Barker and Bender on the Case-Part Two

December 10, 2017, 11:20 am

≫ Next: Barker and Bender on the Case-Part Three

≪ Previous: A Little (or a Lot) on Algernon Blackwood

On Friday evening, September 12, 1952, a visitor from another world came to West Virginia. Soon after dubbed the Flatwoods Monster, the Phantom of Flatwoods, the Green Monster, and the Braxton County Monster, the visitor put a scare into residents of Flatwoods. Within days, journalists and other investigators were roaming over town and country in search of witnesses, evidence, and clues. Gray Barker, a Braxton County native then living in Clarksburg, was among them. He arrived in Flatwoods after work on Friday, September 19, only a week after the sighting of the monster. He had in hand an assignment from Fate magazine: 3,000 word and a few pictures with a Monday deadline. That weekend, Barker interviewed some of the witnesses of the event. He also ran into Ivan T. Sanderson, another investigator of strange and unexplained phenomena. The two men collaborated in their investigations in that last weekend of the summer of 1952, the closing of what in journalistic circles is sometimes called "the silly season." Both got their stories. It was likely the first time they had met.

Gray Barker's story of the encounter with the Flatwoods Monster, entitled "The Monster and the Saucer," was published in Fate in January 1953. By then, Barker was already in touch with still another investigator, Albert K. Bender, Jr., of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Barker first wrote to Bender on November 20, 1952, after having read a letter by Bender that was published in the December 1952 issue of Other Worlds Science Stories. Bender's missive to Other Worlds announced the formation of the International Flying Saucer Bureau and invited interested parties to join. In writing, Bender also offered an honorary membership to the editor of Other Worlds. Although the wording of his response is ambiguous, the editor seems to have accepted the honor. His name, by the way, was Raymond A. Palmer, also known by his initials, Rap.

Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on August 1, 1910, Palmer was a writer, editor, and publisher of fact, fiction, and things from the twilight zone between them. Palmer was badly injured as a child. In search of solace and escape, he read science fiction and fantasy, then created with Walter Dennis the first science fiction fanzine, The Comet, published in May 1930, when he was only nineteen. With the June 1930 issue of Wonder Stories, Palmer became a professional author of science fiction. He also managed to slip his first name into the title of his first published story, "The Time Ray of Jandra."

Palmer was not quite thirty when he landed a plum assignment as editor of Amazing Stories. The June issue of 1938 was his first. Eleven months later, in May 1939, he took on additional duties as editor of the new Fantastic Adventures, also published by Ziff-Davis of Chicago. He remained as editor through the December 1949 issues of the two magazines and was succeeded in the following month's issues by Howard Browne. Palmer wasn't out of of work, though, for he had already started as editor of Other World Science Stories in its inaugural issue of November 1949. More commonly known as Other Worlds, the new publication was digest-sized in keeping with a growing trend in the pulp-fiction market. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction also began as a digest-sized publication in the fall of 1949. (1) Astounding Science-Fiction had started the trend in November 1943. Weird Tales didn't follow suit until September 1953.

Other Worlds was published by Clark Publishing Company of Evanston, Illinois. Although the magazine was new in late 1949, its publisher was not, for Clark Publishing Company had been formed about two years before, in late 1947, by Raymond A. Palmer and Curtis Fuller. Their purpose was to publish a new kind of magazine, a magazine to look into the strange and unexplained facts on the fringes of science. They called it Fate.

To be continued . . .

Note
(1) The first issue was called The Magazine of Fantasy.

A clipping from the Charleston, West Virginia, Gazette from Tuesday, September 23, 1952, page 3, eleven days after the sighting of the Flatwoods Monster in Braxton County. Kathleen May and Gene Lemon were the only two adults to see the monster. All of the other witnesses were children. A week after the sighting, Mrs. May, Gene Lemon, and A. Lee Stewart, Jr., co-editor of the Braxton Democrat, appeared on the NBC television show We the People in New York City to talk about the incident. Note that the photograph above was taken at the Charleston bus station. Presumably, that was on the trip to or from New York. I don't know who drew the picture the two eyewitnesses are holding here, but I believe it was also shown on We the People. It may have been drawn by an artist for the show or by a newspaper artist.

A photo-montage of the Flatwoods Monster, ostensibly created by Gray Barker. However, Barker admitted in another context that he was not an artist. If he in fact created this image, he seems to have superimposed the artist's drawing from above onto a photograph of a woodland scene, with a large white oak tree on the right. I don't whether the photograph of the oak tree was shot at the original location of the sighting of the Flatwoods Monster or not. In any case, in the sixty-five years since the monster came to Earth, the tree has died and rotted. There may be little left of it.

Barker wrote his account of the encounter with the Flatwoods Monster for Fate magazine. It was published in January 1953. I like the drawing of the monster shown here. Unfortunately, I don't know the identity of the artist.

Asa Lee Stewart, Jr., known as A. Lee Stewart (1930-1998), was co-editor of the Braxton County Democrat and the first reporter on the scene after the encounter with the Flatwoods Monster. According to Gray Barker in Barker's book They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers (1956), "He arrived about half an hour after the incident." (p. 28) A few weeks later, Barker stopped in at Stewart's office. "Stewart chuckled as he held up an 8 x 10 photo, attached to a publicity release from Collier's magazine. The issue of October 18 was to contain the story of how a moon rocket would be constructed in the future, and the photo was [of] the art work which was to appear on the cover." (p. 30) Stewart, then, would seem to have been the first to notice a similarity between the eyewitness descriptions of the Flatwoods Monster and the cover art for Collier's, October 18, 1952. (Rev. S.L. Daw of Washington, D.C., an associate of Albert K. Bender, Jr., would write about the similarity in the January 1953 issue of Bender's Space Review.) Again, I don't know the identity of the artist. I also don't know whether the October 18 issue would have been on the newsstand as early as September 12. It doesn't seem likely to me, given that Collier's was a weekly rather than a monthly. On the evening of the incident in Flatwoods, the issue whose cover is shown above would have been still five weeks--and five issues--out.

Not long ago, I was watching the 1950 science fiction film Rocketship X-M when I saw this scene: actor John Emery as physicist and rocketship designer Dr. Karl Eckstrom at the chalkboard as he explains his creation to the astronauts who are about to be shot into outer space. I was struck by the resemblance of the drawing to the Flatwoods Monster, especially to later mechanistic interpretations of the monster's appearance. According to Wikipedia, the design of Rocketship X-M was based on drawings that had appeared in the January 17, 1949, issue of Life magazine. So in this wondrous age of the Internet, what do you do but look for just those drawings?

Five years ago--even a year ago--you might not have found what you were looking for. Now it's another story. And so I found these two images (above and below), illustrations for the article "Rocket to the Moon," predicting a trip within the next twenty-five years. (It actually took twenty.) The artist was Michael Ramus (1917-2005).

Although they don't offer the best view of Ramus' rocketship design, these images show a craft similar to the one in Rocketship X-M, a movie released a little more than a year later, on May 26, 1950.

In any case, as this advertisement from the Beckley, West Virginia, Post Herald from May 9, 1953, shows, Rocketship X-M was still playing at theaters three years after its debut. In other words, it might still have been fresh in the minds of moviegoers. By the way, Gray Barker worked as a movie theater booker. His business was the largest of its kind in West Virginia at the time. So did he book Rocketship X-M at the Pine theater in Beckley less than a year after the Flatwoods Monster incident?

A baby Flatwoods Monster? No, just a barn owl with its heart-shaped face turned upside down to form instead a spade-shape. Some people believe that the witnesses in Flatwoods actually saw an animal, possibly a barn owl, and in their excitement, fear, and hysteria, mistook it for a monster. After all, they went up on the hill expecting to see a Martian, so they saw one. Photograph by Lisa Kee.

Gray Barker (1925-1984), in the overused "talking on the phone" portrait of the 1940s and after. I don't know when this picture was taken nor the identity of the photographer, but in looking at it, you might get an idea of Barker's great height: he was six feet, four or five inches tall. You might also have noticed by now that Barker shared his first name with the most common type of alien (unlike him, a diminutive creature), while his last name suggests an association with a carnival barker. "Step right up, folks," he says, "and see the gray alien from another world." Half sincere, half huckster and hoaxer, Gray Barker had one of the most appropriate names of anyone I know of. (A forestland owner I knew by the name of Forrest Akers might have had him beat.)

Finally, Albert K. Bender's letter in Other Worlds Science Stories, December 1952, page 156. This is almost certainly the letter that prompted Gray Barker to write to Bender on November 20, 1952. (I don't have access to the October 1952 issue of Other Worlds, but I doubt there was a letter prior to this one.) Barker's letter was his introduction to Bender and to the whole mystery that would soon surround him, including the Mystery of the Three Men in Black.

↧

Barker and Bender on the Case-Part Three

December 13, 2017, 3:00 am

≫ Next: The Last Jedi at the First of the Year

≪ Previous: Barker and Bender on the Case-Part Two

The founding of Clark Publishing Company in late 1947 and the publication of the first issue of Fate in the spring of 1948 weren't just by happenstance. They were a result of the events of the first summer of flying saucers, which had its beginning on June 24, 1947, when Kenneth Arnold, a private pilot flying out of Chehalis, Washington, saw over Mount Rainier a flight of nine unidentified objects that "flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water." (1) Within a few days--in some places within a few hours--of Arnold's story getting out over the newswire, flying saucer fever seized Americans of all stripes, and people began seeing these unexplained aerial objects everywhere.

Kenneth Arnold was an average joe and not a crackpot of any kind. Observers found credence in his story. Around the middle of July, he received a letter from an outfit called The Venture Press, presumably based in the Chicago area. The sender asked him to investigate a supposed sighting of flying saucers over Maury Island, located about three miles north of Tacoma, Washington. And not just a sighting but a crashdown--a partial crashdown to be sure, one of debris that had supposedly fallen from a damaged craft, but one that nonetheless might yield physical evidence of the existence of flying saucers. What's more, the sighting and crashdown of debris were supposed to have taken place on June 21, 1947, three days before Arnold's sighting over Mount Rainier and about two weeks before Mac Brazel is supposed to have found evidence of a crashdown near Roswell, New Mexico. In other words, the incident--now known as the Maury Island Incident--if found to be based in fact would establish precedence for its two witnesses. Keep that thought--precedence--in the back of your mind for a while. It will come up again before too long.

The man who wrote to Kenneth Arnold from The Venture Press was Raymond A. Palmer, at the time the editor of Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures, published by Ziff-Davis of Chicago. If there ever was a Venture Press, it didn't last under that name. More than likely, the name was a front for a new venture planned by Palmer and his business partner, Curtis G. Fuller, editor of Flying magazine. According to Palmer's biographer, Fred Nadis,

[F]or nearly two years, beginning in 1947, Palmer had been leaving the Ziff-Davis offices (on North Wabash Avenue as of the mid-1940s) in Chicago's loop for long lunch breaks, during which he would head three blocks west to a drab office on Clark Street. There, using the pseudonym Robert N. Webster, he edited and prepared Fate magazine designed for an audience with a taste for the paranormal and unexplained. (2)

So, fake name and fake company. In any case, whether Fate was in the works before the first flying saucer sighting or not, Palmer and Curtis--Palmer especially, I think--must have seen a potential gold mine in the subject. And when Kenneth Arnold agreed to investigate the Maury Island Incident, Palmer uncovered another rich vein, for the incident introduced into the flying saucer story sensations of fear, paranoia, and conspiracy that have never really been shaken off in the seventy years since. The incident also brought on one of the first investigations of flying saucers by the U.S. government and resulted, tragically, in the first deaths associated with the phenomenon.

Fred Nadis goes into more detail on the origins of Fate:

Decades later, Curt Fuller said he started Fate after the first wave of flying saucer sightings in 1947. As editor of Ziff-Davis's Flying magazine, he had numerous contacts in the aviation and military worlds. He began to ask questions and concluded military officials were lying to him. [. . .] In this same period, Palmer was developing an "all flying saucer" issue of Amazing [Stories, of which he was editor until December 1949]. According to Palmer, Ziff-Davis [publisher of Amazing Stories] rejected the proposed issue after receiving a visit from a government official. Sharing notes, Fuller and Palmer decided to start a magazine that would question standard assumptions. (3)

Here again is the theme of fear, paranoia, and conspiracy, especially conspiracy supposedly carried out by the U.S. government and against believers in flying saucers.

The cover of the first issue of Fate capitalized on the flying saucer craze as it approached the beginning of its second year. The cover story is "The Truth About Flying Saucers" by Kenneth Arnold, while the cover illustration, captioned "The Flying Disks," shows Arnold's bright red Call Air A-2 in flight above Mount Rainer and overshadowed by three large, otherworldly craft. The magazine was a hit among those caught up in the phenomenon. John Keel reported that at the first flying saucer convention, held in New York City in the fall of 1948, most of the attendees (there were only about thirty) clutched copies of Fate as they shouted and argued their positions. (4) In case you're wondering, Fate is still in existence and is closing in on its seventieth-anniversary year.

* * *

Year after year beginning in 1947, flying saucers fascinated the American public, and year after year, flying saucer fans kept up on the latest news in Ray Palmer's several titles, including Fate, MysticMagazine, The Hidden World, Search, Ray Palmer's News Letter, and Forum. By John Keel's estimation, Palmer was the man who invented flying saucers. What has largely been forgotten, however, is that he was also the prime promoter of a mystery that served more or less as the forerunner to flying saucers. This was the so-called Shaver Mystery, which excited, perplexed, and angered readers of science fiction from its beginnings in the mid 1940s until it was overtaken by spacecraft from another world.

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) From The Coming of the Saucers by Kenneth Arnold and Ray Palmer (Boise, ID, and Amherst, WI: Authors, 1952), p. 11.

(2) From The Man from Mars: Ray Palmer's Amazing Pulp Journey by Fred Nadis (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2013), p. 116.

