Where the Sea Used to Be by Rick Bass

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date. 

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I discovered Rick Bass in the book of short stories that won O. Henry Awards in 1989. His contribution was called “The Watch,” and I said it was my favorite, not because of the subject matter but because of the prose. This was June 2006, and shortly thereafter I found his only novel, Where the Sea Used to Be, at Half Price Books, and I added it to my collection.

Now, after having completed it, I’d have to say that I’m just as impressed with Bass’ prose. His command of language is inspiring, as is his attempt to capture in a human story the universal forces that shape our world and all the life that lives upon it.

The bulk of the story takes places in a barely populated valley in far northern Montana, a place that gets snowed in every long and dark winter and which experiences brief and glorious springs and summers when the natural verdure leaps backs into existence before dying and getting buried under feet of snow.

The landscape and its change of seasons is practically another character in Bass’ story, almost the antagonist, as he uses it to great metaphoric effect in showing how it shapes, threatens and sometimes takes the lives of the story’s human characters. Like this scene from early in the book:

Mel turned and began moving hard to the right—almost a lunge—and Wallis nearly lost his grasp on her. She traveled another ten steps and then stopped again. They stood there in the blizzard like ghosts.

Mel was looking hard in one direction, her stare fixed at nothing. Wallis watched too. It was as if she were listening to something, though all of the senses were gone, rendered unintelligible, meaningless. There was only the weight and pull of gravity beneath their feet.

Her tenseness eased. Her breathing steadied. She continued to watch in the one direction, as a hunter watches a meadow. Wallis could see it, then—or thought he could see it. A paleness in the storm disappeared when he looked at it, but when he tried to look away, it came back again: not a glow, by any stretch of the imagination—not the thing they were looking for—but a lessening, a gauziness, which was inviting. It tempted them to step through it.

Wallis wanted to move toward it immediately. Pants cuffs frozen solid. Shaking and rattling, shivering like a sack of bones. Mel held her ground: watched that different patch of storm as if challenging it.

It began to storm harder, and the patch, the place of nothing they were looking at, disappeared. Mel took a full step toward it, and then another, and then she began moving toward it quickly. It reappeared, and now it had the faintest yellow color to it, and then more, until it was a glow, and it was exactly the opposite of how the light had gone back into the lantern.

Inside, the boards beneath their feet. The familiar objects on her shelves, when they stepped inside: feathers, stones, shells, and the sprawl of closed, silent books—each one of them swimming with millions of hieroglyphics that were designed, upon being scanned, to ignite into light and knowledge, into images and scents and sounds.

The pine planking of her floor. The dishes from their meal, the cold stone fireplace, and the cold air in the cabin, the lantern’s bright light, and the snow not yet melting from their boots, for already the cabin had grown so cold. Only a degree or two—the tiniest bit of correction to the angle of their arc, in the beginning—separated them from all the snow beyond, and so much cold—too much cold, even for Mel.

Mel is a native, born and raised in the valley. Wallis is a newcomer, a geologist sent by Mel’s father, Dudley, to determine if there was any oil to be drilled in the valley. Dudley is everyone’s least favorite character in the book, an intentionally despicable person who is nonetheless necessary to set all the drama into motion. Long swatches of the book are excerpts from Dudley’s youthful journal, which Wallis finds in Mel’s cabin and reads. The excerpts are overly poetic and indecipherable, and a stark contrast to the vile and pragmatic man who shows up at various episodes in the novel.

My favorite character is Colter, and teenage boy who eventually leaves the valley and the story, never to return. We are introduced to Colter the same way Wallis is, when he and his mother are pointed out by the proprietor of the town’s lone tavern.

“That’s Amy,” Danny said, “and her boy, Colter. Her husband, Zeke, died last spring. He went through the ice,” Danny said. “He was a trapper. You can still see him down there,” he said, and at first Wallis thought Danny meant you could see Zeke’s likeness in the face of the boy. “He’s only about twenty feet down,” Danny said, speaking quietly beneath the noise of the bar. “The water is as clear as gin, cold as hell. Everything’s still the same on him, same as it was the day he went in. He’s got his arms raised up like this”—Danny demonstrated, as if signaling a touchdown—“and his hair is still waving in the current, black as his over there”—he pointed to Colter—“only longer. It kept growing after he died.”

This stark apparition of his father hangs over Colter for his entire time in the story, and eventually he and Wallis go to see the old man. Their short journey together is one of my favorite passages in the novel. It’s rich with symbolism and there’s something compelling in the way the younger Colter becomes a kind of guide in what is to Wallis very much a foreign landscape. They collect the fallen antlers of deer as they go, which Colter sells for money.

They skied on without speaking after that, their skis cutting fresh powder, and the antlers in the bag thrown over Colter’s shoulder clunking together and rattling. Sometimes bucks who still had their antlers would hear the dull sound, and would suddenly appear a short distance from them, eyes bulging, nostrils flared, and they would stand there as if planning to stop the skiers’ passage, wanting to fight: believing that the sounds they heard were the rattlings from two bucks fighting over a doe. The first rut had occurred a month ago, but now there was the secondary estrus, twenty-eight days later, and whenever the bucks that still had antlers would appear before them—just standing there, plumes of frost jetting from their nostrils—Colter and Wallis would have to stop and wait for the bucks’ adrenaline to subside before they could pass safely.

The confusion of the bucks is understandable—the humans are the intruders in this landscape, and they act in ways that seem out of kilter with the natural order of things. Colter goes on to explain how the natural world uses the fallen antlers.

“The squirrels and porcupines chew on them in the spring for the minerals,” he said, “which is when they need nutrients, because they’re pregnant. But the hawks, owls, and eagles have their little ones to take care of then, too. They can’t eat antlers the way a rodent can. So they pound on the squirrels and chipmunks, and get the antlers’ minerals that way. When you stop to think about it, it’s pretty wild,” he said. “This spring when you see a hawk flying through the forest, it’s going to have part of one of those antlers inside it.” He picked up another small antler, which had been shed so recently—perhaps in the night—that it still had a ring of blood and damp flesh around its base. Colter tossed the antler into the woods. “Think of it,” he said. “A flying antler.” He spoke not of his toss, but of the hawk carrying the rodent carrying the antler inside it.

