

Mass Rebellion


 All this is enough to frighten the rulers into active resistance. It's enough to frighten them into inventing flying saucers! The parties of mass rebellion take counsel together. But about what and against whom? Mennonites have already proved it impossible to live with earth rulers. Are autocratic corporations punitive? Is Revelations 18, Babylon City Woman, an invention of the rulers to fake their own oppression, a picture of bond traders and merchants of world capital, global internationals unmasked in the intercourse of traffic? Is double think the fortune of “an idolatrous cult of Mammon, a cult that can only merit the name ‘fornication’”  (Ricardo Foulkes. El Apocalipsis De San Juan, 189) in the democratic state? Is Polyphemus a symbol of empire? Would  democrats execute Socrates? Never! Never! Never! Never means always.

So people with  rulers, nations and kings "take counsel" against the Lord, and against his anointed (2). But you will not catch them doing it.Such threats are only comprehended by fiction. The third part of the trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, has to stand in for the truth about it because nobody will believe that Karen Silkwood, or anyone else is threatened by these powers. These things are done behind closed doors where only prophets see. There Ezekiel saw Lucifer's fall (Ez. 28) and the seventy elders of Israel each at the shrine of his own idol worshiping crawling things and the detestable (Ezekiel 8). The most artful thing these powers have ever done, whether in Revelations 18, Ezekiel 8, religion, business or politics has been to turn themselves into liberators to cast the true redeemer as the oppressor, instances which occur with muchfrequency, as with the later cinematic cast of Johnny Cash's There's A Man Going Round as an incarnation of evil.

It's hard to say (without the White Horse Rider) who's more afraid of corruption, the howling mobs of the Boxer Rebellion or the state control of Tienanmen Square. China watches its billion unfranchised dangers who might turn. America mastered its social controls, but in a productive economy. Rebellions above and below  suggest earth a danger, not at all what alien propaganda media and governments show.

Western health pros think if you impose a belief on children they will rebel. They argue the semantics of "impose," thus government is rebellion's cause, (unless it's their own protocols) which contrasts with all pre-democratic, traditional experiences where the child was raised to belong to a people, ethos and tribe (that even Hilary Clinton referenced, but in a perverted manner). In China, Japan, Nigeria and elsewhere some traditional respect remains. But not in the west. Do It Is The Enchilada. Logically, to the West, all rebels are right. They are exercising free speech. Rebellion is a step toward diversity, a fight for human rights, (except for al qaeda!),  except for the Taliban. It's hard on the United States to oppose the Taliban. Cast as terrorists by Western  rhetoric, the Taliban think they are fighting for a way of life. Freedom fighters!  Freedom means overthrow whatever law troubles the exercise of  "rights." The Supreme Court proudly imposes law and is proud the people submit. Government deems people children who don't know what's best for them, that's why it must rule. Psalm 2 magnifies this to the nth degree. It's as though we confront  a principle of human behavior that there is a law that there can be no law unless that law is overthrown.

This underlying attitude of what we should do about our children suggests that turning to the police is equally troubling. They may kill the child who we wanted to "listen to reason." Many mothers wish they had never called 911 when the child threatened because when they threatened the police they went down. But the Psalm is more sure than the rebels. The "come let us reason together" part is enforced with "thou shall break them with a rod of iron" (9). A father would wish for his children to  "get along," to live in peace and care for one another. While earth  is no family there is a destiny of  "the son" to rule. The rebellion of the future will put others to shame.  Psalm 2 holds that nations, kingdoms and rulers who are afraid of one another, have even more to fear from the Anointed.

" Why do the nations so furiously rage together, why do the people imagine a vain thing?" asks Handel. It stands unanswered. But then why did the people go from John Milton to Samuel Beckett, from justifying the ways of God to a dead man sitting in a chair?