(3) From Nadis, p. 117.

(4) See Nadis, p. 116.

Kenneth Arnold (1915-1984), who made his fame by seeing and reporting the first flying saucers. From The Coming of the Saucers by Kenneth Arnold and Ray Palmer (Boise, ID, and Amherst, WI: Authors, 1952), p. 161.

Raymond A. Palmer (1910-1977), the man who invented flying saucers and kept them in the public eye for almost thirty years. As with Gray Barker, his name is suggestive: a palmer was a Christian pilgrim of the Middle Ages, in other words, a devout believer. On the other hand, someone who palms cards is a cheat or a grifter. On the other, other hand, Ray, as in ray of light, suggests something pure, warm, illuminating, heavenly, or in the science-fiction sense, a deadly force. From The Coming of the Saucers by Kenneth Arnold and Ray Palmer (Boise, ID, and Amherst, WI: Authors, 1952), p. 163.

From left to right: Curtis Fuller (1912-1991), his wife Mary Fuller (dates unknown), and Jerome Clark (b. 1946), all on the staff of Fate magazine in 1982 when this AP photo was published. Fuller and his wife bought out Ray Palmer in 1955 and ran Fate for decades afterwards.

Fate, Spring 1948, the first issue of a magazine that continues to this day, nearly seven decades later.

↧

The Last Jedi at the First of the Year

January 4, 2018, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Materi-Chlorians-Part One

≪ Previous: Barker and Bender on the Case-Part Three

Star Wars: The Last Jedi opened on Thursday, December 14, 2017, and so far has made a big bucket of money, as you would expect. It has also earned plenty of controversy. Some people--especially non-hardcore fans--really like it. Some--especially hardcore fans--really hate it. Four of us saw it on opening night in a small town in Indiana. The theater was pretty well full. We had to split up, two by two, because there weren't four adjoining seats left. There was expectancy, though, and when the main title came up and the opening blast of the fanfare sounded, people whooped and cheered. They laughed and cheered during the movie, too. And at the end, they clapped, as people used to do when they went to the movies. Many stayed all the way through the very long closing credits. If anyone at the theater that night didn't like The Last Jedi, we didn't know about it. It seemed that most everyone there was happy to have seen it.

There are, of course, serious problems with The Last Jedi, but then I don't know that anyone these days is capable of making a movie--or at least a big-budget movie--without serious problems creeping in, or actually built in to the thing. I have written before about the seeming contempt moviemakers have for their audiences. They must think that no one will notice when a plot hole the size of a space slug's maw opens up in the middle of their masterpiece. On the other hand, maybe the moviemakers themselves don't realize when these holes open up. So who here is stupid exactly? Anyway, I was going to leave the controversy alone, but I have decided to write on The Last Jedi to begin the new year. We will return to our regularly scheduled programming after this not-so-brief interruption.

One of the complaints against The Last Jedi is that it is too politically correct, meaning, there are too many women and minorities in positions of power and prominence, while men, especially white men, are relegated to minor roles or roles as villains. The complainers might have a point. You could make the same complaint about The Force Awakens and especially about Rogue One. Political correctness might be one explanation--Star Wars is owned by Disney after all--but there could be a simpler reason for the preponderance of women and minorities in these new Star Wars movies, namely, that the series is playing to a different audience than it did in 1977 or even in 1998. The original movie was made in Britain employing British and American actors and crew, and it was intended for an American audience. (Star Wars wasn't released in Britain until seven months after its American premiere.) Today the series plays to audiences worldwide, where the potential viewership may be ten to twenty times greater than it is here. You might as well put in some characters who look like the people who will see the movie in Turkey, Pakistan, India, and China. Maybe that will win new fans and help boost box office receipts.

That's just speculation on my part. More to the point, moviemakers seek more and more to appeal to girls and women by casting females in strong, leading roles. Rey, played by Daisy Ridley, is a case in point. She is, more or less, a female version of Luke Skywalker. The Force Awakens makes that obvious. The story so far is mostly her story, but at least in The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, there are male characters who act independently of her. In Rogue One, the lead character, Jyn Erso, played by Felicity Jones, ends up calling all the shots. The men in the movie, minorities or not (including the all-male crew of the eponymous spacecraft) are merely her helpers. Cassian (Diego Luna), who is so active in the first part of Rogue One, is reduced to a supporting role, just as Max (Tom Hardy) in Mad Max: Fury Road is merely a helper to Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron). This is what movies--or popular culture in general--are now. Male roles are passing to women, and movies are made more and more to appeal to a distaff audience, perhaps, too, to weak or feminized men. It's no wonder that boys and young men stay home to play video games in which they can act out traditional male roles. This is the beginning of a negative feedback loop.

Related to all of that, I heard a complaint about The Force Awakens when it came out, specifically about Daisy Ridley. The complaint had to do with her physical appearance. The word ugly was used. I don't think Daisy Ridley is ugly, but I'm not sure I would describe her as beautiful, either. But physical beauty is not the point now among actresses and the characters they play, and it's precisely for the reason that female characters no longer play traditional female roles. They are not meant to be beautiful. They are meant to be strong, in command, in control, in charge. In short, they are meant to be men. To be beautiful might actually be an undesirable trait among actresses and the characters they play these days. It's more important for them to be able to throw a punch or wield a weapon the size of a table saw.

Another complaint against The Last Jedi has to do with its use of humor. Maybe the complainers have forgotten how funny Star Wars is, but this is something I have noticed among fans not only of Star Wars but also of science fiction and comic books. You're messing with their fantasy world here. They take their fantasies very seriously, and they don't like it when you make light of them. I understand the feeling, but is it really that important that everyone in Star Wars be so stoic and humorless? Can't there be some humor somewhere? Can't anyone in this universe enjoy anything or take any pleasure in their lives? Or is everything always supposed to be heavy and grim?

A related complaint comes from people who hate The Last Jedi so much that they want it to be withdrawn, even remade, and struck from "the canon" of Star Wars movies. "The canon," they say. Not the Biblical canon or the canon of the Catholic Mass or some religious belief, but the canon of a popular entertainment. This overly serious way of looking not just at Star Wars but at other bits of popular culture is, I think, a real problem with fans, for if you think there is or should be a "canon" of Star Wars, Star Trek, Sherlock Holmes stories, or any other franchise, you really should get a life. All are simply fantasies or entertainments. Yes, they're fun, and escaping into fantasy may help you get through the rough patches in your life, but there is nothing sacred or untouchable about them. Nobody's mortal or spiritual life depends upon whether one spacecraft can or cannot track another through hyperspace. And if you're so worried about "the canon," what about the hundreds of Star Wars comic books, novels, short stories, children's books, and installments of television shows and daily comic strips that have come out? Have you placed your imprimatur on those things yet?

A chief complaint about The Last Jedi and about the other new Star Wars movies has to do with the expectation among moviegoers that they are going to experience what they experienced when they first saw Star Wars as children (in whatever form that might have been). I was there in 1977, just like many of you were. We remember what it was like to see Star Wars--the real, unadulterated Star Wars--for the first time, when it was fresh and new, like nothing we had ever seen before. It was exciting, exhilarating, even life-changing. But those days are gone, and they will never be brought back, no matter how hard anyone tries. We live in a different world now. We will never have that experience again, and it is unreasonable for anyone to expect, let alone demand, that we will.

But there is still a chance for Star Wars to be new and exciting. There is still a chance for children--real, chronological children--to enjoy Star Wars, and we should let them. My nephew is twelve. When we saw the preview for The Last Jedi in November, he told us that he felt goosebumps. After we saw the movie, he said it was awesome and put it in his top three of Star Wars movies. He wanted to talk about it for hours and days afterwards--What was your favorite part? Who are your favorite characters? And on and on, just like we did at that age. This movie and its predecessor were made for kids like him, kids who don't notice plot holes or illogical behavior on the part of the movie's characters or that certain things, like gravity bombs in space or spaceships that slow down and go adrift when they run out fuel, defy the laws of physics. They notice other things, like thrilling chases, well-staged fight scenes, and young characters experiencing emotions that they, the children watching, can understand. The children watching know what they like, and they like the new Star Wars movies. Rey and Finn are to them what Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Princess Leia were to us. We should let them have that pleasure and that experience.

Related to that is the idea that the current trilogy appears to be geared to a younger audience than the one that saw Star Wars in 1977. To be sure, the original Star Wars appealed to kids, but the prime audience seems to have been teenagers and young adults. It's worth remembering that those born in the peak year of the baby boom--1957--were twenty years old when Star Wars was released, the same age, by the way, as Carrie Fisher. (Although she was born in 1956, Carrie was still twenty in May 1977 when Star Wars came out.) There was no larger cohort born in the United States until 2007--and those children were ten years old when The Last Jedi was released last month, the same age, by the way, as Temirlan Blaev, the young actor who played the boy who uses the Force to gather a broom into his hands at the end of the movie.

Notice the name: Temirlan Blaev is not American or British but Russian by nationality and perhaps non-Russian by ethnicity. (He is, however, Caucasian--literally.) So he serves two--actually three--purposes in the movie: First, he is a child of ten, perhaps close to the median age for the target audience of The Last Jedi. Second, he is an ethnic minority and hails from central Asia, thus he covers two additional parts of the potential target audience. And third, he acts as a surrogate for the children watching the movie, for he is like them, and if he is like them, then maybe they can be like him. Maybe they can imagine themselves into the Star Wars universe in his place. From there, they can imagine a limitless future in store for them. Moreover, if he, a mere servant and stable boy in some dirty, remote place--a "nobody" as Kylo Ren describes Rey's parents--possesses the Force, then it shows that a person doesn't have to be a Skywalker, a Darth, a Count, or an Emperor to so possess it. In short, anyone can be a hero. Anyone can have great adventures and even save the galaxy, just as Luke Skywalker, a nobody who hails from a backwater planet called Tatooine, does in the original movie.

Still the complaints keep coming. Next is that Luke Skywalker's character is misused somehow, that his self-imposed exile doesn't follow logically from preceding events, and that there is violence done to the idea of the Jedi themselves. First, I would say that reducing Luke Skywalker to a crabby or curmudgeonly hermit doesn't work especially well in The Last Jedi, but remember, he redeems himself and saves the Resistance by doing something no Jedi has ever done before. And after so doing, he joins Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda as Force-ghosts. (Let's not talk about the Anakin Skywalker Force-ghost.) And maybe his situation doesn't follow logically from preceding events, but I for one thought that Anakin Skywalker's turn to the Dark Side as depicted in the second trilogy was also not very convincing--that he could not have been sufficiently motivated by the depicted events to make the turn. In other words, the turning of characters in the Star Wars universe is often not very convincing or logical, but that might be a built-in problem with the Star Wars universe anyway. (More on that in a minute.) Finally, the idea that the Jedi are basically kicked to the curb in the current movie is a moot point, for if The Phantom Menace is part of the Star Wars "canon," then it's already too late for the Jedi to acquit themselves well at all. The reason is this, and it's something that really bothered me when I saw The Phantom Menace at the theater: Qui-Gon Jinn, a Master Jedi, an exemplar of the order, walks right by the slavery on Tatooine without a word of objection and without taking any action against it. I'll say it again: If the Jedi can countenance slavery, then it's too late for them to make any claims to being a force for good in the galaxy.

That brings me to a point, again regarding the original Star Wars versus all of the movies released since The Phantom Menace in 1998. In Star Wars, the Force is explained in mystical or quasi-religious terms. In 1977, we accepted, even embraced and marveled at, that explanation. Then, for whatever reason, the Force became a merely material force. Mysticism and quasi-religion were banished from the Star Wars universe, and with them, seemingly any moral objection to slavery. This, then, is a kind of stoic or Roman society, in other words, a pre-Christian society. The galaxy is a harsh and unforgiving place. People die. Others suffer. Some are enslaved. There is nothing to be done about these things. Life is indeed grim. Further still, in this universe, those things that are judged necessary or expedient in attaining the objectives of either side are also judged to be good and proper by that side. The opposite is improper. Both the Empire and the Rebellion, the Sith and the Jedi, have their own versions of what is good and proper. The other is merely the opposition which must be fought or pursued, oppressed or resisted. And so the conflict goes on, not between good and evil but between the two possessors of a materialist Force, a force separated from any moral or spiritual possibilities that might entail. And there is one of my complaints--not that the Star Wars universe needs Christianity but that it needs some positive moral order, some absolute conception of good and evil. Anakin Skywalker's turn to the Dark Side is not convincing because there is no real evil in the Dark Side, nor is there any real good or positive moral force on the side of the Jedi. Anakin's motivations in turning are inadequate because no great moral question is at stake. He flips like a pancake from one side to the other. He does it again (or for the first time) as Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi. Yes, his son's life is at stake in that movie, but there isn't any run-up to Vader's conversion. Nothing that we have seen has happened between Darth Vader's first appearance in Star Wars--a movie in which he is shown to be hard, cruel, unfeeling, implacable--and the final scenes of Return of the Jedi, yet he turns after only a moment of silent thought, consideration, or indecision.

Nor is Luke Skywalker's conversion from a Jedi to a non-practicing hermit especially convincing because there is no great precipitating struggle within him, or at least no struggle that is adequately depicted in the movie. Luke's decision to kill should have been a central event in the Star Wars saga, like Abraham's decision to sacrifice his son before Yahweh, or even Meursault's actions in shooting the Arab on the beach in The Stranger. There could have been a whole movie built around Luke's struggle and decision, yet it's all disposed of in two short flashback sequences. What are we left to think about a man who would kill, in cold blood, his own nephew and the last of his line, without his first having gone through any great torment? Why did he not try to correct his mistake? Why has he fled from all responsibility? And what are we to think of a moral order, the order of the Force, in which a man like Anakin Skywalker or Kylo Ren might just as easily and justifiably choose one path as another, in which there is no battle between good and evil because there appears to be in the Star Wars universe no such things as good and evil? If the Force is what binds together all things in the universe and yet is ultimately a mere material phenomenon, how can there be? What do Midi-Chlorians care about the moral and spiritual state of men?