“Did you think that up, or did your father tell you about it?” Wallis asked.

“You don’t have to think it up,” Colter said. “Hell, you look around and you just see it.”

Like Colter, Bass’ prose allows us to see a lot of the natural order of things, and it is a nature that is often grisly, but always calculated, and often predictable once you learn its ways.

The deer had herded into larger numbers than ever, and no longer possessed any discernible grace. Their ribs heaved gaunt as they limped along the narrow icy trails of their own making—they slipped often—and yet if they tried to venture off of those trails they would become even more exhausted. Sometimes they would do so, anyway—striking out through the drifts toward the top of some distant, unbrowsed bush, barely visible above the top of the snow—but they would not make it, and would instead simply disappear beneath, like a swimmer going down in heavy surf. They would not rise again, but would come to rest several feet below the surface, where they would remain for the rest of winter, perfectly preserved in the blue grip of ice; and only later, in the spring, would the tips of their ears, and then their heads and shoulders, and then the rest of them, become visible once more; and the coyotes, wolves, ravens, and eagles would gnaw on them as the snows receded, as if the wolves and coyotes were erasing them.

Bass’ characters generally fall into two stripes: those who live in community with this natural order of things—characters like Mel who has spent twenty years following and documenting the movements of wolves through the valley—and those who exploit that natural order for purely human purposes—characters like Old Dudley, who recruits young geologists like Wallis to bend that natural order to his own will. Dudley, in fact, sums up his approach to the natural world in this little speech about the taming of falcons, delivered to a rapt group of valley dwellers at the tavern.

Dudley picked up his megaphone again. “There are two theories why the falcon returns to the falconer,” he bellowed, as if preparing his listeners for an exam to be given later. “One is that the falcon is conditioned to its hunger pains: that it has learned to associate its master with food. But the other theory is that the falcon truly loves the falconer, and returns solely out of love.”

“Which do you think it is?” Mel asked.

Matthew was listening intently.

“Both,” said Old Dudley. “I think we manipulate them coming and going. I think the poor creatures are born with exquisitely pure souls which only through superior association with beings such as myself are able to be bent and retrained. I think we teach them to confuse hunger with love, and love with hunger. I think we mix it all together, and that only when they’re way the fuck up there, half a mile above, can they draw things back out pure and separate once more: a distillation of how it was when they came into the world, and how they are really supposed to be.

“But it’s too late. They are owned by another. They have lost their ancient selves. They are but feathered ghosts.

“Shit,” he said, “it’s a miracle they can still hunt, when we get through with them.

Matthew is Mel’s former lover, and the last geologist Dudley sent into the valley looking for oil, and the parallels between Dudley’s approach to falconry and his approach to hiring geologists are apparent throughout the book. And hunting is another extended metaphor that takes on much significance in the novel’s subtext.

For a moment, Wallis saw it all with clarity, as with a sudden gust of wind that brings new scents—an understanding, where before there had not even been a question. He saw how the long, sleepy moments of things lie in calm stretches, eddies, which we continue to believe are peaceful, serene moments—nothing more than slow passages of time—but which are really only a coiling and deepening in preparation for the sudden, near-frantic weaves and pursuits—the lusts. He saw how in the hunt, it all falls into place—how all the elements that seemed previously to be meaningless become now spurred into action: how every element, every atom, has meaning—and how this is the perfect desire of nature, the moment toward which all waiting, which is not really waiting, moves.

Mel is one of the most philosophical of characters, and she struggles against the inevitability of being Dudley’s daughter the way the deer struggle against the inevitability of winter.

She tried to hold back. She had hoped to make it to April—to resolve things with Matthew in mid-March, and then move on, in one direction or another—but she found now that she had fallen several weeks shy of that goal, like the deer who did not carry quite enough reserves to take them across that last white expanse. She saw them every year by the hundreds: deer that were whittled down to next-to-nothing—brown tufts of hide stretched taut across knobby bones—deer that had plowed through five months of snow only to lie down at the edge of the end of snow, starving—lying with heads outstretched, no longer able to break through the shell of ice covering the world they’d known—only to have the bare brown ground begin opening up, revealing itself days after their death: bare earth, and then green shoots appearing right in front of the deer’s unseeing, unmoving eyes.

Every year it was this way—as if spring could not occur without it; as if this falling just short were a pattern for most of the world: as if it took exceptional grace or strength or cunning to cross that last bridge.

Ultimately, Mel has the exceptional grace needed to cross her bridge away from Dudley’s manipulation of nature, and so does Wallis, but Matthew does not. He ends up dragging the old man around in the snow in a kind of travois, an apt metaphor for the way the old man and the force he represents has come to be Matthew’s master.

Other intriguing concepts we’re introduced to as part of Mel’s thoughts or through the way she experiences the world include…

She continued to use up her days like sticks of firewood, of which she had only so many, tossed on some fire that was providing light for no one other than herself, and keeping no one warm but herself.

And:

A thing could be either one way or another. There didn’t need to be any more variance in the universe than that most basic rule of binary. A thing—glacier, fire, flood—happened or didn’t. A thing came or it went. A thing was either being born and was growing, or was dying. And with only those two possibilities—the day and night of things—transcribed across every object of the world, came all the mystery and richness one could ever hope to seek. For even in the act of grasping one thing, and achieving knowledge, there was always somehow and inversion that occurred, where the thing that you grasped or knew revolved back to mystery. The pulse. Within this pulse, day was but a variation of night. The pulse was always moving back toward its other.

And:

Perhaps it is not the flesh that is mortal, she would think, but time. Perhaps time moves in cycles—is born, lives, then dies—while the physical materials are constant, like some residue of time’s passage.