Establishing My King Upon Zion

 There have been pictures of justice in the reign of  Queen Elizabeth celebrated by Spenser.  Psalm 2 establishes "My king Upon Zion" (6). The nations have adopted the rule, "do what you want is the whole of the law." There is no middle ground, but there is time yet in the Psalm for kings to be "wise," to be "admonished." They can yet "rejoice with trembling;" they can "do homage with purity" (12). When did this happen? Nebuchadnezzar did it, Cyrus might qualify. Sennacherib failed in his warning (Isaiah, 36f). "Kiss the Son" (12) says King James, but planning for resistance had already begun: they say, "let us break their bands asunder." This refers to the recognition, really David's, that the Two that the nations contend with are 1) the Lord, and 2) his anointed. It is coming. 

TRICK OR TREAT !

The Man Comes Around, 2002, here.
Almost the last song of Johnny Cash, worked longer than any other, was The Man Comes Around (2002). The final scenes of the last 2008 Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, "What He Beheld," join it to a version of the space alien for a cinematic apocalypse played to Johnny Cash.

These things stand out, the left hand piano. The song references a kettle drum and the piano serves its depth. The reportage of his singing, reporting in the song, as though it were a message. In fact Cash digested many months of study, dreams and  life into this version of the Apocalypse. The speed of the rhythm guitar slightly ahead of the words makes a felt urgency against the piano bass. The high rapid beats of the rhythm at "a hundred million angels singing" is in sync with the words, implying a certainty. In reuses of it in cinema, good is visualized as evil, as though the devil were the man, as if the rebel were the judge. So for all his artistry nothing penetrates the pop rebel philosophical mind. Compare the deep tones of the left hand piano with the bass in Messiah, part 11, "The People That Walked in Darkness" (not a Hillerman novel) especially in the bass tones of "darkness" and later in "the valley of the shadow of death" here

From the liner notes of the CD:

I wrote and recorded ‘The Man Comes Around’ early on in this project, and for three or four months I recycled that song, over and over, until I’d have to get up out of bed, and turn on the radio. It worked for a while, but my inner playback system always went back to ‘The Man Comes Around.’
 
I spent more time on this song than any I ever wrote. It’s based, loosely, on the book of Revelation, with a couple of lines, or a chorus, from other biblical sources. i must have written three dozen pages of lyrics, then painfully weeded it down to the song you have here.

The initial idea for the song came from a dream I had seven years ago. i was in Nottingham, England, and had bought a book called ‘Dreaming of the Queen.’ The book talked about the great number of people in that country who dream that they are with the Queen Elizabeth II. I dreamed that I walked into Buckingham Palace, and there she sat, knitting or sewing. She had a basket of fabrics and lace. Another woman sat beside her, and they were talking and laughing. As I approached, the Queen looked up at me and said, ‘Johnny Cash! You’re like a thorn tree in a whirlwind.’ Then of course, I woke. I realized that ‘Thorn tree in a whirlwind’ sounded familiar to me. Eventually I decided that it was biblical, and found it in the book of Job. From there it grew into a song, and I started lifting things from the book of Revelation. It became ‘The Man Comes Around.’

‘Revelation’ by its mere interpretation says that something ‘is revealed.’ I wish it were. The more I dug into the book the more I came to realize why it’s such a puzzle, even to many Theologians. Eventually I shuffled my papers, so to speak, drew out four or five pages, and wrote my lyrics.”

 Music to Trick or Treat in Space

And I heard as it were the noise of thunder
One of the four beasts saying come and see and I saw
And behold a white horse

There's a man going around taking names
And he decides who to free and who to blame
Everybody won't be treated all the same
There'll be a golden ladder reaching down
When the Man comes around

The hairs on your arm will stand up
At the terror in each sip and in each sup
Will you partake of that last offered cup?
Or disappear into the potter's ground
When the Man comes around

Hear the trumpets, hear the pipers
One hundred million angels singing
Multitudes are marching to the big kettledrum
Voices calling, voices crying
Some are born and some are dying
It's Alpha and Omega's kingdom come