But here's the thing: As far as I can remember, Midi-Chlorians are not mentioned in The Last Jedi. But the word God is, for the first time in the entire series, again, as far as I can remember. (The word is actually godspeed, but close enough. How can you say godspeed without invoking God to speed you in your journey?) So Midi-Chlorians are out, but God is in (though only by the skin of His teeth). That leads to yet another point about the movie. Rian Johnson, the screenwriter and director, is a creator, but it's also clear that he is a destroyer, and he did a lot of destroying in The Last Jedi. Like so many creators in popular culture, he seems to have been shooting (to mix metaphors) for a reboot. He seems to have decided that there are certain things in The Force Awakens and previous movies that he just wasn't going to put up with, and he decided to get rid of them in spectacular and devastating fashion. Snoke? Sliced and diced. (I say, good, the story is more interesting with a more mature Kylo Ren on top.) Captain Phasma? Dropped into a flaming pit. (Is she all dead or just mostly dead?) Any budding romance between Finn and Rey? Flattened. The Jedi? Extirpated. Midi-chlorians? Not even mentioned. Mr. Johnson goes further still in his laying waste to the past. (Remember that Kylo Ren keeps telling Rey to forget the past.) Luke Skywalker (played by Mark Hamill, who I think is the most watchable of the original three in this new series) is first a nutcase, in no way noble or stately or good, and though he saves the day in the end, he is now a Force-ghost, fated to reappear in future movies--if he appears at all--only as a faint, blue haze. Admiral Akbar dies offscreen and is soon forgotten, like Lieutenant Cable in South Pacific. Even the Rebel fleet from The Empire Strikes Back is utterly destroyed. (A good move, I think, as now future moviemakers are free to come up with new designs instead of using those from nearly forty years ago.) Finally, in an unexpected development, the death of Carrie Fisher, hence of Princess Leia, will have to be dealt with in the next installment. I'm not sure how they'll do it. Can it possibly happen in the opening crawl?

(By the way, I'm not happy that Carrie Fisher died, but her performance in this movie is odd, awkward, and uncomfortable to watch. She was no longer a very good actress, she looked at least ten years older than she was, and she talked like she was wearing dentures. I only hope she doesn't show up in CGI next time, and this is coming from one of her fans. RIP, Carrie, but you should have laid off the drugs.)

It's clear from all of this that there isn't a senior story editor in the new Star Wars series, no one to make the big decisions about where it's going, what's going to happen, and which characters get to live and which ones have to die. J.J. Abrams, who is set to direct the next installment, likely stands ready to destroy everything he doesn't like about The Last Jedi, and there will be no one to stop him. So look for another reboot, and if Mr. Abrams' previous movies are any indication, look also for plenty of holes in the plot, swipes from previous movies, and things that don't make any sense at all. In any case, complain or no, we should all realize that, again, the next movie and all of the movies after it will be made for new generations of children and not for us. Like I said before, 1977 is gone forever and there isn't anything anyone can do to bring it back. As the saying goes, that was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

↧

Materi-Chlorians-Part One

January 11, 2018, 7:10 pm

≫ Next: Materi-Chlorians-Part Two

≪ Previous: The Last Jedi at the First of the Year

Since writing a very long entry the other day, I have been thinking about midi-chlorians in the Star Wars universe. According to Qui-Gon Jinn in The Phantom Menace (1999):

Midi-chlorians are a microscopic life-form that reside within all living cells. [. . .] And we are symbionts with them. [. . .] Without the midi-chlorians, life could not exist, and we would have no knowledge of the Force. They continually speak to us, telling us the will of the Force. When you learn to quiet your mind, you'll hear them speaking to you.

It's clear that George Lucas based his concept of midi-chlorians on the very real organelles called mitochondria. One hypothesis as to the origins of mitochondria is that they were once separate organisms that became symbionts in the cells of eukaryotes. In fact, mitochondria have their own DNA, just as all organisms do (or most do, depending on your opinion of viruses). The existence of mitochondrial DNA allows geneticists to trace maternal lineage into the distant past.

Qui-Gon Jinn's explanation of the Force to the moppet version of Anakin Skywalker in The Phantom Menace differs from that provided by Obi-Wan Kenobi to Luke Skywalker in Star Wars (1977):

Well, the Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together.

Note that Obi-Wan says that the Force is "created by all living things" (emphasis added), the implication being that it does not exist independently of them. Qui-Gon Jinn, on the other hand, describes a Force that would seemingly exist even if there were no life in the universe. Additionally, Obi-Wan's Force has nothing to do with "a microscopic life-form that reside within all living cells." His Force is within us, all of us. A second implication is that anyone who believes in the Force and trains properly can learn to use it. Contrast that with the more exclusive Force in The Phantom Menace and its sequels, a Force that can be used only by a select few who have sufficiently high midi-chlorian counts in their blood. That problem of exclusivity seems to have been corrected only with The Last Jedi, released last month.

Note also that Qui-Gon Jinn says that the Force has "will," while Obi-Wan Kenobi calls it "an energy field." I take that to mean that the Force in the original, unadulterated Star Wars is inanimate, thus incapable of possessing or exercising will. In The Phantom Menace and its sequels, on the other hand, the Force would seem a kind of material, though scattered, god or god-like force, with midi-chlorians seemingly functioning as intermediaries between it and human beings. Are midi-chlorians, then, roughly equivalent to the Holy Spirit? (Or to saints and angels?) Remember, Qui-Gon Jinn says, "When you learn to quiet your mind, you'll hear them speaking to you." Is that the voice of the god called the Force, whispering in a person's ear through its intermediaries? Do the Jedi (and the Sith for that matter) hear voices in the way that Joan of Arc and other Christian devotees throughout history have? And might the activated light saber of the Jedi (and the Sith) be something like the tongue of flame that symbolizes the presence of the Holy Spirit? Or, alternatively, is the light saber a sword of flame wielded by agents of the Force as in this verse from Genesis:

After he [Yahweh] drove the man out, he placed on the east side [or in front] of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life. (3:24)

Following this new thread of the tree of life leads to the online Encyclopedia Britannica and its entry on the term World tree (here):

Two main forms [of the world tree] are known and both employ the notion of the world tree as centre. In the one, the tree is the vertical centre binding together heaven and earth; in the other, the tree is the source of life at the horizontal centre of the earth. Adopting biblical terminology, the former may be called the tree of knowledge; the latter, the tree of life. [Emphasis added.]

And further:

In the horizontal, tree-of-life tradition, the tree is planted at the centre of the world and is protected by supernatural guardians. It is the source of terrestrial fertility and life. Human life is descended from it; its fruit confers everlasting life; and if it were cut down, all fecundity would cease. The tree of life occurs most commonly in quest romances in which the hero seeks the tree and must overcome a variety of obstacles on his way. [Again, emphasis added.]

There are echoes of Obi-Wan Kenobi's and Qui-Gon Jinn's words in these two quotes. First, both Obi-Wan and the Encyclopedia Britannica use the verb to bind to describe the modes, respectively, of the Force and the tree of knowledge. Both allow people on earth (or Tatooine) to come in contact with the transcendent or immanent. In the second quote, the Encyclopedia Britannica approximates Qui-Gon Jinn's idea that life would not be possible without the midi-chlorians coursing through our veins. I have added the emphasis in the last sentence of the second quote because it begs a question, for what else are Luke Skywalker's adventures in Star Wars but a quest romance in which he seeks mastery of the Force (perhaps roughly equivalent to the tree of life) while overcoming "a variety of obstacles on his way"?

It seems to me that the Force in its original formulation in Star Wars (1977) is a life force, or, in terms of psychology, perhaps a life energy or eros. (Or, in the words of the Encyclopedia Britannica, "the source of terrestrial fertility and life.") It is created (not generated or produced) by all living things, permeates all living things, and binds all things in the galaxy together. By Obi-Wan Kenobi's explanation, the Force also seems to be a mystical or quasi-religious concept. Qui-Gon Jinn is more vague. The Force he describes has will and would seem to exist independently of life or humanity, yet it expresses itself and makes itself known only through a biological, i.e., material, intermediary. The midi-chlorians may be intelligent, but they appear to be like idiot-savants: knowing in the ways of the Force, yet ignorant of any moral or spiritual implications of the fact that this great, god-like thing exists above them and acts through the men who live below them, men who are unable on their own to come in contact with or experience the Force. Are midi-chlorians, then, George Lucas' idea of the soul or spirit (rather than the Holy Spirit, saints, or angels, as I suggested above)? If so, does that mean that the people in the Star Wars universe lack souls of their own? And if the midi-chlorians are merely biological vectors through which the Force makes its will known, then don't they, the midi-chlorians, also lack a spiritual existence?

The difference between these two concepts--Obi-Wan Kenobi's mystic or quasi-religious Force versus Qui-Gon Jinn's biological or materialist version--might be explained by the times, for the first movie was made in the 1970s, a New or Aquarian Age, while the second came along in the much more jaded and cynical 1990s. On the other hand, George Lucas supposedly developed the idea of the midi-chlorians in 1977. He was at the time an admirer of Joseph Campbell and revised his screenplay to align more closely with Campbell's interpretation of the hero in literature and myth. Coincidentally or not, Campbell was not religious in any conventional sense. Some people consider him to have been an atheist or materialist, even though he seems to have believed in something non-material, even if it was only some vague idea of transcendence or immanence, a thing so vague that he seems never to have explained it very well. (Does that sound familiar?) Here are two quotes by Campbell, though, from the television program The Power of Myth (1988). These are from the website Answers in Action and an article called "Myth Perceptions, Joseph Campbell's Power of Deceit" by Dr. Tom Snyder (here), an admittedly unfriendly critic, as you can tell by the title. The ellipses and the words in brackets are in Dr. Snyder's article:

I have a feeling that consciousness and energy are the same thing somehow. Where you really see life energy, there's consciousness.

And:

There's a transcendent energy source . . . . That energy is the informing energy of all things. Mythic worship is addressed to that. That old man up there has been blown away. You've got to find the Force inside you. [Your life comes] from the ultimate energy that is the life of the universe. And then do you say, "Well, there must be somebody generating that energy?" Why do you have to say that? Why can't the ultimate mystery be impersonal?

Note the phrase--and the capitalization--"the Force." Remember, this was in 1988, more than a decade after Star Wars was released. I have to ask myself, when Campbell gave this interview in 1988, who was the master and who was the student (or padawan)? Were they Campbell and Lucas? Or were their roles reversed? Either way, a personal God is here swept away in favor of an impersonal and scattered energy, consciousness, or Force which may or may not be merely material. The idea doesn't seem to be very well developed, and I doubt that any one person on his own could well develop a complete and satisfying system of belief, yet Joseph Campbell seems to have tried it for himself, while George Lucas seems to have followed his lead in creating the Star Wars saga. Maybe that's why the Force and all of its penumbrae are so vague, inconsistent, and ill-defined. Maybe Mr. Lucas should have done what other creators of fantasy have done by leaving his system of belief on the periphery of his creation instead of placing it at its center.

In any case, C.S. Lewis will now make his entrance, speaking in the voice of the demon Screwtape, who is advising his nephew Wormwood on how to win human souls. From The Screwtape Letters (1942):

I have great hopes that we shall learn in due time how to emotionalise and mythologise their [humanity's] science to such an extent that what is, in effect, a belief in us (though not under that name) will creep in while the human mind remains closed to belief in the Enemy [God]. [. . .] If once we can produce our perfect work--the Materialist Magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls "Forces" while denying the existence of "spirits"--then the end of the war will be in sight. [Ch. VII]

So is that what the Jedi (and the Sith) are? Are they just Materialist Magicians? Is their very vaguely defined "Force" a way for George Lucas and his fans and followers to duck belief in God or to deny the existence of the human soul or spirit? If so, were they always that way? From a scene in Star Wars, on board the Millennium Falcon:

Obi-Wan: Remember, a Jedi can feel the Force flowing through him.

Luke: You mean it controls your actions?

Obi-Wan: Partially, but it also obeys your commands.

[Luke is zapped by the practice drone.]

Han Solo: (Laughs.) Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.

Luke: You don't believe in the Force, do you?

Han Solo: Kid, I've flown from one side of this galaxy to the other, and I've seen a lot of strange stuff, but I've never seen anything to make me believe that there's one all-powerful force controlling everything. There's no mystical energy field controls my destiny. It's all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.

So is Han Solo a materialist? Or is he merely a skeptic or a cynic? The best explanation might be that he is practical-minded and not a deep thinker. He gets to a point, though, one that I'll address in my closing. Before that, though, I should say that it's clear we're supposed to sympathize with Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi when it comes to a belief in the Force. Han Solo is their very mild antagonist. But if Star Wars is the story of Luke's quest and coming of age, it's also the story of Han Solo's conversion from hard, cynical, ruthless rogue to true and selfless hero. Near the end of the movie, he says to Luke, "May the Force be with you." And in the end, he saves Luke from the wrath of Darth Vader . . .

But that doesn't mean everything is nicely-nicely when it comes to Obi-Wan Kenobi's version of the Force, for if Han Solo's phrase "mystical energy field" is accurate--and there is reason to think that he has gotten to the heart of the matter--then the Force in the original Star Wars is still only vaguely mystical, more nearly concrete and materialist, in other words not very much different from Qui-Gon Jinn's even more vague, even more materialist interpretation expressed in The Phantom Menace.

To be continued . . .

The Angel with the Flaming Sword (1893) by the American artist Edwin Howland Blashfield (1848-1936).

Saying Grace (1951) by Norman Rockwell (1894-1978). The figures at the table are, from left to right, Han Solo, Chewbacca, Luke Skywalker, and Obi-Wan Kenobi. Note the light saber on the floor.