The thought would invariably make her feel small, strangely unclean, insignificant: as if she were merely the spoor of some mindless thing.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

FARCHRIST TALES

BOOK TWO:

THE FORGOTTEN TEMPLE

A Squire must serve at least three years under a Knight before he can be considered for the knighthood himself. However, a man must also be twenty-one to become a Knight. These laws were set down at the beginning of the Order and are unbreachable. As a result of this, Gildegarde Brisbane II was forced to serve five years as the Squire of Sir Reginald Ironshield. As soon as he became eligible, Ironshield stood before the old King and announced that through faithful and exemplary service to him, Gildegarde Brisbane II had earned the right to become a Knight of Farchrist. The ceremony was held in the King’s own chambers. It was an exclusive affair with only the King, Ironshield, Brisbane, his mother Madeline, and dwarf named Nog Shortwhiskers in attendance. When King Gregorovich Farchrist II brought his father’s sword, the sword of the Peasant King, down on the shoulders of my father and proclaimed him a Knight, the only sound in the chamber had been that of Madeline’s quiet tears.

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As it turned out, things were much better in the morning. Brisbane awoke feeling somewhat refreshed and, when he emerged from the tent, the first thing he saw was Stargazer sitting on the ground with her legs crossed, her eyes closed and her hands folded in her lap.

Brisbane quietly went down to the river to relieve himself and, when he returned, Stargazer was standing there waiting for him. There seemed to be no one else around.

“Gil,” she said. “I would like to speak with you.”

“I’m sorry, Allie,” Brisbane blurted out. “Please, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

Stargazer smiled. As soon as Brisbane saw that he knew everything was going to be all right.

“I know you are,” Stargazer said. “But it is I who should be apologetic. I have thought a lot about what you said and, although your words did hurt me, I realize there was no real malice in them. You are, of course, right in the matter of Roundtower and your sword, Angelika. He could no more become a Knight with it than Roystnof could with his spells.”

Brisbane did not like the nature of her analogy, but he accepted it and kept his mouth shut. Stargazer was doing her best to deal with the situation.

“I have perhaps lived apart from the world for too long,” Stargazer went on. “Many things have passed me by. The humans have made many advances in the administration of their religion. I am perhaps a fossil in their midst.”

Brisbane also did not like to hear Stargazer speaking so, no matter how true he thought the statements to be. “Allie, please. You’re being too hard on yourself.”

“No, Gil,” she said. “As you are so fond of doing, I am just saying how things are. But, don’t you see, all of this only further resolves me to stay apart from the organized religion I deserted years ago. They, the priests and patriarchs of Grecolus, they have in effect banished him from the earth. They control his worshippers and they have denied his works. They claim all magic is the tool of Damaleous, but they don’t know that Grecolus has a magic of his own. How could he perform creation without it?”

The logic made sense to Brisbane. “But how is one to tell the difference?”

Stargazer smiled. “That is the problem the priests had. For them, it got to the point where magic was so intricate that they threw the whole lot away and tagged it as evil. But there still is a difference.” She put her hand over her heart. “The difference is here.”

“I don’t understand,” Brisbane said, but he thought maybe he did.

Stargazer’s took Brisbane’s hand and placed it against her chest. Brisbane tried to pull away when he felt her heart thump but Stargazer held him firmly.

“Don’t you see?” she said. “People have such a hard time distinguishing good magic from evil magic because only the person who uses the magic really knows which her body is being used for. I know in my heart I am serving Grecolus and so my healing power is good magic. You know you are serving Grecolus, so Angelika is good magic, too.”

She was beginning to go beyond Brisbane’s understanding of things. “But what about Roystnof?” he asked.

“What about him?”

“He is serving neither Grecolus nor Damaleous,” Brisbane said. “Where does his magic fall?”

Stargazer paused. “Now, Gil,” she said slowly. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings either, but I am going to tell you how things are.”

“Go ahead,” Brisbane said, mentally cringing at what she might say.

“If Roystnof is not serving Grecolus, whether or not he actively worships Damaleous, his magic is evil and he is being used by the Evil One. Magic power comes from one or the other. It does not come from man.”

Brisbane wanted to explode but he refused to react as Stargazer had the day before. He was going to see this through calmly, rationally.

“So you’re saying Roy could be misguided, but you couldn’t be. Is that it?”

“What do you mean?” Stargazer said, dropping his hand from her chest.

“If Roy is serving Damaleous without realizing it, then how do you know you’re not serving him, too?”

“Gil, I serve Grecolus. My powers are his.”

“That’s what you believe,” Brisbane said, his voice rising. “But what if the priests are right? What if all magic, even yours, is the tool of Damaleous? What if he has only duped you into thinking your magic is good? He is supposed to be the Father of Lies, you know.”

Stargazer shook her head. “No. This cannot be.”

“But how can you know?” Brisbane asked. “How can anyone know?”

“I have faith,” Stargazer said. “Don’t you?”

A flap on one of the tents was suddenly pulled back and Roystnof stepped out into the campsite. He greeted both Brisbane and Stargazer with a cheerful good morning and then made his way down to the river. Brisbane’s eyes followed his friend.

“Well,” Stargazer said guardedly, drawing Brisbane’s attention back to her. “They’ll all be up soon. I just wanted you to know I forgive you for your callousness and that I’m not mad at you.”

Brisbane heard Shortwhiskers cough from inside one of the tents. “Yes,” he said, trying to forget all the questions and ideas their little talk had brought to his mind. “Well, I’m glad for that. I never meant to offend you, Allie. It’s just that life is confusing, more so when you try to make sense out of it.”

Stargazer kissed him on the cheek. It was a part of their relationship he was really beginning to enjoy. “You’re young, yet,” she said. “Wait. It gets worse.”

He tried to grab her for that but she playfully drew away and he soon found himself chasing her around the campsite as if they were two schoolchildren.

Roystnof returned and soon the whole camp was up and about, fixing breakfast and discussing plans for the day. In actuality, Stargazer was the only one who truly wanted to go into the garden and explore the shrine, but whereas Roystnof, Shortwhiskers, and Brisbane didn’t mind the delay on their journey up the river, Dantrius showed he was dead set against the foray. He argued there was nothing to see there anyway, four of them had already been there and had seen nothing but rock—after the death of the demon, of course—and he didn’t see why they should waste their time on the whims of only one of their number. But his complaining was largely ignored as the others saw it as no bother and they knew Dantrius was not about to journey on alone.

A surprising amount of time, however, went into deciding just who would go into the garden. Roystnof suggested they all go to preserve party unity, but again Dantrius dissented. He declared he would not again set foot in such a place and said anyone who would was nuts. There could, after all, be any number of basilisks still wandering around in there and he wasn’t going to take that risk for no good reason.