And the whirlwind is in the thorn tree
The virgins are all trimming their wicks
The whirlwind is in the thorn tree
It's hard for thee to kick against the pricks

Till Armageddon no shalam, no shalom
Then the father hen will call his chickens home
The wise man will bow down before the throne
And at His feet they'll cast their golden crowns
When the Man comes around

Whoever is unjust let him be unjust still
Whoever is righteous let him be righteous still
Whoever is filthy let him be filthy still
Listen to the words long written down
When the Man comes around

Hear the trumpets, hear the pipers
One hundred million angels singing
Multitudes are marching to the big kettledrum
Voices calling and voices crying
Some are born and some are dying
It's Alpha and Omega's kingdom come

And the whirlwind is in the thorn tree
The virgins are all trimming their wicks
The whirlwind is in the thorn tree
It's hard for thee to kick against the pricks

In measured hundred weight and penney pound
When the Man comes around.

Close (Spoken part)
And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts
And I looked and behold, a pale horse
And his name that sat on him was Death
And Hell followed with him.

Absalom's Beauty

The mind of Absalom in Psalm 2 agonizes the mind of his father in Psalm 3.

In the way of a mountaineer at the base of  a volcano David cannot stop thinking of Absalom.  Absalom made rebellion, as if it had just occurred to him from Psalm 2, killed his brother Amnon for raping his sister Tamar.

Why do the nations so furiously rage together, why do the peoples imagine a vain thing?

David refused to see him for two years.  Absalom, kings, rulers, nations David flees. Absalom got his neck tangled in the rebellion. He got his neck caught in an oak branch riding a mule. David's general, Joab,  killed him hanging by the hair. The "trouble" for David with rebellion is of the "many"  people drawn away by Absalom's "beauty" (II Sam 14.25).  Look at Helen, the face that launched a thousand ships. Look at Lucifer, perfect in beauty, every precious covering, whose heart was lifted up because of his beauty (Ezekiel. 28). Chuang Tzu says it's better to be ugly. Beauty anyway is a transient state. Beauty is also for others; yourself you cannot see. Messiah had no form or comeliness and  no beauty that we should desire him (Isaiah 53). The sin bearer cannot bear beauty, but ugliness. We  hid our faces from him.

Agony

 If you're not a king or a hero  and free of their trials at least your children can make you feel some pain. Fathers like saying, at least save his life.  Just let him live. Absalom still lives. David's ultimate hopes had not yet dashed; it was yet to happen.  David fled, which he's good at, spent 15 years fleeing Saul. What is greater than the iceberg of our souls in which to immerse our trouble?  Some people verbalize their doubts. What did I do to deserve it?   If only I had been a better mother, father, husband wife, friend, teammate, worker...citizen (Pinter). Among victims and persons of conscience the only one one who escapes self doubt is the criminal. Who is an ocean to bathe in? A man of sorrows is acquainted with grief. Psalms were written for people like this, that is, after the affliction begins. Agony is a sword in the heart against hope for amity once known.

Psalm 51, out of sequence chronologically with Psalm 2, comes before it in the narrative life of David as the cause of  rebellion. David went on the roof and got Bathsheba's husband to go to the front. Uriah died on the battlefield. David's first loss from this was his child by Bathsheba. He lost three more sons because of it. Remember though that the next child he and Bathsheba had was Solomon! David got the message that "the sword shall never depart from your house (II Sam 12). Amnon, Absalom, Adonijah all departed. That's why Psalm 3 is as ironic as any taunted in the valley of death by enemies, but Psalm 3 also shows the state we are in. He has set apart the godly for himself.

 David gets a chance to pray when the petals radiate from center, covering his cares. His intercession is a field of flowers, but there's hardly a time in the Psalms when David doesn't need rescue. He's desperate when the clock strikes.  How many are his foes! They say God will not deliver him! They must be strong foes if they can dictate to God. Can they? Others made songs of it, thou O LORD art a shield for me! This is the first reference to the shield in Psalms. Hide in the shadow! Because he loves me I will rescue him! The glory and lifter of my head begs to be remembered with Psalm 34, faces never covered with shame. The poor man is always calling. It is why they who don't live in trouble are obscene.