↧

Materi-Chlorians-Part Two

January 15, 2018, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Weird Fiction Against Materialism

≪ Previous: Materi-Chlorians-Part One

So we have two--actually three--explanations of the Force. According to Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars (1977), "It's an energy field created by all living things." The Force "surrounds us and penetrates us," he says. "[I]t binds the galaxy together." In The Phantom Menace (1999), Qui-Gon Jinn is more vague, implying that the Force exists independently of living things and that we can come in contact with it or experience it only through an intermediary, the midi-chlorians that "reside within all living cells," without which "life could not exist," and without which "we would have no knowledge of the Force." (1) As you would expect, Han Solo's description in Star Wars is simplest and most direct of all: he calls the Force a "mystical energy field."

These three explanations have in common the idea that the Force may be partly mystical and partly material (or maybe, ultimately, wholly material). By Obi-Wan's explanation, the Force emanates from all living things. If it exists outside of us, it does so only by being created by all of us together, from bacteria to banthas, from butterflies to Boba Fett. That's a comforting idea, and it still allows for something greater than the Force to exist in or outside of the universe. Keep in mind that in Star Wars and its two immediate sequels, there is love, caring, and kindness among the main characters, while the Empire is demonstrably evil, in no greater way than when it destroys the planet Alderaan. The difference is stark. We know who is good and who is bad. Keep in mind, too, that only in The Empire Strikes Back (1980) does anyone say "I love you" with any deep or genuine feeling. Those facts may be significant, so keep them someplace close at hand.

Qui-Gon Jinn's explanation of the Force is far more vague than Obi-Wan's. If I had to guess, I would say that it's because George Lucas wasn't able to formulate a complete and satisfying system of belief for his second trilogy. I doubt that any person could formulate such a system, regardless of time and circumstance. Just look at the quotes by Joseph Campbell from my previous article. His ideas are fuzzy, imprecise, not well thought out, almost incomprehensible. Beyond that, there isn't any sound evidence in favor of them. We have seen this before, in every kind of cult and every crackpot religion or system of belief formulated by a single person or small group of people, in Theosophy, I AM Activity, the Shaver Mystery, Dianetics and Scientology, and the cult of flying saucers to name a few. (2) In contrast, well-established and enduring religions are worked out over the centuries, with the input and by the experience of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people. Belief systems like the Force in either Joseph Campbell's or George Lucas' formulation are by comparison weak, short-lived, confused, even empty.

Ordinarily that might not be a problem, but in his second trilogy, George Lucas made the Force and all of its penumbrae central to his story. And so you get this nonsense about Anakin Skywalker's having a higher midi-chlorian count than anyone ever. Even worse, we know what that count is. Here is an exchange from The Phantom Menace:

Qui-Gon Jinn: I need a midi-chlorian count.

Obi-Wan Kenobi (after running the count): The reading is off the chart. Over 20,000. Even Master Yoda doesn't have a midi-chlorian count that high.

Qui-Gon Jinn: No Jedi has.

Obi-Wan: What does that mean?

Qui-Gon Jinn: I'm not sure.

Yeah, join the club.

The foregoing is actual dialogue from an actual movie. It may not be the worst dialogue ever written, but in the second trilogy, Anakin Skywalker's midi-chlorian count is a very important piece of information, and we as the audience are supposed to care about it. And not only care but be amazed at such a high reading--amazed at this person who is like no one who has ever before existed--amazed at a character played first by Adam Rich or Robbie Rist or whatever his name was, then by Hayden Christensen, neither of whom inspires anything at all except disgust and indifference. (3) In 1977, we could go along with the Force and feel a sense of wonder that such a thing might exist in this great universe. In 1999, we found out that the power of the Force is measurable by way of a blood test, like checking your insulin in the morning. Knowing Anakin Skywalker's midi-chlorian count is about exciting as knowing his credit score.

There is another way in which Anakin is different from anyone ever, for according to Wookiepedia, the Star Wars Wiki, he is "[b]elieved to have been conceived by the Force." In other words, his was a virgin birth, just like that other guy--what's his name? Oh, yeah, Jesus Christ. And like Christ, Anakin is a savior. In the Star Wars universe, he is the chosen one who will save the galaxy by restoring balance to the Force. (4) So if Anakin Skywalker is the Christ figure and the Force is his father, then is the Force simply a substitute for the Christian God? And if the Force is God, then what are the midi-chlorians? Are they the Holy Spirit? If so, then we have a trinity. Or do midi-chlorians instead take the place of the human soul in the theology of Star Wars? Whatever the case, if being in contact with and experiencing the Force is the only spiritual experience available to people in this universe, then only those with a sufficiently high midi-chlorian count will ever have such an experience. That leaves the vast majority bereft of spiritual experience and spiritual lives. It's no wonder, then, that human society in the Star Wars universe is essentially pre-Christian or stoic in nature. It's no wonder that people lead such grim lives.

To go further, if the Force is the highest force in the universe--in other words, if there is an impersonal and scattered Force but no personal God--then its people must lack souls, unless midi-chlorians act as their souls. But if midi-chlorians act as souls, then only those people who have sufficiently high midi-chlorian counts in their blood (or hemolymph or protoplasm or ichor or whatever fluid fills them) have anything like a soul. Even then, the Force is seemingly not a force for good but something else. Even if you're in contact with the Force, you are still cut off from any moral action. You can be bad or good and nobody cares, least of all the midi-chlorians. All human efforts, then, must lack a moral dimension. The conflict in which people in the Star Wars universe are engaged is reduced not to one of good versus evil but to a simple vying for power. Yes, the Empire blows up planets, but the Jedi, and by extension the Republic, countenances human slavery.

It's clear that in Star Wars (1977) the conflict is between good and evil. It's clear also that the main characters love and care about each other and that they're capable of joy, excitement, grief, and other very real human emotions. By the time the second trilogy begins, things aren't as clear. Again, there is the issue of slavery. More than that, though, the Jedi are shown to be more nearly political animals than some high religious order guided by a sense of morality. Love, joy, pleasure, humor--all seem to have been banished from the universe. By the time of The Phantom Menace (1999), it has become a grim and faintly unpleasant place. Princess Leia, Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, and Chewbacca have way more fun in Star Wars, even when they're running around on the Death Star. They're like the Dukes of Hazzard in outer space.

In the original movie, one side of the Force is exemplified in Luke--Luke as in light or light-giving--the other in Darth Vader, Dark Lord of the Sith and practitioner of the Dark Side of the Force. One wears white (or off-white). The other of course is garbed in black. (5) Again, the conflict is clearly between good and evil, whereas in the second trilogy, there doesn't seem to be a clear distinction between the two. In fact, there may not be any such things as good and evil, precisely because the Force has been reduced to a material phenomenon by the introduction of midi-chlorians. In any case, in the real world we have seen a battle between the powers of light and darkness before, in a dualistic religion called Manichaeism, founded by a Persian guy named Mani. (Not Ani, Mani.) Manichaeism took ideas and beliefs from various religions and thrived for centuries in the Middle East and Far East. It didn't last, though, presumably because it was inadequate as a belief system. Are you paying attention, George Lucas? (6)

Anyway, if there is no God, then slavery cannot be morally wrong, hence there can be no moral objection to it, by the Jedi or anyone else. And if slavery isn't morally wrong, what is? What can be? The enslaved lack souls, just like everyone else. They have no claim to any rights or freedom, for those are granted by a creative and loving God, not by the Force, not by midi-chlorians, least of all by the State, whether it be a Republic or an Empire. Slaves also have the misfortune of lacking a sufficient number of midi-chlorians in their blood, all, that is, but young, already obnoxious Anakin Skywalker, the moppet of Tatooine. His gazillions of midi-chlorians earn him a ticket out of slavery and off the backwater planet he calls home. Never mind the mother who gave him birth. We'll just take her son from her and throw her to the wolves, good Jedi that we are.

Here's my real point, though. A few paragraphs back, I mentioned love in the Star Wars universe. This should make for a short discussion for the reason that there isn't any, or very little anyway. How can there be when everyone lives a life devoid of spiritual experience and no one possesses a soul? In the original Star Wars, there is love, caring, and kindness among the main characters. In The Empire Strikes Back (1980), love between a man and a woman blossoms. Princess Leia even says to Han Solo, "I love you" (to a famously funny reply). They are presumably still in love in Return of the Jedi (1983). But those are the most human of the Star Wars movies, especially the original from 1977. As far as I remember, overt acts of love don't reappear until The Last Jedi (2017), when Rose grieves at the death of her sister, moreover when she saves Finn from sacrificing himself in the last battle on the salt planet and subsequently confesses her love for him. In the meantime, midi-chlorians appear and the Star Wars universe suffers through a lack of love. In the second trilogy, it is a grim, loveless, and humorless place. Significantly, midi-chlorians are not mentioned in The Last Jedi, and I don't think they're mentioned in The Force Awakens. Maybe the series is finally emerging from its materialist fog.

But what about the relationship between Anakin Skywalker and Padmé Amidala? Isn't that love? You tell me. Look at them together and tell me they love each other. The scenes they share are too excruciating to watch. There isn't any chemistry--no feeling, no life, no soul, no humanity in any of it. The words George Lucas (a champion of bad dialogue) puts into their mouths are embarrassing and ridiculous. I think it more accurate to say that the relationship between Anakin and Padmé is a plot device expanded for purposes of driving not only the second trilogy but the entire Star Wars saga, for who else is at its center than Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader? His whole story has to be told. And because of that, George Lucas was faced with a serious problem when he began writing the second trilogy, a problem that dates to The Empire Strikes Back, when Darth Vader became Anakin Skywalker. Mr. Lucas had to ask himself, How do I make Anakin Skywalker turn? He has to become Darth Vader. How can that be done? His simplistic solution was not for Anakin to arrive at Darth Vader by being naturally inclined towards ruthlessness and cruelty, or to become that way by being brutalized as a child (like Hitler, Stalin, and Saddam Hussein, for example), or by turning because of some great existential or philosophical struggle within him, or by acting simply as a kind of mercenary and suppressing any moral objections he might have to performing his duties. It wasn't even by being seduced by the power of the Dark Side. Instead it was for love and the fear of the loss of love, the one crisis that everyone in the audience has experienced and with which everyone might sympathize. That might have worked under different circumstances. We have seen great love and great loss on the big screen before. Unfortunately, George Lucas wasn't able to pull it off. And so we have a failed attempt to depict love in the second trilogy, an attempt not for the sake of telling a great love story but for getting cute, revolting little Ani into the dark guise of Darth Vader. And in that, George Lucas failed, too. I for one was never convinced that Anikan Skywalker as portrayed in the second trilogy was the same person as the Darth Vader of the original Star Wars. The larger problem of course is that if people don't have souls, are incapable of having any spiritual experience, and have as their god "a mystical energy field," how can there be love? We might ask ourselves the same question about the real world in which we live. (7)

To be continued . .

Notes
(1) If all living cells have midi-chlorians within them, and midi-chlorians are living cells, then are there midi-chlorians within midi-chlorians within midi-chlorians, ad infinitum?
(2) These, along with a belief in the Force, are among the religions of either pseudoscience or pseudoscientific fiction, aka science fiction. Be aware that there is now a real-world belief called Jediism. As G.K. Chesterton pointed out, once people stop believing in God, they'll believe in anything.
(3) Note the irony in his surname, Christensen. There is irony also in Luke Skywalker's Christian name--oops, given name--which he shares with the author of one of the Gospels of Jesus Christ and which means light or light-giving. Luke is of course a nickname for Lucas, as in George Lucas. And while we're on names, consider that Qui-Gon Jinn's surname is another word for a demon or spirit.
(4) Is it any wonder that in 2008 Americans would choose as our president a man whom some called a "lightworker" and "the one" or "the chosen one"? They must have been primed for such a thing by watching the second Star Wars trilogy in the years 1999-2005.
(5) Not yet Luke's sister, Princess Leia also wears white--pure, immaculate white--at least until she falls into the depths of the Death Star, where her garments are stained and tainted.
(6) I'm not the first to link Star Wars to Manichaeism. See "Manichaeism: A Dualistic Cosmology" by Jenny Northrup at the following URL:

http://jennynorthrup.com/index.php/2015/12/26/manichaeism-a-dualistic-cosmology/

(7) I read not long ago that the current moviemakers are planning to introduce homosexuality into the Star Wars universe. My initial question on reading this was Shouldn't there be heterosexuality first? The people in this universe are pretty rambunctious, yet hardly anybody is interested in the opposite sex. Where do they all come from? Currently, the series appears to be aimed at children who are in the latent stages of their development. The story can be told without any kind of sexuality at all. Why bother with homosexuality? Better yet for the bottom line (no pun intended): If you think hardcore (no pun intended) fans hated The Last Jedi for all of its perceived transgressions, just wait until you show Poe holding hands with one of his buddies.

In the Manichaean struggle between darkness and light, Darth Vader easily fills the role of the powers of darkness. Given his name, Luke Skywalker would seem to exemplify the powers of light. But who else wears the pure, white vestments of those same powers but Princess Leia?

I wrote the other day about the roles women now play in movies, roles in which physical beauty is discounted and may even be considered undesirable. Now women only have to be as tough, as strong, and as in control as men. That wasn't the case in 1977 when Star Wars was released. Carrie Fisher was beautiful and played the traditional role of the damsel in distress. She was the princess who had to be rescued from the dungeon of a great castle called the Death Star. But when it came down to it, she was tough and strong. She could handle herself and a weapon. Hers was slender and dainty, though, the Virginia Slims of blasters. It's just too bad that moviemakers and audiences have decided that actresses and the women they portray should no longer be beautiful--that masculinity in a woman is a far more desirable trait. You haven't come a long way, baby.