Brisbane could see some sense in Dantrius’ argument, especially after what the mage had been through with the basilisk he had met those many years—and Brisbane still didn’t know just how many years—ago. But as Shortwhiskers had felt when he witnessed Dantrius arguing against sending the expedition to Dragon’s Peak, Brisbane now sensed Dantrius was arguing for all the wrong reasons. He was hiding something, and Brisbane suspected it had something to do with the demon they had destroyed.

Shortwhiskers finally said, fine, let Dantrius sit outside by himself, but Roystnof refused to let that be the end of it. He said no one should be left alone out here in the hills, and at least one of them should stay with Dantrius. As there were no volunteers, and as it had been Roystnof’s idea, he agreed to stay with Dantrius while Shortwhiskers and Brisbane went with Stargazer into the garden.

Brisbane did not like the idea of going in without the magical protection of one of the wizards, but there seemed to be no other way around it. Roystnof assured Brisbane basilisks were extremely rare creatures and that he very much doubted there would be any more waiting for them.

So Brisbane reluctantly entered the garden from the southern side with Stargazer and Shortwhiskers. It occurred to Brisbane that because of the placement of their camp, they would have to walk through unfamiliar territory in order to get to the shrine at the center of the garden. He mentioned this to Shortwhiskers but the dwarf did not seem worried about it. Brisbane tried to put it out of his mind.

This part of the oasis looked about the same as the part they had already seen and, as he walked, Brisbane began to experience the same worries about a basilisk surprising them as he had the last time. He was at the back of the line with Stargazer between him and Shortwhiskers, but this position did nothing to allay his fears. As he remembered, the basilisk they had encountered before had crept up on them from behind.

The trees and the underbrush thickened as they continued on until it seemed they were walking through a small forest. The whole garden seemed to be set up like that, with the clearing where the shrine stood in the very center, surrounded by a forest of trees that thinned as they radiated outward.

Brisbane walked with Angelika drawn in his right hand and his undecorated shield in his left. It seemed like hours, but the sun had barely moved when the trio found the clearing and cautiously stepped into it.

It was almost unnaturally quiet. There seemed to be no life anywhere around them. The circle of trees defined the limits if their vision and in its very center stood the cube of stone Stargazer had come to see.

“That’s it?” Stargazer asked Shortwhiskers.

The dwarf silently nodded his head.

She began to walk towards the structure, Brisbane and Shortwhiskers following closely behind her. They approached the back of the shrine without incident and began to circle around to the front. When they got there, they found the portal, and Stargazer began examining the strange writings that outlined it.

“Roundtower was right,” she said aloud. “These are ancient runes used in the worship of Grecolus. Here is the one meaning peace and safe passage.” She pointed to the glyph directly over the portal.

“Can you read the rest of them?” Brisbane asked. “Ignatius couldn’t.”

“Oh yes,” Stargazer said. “And it is a good thing I can.”

Shortwhiskers came forward. “Why is that?”

Stargazer indicated the two columns of markings, one on each side of the doorway. “Well, first of all, this line verifies the temple at the source of the Mystic, the one we seek, does indeed exist and that it is devoted to the ancient worship of Grecolus.”

Shortwhiskers’ ears seemed to perk up. “Does it say anything about how much treasure there is?”

Stargazer laughed. “No, Nog. But this second line tells me something much more important.”

“What’s that?” Brisbane asked.

“It says the entrance to the temple is trapped. Only the faithful can enter.”

Shortwhiskers wrinkled his nose. “Trapped? Does it say how the entrance is trapped?”

Stargazer checked again. “No.”

“Well, what good is that?!” Shortwhiskers said. “Only the faithful can enter? Is that supposed to be a clue or something?”

Brisbane thought about it. It made no practical sense to him.

“It probably means,” Stargazer said, “the ancient worshippers knew a secret way in to avoid the trap. A secret that has probably been forgotten long before even you were born, Nog.”

“Swell,” Shortwhiskers said.

Brisbane examined the markings around the portal with renewed interest. “Allie,” he asked. “Do they say anything else?”

Stargazer shrugged her shoulders. “Nothing special. Those two lines on the sides are really the only two that say anything definitive. The rest just convey ideas like the marking representing safe passage. The one next to it is the symbol for hope. That kind of thing.”

With nothing else to see on the outside of the shrine, the trio entered the structure. It was just as Brisbane had remembered it. The staircase, the kneeling benches, the cobwebs, and the mural. He and Shortwhiskers stood off to one side as Stargazer went about, taking great interest in everything she saw. Brisbane was amazed to see that the place still glowed with the light spell Roystnof had cast months ago. Stargazer didn’t notice or just didn’t comment on the unusual light source.

As Stargazer went about the room, examining every little detail, Brisbane tried to take the faded, rotted place and, in his mind, restore it to what must have been its original splendor. He pictured the kneeling benches freshly carved and varnished and the mural of the parting hands still wet with the paint that defined it. He saw small groups of simply-dressed people shuffle into the shrine, take their places on the benches, and offer their silent prayers up to their deity. With this image fresh in his mind, it saddened him to see the place in such ill repair. Who knew how many other places like this were scattered across the land, forgotten by the people who no longer needed them? It started him thinking about history, about the scores of people who had lived before him and of whom he would never know anything. For how many years had there been people on earth? Brisbane didn’t know. The scriptures said Grecolus had created everything “in the beginning,” but they didn’t say when that beginning was. And if the ways of religion could change so drastically in the few centuries since this shrine was a living part of society, how much could things change over the course of human history? How many gods had lived and died before Grecolus came into being?

Stargazer said she was done looking things over and was ready to proceed downstairs. Shortwhiskers took the lead and they went down the stairs in the same order they had walked through the garden. Brisbane tightened his grip on Angelika as the place he had battled the demon came into his view.

The place was as barren as it had been before, an empty twenty square feet of stone still lighted by Roystnof’s magic. The far wall had a large, smeary red stain upon it an innocent-looking pile of ashes lay in the center of the floor.

“So this is where it happened,” Stargazer said quietly as she went up and poked the end of her staff through the ashes.