Shall we rank the suffering?  Messiah's troubles outrank David's. Messiah is a man of sorrow, acquainted with grief. We  deny horrors to survive. Messiah looked it full in the face and knew the whole in a moment, not layered over decades by degrees so he could peep around the corner of memory and heal. He took in a moment the sins of the world alive! Completely conscious. A second, two moments, two hours!  That's what Timmerman says, you only hear the howl, but you don't know who it is. It's you. None of this dissociation was in Messiah's suffering. That's important because despair is the cruelest act.

 David says glory is bestowed on his head when he gets answers from the holy hill. That the LORD sustains him even against ten thousands on every side. Know nothing at all. Knowing is equivocation. Faith is the only knowledge. Of course spectators, the bulls that surround him (Psalm 22), the power of the dogs, have critical objectivity. Northrop Frye says critics are not only jackals and hyenas, have some use, but aren't they aghast if somebody pulls a rod of iron and strikes them on the jaw?  David says, break their teeth, a good image because teeth will break, but a bruised reed won't (Isa. 42).  It just depends what side you're on. The observer, the torturer of Mennonites and the disappeareds, or the tortured? The list is long. He will not falter or be discouraged. We're in Isaiah in the Psalms.

It's better to be consumed by malady so nothing comes but pain. Or is it better to collapse in disaster here but over there get grace?  After sustaining a tragedy with a brave face a word of kindness breaks. The theory goes emotion is no friend. When he was disfigured, marred beyond human likeness so there was no sympathy we were just appalled. It's a good thing he said to his mother, "woman behold your son." In the throes of death who has time for life? In the midst of creation who has time to chat? Sean O'Keefe, who survived the plane crash in Alaska that killed Senator Ted Stevens, said he held out against all odds and pain to deliver his son safe, but that when he was strapped in the rescue helicopter he allowed himself to pass out, but only then. When the time comes we commend our spirit. If you want to talk about that you are human.

Absalom is like Judas in passing. Both were hung.  David wants his enemies "smitten on the cheekbone" when they break their teeth. Do you want prayers answered? Imprecations are mild unless you intend them fulfilled. Prayers as curses, praying evil down, speaking ill that good may come, you  bless. I heard it said, "I'm as liberal as anybody" right before the president, the governor, the senator, the police past and present got rocked. The religious will curse you with the irreligious who use religion when it suits. David,  driven to extremity, prays but doesn't want answers? He asked Joab to spare Absalom, but  forgot to do the same in this prayer.  Did he connect the fate of his son with his prayer. Absalom got smitten on the cheek all right, probably got teeth broke when he caught his jaw in the fork of the oak.

Poets the surface beneath with contraction, molder from eruption. Of course we only know it later when David or Jonah gets spit back up. Absalom, Absalom why kick against the pricks? The mind of Absalom in Psalm 2 agonizes the mind of his father in Psalm 3. The unspoken death of a son is so great we are not prepared for it to exist. It happens in Psalm 51  too;  a series of background events spoken only as foreground. They could be spoken, but aren't, like Abraham's poems on the sacrifice of his son Issac that he didn't write, or Issac's upon his own.

The hummingbird drinks from the hose, but how talk about a thing without talk? These icebergs of the mind are icebergs of the mouth, huge, uncomprehending. We think we don't know or talk about it  in code.  Each  nuance informs. Millenniums magnify in the background that exceeds foreground. Psalm 51 pairs Psalm 3, a world as much larger than the original as the ear of corn is greater than than seed.

"The critic as parasite and jackal." Northrop Frye. Anatomy of Criticism, 6.
"You only hear the howl." Jacobo Timerman. Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, 32.