By the way, the term blaster, originally spelled blastor, first appeared in the magazine Weird Tales, in Nictzin Dyalhis' story "When the Green Star Waned" from April 1925. I will soon have more to say about Weird Tales and Star Wars. When? Soon. How soon? Very soon.

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Weird Fiction Against Materialism

January 22, 2018, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Scraps of Star Wars

≪ Previous: Materi-Chlorians-Part Two

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

--from Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Lovecraft aside, weird fiction is a warning against materialism, for it is a genre that lives in a pre-science, pre-Enlightenment age, one in which magic and supernatural monsters are still possibilities. Its materialist characters are science-minded, working in physics, chemistry, medicine, and so on. The materialist himself is arrogant, superior, sure of himself in his beliefs and dismissive of anything that can't be measured, quantified, or described by a mathematical equation or an abstruse theory. Moreover, he lacks imagination and sensitivity. His mind is unbending. And because it doesn't bend, it breaks as he comes face to face with the non-material. Some examples:

From "May Day Eve" by Algernon Blackwood (1907):

It was in the spring when I at last found time from the hospital work to visit my friend, the old folk-lorist [sic], in his country isolation, and I rather chuckled to myself, because in my bag I was taking down a book that utterly refuted all his tiresome pet theories of magic and the powers of the soul. These theories were many and various, and had often troubled me. In the first place, I scorned them for professional reasons, and, in the second, because I had never been able to argue quite well enough to convince or to shake his faith, in even the smallest details, and any scientific knowledge I brought to bear only fed him with confirmatory data. To find such a book, therefore, and to know that it was safely in my bag, wrapped up in brown paper and addressed to him, was a deep and satisfactory joy, and I speculated a good deal during the journey how he would deal with the overwhelming arguments it contained against the existence of any important region outside the world of sensory perceptions.

"Smith: An Episode in a Lodging-House" by Algernon Blackwood (1907):

"I was at that time, moreover, in the heavy, unquestioning state of materialism which is common to medical students when they begin to understand something of the human anatomy and nervous system, and jump at once to the conclusion that they control the universe and hold in their forceps the last word of life and death. I 'knew it all,' and regarded a belief in anything beyond matter as the wanderings of weak, or at best, untrained minds. And this condition of mind, of course, added to the strength of this upsetting fear which emanated from the floor below and began slowly to take possession of me."

From "The Eighth Green Man" by G.G. Pendarves (Weird Tales, March 1928):

I was frightfully embarrassed. How explain to such a rank materialist as Nicholas Birkett that instinct alone warned me against that road? How make a man so insensitive and practical believe in any danger he could not see or handle? He believed in neither God nor Devil! He had only a passionate belief in himself, his wealth, his business acumen, and above all, the physical perfection that went to make his life easy and pleasant.

There is of course Han Solo in Star Wars (1977), too:

Han Solo: Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.

Luke: You don't believe in the Force, do you?

Han Solo: Kid, I've flown from one side of this galaxy to the other, and I've seen a lot of strange stuff, but I've never seen anything to make me believe that there's one all-powerful force controlling everything. There's no mystical energy field controls my destiny. It's all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense. (1)

Every one of these characters gets his comeuppance, of course. Han Solo, not overtly a materialist, gets the best of outcomes. He may not accept things exactly, but he bends, out of friendship and, soon enough, love. Birkett, from G.G. Pendarves' story, gets the worst of outcomes here. All are shown that their materialism and skepticism are inadequate in the face of the true nature of the universe.

You might say that the materialist (or skeptic) in each of these examples is a kind of strawman, set up only so he can be knocked down again. You might say also that the non-materialist uses material means to show the materialist that the universe is at its base non-materialist. In other words, the materialist is shown to be wrong in his beliefs by his encountering physical (i.e., material) manifestations of non-material phenomena. The point is that weird fiction is very often a whisper of dissent in the great halls of Scientism and materialism. Given the current popularity of weird fiction and fantasy over science fiction, the idea that the universe is not strictly material may be an attractive one for both writers and readers of these genres.

Note

(1) Star Wars is sometimes labeled as science fiction when it clearly isn't a part of that genre, spaceships, robots, aliens, and blasters aside. Star Wars isn't weird fiction, either, but it is fantasy, and it is descended in part--Han Solo especially-- from the tales of Northwest Smith written by C.L. Moore and published in Weird Tales from 1933 to 1936. By the way, the last Northwest Smith story in Weird Tales, was "The Tree of Life" from October 1936.

Northwest of Earth by C.L. Moore (Gnome Press, 1954), with cover art by Ric Binkley. The image is conventional and not an especially good one. (Notice how long Northwest Smith's thighs are in relation to the rest of his body.) Nonetheless, C.L. Moore's planetary adventurer can be considered a progenitor of Han Solo. He's even wearing a vest and wielding a "good blaster."

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Scraps of Star Wars

January 31, 2018, 3:00 am

≫ Next: The Cosmic Question

≪ Previous: Weird Fiction Against Materialism

I have gotten on to Star Wars and away from my previous series on Gray Barker and Albert K. Bender. Today I'll finish with Star Wars. I'll return to "Barker and Bender on the Case" as soon as I can. That series is going somewhere, so I hope you'll see it through.

Before that, here are my scraps of Star Wars.

"May the Force be with you." This is what people in Star Wars say as they part, sometimes never to see each other again. In speaking these words, they echo our own valedictions: "May God be with you,""God be with you," or simply "Goodbye." Instead of God there is the Force. Impersonal, scattered, Manichaean, indifferent to the fate of humanity or of individual human beings, the Force, then, would seem the god of the Star Wars universe. Evidently there is no human soul here either. The only way anyone has of coming in contact with or experiencing this god is through a biological, hence material, intermediary. Even then, only certain, select people, an elite with high midi-chlorian counts, are permitted that contact and those experiences. But what experiences? Does any Jedi or Sith undergo a genuine spiritual experience, any deep feeling of transcendence, any contact with a higher power? Or is the Force used simply for a person's own purposes or as an exercise in power? If the Jedi can countenance human slavery, then are they really a force for good in the galaxy? And if the Dark Side is merely about hate and anger, as Emperor Palpatine seems to be saying in the throne room scene in Return of the Jedi, is it really evil? Yes, the empire destroys Alderaan, but that is the decision of Grand Moff Tarkin, who is not in touch with the Force and whose exercise of power is purely secular. Darth Vader is his servant and lieutenant, the wizard at his side. He does what he is told. Beyond that, Alderaan was destroyed before there were midi-chlorians--when there were still good and evil in the Star Wars universe and while the Force was still secondary to the secular power of the Empire.

* * *

The midi-chlorians are supposedly intelligent, but they are also seemingly morally neutral. Or maybe they lack any concept of morality. They will facilitate access to the Force for the person who has crossed over to the Dark Side just as readily as they will for a Jedi. Are they agents of free will? Do they simply allow the people whom they inhabit to make the choice between one side and the other? Or are they like the deist concept of God the Clockmaker, who has stepped away from his creation to allow it to unwind as it will? Alternatively, do they simply not care?

Midi-chlorians are supposed to be symbionts, but are they really? Or are they parasites? Do they manipulate people, playing them off one against the other in some Darwinian struggle for existence? Do they play the field, chancing that this person using the Force for "good" is likely to survive by defeating that one using it for "evil," and vice versa? For if the person in whose blood they live survives to reproduce, then they will, too. Like Richard Dawkins' selfish gene, are midi-chlorians also selfish, seeking only to be perpetuated into the next generation? And will they do anything to make that happen, however wrong or immoral that might be?

* * *

We have seen this idea before in fantasy and science fiction. I'm thinking of the Star Trek episode "Return to Tomorrow," first broadcast fifty years ago, on February 9, 1968. In that episode, god-beings of pure energy occupy the bodies of Captain Kirk, Mister Spock, and babe-of-the-week Dr. Ann Mulhall. The beings inhabiting the bodies of Kirk and Spock vie with each other for survival--and presumably for the chance to reproduce. (Don't forget the babe-of-the-week, Dr. Ann Mulhall.) The difference between Star Wars and Star Trek of course is that in Star Trek, some things are known to be good and moral, while other things are known to be bad and immoral, and so the god-beings decide to fade into oblivion rather than make immoral choices.

* * *

So in the newest Star Wars trilogy (now 67% complete) why is the First Order evil? And why is the Resistance good? Both have military governmental structures, both are vying for power, both use the Force for their own seemingly amoral purposes. Is the cause of the Resistance freedom? If so, has anyone in that organization ever stated as much?

As for the First Order, we know what they're up to. Here is their mission statement, spoken by the baby Vader, Kylo Ren, according to Wookieepedia: The Star Wars Wiki:

"It is the task of the First Order to remove the disorder from our own existence, so that civilization may be returned to the stability that promotes progress. A stability that existed under the Empire, was reduced to anarchy by the Rebellion, was inherited in turn by the so-called Republic, and will be restored by us. Future historians will look upon this as the time when a strong hand brought the rule of law back to civilization."

Order, stability, progress--these are the values of the tyrant. (They remind me of the goals in the novel We by Yevgeny Zamyatin.) In our neck of the galaxy, they are the ingredients for making a big heapin' helpin' o' Dystopia. And not just any Dystopia but the leftist/socialist/statist brand favored by tyrants of the twentieth century. So I'll ask the question again: What is the cause driving the Resistance?

* * *

I have more questions about the new Star Wars universe. First, who is in control of the galaxy right now while Snoke lies in pieces and Kylo Ren is rapidly winging his way into the boondocks of space? Is it the First Order? Aren't they too busy running down the Resistance to pay any attention to anything else? And where do they get their funding? Every week or two, some enormously expensive piece of space weaponry is reduced to dust by the Resistance. Who is financing all of these boondoggles? Aren't the people of the galaxy fed up with all of their hard-earned money being flushed down a big black hole?

More questions: In The Last Jedi, the First Order seems to be reduced to a small fleet whose sole obsession is, like Ahab after his whale, to chase the Resistance to the ends of the galaxy, no matter the cost. They don't seem to care that everything might be lost or that they might never see home again. What drives these people exactly? We know that the True Believer here on Earth will give up everything for his holy cause, but what holy cause is there in this galaxy of long ago and far, far away? Does anyone among the First Order really believe in order, stability, and progress as the one cause for which they will sacrifice everything? Considering that there is no God or god in the Star Wars universe, no one has ever been driven by anything holy or even close. How can they be now? Or are they all being dragged along by a singular obsession, Kylo Ren's desire to have Rey?

I sense an air of decadence and of smallness hanging over the whole operation. General Hux is a clown, lacking all of the gravity and ruthlessness of Grand Moff Tarkin. At the beginning of The Last Jedi, he falls for Poe's radio trick, like Moe answering the phone on The Simpsons or some outer-space ship captain encountering Star-Lord in Guardians of the Galaxy. Needless to say, Kylo Ren is a mere shadow of Darth Vader, Snoke an almost comical caricature of Emperor Palpatine, and Captain Phasma a rejiggered Cylon. For their part, the Resistance is down to so few people that all can fit on board the Millennium Falcon. Princess Leia is an old rummy whose offscreen death will soon have to be explained. Luke Skywalker is a Force-ghost who may or may not return. Han Solo has fallen into a pit, as most of the major characters in the Star Wars saga do at one time or other. Poe is his third-rate replacement. Chewbacca, C-3PO, and R2-D2 are relegated to very minor roles. Lando Calrissian is nowhere in sight. The Resistance fleet has been destroyed and they're on the run like the crew of Battlestar Gallactica. Only Finn and Rey have any spirit left. How long will it be before the whole series collapses from exhaustion?

* * *

So is it just me, or in the Star Wars universe does no one ever sing, dance, or listen to music--endless hours and days spent flying through outer space and no music. (At least Star-Lord has his mix tapes.) There is actually singing, dancing, and music in certain places, places that are cast as somehow immoral, corrupt, or decadent: the cantina at Mos Eisley; Jabba's palace on Tatooine; Takodana in The Force Awakens, a place for spies, smugglers, and fugitives; and most immoral and decadent of all, the casino planet in The Last Jedi. No one ever eats or drinks anything, either, nothing but blue milk anyway. Nobody but Han Solo and Lando Calrissian seems to have any interest in the opposite sex. In fact, no one has very much fun at all in this place. Everything seems to be a very grim and joyless struggle. So is the Star Wars universe one full of Puritans and ascetics? Why?

Better questions: Where is all of this going? What is the goal? What is the point? If there is no moral struggle, no striving for love or freedom (as in Star Trek), then isn't the Star Wars universe essentially empty? Did George Lucas design it to be empty in fact, not intentionally, but by his lack of belief in a personal God or in the individuality of all human beings, created by God in his own image and endowed with free will, the capacity for love, and a deep desire to strive for understanding and transcendence? Does Mr. Lucas believe in an individual human soul? He is famously leftist in his political orientation. A hostility towards individuality might come naturally to him. The idea that the Force is created by all living things is, after all, vaguely collectivist. I have already written about the materialism behind the concept of the midi-chlorians. Collectivism, atheism, materialism, hostility towards the individual--these are the values of the leftist/socialist/statist, throughout the twentieth century and still today. The irony is that George Lucas and similar-minded moviemakers would seemingly identify more with the goals of the First Order than with the opposing goals of love, faith, and freedom. But then the Resistance doesn't seem to have these things as their goals either. In any case, leftwing politics comes out in The Last Jedi, but it is so naïve and ignorant as to be laughable. These things can pretty easily be dismissed:

The war profiteers who are busy are whooping it up on the casino planet while the Resistance fights, suffers, and dies. (Remember, in the Star Wars universe, fun=moral corruption.) Never mind that in the real world the people who so often enrich themselves under any form of government, especially under tyranny, are actually in government rather than in the private sector.
The Resistance forces who are so soft-hearted that they free the animals used and abused for entertainment on that same planet. Again, never mind the poor slave children who clean out the stables. We don't care about their plight because, as we already know, slavery is acceptable in the Star Wars universe.
The labeling of the Republic/Rebellion forces as "the Resistance," in sympathy, I suppose, with the people who oppose our current president by beating up people who disagree with them.
The pseudo-fascism or pseudo-nazism of the First Order, who, ironically, have as their goals order, stability, and progress, the same goals that leftists, socialists, and statists of the twentieth century and today have.