“This is where it happened,” Shortwhiskers confirmed as he came up to look at the black remains.

Brisbane stayed at the foot of the stairs.

“It must have been huge,” Stargazer said. “There are a lot of ashes here.”

“It was at least nine feet tall,” Shortwhiskers said. “Its muscles made Gil’s look like empty flour sacks.”

Stargazer turned to Brisbane. “And with Angelika you were able to defeat such a monster?”

Brisbane looked at his sword. “Without Roy’s slow spell,” he said purposefully, “even Angelika would not have been enough to defeat it.” He met Stargazer’s eyes and she did not seem pleased with his statement.

—No,— Angelika said to him. —It was you and me. Together there is no evil we cannot defeat.—

Stargazer went over to the stain on the far wall and ran her hand down the crusty remains of blood that had once formed the magical pentagram.

“Who could have done this?” she said, more to herself than to her companions. “Who could have done such an evil thing in such a reverent place? It is the highest sacrilege.”

“Ignatius felt the same way,” Shortwhiskers said.

Stargazer seemed to whirl on the dwarf. “Was it Dantrius, Nog? Did he do this?”

“He says no,” Shortwhiskers said. “We have no proof against him. We found him as a stone statue outside the shrine. He could have been coming or going.”

“Which way was he facing?” Stargazer asked.

“As if he was arriving,” Shortwhiskers said. “But a basilisk had turned him to stone. He could have turned any which way in the melee.”

Stargazer looked at the remains on the wall and then back to the ashes on the floor. “Why did you let Roystnof restore that man to…” she said, trailing off and searching for the right words. “…to his fleshy form,” she said eventually with some distaste.

Shortwhiskers shrugged. “I did not recognize him. We took a party vote. They thought they would be helping an unfortunate victim.”

Stargazer shook her head. “They were wrong.”

“We all are, at times.”

Stargazer looked upon the dwarf with caring eyes. She placed a soft hand on his shoulder. Shortwhiskers patted it with his own and they passed a moment in silent communication.

“I am ready,” Stargazer said. “Let us leave this place.”

Shortwhiskers and Stargazer rejoined Brisbane at the foot of the stairs, widely skirting the ashes of the fallen demon, and together they left the shrine. They quickly and quietly made their way out of the clearing and back into the trees. Apprehension tried to overcome Brisbane as they walked through the garden for the last time, but he was able to hold it in check. Soon they were back at the low stone wall and soon after that they were in the campsite.

Roystnof and Dantrius were sitting outside waiting for their return and they all immediately found themselves in a discussion about what the three of them had seen on their little trip. Stargazer told the two wizards what the ancient runes on the shrine had told her about the temple they were seeking and Roystnof, intrigued by the information, began drilling her on all she could remember. Roystnof, however, could make no more use out of it than Shortwhiskers had. Still, there was a moment in the discussion where Shortwhiskers made it clear to Dantrius the delay of their intended journey had been more than justified by the knowledge they had received.

The decision then had to be made about what to do with Stargazer. She had originally intended just to see the shrine and then turn back for Queensburg, but now that she knew the nature of the temple at the source of the Mystic, she wanted to tag along the rest of the way. Again, this probably would not have been a problem if it had not been for Dantrius, who was dead set against the idea. Everyone else felt Stargazer’s presence could only be an asset to their expedition, but Dantrius was defiant. The argument went on for some time but eventually Roystnof stepped in and said unless Dantrius could come up with a valid reason why Stargazer could not accompany them, she would be allowed to continue with them. Dantrius was unable to come up with a proper restriction and the matter was finally settled.

Little of the day had been used up with these proceedings and all decided to use the rest of the day to make more progress up the river. They packed up the camp onto the mules and were off before noon. They stayed as close to the river as they could to avoid the orks which Roystnof and Shortwhiskers said lived in the hills to the east. The farther south they went, they warned, the more hostile the area was likely to become. As they neared the Crimson Mountains, they would have to be prepared for sudden attacks, not just from orks, but from other creatures that made the area their home.

But the rest of their second day from Queensburg passed uneventfully. The day seemed to go quickly for Brisbane, who spent most of his time chatting with Stargazer and Shortwhiskers. Their main topic of discussion seemed to be Illzeezad Dantrius and how much of a pain he had been on the journey so far.

They camped at sunset and this time Brisbane drew the first watch. After the evening meal had been devoured, everyone went quietly to bed as Brisbane sat outside, keeping the fire low and his ears open.

It was a terrifying night for him, and although their camp was unmolested in the three hours he had to sit up, he was all too glad to wake Dantrius and tell him it was time to relieve him. It was dark out, darker than Brisbane thought it could get. Grecolum was up, but it was waning and the red moon, Damaleum, was growing conversely larger every night. Brisbane remembered the Festival of Whiteshine, when Grecolum had been full and Damaleum new, and he had seen Stargazer for the first time. It was a happy memory for him but it did little to calm his nerves that night. He couldn’t keep his mind off the waxing Damaleum, and every little sound he heard in the night he knew was surely an approaching evil creature, ready to celebrate the festival of its moon a little early with the spilling of Brisbane’s blood.

Finally, Brisbane’s shift was over and he went over to Dantrius’ sleeping form and shook him awake.

“What?” Dantrius mumbled, his voice groggy and his eyes shut.

“It’s your turn to stand watch,” Brisbane said. “Get up.”

Dantrius turned and looked at Brisbane. “Go watch yourself,” He said and snuggled back down into his sleeping bag.

Brisbane looked at Dantrius’ shadowy form in the dim firelight. He considered yelling at Dantrius but decided arguing with the mage usually did little good. He reached over and carefully withdrew a burning log from the campfire. He held the lit end, slowly smoking and glowing orange, up to his face and smiled. He deliberately pressed the hot end of the log against Dantrius’ sleeping bag, approximately where he judged the mage’s hind end to be. Brisbane held it there for perhaps two seconds.

Dantrius leapt clear of his sleeping bag with a yelp of pain. He stood on the bare ground, rubbing his backside and giving Brisbane a venomous look.

“Now that you’re up,” Brisbane said calmly, “you can stand your watch.” He handed Dantrius an hourglass. “In three hours, you can wake Roystnof to relieve you. Good night.”

