• they/them

plural system in Seattle, WA (b. 1974)
lots of fictives from lots of media, some horses, some dragons, I dunno. the Pnictogen Wing is poorly mapped.

host: Mx. Kris Dreemurr (they/them)

chief messenger and usual front: Mx. Chara or Χαρά (they/them)

other members:
Mx. Frisk, historian (they/them)
Monophylos Fortikos, unicorn (he/him)
Kel the Purple, smol derg (xe/xem)
Pim the Dragon, Kel's sister (she/her)


I finally made good on a promise to myself, and reread C. S. Lewis's awkward novel That Hideous Strength, the third book of the so-called Space Trilogy (or Ransom Trilogy as it's sometimes called). Technically it counts as science fiction but Lewis also throws in a lot of half-digested metaphysics and conservative Christian moralizing (lightly veiled). Lewis also does something in common with Aleister Crowley, if only he'd known it: he fills the book with thinly disguised real-life persons. Ransom, demoted to a supporting role after his heroic turn in Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, gets written into an astonishing transmogrification of Lewis's friend and fellow scholar and writer, Charles Williams; indeed That Hideous Strength feels a bit like Lewis's attempt to write a supernatural thriller amid a contemporary British setting, much like Williams's Descent into Hell or War in Heaven.

Other, evil characters from THS are based on people Lewis disliked: H. G. Wells turns up as "Harold Jules", the comically ineffectual figurehead leader of the villainous "National Institute of Coördinated Experiments" or N.I.C.E., while the N.I.C.E.'s repellent private police chief, Major Hardcastle—depicted as a truly appalling butch lesbian stereotype—is just a bit too reminiscent of Dorothy Sayers. This is one of the reasons that I've come to regard Lewis as a generally second-rate fiction writer: he's far too inclined to season his work with personal beefs given the thinnest possible disguises; the later Chronicles of Narnia books are especially obnoxious in this regard (and children read those ghastly things...)

That Hideous Strength is bizarrely important to me. It may well be one of the most influential books that entered my life...it's strange to realize, in retrospect, how many later decisions cascaded out of reading one baffling book. I stumbled across THS in the Blacker House dorm library while I was at Caltech in 1992-94, at a time when I read almost nothing except science fiction and fantasy. Lewis's novel isn't without its science-fictional elements, but it sure wasn't like any other sci-fi I'd ever read, what with Merlinus Ambrosius turning up (loud and beardy and ferocious, too, like a lumberjack who knows natural magic and talks in book-Latin) and substantial sections of the novel given over to Ransom preaching Christian values on love and relationships. At the time I didn't think it was exactly good...but it was captivating all the same, and I confess that I stole the paperback from Blacker House, taking That Hideous Strength home with me when Caltech kicked me out. I would revisit the book from time to time, and after a while I started seeking out more C. S. Lewis books, and then also Charles Williams and G. K. Chesterton and Dorothy Sayers's The Mind of the Maker, and eventually I'd convert to Catholicism. That Hideous Strength had proved to be like the loose stone that starts a landslide.

But there's something else that C. S. Lewis and That Hideous Strength did for me: they shamed me into changing my education. I felt extremely guilty, in 1995-96, about failing out of Caltech and giving up on chemistry in order to muck about with learning how to program computers. I was probably the unhappiest computer science major at SDSU; I felt like the discipline was tinny and fake, lacking in substance, like I was just learning a bag of arbitrary tricks for doing things with a computer. I wasn't studying the Universe, I was mastering how to use an exceedingly elaborate and popular technological toy, and I felt awful about it. A particular passage from That Hideous Strength seemed to encapsulate my malcontent:

It must be remembered that in Mark's mind hardly one rag of noble thought, either Christian or Pagan, had a secure lodging. His education had been neither scientific nor classical—merely "Modern." The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by, and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honour to help him. He was a man of straw, a glib examinee in subjects that require no exact knowledge (he had always done well on Essays and General Papers) and the first hint of a real threat to his bodily life knocked him sprawling.

And that is how I felt about fooling around with computers at a state university: I'd failed at learning a proper science and now I was getting a superficial "modern" education, working on computers because it felt like a safe unchallenging option after heavy-duty math and science had proved too tough, and I felt like the scum of the earth. I felt shallow and weak like Mark Studdock, like the protagonist of That Hideous Strength, who gets sucked into the infernal machinery of the N.I.C.E. because he's a flimsy and insubstantial person, more interested in success than in knowledge, and easily duped into chasing dubious ambitions. (The N.I.C.E. have a lot of unsavory plans for the future of humanity; Elon Musk and the "techno-optimists" wouldn't be out of place there.) Anyway...I was so ashamed to think that I'd become someone like Mark Studdock, I did something about it: I started taking Latin at SDSU, and eventually got a Classics degree. My double degree is up there on the wall to my left: "Computer Science and Classics, with Distinction in Classics".

And thanks to my classics curriculum, I was also introduced to Hellenic paganism, and the way that's played off over my long life along with a competing affinity with Christianity has been...very complicated. For a while I tried to believe what C. S. Lewis (and J. R. R. Tolkien) asserted, which was that Christianity was like the culmination or fulfillment of everything worthwhile in classical paganism, and is therefore the true inheritor of that tradition, as if paganism were merely a crude and faulty prototype or dress-rehearsal for Christianity. I wouldn't have converted to Catholicism in 2004 without first having been disappointed by the 200x Seattle pagan scene; after that I was inclined to think that maybe Lewis had been right. Now, though...now I feel either like Lewis was wrong, or perhaps that he inhabited a world too different from the one that I perceive myself to inhabit. For his part Lewis (with more than a little self-flattery) called himself "a converted Pagan living among apostate Puritans", a description that makes me roll my eyes a bit—Lewis was raised Christian. Sure, he'd picked up some pagan longings from his reading, but in converting he merely returned to the Anglican (well, Church of Ireland) faith of his youth in Belfast. He felt like he'd arrived home when he did that, if you believe Surprised by Joy, whereas my own Christian conversion left me feeling less satisfied than ever that I was on the right spiritual path. I didn't dislike churchgoing but the place felt so...empty, somehow, and full of pain and ghosts. And eventually I found myself turning back towards paganism.

C. S. Lewis is...like that. He wants to be a Good Christian™ apologist, steering people towards the One True Faith, but he's often more interesting when he's on a pagan vibe. That Hideous Strength furnishes many examples, especially an extended scene where the various planetary deities—Mercury, Venus, &c.—visit Ransom's household in turn, and we see how Ransom's close friends respond to those powerful influences. But there's also Dionysos showing up in Narnia, and then there's Till We Have Faces which is so pagan and so much better than C. S. Lewis's usual fare that I wonder if Lewis actually wrote it. (I suspect that Joy Davidman may have partly written or rewritten that novel.) Anyway, Jack Lewis and his friends have cast very long shadows over my life...I feel curiously as though I have some kind of duty towards them, as if to one's ancestors.

~Chara of Pnictogen


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