These are the most obvious manifestations of leftism in The Last Jedi, but like I said, I think you can just dismiss them. There are far worse flaws in the movie. I had fun watching it, but here's hoping the next one is better.

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The Cosmic Question

February 2, 2018, 3:00 am

≫ Next: The Shape of an Oscar

≪ Previous: Scraps of Star Wars

I have been reading The Cosmic Question, a British edition of the book The Eighth Tower by John A. Keel, published in 1978. (The original was published in 1975.) By a process of serendipity, my reading of this book at this moment provides a transition from my series on Star Wars to my previous series on the Fortean authors Gray Barker and Albert K. Bender. Here is a quote from The Cosmic Question (Panther Books, 1978):

The standard definition of God, 'God is light', is just a simple way of saying that God is energy. Electromagnetic energy. He is not a He but an It; a field of energy that permeates the entire universe and, perhaps, feeds off the energy generated by its component parts. (p. 21)

Keep in mind, John Keel wrote these words at least two years before Star Wars arrived on the scene, yet he used some of the same language that Obi-Wan Kenobi uses to describe the Force:

Well, the Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together.

and that Han Solo uses in his later rebuttal (spoken to Luke Skywalker):

Kid, I've flown from one side of this galaxy to the other, and I've seen a lot of strange stuff, but I've never seen anything to make me believe that there's one all-powerful force controlling everything. There's no mystical energy field controls my destiny. It's all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.

Now, I have never heard anyone ever say that God is light. (By the book of Genesis, God created light, and so precedes it.) I think Keel was just making that up. His point, though, is to assert that God is simply energy, electromagnetic energy that exists on an electromagnetic spectrum, in other words a continuum. That's the point of this book, too, that all energy--in other words all phenomena, including Fortean phenomena--exists on a spectrum, one that he calls and describes as the superspectrum. According to John Keel, then, all phenomena--Fortean phenomena and non-Fortean or scientific phenomena alike--are continuous. The procession of the damned shall, by this scheme, gain entry into the halls of the un-damned, and all things, which were once discontinuous, shall be continuous again. Keel, who I believe was an agnostic at best, also sought here to reduce everything supernatural to the merely material. In any case, the Fortean notion of continuity vs. discontinuity is the theme of my series on Barker and Bender, a series that will eventually go well beyond them and into the coming spring.

The Cosmic Question, by John A. Keel, published by Panther books in 1978. Peter Jones' cover art recalls the image of Kenneth Arnold's famous encounter with the first flying saucers over Mount Rainier in 1947, shown below on the cover of the first issue of Fate, from 1948.

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The Shape of an Oscar

March 9, 2018, 8:46 am

≫ Next: The Shape of an Oscar-Part Two

≪ Previous: The Cosmic Question

We saw The Shape of Water a few weeks back. I was going to let it slide without comment, but then the thing won Oscars for best picture and best director this past Sunday, so here I am with my two cents' worth.

I read a long time ago that in a decadent culture, everything is reduced to allusion. I would add a remake or an outright swipe to the end of that sentence. Avatar (2009) is really just Ferngully in space (or Dances with Smurfs). The recent Star Trek and Star Wars movies are simply retreads of previous entries in those series. And The Shape of Water (2017) could easily be called E.T. from the Black Lagoon, or The Splash of Water (you know, the movie with Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah), or The Little Mermaid in Reverse. There is still some originality, creativity, and imagination in movies today, but these things are becoming increasingly rare. The Shape of Water may be a nice movie in some ways, but it has some really debilitating flaws, too, and in my little opinion, it should never have won an Oscar for best picture. You could take its winning as a bad sign in creative or artistic terms because it's such a step down from previous winners. But I think there's actually something different at work here. It may be something that will blow over. But if our culture keeps going in this direction, it won't blow over. It could actually be the thing that blows other things over, and people will stop going to movies as a result.

I wrote sometime back about the idea that politics ruins everything it touches. Put another way, politics is sewage, art is wine. Pour a cup of wine into a barrel of sewage and you still have a barrel of sewage. Pour a cup of sewage into a barrel of wine and you have just another barrel of sewage. This year at the Oscars, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences poured sewage into the art of moviemaking. Many of the major awards and probably some of the minor awards were tainted, either in actuality or by association with politics. They mean comparatively little because of it. The Shape of Water won an Oscar not for its artistic merits but because it checked so many boxes on the scorecard of political correctness. The members of the Academy see themselves as part of the so-called "Resistance" to the current presidential administration, which they deem as horribly and atrociously racist, sexist, and xenophobic or anti-immigrant. And so, seeing their chance to stick their finger in the eye of our current president and to do some conspicuous moral preening before the world, the members of the Academy handed out awards based on something other than merit. They chose sewage over wine. I have not seen Coco, but I don't think it's any coincidence at all that movies made by and/or about people from Mexico won Oscars for best picture in their respective categories this year. I don't know about you, but as an artist, I would not want to receive an award tainted by political considerations: I would want instead to have my work judged solely on its artistic merits. If I were Guillermo del Toro, I would always have to doubt the integrity of an award given with a political asterisk attached to it.

So what are the problems with The Shape of Water? Let me count them. Actually, let me not count them, as I don't want to spend too much time on this topic. I guess I'll start by saying that a person should not make a movie using a sledgehammer. That's how this movie was made. Okay, yes, we know by now that you, being a Hollywood-ite, believe that pre-Beatles America was a horrible, terrible, unlivable place. It was also horrible and terrible. We know that. Quit reminding us. Quit hitting us with this sledgehammer. (Never mind that Saint John F. Kennedy was president when The Shape of Water is set.) We also know that heterosexual white men attached to the American military-industrial complex are the worst villains the world has ever known and ever will know. This villain is even worse, though. He's got it all covered: he lives in the suburbs with his 2.5 squeaky-clean whitebread (and white-bred) children. He has a Stepford Wives wife who whips out her lovely breast the second his children are out the door and submits to sex in the starfish/missionary position with his disgusting gangrenous hand over her mouth so that she'll shut up while he's going about his bidness. He calls black people "you people" (signifying his racism), sexually harasses the protagonist (signifying his misogyny), makes fun of her disability (signifying his making fun of people with disabilities), torments and tortures the Gill-man (signifying not only his xenophobia but also his mindless and motiveless cruelty and psychopathy), and packs a pistol (signifying his inherent violence and probably also his unnatural feelings for the Second Amendment). He is also former military, and as we know from watching Avatar and other films made by James Cameron, Guillermo del Toro, and their co-religionists, anybody who has served in the military is necessarily a mindless, stupid, aggressive, insensitive, racist, misogynistic, violent, psycho knucklehead.

So the villain in The Shape of Water is a twofer, threefer, fourfer, or morefer. The other characters are twofers or morefers, too. The protagonist is not only a woman and disabled, she's also Hispanic, an orphan, and working class. Her co-worker is not only a woman, she's also black and working class. The protagonist's friend may be white, but he's also homosexual, and we're led to think that he lost his job because of his homosexuality (signifying the homophobia of pre-Stonewall America). (If he's white but gay, he's okay. If he's white but straight, we gotta hate.) There's a twofer in the restaurant where he likes to eat, too: not only does the man at the counter refuse his advances (signifying the man's homophobia), he also refuses service to a young black couple who are looking for what we're all looking for in this life: a good piece of pie. This of course signifies the counterman's racism and the general overall racism of pre-Civil Rights America. In short, this is moviemaking with a sledgehammer. And so much of it is gratuitous--gratuitous, that is, unless moviemaking with a sledgehammer is your purpose: unless politics rather than art is your guiding inspiration.

So if you disregard all of that (not an easy thing to do), you arrive at a love story in the form of a magical-realistic/contemporary urban fantasy/weird-fiction/fairy tale. It's hard to accept the idea of love, specifically physical love, between a human being and a reptile, amphibian, or fish. After all, we have an atavistic revulsion towards these creeping, crawling, swimming creatures, those made on the fifth day of Creation rather than the sixth. (It's much easier and more natural to believe in the love of Beauty for the Beast, as he is at least soft and furry, i.e., mammalian.) But for an hour or so, you can set that aside, too. The protagonist is, after all, very lonely, and we can all identify with loneliness, even extreme loneliness. In our loneliness, we might even envision love with a toad.

You can also accept impossibilities, like the bathroom filling up with bathwater so that the two new lovers can enjoy a kind of sexual aquacade, like the contrastingly chaste underwater scenes in Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) in which the Gill-man spies on and soon abducts Ginger Stanley, standing in for Julia Adams. (The Shape of Water is basically a sequel to Creature from the Black Lagoon. Screwy, but a sequel.) What you can't accept is the ignorance and lack of imagination on the part of the moviemaker when it comes to storytelling. I'll give just one example of each. I think each one of these is pretty disastrous.

First, one of the badguys in the movie is U.S. Army General Frank Hoyt. We already know he's bad because he serves in the military. He's worse because he's in command of this whole operation in which the Gill-man is supposed to be used for some kind of nefarious secret government conspiratorial plot, just like all government operations were until our most recent ex-president got into office. (If we ever know what the plot is in The Shape of Water, we have forgotten by the end of the film. This reminds me of a Squatcher I know who thinks the U.S. Army is hiding evidence of Bigfoot. Why? Who knows.) Anyway, Hoyt is not just a general. He's a five-star general. I guess in Mr. del Toro's stunted imagination, the U.S. Army hands out stars the way you hand out candy at Halloween. Never mind that there have been exactly four five-star army generals in American history (and five previous generals-of-the-army). Hoyt might as well have been called a Super-Duper General. That would have made just as much sense. Mr. del Toro's gaffe is reflective not only of the hostility moviemakers have towards the military but also of their breathtaking ignorance when it comes to military matters. Somebody should have stopped him before he made his mistake.

Second and more serious is that when the Gill-man is brought into the military-scientific facility for study, he arrives inside a tank with a window. Any Joe (or Jane) Blow standing around picking his nose or mopping the floor can see what's inside--and she does, the protagonist that is. For a place that's supposed to be about secrecy and security, there is astonishing incompetence when it comes to actually keeping anything secret and secure. The cleaning ladies wonder around on their own, going wherever they want, seeing whatever they want, talking to the Gill-man, playing him records and feeding him hardboiled eggs, like the cheapest date there has ever been. (What does he know? He lives in a river. And what about the eggs? They're her eggs, aren't they, meaning her own symbolic ova? She of course prepares them by the egg timer she uses every morning for another purpose.) The screenwriter should have thought of a better way of telling his story. Instead he took the easy way out, and so we have a whole movie based on an entirely unbelievable premise. This may be a fantasy, but even a fantasy has to follow basic rules, one of which is that people must act like real people instead of like incompetent morons when the moviemaker requires them to because he's too stupid or lazy to figure out how to tell his story otherwise.

Now see what has happened? I have written way more than I was planning to, and I'm not even done yet. This will be the last, though, I promise. I have written before about the idea that fantasy and weird fiction tend to be conservative genres and generally about the past, while science fiction tends to be progressive and generally about the future. The Shape of Water is not science fiction, despite any science-fictional elements it might have. It is obviously a fantasy, but it's a progressive fantasy. Is that a self-contradictory thing? Can there really be a progressive fantasy? Maybe. But The Shape of Water is a progressive fantasy not in that it imagines how things might be in a progressive world. Instead, it's a fantasy imagined by a progressive moviemaker. In other words, it's not the movie itself but the moviemaker who is progressive. Guillermo del Toro has told a story from a progressive point of view. In so doing, he has relied on extreme and unrealistic stereotypes*, gratuitous episodes and gratuitous story elements, implausible or impossible situations, ignorance as to history and human nature, and extreme laziness or incompetence in his storytelling. Despite the opinion of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, his movie is middling in its accomplishments. So if this is an example of a progressive fantasy, it falls pretty flat. I would argue that any progressive fantasy is likely to fall flat, as: a) fantasy is an artistic genre; b) art is about the nature of human beings, life, and reality; and c) progressivism is basically out of touch with these very subjects. If anyone can come up with a progressive fantasy that can stand on its own two legs, I'm willing to listen to your case. Just make sure it's a strong one.

*Speaking of stereotypes, did anyone in the Academy or the media notice the stereotype of the black man as weak, cowardly, unreliable, lazy, or afraid in The Shape of Water? I suppose in this age, stereotypes of men are permitted, no matter what color they are, especially if the stereotype is being peddled by another person of color (although Guillermo del Toro is a pasty-faced white dude with brown hair and blue eyes), and especially if that person is of a higher caste in the hierarchy of political correctness.

↧

The Shape of an Oscar-Part Two

March 11, 2018, 10:05 am

≫ Next: Barker, Bender, Shaver, Palmer . . . and Beyond

≪ Previous: The Shape of an Oscar

I didn't mean for there to be a part two to this article, but I read something on Friday night, after I had written part one, that fits so perfectly with this topic and this title that I have to tell you about it.