Brisbane abruptly turned away from Dantrius and crawled into one of the tents. When he was inside, he heard Dantrius’ voice through the tent fabric.

“This is not over, Brisbane,” the mage said. “Laugh all you want now, but there will come a day when you will regret what you just did to me. There will come a day.”

Brisbane looked over at Shortwhiskers who was still sleeping in the tent. His snores were soft and consistent. It was quite a while before he fell asleep himself.

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris

I read this book on my phone. Specifically on a Kindle app on my phone. I remember downloading it so that I would have something to read in places where I had no access to my books. As experiments go, it was a dismal failure.

I find it really hard taking notes on my phone, so I’m not sure that I’m going to have much of an overall thesis to share with you. But here’s Harris’s central thesis for this work as he describes it:

Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds -- and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe. Conscious minds and their states are natural phenomena, of course, fully constrained by the laws of Nature (whatever these turn out to be in the end). Therefore, there must be right and wrong answers to questions of morality and values that potentially fall within the purview of science. On this view, some people and cultures will be right (to a greater or lesser degree), and some will be wrong, with respect to what they deem important in life.

And, a few “pages” later:

In my view, morality must be viewed in the context of our growing scientific understanding of the mind. If there are truths to be known about the mind, there will be truths to be known about how minds flourish; consequently, there will be truths to be known about good and evil.

Essentially, there are right and wrong answers to moral questions that are discoverable by science. There are, as far as I can tell, only two presuppositions that undergird that view. The first, when we say morality, we mean the well-being of conscious minds, and the second, there is no such thing as magic.

If you agree with those presuppositions, then Harris’s statements about the scientific discoverability of peaks and valleys on the moral landscape come to little more than a tautology. It is very much like saying A is A. But if you don’t agree with those presuppositions -- and many people do not -- then the ideas in this book can be subversive, and maybe dangerous.

Harris tries to deal with these criticisms in the text itself, addressing himself frequently to philosopher and literary critic Russell Blackford.

By analogy to the rest of science, I have argued that the value of avoiding the worst possible misery for everyone can be presupposed -- and upon this axiom we can build a science of morality that can then determine (yes, “determine”) myriad other human values.

But it is exactly this presupposition -- that “avoiding the worst possible misery for everyone” is a morally valuable goal -- that Blackford, and others, seem to disagree with. Here is Harris quoting Blackford directly.

“[W]e usually accept that people act in competition with each other, each seeking the outcome that most benefits them and their loved ones. We don’t demand that everyone agree to accept whatever course will maximize the well-being of conscious creatures overall. Nothing like that is part of our ordinary idea of what it is to behave morally.”

It seems kind of bankrupt to me -- and to Harris. The Blackfords of the world seem to be saying that “doing what’s good for me and my loved ones” has to be the basis of morality, because we are forever lost in our subjective view of things and can never actually determine objective reality.

Contrary to Blackford’s assertion, I’m not simply claiming that morality is “fully determined by an objective reality, independent of people’s actual values and desires.” I am claiming that people’s actual values and desires are fully determined by an objective reality, and that we can conceptually get behind all of this -- indeed, we must -- in order to talk about what is actually good.

There’s a lot of back and forth like this in the book. In my view, Harris’s critics don’t understand the point he is making because they are dualists. They say our values come from magic and your science can’t touch them. But Harris says, no, your values are science, they have to be, because magic ain’t real.

That’s about the best I can do. But here are a few other paragraphs that I managed to highlight in the text, with the commentary I was able to attach to each with the “notes” function.

Muslim Algebra

Just as there is no such thing as Christian physics or Muslim algebra, we will see that there is no such thing as Christian or Muslim morality.

Such an amazing point. The morality of human flourishing is a science, not a culturally-derived practice. The parallel to math is insightful. Just because you were taught 2 + 2 = 5 does not mean it’s true. And just because you were taught to stone unruly children does not make that right.

Getting a “What” from an “Is”

While I agree with Moore that it is reasonable to wonder whether maximizing pleasure in any given instance is “good,” it makes no sense at all to ask whether maximizing well-being is “good.”

Is the problem really this easily resolved? Science doesn’t tell us what we ought to do, it tells us what to do to increase well-being. From the “is,” not an “ought” but a “what”?

Pleasure Does Not Equal Moral

What if certain people would actually prefer the Bad Life to the Good Life? Perhaps there are psychopaths and sadists who can expect to thrive in the context of the Bad Life and would enjoy nothing more than killing other people with machetes.

Sam doesn’t give the most obvious answer of all. Just because one person derives pleasure from it doesn’t mean it’s what’s best for human well-being.

It seems clear that ascending the slopes of the moral landscape may sometimes require suffering.

See previous note. Just as human well-being may require things that most people find unpleasant.

Exorcizing the Noble Savage

Robert Edgerton performed a book-length exorcism on the myth of the “noble savage,” detailing the ways in which the most influential anthropologists of the 1920s and 1930s -- such as Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, and Ruth Benedict -- systematically exaggerated the harmony of folk societies and ignored their all too frequent barbarism or reflexively attributed it to the malign influence of colonialists, traders, missionaries, and the like.

Get this book.

Grotesquely Confused

It seems clear that the Catholic Church is as misguided in speaking about the “moral” peril of contraception, for instance, as it would be in speaking about the “physics” of Transubstantiation. In both domains, it is true to say that the Church is grotesquely confused about which things in their world are worth paying attention to.

Amen to that.

Because most religions conceive of morality as a matter of being obedient to the word of God (generally for the sake of receiving a supernatural reward), their precepts often have nothing to do with maximizing well-being in this world. Religious believers can, therefore, assert the immorality of contraception, masturbation, homosexuality, etc., without ever feeling obliged to argue that these practices actually cause suffering. They can also pursue aims that are flagrantly immoral, in that they needlessly perpetuate human misery, while believing that these actions are morally obligatory. This pious uncoupling of moral concern from the reality of human and animal suffering has caused tremendous harm.

Another amazing point. Religious morality measures against God’s happiness, not against the happiness of conscious creatures. Is it any wonder then why it can actually cause suffering, while still being touted as moral?

