Tricolon, tricolon, tricolon!

 The First Lesson from the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost is Deuternomy 30:9-14. This passage displays the use of tricolon, as well as other rhetorical devices. The first tricolon centers around "prosperous" and "prospering." The Lord will make Israel prosperous, and will delight in making Israel prosperous, just as He made their ancestors prosperous. The first part of this tricolon is expanded by a second tricolon, thereby making the first tricolon a descending tricolon. This second tricolon is based around the fruit of various living things and is (grammatically at least) balanced rather than descending or ascending.

The third tricolon is expanded to a paragraph, embedded in a ring composition, and could be decribed as a priamel, although the goodness of the commandment is not explicit. The first two parts of the tricolon are startements of fact that exclude asking the hypothetical question (which is asked anyway). The final part of tricolon is a refutation of the distance of the commandment by locating it not just near the addressee, but within him. 

Deuteronomy 30:9-14 NRSVUE - and the LORD your God will make you - Bible Gateway

Gorr the God-Butcher: A Child's Story

 Thor: Love and Thunder is a “classic Thor adventure” told by Korg to children and ending with a punchline that is poignant rather than funny. The audience of children frames the way the story is told in both omission of gruesome deaths and the prominent inclusion of children within the story. This child-focus also creates a connection between the narration and the other framing device about Gorr the God-Butcher, which in the source material was less child-friendly and certainly more lethal. There are a lot of scary and dangerous things in Love and Thunder – as Thor reminds us, these are (mostly) Asgardian children.

The reticence of early MCU to use the word ‘gods’ is wholly gone from this movie, although Thor is still from space. The gods in this story are the sort tp whom you can pray and they might hear you. The attitude of the gods is established in the interaction of Gorr, the last surviving devotee of his god, who takes his devotion for granted and mocks his belief in an afterlife. This god’s existence is not contingent on the existence of believers. The existence of a divinely lush oasis on an otherwise dead planet suggests a retreat of the gods from reciprocity of do ut des, which is mirrored in the hedonistic isolation of Omnipotence City. The corpse of the previous owner of the Necrosword, a weapon which can kill gods, suggests that Gorr is not the first to turn resentment towards the gods into direct hostility; perhaps the existence of gods who might aid mortals are a hindrance in the Celestials’ plans for planets such as Earth? Or perhaps the Necrosword is a weapon of an enemy of the Celestials, who want life, if only specific kinds, to exist? After this nameless god has dismissed his last worshipper, Gorr starts his career as Gorr the God-Butcher.

By the end of the movie, there has been a lot of love and even more thunder, but both have been recontextualized in such a way that Thor and others receive as happy an ending as one can find in the death and battle dominated world of Norse myth. Thor’s arc, like those of many MCU heroes, finds him in a state closer to his canonical self than at the beginning. The mid-credits scene promises the audience a new father-son dynamic to replace that of Thor and Odin for the next phase.

The Complete Pegānā

 If you want to avoid the loathing of all things and otiose verbiage of Lovecraft, but still desire a cosmos that is at best indifferent and at worst actively hostile, you could do worse than Lord Dunsany’s mythology about the Gods of Pegānā. Lord Dunsany’s style is the opposite of that of Lovecraft: Lord Dunsany writes horror by omitting adjectives and descriptions of rituals which are either known to those who dwell therein or are secrets known only to the Gods. Many of the most memorable elements of Lovecraft’s cosmos derive from here, including the sleeping god whose dream we are and his musical attendant. The best collection to read these tales is The Complete Pegānā: All the Tales Pertaining to the Fabulous Realm of Pegānā. The cosmos of the Gods of Pegānā is mostly Lucretian, in which the prayers of Men usually reach only as far as the ears of the priests; the attitude of the Gods towards Man is best epitomized in these lines from the chapter “Of Yoharneth-Lahai”: “Yoharneth-Lahai is the god of little dreams and fancies … To whom Yoharneth-Lahai come not with little dreams and sleep he must endure all night the laughter of the gods with highest mockery in Pegānā.”

The first half of the collection is structured like a holy book. The chapter divisions are similar to the surāt of the Qur’an. The chronology is similar to the books of the Bible, stretching from the creation of the Gods and the Worlds to the End. The content in the beginning is reminiscent of the Theogony of Hesiod (another noted pessimist), while the middle contains longer stories of Men and their desperate attempts to access the Gods. The Gods win, every time. There is some variety, such as the rebellion of minor streams. The final tale is that of the End, in which the god of Time is slain by one of his own hounds, who are the Hours which devour all things.

The second half of the collection is an expansion of the mythology, both in the realms of the Gods and of Men. The order here is more varied. On the divine side, it includes “A Legend of the Dawn,” in which the sole child among the gods loses her ball (the Sun), and “When the Gods Slept,” in which worse things than the gods creep into the world and further degrade Men. On the human side, there is “The Relenting of Sarnidac,” in which a disabled dwarf undergoes accidental apotheosis, and “In the Land of Time,” in which a king declares war against Time himself.

The final three tales of the collection are titled “Beyond the Fields We Know”: each tale involves a traveler from our world participating in the world of Pegānā. These serve as a link between the realms of Dunsany’s dreams and the “real world,” thereby allowing a transition to more familiar landscapes with a new appreciation. A good (but definitely not tame) Lion once put it thus: “I am [there] … But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason you were brought [here], that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.” Homecoming is a necessity after the adventure in the perilous realm.

If you enjoy Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, you will enjoy Pegānā; but I would not recommend a graphic novel adaptation, for the sign of Mung and the other Gods of Pegānā are best left to dreams and dreamers.

Rainbow Brite Is Truly Dead

 This was my first time inside the new McDonalds buildings (I have ordered from drive up). The wooden paneling seems more natural, less plastic, but also exciting, less vivid, as though the abolition of the characters took away the joy of childhood fast food. Gone, too, was the germ-ridden plastic play area of my childhood, replaced by a more compact structure that retains all the colors of years past but none of the whimsy (or, depending on your experience with Grimace, whimsical terror). Perhaps this impression was magnified by this particular franchise’s location in Pacifica, but overall the world has grown duller, more frequently monochrome, a return to beige sans the illusion of smoking section.