I found last week a book called Seeing Is Believing, or How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the 50s by Peter Biskind (1983, 2001). In my reading, I skipped to Chapter 3, "Pods and Blobs," about science fiction and monster movies of the 1950s. Here is an excerpt from the author's discussion of the Creature from the Black Lagoon trilogy of 1954-1956:

In the first film . . . the Creature was mildly appealing, more sinned against than sinning, almost but not quite a noble savage tormented beyond endurance by the arrogant scientists who mucked about in his lagoon, and driven into a frenzy by the proximity of Julia Adams in a one-piece bathing suit. . . . In the second and third films the Creature gets increasingly put upon. In [John] Sherwood's 1956 version [The Creature Walks Among Us], "he" has been taken out of his natural habitat entirely, removed in chains to a cage on land. Here, he's unambiguously sympathetic . . . . But he's unable to protect himself from the mad scientists who perform all sorts of grim experiments upon his body while prattling about "reality and facts." They transplant this, amputate that, move a fin here, a gill there, until his own mother wouldn't recognize him. One of the scientists even tries to frame him for murder, and in the end, the creature is killed. (Bloomsbury, 2001, p. 121)

That sounds a lot like The Shape of Water. There's a difference, though, and it's a significant one if you look at this movie of today in the context of the science fiction movies and monster movies of the 1950s. In those movies, there is a dichotomy between the military man of action and the scientific man of words and ideas. Sometimes the moviemakers were on one side of the dichotomy, and sometimes they were on the other. I can think of no better example than The Thing from Another World vs. The Day the Earth Stood Still, both from 1951. In The Thing, the military men are the heroes. It is by their action that an invasion (or infestation) of Earth is prevented. The scientist on the other hand, Dr. Arthur Carrington, wants to understand and communicate with the alien creature. He even goes so far as to propagate it by feeding it blood, including his own blood. He very nearly wrecks the whole operation, thereby threatening Earth with destruction. In contrast, in The Day the Earth Stood Still, the military men are the tormenters of the alien. They even shoot and kill him, only to see him resurrected. By their actions, the whole Earth is threatened with destruction. It is the scientists who sympathize with the alien and to whom he appeals. If the planet is to be saved, it will be by their ideas rather than by militaristic action.

So, in The Creature Walks Among Us, the scientists--"mad scientists," Peter Biskind calls them--torment and mutilate the Creature. They are, then, scientists of the first type, i.e., bad scientists. This, I think, is the more conservative version of the military man/man of science dichotomy. (Not conservative in the contemporary political sense but in an older, non-political or anti-political sense.) In The Shape of Water, there is an inversion. The military men or quasi-military men are now the tormenters of the Creature, and it is the scientist who sympathizes with him. (Significantly, the antagonist is the only character in The Shape of Water to quote from the Bible.) Instead of the conservative version of the dichotomy, we have the more liberal or leftwing version. (The scientist in The Shape of Water is a Soviet spy. I think his humanity and sympathy for the Creature are more to the point than his nationality or political affiliation.)

In any case, I haven't seen The Creature Walks Among Us in a long, long time. There may be more similarities between it and The Shape of Water. But as I wrote the other day, The Shape of Water is basically a sequel to The Creature from the Black Lagoon. I think that's okay. Universal Pictures doesn't have exclusive rights to the idea of a lizardman, nor to the idea that a monster or beast might love a woman, a story as old as humanity. (The Creature of the Black Lagoon is essentially the same story as King Kong.) But in any movie a person might make, art should trump politics. More essential than that, bad storytelling should always be banished in favor of good storytelling. Like I told a friend, a good story is what counts. Nothing else in storytelling matters very much.

Finally, I mentioned how I found something in my reading that pertains to the title of this article. Well, the second series of ellipses in the quote above are in place of the following parenthetical statement:

(The Creature's distinctive costume was reputedly derived from a sketch of the Oscar statuette.) (1)

I didn't know that when I wrote the first part of this article, but by a bit of serendipity, my title closes a circle.

Notes

(1) According to the blog Psychobabble: "Millicent Patrick, who designed the Gill Man, was a television and film actress and had been the first female animator at Disney Studios. She was also responsible for the Mutant alien in This Island Earth." (July 25, 2010.)

(2) According to Wikipedia: "Producer William Alland was attending a 1941 dinner party during the filming of Citizen Kane (in which he played the reporter Thompson) when Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa told him about the myth of a race of half-fish, half-human creatures in the Amazon River. Alland wrote story notes titled 'The Sea Monster' 10 years later. His inspiration was Beauty and the Beast." And so another circle is closed in that a Mexican moviemaker, Guillermo del Toro, has made a movie based on a story told by another Mexican moviemaker more than three-quarters of a century ago.

The Gill-man and swimmer from Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954). You could write more than a few sentences about this image: about the Creature's superior position vs. the woman's inferior position; the fact that his hand is positioned just right to cover a part of his anatomy not intended for display; about her passiveness, fear, and averted gaze. But look at the background. Note the series of symmetries. Is this an unaltered image? Or did the original background look like a view through a kaleidoscope? Look at the background particularly at Julia Adams' left. Are there unintended echoes of female anatomy reverberating there?

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Barker, Bender, Shaver, Palmer . . . and Beyond

March 12, 2018, 3:00 am

≫ Next: The Shaver Mystery-Part One

≪ Previous: The Shape of an Oscar-Part Two

I have been working on an idea and a series for many months. That's too long for this kind of thing, but that's just how it is. Before continuing, I would like to provide links to previous entries. Although the idea for this series started earlier last year, the first entry is from July 2017:

The Summer of Flying Saucers (July 18, 2017)

Another Silly Season-Part One (July 21, 2017)

Another Silly Season-Part Two (July 24, 2017)

Barker and Bender on the Case-Part One (July 27, 2018)

Barker and Bender on the Case-Part Two (December 10, 2017)

Barker and Bender on the Case-Part Three (December 13, 2017)

The Cosmic Question (February 2, 2018) (a segue way and an aside)

Next comes The Shaver Mystery-Part One. Stay tuned.

↧

The Shaver Mystery-Part One

March 13, 2018, 3:00 am

≫ Next: The Shaver Mystery-Part Two

≪ Previous: Barker, Bender, Shaver, Palmer . . . and Beyond

One afternoon in December 1943, Raymond A. Palmer, editor of Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures, was sitting in his office, listening intently as assistant editor Howard Browne read from a recently arrived letter. It had come from a reader in Bardo, Pennsylvania, a man who expressed his hopes that the editors would place it in their magazine "to keep it from dying" with him. The "it" of which the man wrote was his discovery that within words in English there are hidden clues to an ancient and forgotten language. "This is perhaps the only copy of this language in existence," he continued, "and it represents my work over a long period of years." Accompanying the letter was a separate sheet illustrating the secret meanings behind the letters of the English alphabet. For example, the letter A means animal, while B means be, C translates as see, and D represents a novel concept, disintegrant energy or detrimental (presumably abbreviated de), meaning harmful or destructive. The word bad, then, can be broken into its constituent parts: be a de, or be a disintegrant energy or detrimental. (I guess a can mean either animal or the indefinite article.) "It is an immensely important find," the man wrote of his discovery, "suggesting the god legends have a base in some wiser race than modern man." Howard Browne laughed at it as one of countless crank letters received every year in the offices of Ziff-Davis of Chicago. Then he crumpled it up and threw it away. "What kind of editor are you?" Palmer asked as he retrieved the pages from the trashcan. He handed them back to his assistant editor and said, "Let's run the entire thing in next issue's letter column."

And that's how the Shaver Mystery began.

The Shaver Mystery, launched by Palmer from the writings of Richard S. Shaver of Bardo, Pennsylvania, was both a boon and a bane to science fiction during the 1940s. Some readers and fans loved it. Once Palmer started running its stories in Amazing Tales, sales took off, and the magazine began receiving thousands of letters in response. "This is real," many claimed. "This happened to me," wrote others. "I, too, have come in contact with detrimental forces." Others hated it, a very young Harlan Ellison most prominently among them. (Sam Moskowitz and Forrest J Ackerman were part of that group, too.) The arguments and controversy raged for about half a decade, beginning in 1945 and reaching its height in 1947-1948. Then, suddenly, in December 1949, Palmer was out as editor of Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures, and the Shaver Mystery faded from mainstream science fiction (if any science fiction can be called mainstream). There were Shaver Mystery stories published in these and other magazines after 1949, but they were pretty well consigned to the fringes. That is of course where they had originated, for they had emanated from the diseased mind of Richard Sharpe Shaver.

To be continued . . .

"Mr. Shaver's Lemurian Alphabet." The source is unknown. This may be an image reproduced from the letters page of Amazing Stories. According to Fred Nadis, biographer of Raymond A. Palmer, the initial letter written by Richard S. Shaver to Amazing Stories arrived at Ziff-Davis in December 1943, and Shaver's letter and alphabet were published in the issue of January 1944. Author David Hatcher Childress says they appeared in the issue of December 1943. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDb) says there was no issue of December 1943, but I also couldn't find any listing of Shaver's initial letter and alphabet in the ISFDb. For now, we'll say Mr. Nadis is right. In any case, the published letter

included an editor's note asking readers to try it out and see what percentage of root words made sense when the alphabet was applied--would it be higher than pure chance? Rap [Raymond A. Palmer] told readers, "Our own hasty check-up revealed an amazing result of 90% logical and sensible! Is this really a case of racial memory, and is this formula the basis of one of the most ancient languages on Earth?" Dozens of readers responded. Many discussed the philological value of Shaver's discovery while others scoffed, curious why the interstellar root language depended so highly on English-based phonetics to impart its concepts. (The Man from Mars: Ray Palmer's Amazing Pulp Journey by Fred Nadis, 2013, p. 59)

The answer of course is that the alphabet is pseudoscientific and pseudo-historical nonsense, an attempt to reveal Earth's secret history, just as so many cranks and crackpots have attempted to reveal that history in the centuries since the Scientific Revolution began. John Cleves Symmes, Jr., (1780-1829) was one of them. So was Madame Blavatsky (1831-1891). Both provided ideas useful to Shaver and Palmer in their promulgation of what became known as the Shaver Mystery. These and countless others assert and have asserted basically the same case for themselves and their special place in history:

I am special.

I am chosen.

I am the first.

I am the only.

I was specially chosen to reveal this to you, to carry to a benighted humanity the truth about the world.

I alone know the truth. I alone am the prophet and purveyor of these things I tell you.

I was there at the beginning. I preceded all others.

I alone know the secret. I alone have the key.

I am the creator, the originator, the discoverer.

Time and again we have seen it, in Joseph Smith and Karl Marx, in Henry George and George Adamski. They have claimed discovery to the key to history, to economics, to religion, to human nature, and on and on. Richard S. Shaver was just another in a long line of cultists, crackpots, crazies, and cranks, some of whom have been rewarded by humanity, while others have been forgotten. If only some of the rewarded--Marx is the best example--could be among the forgotten.

I alluded earlier in this series to the significance of precedence in the various fields of pseudoscience, pseudo-religion, and pseudo-history. The men and women working in these these pseudo-fields invariably seek precedence, very often backdating their observations, experiences, and theories to support their claims to being first or to coming first. Rapuzzi Johannis did it when he claimed to have encountered a little green man in the Italian Dolomites in the summer of 1947. Fred Crisman did it, too, when he claimed to have seen and recovered parts from a flying saucer earlier that summer at Maury Island, Washington, before Kenneth Arnold's sighting near Mount Rainier and Mac Brazel's discovery of a supposed crashdown near Roswell, New Mexico. And Raymond A. Palmer did it when he wrote:

On December 27, 1949, Albert Einstein came out with a new theory of gravitation and electromagnetic fields. Months before that, Mr. Shaver (minus the mathematical formula) told me the same thing! For the record, I want to say that if any credit for a new and revolutionary theory of gravity goes to anybody it should go to Richard S. Shaver, on the basis of prior publication. (Quoted in "The Shaver Mystery" by Richard Toronto, Fate, March 1998, here.)

The examples could go on and on--and they will in this series, if only a little.

↧

The Shaver Mystery-Part Two

March 16, 2018, 3:00 am

≫ Next: The Shaver Mystery-Part Three

≪ Previous: The Shaver Mystery-Part One

Richard Sharpe Shaver was born on October 8, 1907, in Berwick, Pennsylvania. His father, Ziba Rice Shaver (1875-1943), was descended from Philip Shaver (1762-1826), a native of Vienna, Austria, who lived and died in Pennsylvania. Shaver's mother was Grace T. (Taylor) Shaver (1871-1961), an author of verse and true confession stories. She was the daughter of a Pennsylvania cavalryman of the Civil War era. (1)

Richard S. Shaver was one of Ziba and Grace Shaver's five children:

Donald Shaver (b. Sept. 27, 1899; d. Apr. 29, 1979), a U.S. Navy man (Oct. 4, 1917-Aug. 19, 1919) and a railroad brakeman. He married Marion Harder.
Catherine Claire Shaver Haughton (b. Nov. 26, 1901; d. Aug. 22, 1993). She married Henry Osburne Haughton.
Taylor Victor Shaver (b. Nov. 9, 1903; d. Feb. 24, 1934, Detroit, Michigan), a veteran of the U.S. Army Air Corps, a Pennsylvania state trooper, chairman of the Board of Inquiry for the U.S. Immigration Service in Detroit, and an author of stories for Boys' Life and The Open Road for Boys.
Richard Sharpe Shaver (b. Oct. 8, 1907; d. Nov. 5, 1975), the subject of this series. He was married three times and had a daughter by his first wife.
Isabel or Isabelle D. Shaver (b. April 23, 1915; d. April 20, 1988), a freelance writer for magazines and newspapers and an advertising copywriter in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

All were born in Pennsylvania.

In the chronicle of public records, you will find Ziba Shaver in the 1900 U.S. census in Philadelphia, where he was employed as a laborer. He had been married for about a year and a half when the enumerator found him. By 1910, he had made his way up in the world and was working as a press operator in a steel plant. In his household in Berwick, Pennsylvania, there were his wife and four children, plus five boarders and a servant. Richard S. Shaver, age two, was the youngest of the four. When he filled out his draft card in 1918, Ziba Shaver was still in Berwick and working as a salesman for Prince Furniture Company.