The Problem with Trolley Problems

I am arguing that everyone also has an intuitive “morality,” but much of our intuitive morality is clearly wrong (with respect to the goal of maximizing personal and collective well-being).

Yes. Like the trolley problems. They measure our flawed moral intuitions.

It seems to me, however, that a science of morality can absorb these details: scenarios that appear, on paper, to lead to the same outcome (e.g., one life lost, five lives saved), may actually have different consequences in the real world.

The essential problem of the trolley problem. They don’t measure the real world.

The Solution?

Would it be possible to design a video game that could help solve the problem of homelessness in the real world?

The big idea. Build things that people want to do that actually solve problems -- homelessness, climate change, etc. What would they be? And what effect would knowing the solving was taking place have on people’s desire to do them? Would they play a game they knew was solving homelessness?

Societal Insecurity

While it has been widely argued that religious pluralism and competition have caused religion to flourish in the United States, with state-church monopolies leading to its decline in Western Europe, the support for this “religious market theory” now appears weak. It seems, rather, that religiosity is strongly coupled to perceptions of societal insecurity.

Big idea -- if true.

Mental Illness?

The boundary between mental illness and respectable religious belief can be difficult to discern. This was made especially vivid in a recent court case involving a small group of very committed Christians accused of murdering an eighteen-month-old infant. The trouble began when the boy ceased to say “Amen” before meals. Believing that he had developed “a spirit of rebellion,” the group, which included the boy’s mother, deprived him of food and water until he died. Upon being indicted, the mother accepted an unusual plea agreement: she vowed to cooperate in the prosecution of her codefendants under the condition that all charges be dropped if her sone were resurrected. The prosecutor accepted this plea provided that that resurrection was “Jesus-like” and did not include reincarnation as another person or animal. Despite the fact that his band of lunatics carried the boy’s corpse around in a green suitcase for over a year, awaiting his reanimation, there is no reason to believe that any of them suffer from a mental illness. It is obvious, however, that they suffer from religion.

God. Go back and read the diagnostic criteria. How are they not mentally ill? Is it just a semantic definition?

It Is Always a Continuum

What if mice show greater distress at the suffering of familiar mice than unfamiliar ones? (They do.) What if monkeys will starve themselves to prevent their cage mates from receiving painful shocks? (They will.) What if chimps have a demonstrable sense of fairness when receiving food rewards? (They have.) What if dogs do too? (Ditto.) Wouldn’t these be precisely the sorts of findings one would expect if our morality were the product of evolution?

What is unique to humans never is. Always a continuum.

Harris at His Best

Thus, Collins’s faith is predicated on the claim that miracle stories of the sort that today surround a person like Sathya Sai Baba -- and do not even merit an hour on cable television -- somehow become especially credible when set in the prescientific religious context of the first-century Roman Empire, decades after their supposed occurrence, as evidenced by discrepant and fragmentary copies of copies of copies of ancient Greek manuscripts. It is on this basis that the current head of the NIH recommends that we believe the following propositions:

1. Jesus Christ, a carpenter by trade, was born of a virgin, ritually murdered as a scapegoat for the collective sins of his species, and then resurrected from death after an interval of three days.

2. He promptly ascended, bodily, to “heaven” -- where, for two millennia, he has eavesdropped upon (and, on occasion, even answered) the simultaneous prayers of billions of beleaguered human beings.

3. Not content to maintain this numinous arrangement indefinitely, this invisible carpenter will one day return to earth to judge humanity for its sexual indiscretions and skeptical doubts, at which time he will grant immortality to anyone who has had the good fortune to be convinced, on Mother’s knee, that this baffling litany of miracles is the most important series of truths ever revealed about the cosmos.

4. Every other member of our species, past and present, from Cleopatra to Einstein, no matter what his or her terrestrial accomplishments, will be consigned to a far less desirable fate, best left unspecified.

5. In the meantime, God/Jesus may or may not intervene in our world, as He pleases, curing the occasional end-stage cancer (or not), answering an especially earnest prayer for guidance (or not), consoling the bereaved (or not), through His perfectly wise and loving agency.

Harris at his best. More of this, please.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens

This post was originally published on a now-retired blog that I maintained from roughly 2005 to 2013. As a result, there may be some references that seem out of date. 

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Oh, wearisome condition of humanity,

Born under one law, to another bound;

Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity,

Created sick, commanded to be sound.

—Fulke Greville, Mustapha

So goes one of three epigraphs Hitchens chose to precede his polemic against belief in God and the role of religion in society. And in it, he comes out swinging. This is on page 7, in his introductory chapter titled, sardonically, “Putting It Mildly.”

While some religious apology is magnificent in its limited way—one might cite Pascal—and some of it is dreary and absurd—here one cannot avoid naming C. S. Lewis—both styles have something in common, namely the appalling load of strain that they have to bear. How much effort it takes to affirm the incredible! The Aztecs had to tear open a human chest cavity every day just to make sure that the sun would rise. Monotheists are supposed to pester their deity more times than that, perhaps, lest he be deaf. How much vanity must be concealed—not too effectively at that—in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan? How much self-respect must be sacrificed in order that one may squirm continually in an awareness of one’s own sin? How many needless assumptions must be made, and how much contortion is required, to receive every new insight of science and manipulate it so as to “fit” with the revealed words of ancient man-made deities? How many saints and miracles and councils and conclaves are required in order first to be able to establish a dogma and then—after infinite pain and loss and absurdity and cruelty—to be forced to rescind one of those dogmas? God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization.

Reading Hitchens’ prose is a delight in and of itself—he is a master at turning a phrase. But it becomes all that more appealing as he uses that razor wit to skewer the religious rituals and taboos of our human societies.

Across a wide swath of animist and Muslim Africa, young girls are subjected to the hell of circumcision and infibulation, which involves the slicing off of the labia and the clitoris, often with a sharp stone, and then the stitching up of the vaginal opening with strong twine, not to be removed until it is broken by male force on the bridal night. Compassion and biology allow for a small aperture to be left, meanwhile, for the passage of menstrual blood. The resulting stench, pain, humiliation, and misery exceed anything that can be easily imagined, and inevitably result in infection, sterility, shame, and the death of many women and babies in childbirth. No society would tolerate such an insult to its womanhood and therefore to its survival if the foul practice was not holy and sanctified.

Time and again, he sets it up just like that—illuminating the sickening folly of it all in ways most would rather not see—and then drives home his telling and crucial point.

Richard Dawkins created quite a controversy when he wrote in The God Delusion that indoctrinating a child into a religion was a form of child abuse. Hitchens goes even farther and, even though both men are clearly eloquent, Hitchens makes the point much more savagely than Dawkins probably dared.

Now, religion professes a special role in the protection and instruction of children. “Woe to him,” says the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, “who harms a child.” The New Testament has Jesus informing us that one so guilty would be better off at the bottom of the sea, and with a millstone around his neck at that. But both in theory and in practice, religion uses the innocent and the defenseless for the purposes of experiment. By all means let an observant Jewish adult male have his raw-cut penis placed in the mouth of a rabbi. (That would be legal, at least in New York.) By all means let grown women who distrust their clitoris or their labia have them sawn away by some other wretched adult female. By all means let Abraham offer to commit suicide to prove his devotion to the Lord or his belief in the voices he was hearing in his head. By all means let devout parents deny themselves the succor of medicine when in acute pain and distress. By all means—for all I care—let a priest sworn to celibacy be a promiscuous homosexual. By all means let a congregation that believes in whipping out the devil choose a new grown-up sinner each week and lash him until he or she bleeds. By all means let anyone who believes in creationism instruct his fellows during lunch breaks. But the conscription of the unprotected child for these purposes is something that even the most dedicated secularist can safely describe as a sin.

And when Hitchens turns to the child molestation and abuse scandals currently rocking the Catholic Church, his arrows grow additional barbs.

“Child abuse” is really a silly and pathetic euphemism for what has been going on: we are talking about the systemic rape and torture of children, positively aided and abetted by a hierarchy which knowingly moved the grossest offenders to parishes where they would be safer. Given what has come to light in modern cities in recent times, one can only shudder to think what was happening in the centuries where the church was above all criticism. But what did people expect would happen when the vulnerable were controlled by those who, misfits and inverts themselves, were required to affirm hypocritical celibacy? And who were taught to state grimly, as an article of belief, that children were “imps of” or “limbs of” Satan? Sometimes the resulting frustration expressed itself in horrible excesses of corporal punishment, which is bad enough in itself. But when the artificial inhibitions really collapse, as we have seen them do, they result in behavior which no average masturbating, fornicating sinner could even begin to contemplate without horror. This is not the result of a few delinquents among the shepherds, but an outcome of an ideology which sought to establish clerical control by means of control of the sexual instinct and even of the sexual organs. It belongs, like the rest of religion, to the fearful childhood of our species.

Part of me feels I should comment on this, but Hitchens states the case so well and so clearly, I’m not sure my additional commentary is necessary. Perhaps I’ll settle for my own tired refrain. When will the Catholic Church be held responsible for its crimes against humanity?

In this same vein, Hitchens attacks a lot of religion’s other sacred cows, and the myths it has perpetrated about itself in our culture. An extended section is about religion’s role as the source and supporter of slavery, despite the fact some of the abolitionists of the 1850-60s were motivated by their deep religious faith, and the resulting cultural myth that it was religion that brought slavery to an end. Hitchens draws a much different conclusion when he takes into account what the deep religious beliefs of generations of people on the pro-slavery side had done.

Whatever may be the case, the very most that can be said for religion in the grave matter of abolition is that after many hundreds of years, and having both imposed and postponed the issue until self-interest had led to a horrifying war, it finally managed to undo some small part of the damage and misery that it had inflicted in the first place.

Another section examines male circumcision. I mention this only to correct what I think might be a mistake in Hitchens’ text. In addressing objections to interference with something that god must have designed with care—the human penis—Hitchens says that believers of long ago invented the dogma that Adam was born circumcised and in the image of god.

Indeed, it is argued by some rabbis that Moses, too, was born circumcised, though this claim may result from the fact that his own circumcision is nowhere mentioned in the Pentateuch.

Well, here’s a few verses from the English Standard Version of Exodus 4:

24 At a lodging place on the way the Lord met him and sought to put him to death. 25 Then Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son's foreskin and touched Moses' feet with it and said, “Surely you are a bridegroom of blood to me!” 26 So he let him alone. It was then that she said, “A bridegroom of blood,” because of the circumcision.

I quote this because I’ve heard at least one Bible expert say that “feet” is a purposeful mistranslation of the original “penis,” changed by some of the more puritan defenders of the faith. Supposedly, the reason the Lord sought to put Moses to death in this cryptic little story is that he was uncircumcised, and Zipporah’s actions placated the violent Yahweh, symbolically circumcising her husband by touching the bloody foreskin of her son to his member.

And if that’s not true, then at least consider this version from the King James Bible:

24 And it came to pass by the way in the inn, that the Lord met him, and sought to kill him. 25 Then Zipporah took a sharp stone, and cut off the foreskin of her son, and cast it at his feet, and said, Surely a bloody husband art thou to me. 26 So he let him go: then she said, A bloody husband thou art, because of the circumcision.

In which it can be more reasonably argued that Zipporah’s actions are meant to show Yahweh that Moses had been circumcised, the proof of “his” bloody foreskin lying at his very feet.

Whatever. It’s a minor point and I’m probably misremembering what I heard. It’s hard to fault an author too badly who fills his book with pithy little observations like this:

In the United States, we exert ourselves to improve high-rise buildings and high-speed jet aircraft (the two achievements that the murderers of September 11, 2001, put into hostile apposition) and then pathetically refuse to give them floors, or row numbers, that carry the unimportant number thirteen.

In other words, if we lived in a world where the number thirteen had to power to harm us, it wouldn’t be very likely that we could master the engineering and mathematics necessary to build tall building and airplanes. Those things work because the world is orderly and predictable, operating in ways that can be understood and leveraged to the advantage of our own internal visions. Despite the protestations of the faithful of all stripes from the beginning of time, the world is not run by magic.

The various forms of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people to be equally true, by the philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrate as equally useful.

—Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

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This post appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.