Things changed greatly by the time of the next U.S. census, for in 1920, Ziba Shaver and family were living in Bloomsburg, Columbia County, Pennsylvania. His oldest son Donald, then only nineteen, was working as a clerk in a restaurant. There was no occupation listed for Ziba Shaver. Change had come again by the next census when, in 1930, the enumerator counted Ziba, his wife, and his youngest child Isabel or Isabelle in Philadelphia. Ziba was at the time employed as a chef at a college.

If a newspaper article from the Detroit Free Press is accurate (2), the Shaver family moved to Detroit in about 1930. They may have followed Taylor V. Shaver there, for he was pretty gainfully employed with the U.S. Immigration Service in that city during the early years of the Great Depression. Tragically, Taylor Shaver died on February 24, 1934, after a brief illness. By 1940, Ziba Taylor was back in Pennsylvania, in Douglass Township, Montgomery County, where he ran a restaurant. His wife was with him, but their children were out on their own. All but Richard Shaver, that is, for he was being cared for by someone else in a faraway place. That's a story for another part of this series.

Ziba R. Shaver died on June 10, 1943, at his home in Barto, near Niantic, Pennsylvania. Also at home were his wife Grace and his son Richard, who helped bear his casket to the grave. Richard S. Shaver was at the time between marriages. His first wife had died in a bizarre accident. His second was still on the horizon. Shaver's seminal letter to the editorial staff of Amazing Stories was still five months off, too, but if he was telling the truth when he claimed that he had been working on his decoded alphabet for "a long period of years," then the death of his father in 1943 and that of his brother nine years before could only have confirmed him in his suspicions about the secret meanings behind the English language. After all, Taylor V. Shaver had died in Detroit, while Ziba R. Shaver had succumbed, according to his death certificate, to pulmonary edema due to cardiac decompensation.

De-troit.

E-de-ma.

De-compensation.

Disentigrant energy--de--was evidently going about its detrimental work within the Shaver family.

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) Ziba Rice Shaver was born on November 1, 1875, Dallas Township, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, and died on June 10, 1943, at home, in Barto, near Niantic, Douglass Township, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, at age sixty-seven. Although there is a Shaver cemetery in Dallas Township, Shaver was buried at Fairmount Springs Cemetery, Fairmount Springs, also in Luzerne County. Ziba's wife, Grace T. (Taylor) Shaver, was born in August 1871. In the 1900 census, while her husband was in Philadelphia, Grace was counted with her parents and her infant son Donald in Fairmount Springs. Thereafter, she was counted with her husband in the U.S. census (1910, 1920, 1930, 1940). After his death in 1943, she presumably lived with Richard Shaver. I have a record of a Grace T. Shaver who died on July 21, 1961, in Portage County, Wisconsin at age eighty-nine. That was almost certainly the mother of Richard Shaver, as the name, age, and place of death fit. Grace Shaver was buried with her husband in Fairmount Springs.

(2) "Taylor V. Shaver" (obituary), Detroit Free Press, February 26, 1934, page 3.

↧

The Shaver Mystery-Part Three

March 19, 2018, 3:00 am

≫ Next: The Shaver Mystery Interlude

≪ Previous: The Shaver Mystery-Part Two

Born on October 8, 1907, in Berwick, Pennsylvania, Richard Sharpe Shaver was of a type that just might be unique to America: the commercial crackpot, alternatively the earnest conman, a guy who isn't exactly trying to put anything over on anybody because he honestly believes his own BS. He's not lying when he gives you his sales pitch because what he's trying to sell you is true and it's for your own good that you believe him. His life was saved when the lights came on and the doors opened to his new beliefs. Yours can be, too. Sometimes the earnest conman is motivated by religious belief. Sometimes his beliefs are non-religious but backed by a religious intensity or fanaticism. Typically, he mixes quasi- or pseudoscientific concepts with pseudo-religion, pseudo-history, or other pseudo-fields, such as pseudo-economics or pseudo-psychology. Pseudoscience, however, is the backbone of his system, the reason being that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Science, having slain God, was seen to have become the ultimate authority on all things. (1) We still live in an age of Scientism, and there are still countless fields of pseudo-studies and countless earnest conmen among us peddling their wares. Whatever you've got to sell these days, it had better be scientific or pseudoscientific if you expect it to go very far. (2)

Richard Shaver was more than just an earnest conman, though, for the things he created and in which he believed came from a diseased mind. (His.) We can't at this distance diagnose him, but he is thought to have been schizophrenic. If he wasn't schizophrenic, Shaver was at least so bad off psychologically that he was institutionalized for much of the 1930s. When he wrote to the editors of Amazing Stories in December 1943, he may only recently have been released. No one seems to know, as the facts of his early adulthood are now pretty well lost. And to be fair to him, when Shaver wrote his letter, he displayed a decided lack of confidence in his ideas, unlike the typical earnest conman. Although he claimed that his discovery of a lost language--and by extension, a lost and ancient civilization--was "an immensely important find," he also closed his letter with these words: "I need a little encouragement." It might be more accurate to say that Richard Shaver was only one-half of the crackpot equation. The ideas were his, but he needed an advertising man, a booster, a promoter, a huckster. Maybe that's the real American type, the guy who's half sincere when he's trying to put one over on you and half full of BS even in his sincerity. Maybe the true American innovation is the attempt at turning a crackpot idea into a moneymaking opportunity. After all, the business of America is business, and material success is a sign of God's grace. In any case, Shaver found the other half of the equation for what became known as the Shaver Mystery in the editor of Amazing Stories, Raymond A. Palmer.

* * *

Richard was said to have been a wild child, playing many pranks, several of which backfired on him giving him a reputation as a "troubled youth." He was reported to have [had] imaginary companions, one his friend, the other his enemy. He had names for these imaginary companions, and fifty years later they were said to be more real to him than other past acquaintances. (3)

Like his father before him, Shaver lived an itinerant lifestyle. He was reared in Berwick and Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania. In the summer he sold ice door to door. As a young man he worked in a meatpacking plant and for a tree surgeon. In 1930, Shaver moved to Detroit, where his older brother, Taylor V. Shaver, was holding down a good job with the U.S. Immigration Service. (4) While in Detroit, Shaver studied at the Wicker School of Fine Arts (5) and made a little money on the side sketching portraits in the park and modeling for life-drawing classes. He also became involved in leftwing causes, joining the John Reed Club in 1930. (6) On May Day that year, he even spoke at a communist rally in Cass Park in Detroit. (7)

In addition to being a student, Shaver was an instructor at the Wicker School of Fine Arts. One of his own instructors, after that presumably one of his colleagues, was a young Russian-born artist named Sophie Gurvitch. Sophie was a prize pupil at the Wicker School and a rising star on the Detroit art scene. On June 29, 1932, in Detroit, she became the bride of Richard Shaver. Neither was employed at the time, but as their family grew with the birth of their daughter, Evelyn Ann, in 1933, Shaver would have to go to work. And when he did, things started to get weird again.

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) The development of the natural sciences in the nineteenth century ran pretty well parallel to the development of the United States as a nation. However, poorly understood science often leads to pseudoscience, in other words, a new mythology for an age of Science, and that's what happened in America. Throw some pretty potent Romanticism and utopianism, the fervor and fanaticism of the Second Great Awakening, and the hustle and bustle of the Early National Period into the mix, and you might have the beginnings of crackpottery (my new word) in America.

(2) The current Cult of Global Warming is a good example. So is the growing fascination with finding Bigfoot. Here's my Unified Field Theory of global warming and Bigfoot: He's getting harder and harder to find because his habitat is being destroyed by global warming. If we want to save Bigfoot, we have to give up on heating our houses and driving our evil, fossil-fuel burning cars. And that means all of you. Not me. You.

(3) From "The Shaver Mystery" by David Hatcher Childress in Lost Continents and the Hollow Earth (Kempton, IL: Adventures Unlimited Press, 1999), p. 220.

(4) I have not found Shaver in the census of 1930.

(5) The Wicker School of Fine Arts was established in 1911 by artist John P. Wicker (1860-1931). See the photograph and caption below for more information.

(6) According to Wikipedia: "The John Reed Club was founded in October 1929 by staff members of The New Masses magazine to support leftist and Marxist artists and writers. Originally politically independent, it and The New Masses officially affiliated with the Communist Party in November 1930." Shaver may have come to the John Reed Club by way of associating with leftwing art students at the Wicker School. Then again, if he didn't start at the school until September (see the advertisement below), maybe he encountered communism by being a tramp and an idler in the first year of the Great Depression.

(7) Shaver's involvement in communism is an example of the concept of continuity, the overarching theme of this series. Again and again, we find examples of authors of science fiction and fantasy who were also involved in Forteana, pseudoscience (e.g., UFOlogy), pseudo-religion (e.g., Scientology), pseudo-history (e.g., Marxism, aka scientific socialism, which is also a kind of pseudo-science), and various combinations thereof. Even the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction are broken down so that they become continuous as well. The Shaver Mystery, passed off as the truth but taking the form of fiction, is an excellent example of the continuity of fiction with non-fiction, more accurately perhaps, pseudo-non-fiction.

An advertisement for the Wicker School of Fine Arts from the Detroit Free Press, August 24, 1930. If Richard Shaver attended the school during the 1930-1931 academic year, then maybe he began on September 22, 1930. By the way, the Maccabees Building is still in existence.

The head of the Wicker School was the well-loved teacher and painter John P. Wicker. Born on February 23, 1860, in Ypsilanti, Michigan, Wicker established his school in 1911. The 1930-1931 academic year was sadly his last: Wicker died on February 12, 1931. Did Richard Shaver know John P. Wicker? Was he in any way close to him? If so, his teacher's death would have been the first of three to hit Shaver in his years in Detroit. Was Detroit, then, the place where disintegrant energy (de) first made itself known and felt in Shaver's life?

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The Shaver Mystery Interlude

March 20, 2018, 3:00 am

≫ Next: Augustus T. Swift (1867-1939)

≪ Previous: The Shaver Mystery-Part Three

My friend Hlafbrot has been reading my series on the Shaver Mystery and brought to my attention another odd manuscript, this one from the Middle Ages. It's called the Voynich manuscript, and it has defied understanding for centuries. Hlafbrot sent me links to two articles, one on Wikipedia, the other on the website of the New York Times Review of Books. That second article is called "Secret Knowledge--or a Hoax?" and it's dated April 20, 2017. (Click here to read it.) It's a fascinating article on a fascinating case. The author, Eamon Duffy, gets to what I have been writing about recently (or I'm getting to what he wrote about last year). The following paragraph, in which the author considers the Voynich manuscipt as a hoax, leapt out at me:

Why might such a hoax have been perpetrated? The sheer scale, expense, and complexity of the Voynich manuscript would seem to preclude the notion that it was assembled as some kind of joke: it's hard to imagine a punch line that required so elaborate a buildup. That leaves lunacy or lucre as possible motives. Madness can't entirely be ruled out: mania takes many forms, and a well-to-do obsessive convinced he (or she) held the key to great secrets might drive the production of such a compilation. [Emphasis added.]

An "obsessive convinced he (or she) held the key to great secrets"--that phrase precisely describes Richard Shaver and countless men like him. (And they're nearly all men.) Like the author of the Voynich Manuscript, these men (and a few women) work out in exhaustive detail their entire systems. This the most ambitious and driven among them commit to writing, calling it Mantong and "A Warning to Future Man,"The Communist Manifesto or Progress and Poverty, Isis Unveiled or Worlds in Collision, The Book of Mormon or Dianetics. Some of these works are more interesting than others, more entertaining than others, more readable than others, more successful than others, but all amount to the same thing: the obsessive--mad or not--who believes he has found "the key to great secrets" and wants the world to know about it. The idea that they might be hoaxes is a non-sequitur, for the obsessed author has no interest in jokes or hoaxes. He doesn't even know what those things are. He is instead driven by his vision and his discovery. He has seen the light and he wants you to see it, too. (He might also want you to come across with the cash, but that's the subject of the next paragraph.)

Here is another phrase from the quote above, the phrase that gets right to my point from yesterday: "lunacy or lucre as possible motives." Mr. Duffy makes an either-or proposition. But what if it's actually a both-and proposition? What about both lunacy and lucre as a motivation for these things? Both madness and money? Europeans may not always be good at this combination, for they tend to be mired in the past, in ancient and medieval institutions of power and culture. They're not forward-looking enough nor perhaps energetic or obsessive enough to make a go at it. Only in America do we have the free-wheeling, anything-goes attitude that allows for the legitimacy of a person's ideas to be measured by the size of his bank account. Maybe Americans are the first people (or the only people) to perfect the combination of lunacy and lucre, madness and money. Maybe it took Puritanism or Calvinism afoot in a New World or a strange mixture of salvation and success, Reason and Romanticism, Utopia and the Millennium before this new man could emerge. That's what I was trying to get at yesterday with my terms the commercial crackpot and the earnest conman. They're still not the best terms. I'd like to find something better. But I think this is an American type, and the combination Richard Shaver-Raymond Palmer gives every appearance of having been of that type.

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Augustus T. Swift (1867-1939)

March 22, 2018, 3:00 am

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Teacher, Writer, Investigator
Born September 23, 1867, New Bedford, Massachusetts
Died November 4, 1939, presumably in Providence, Rhode Island

Anonymous left a comment on my blog the other day regarding Augustus T. Swift and his contemporaneous comments on the fiction of Francis Stevens. For a long time people believed that Augustus T. Swift was H.P. Lovecraft writing under a pseudonym. I thought that this idea had been corrected or debunked already, but apparently there are still some who believe that these two men were one in the same. So I'm going to interrupt my series on the Shaver Mystery to re-debunk the idea that Augustus T. Swift was H.P. Lovecraft. This won't take long. Actually it will, but it won't stretch into a series. I think we'll find some interesting things along the way.

The Swift-Lovecraft story began with two letters written to The Argosy magazine by a man named Augustus T. Swift of Providence, Rhode Island. The first was published in the issue of November 15, 1919, the second in that of May 22, 1920. I don't have anything on the first letter, but here is an image of the second as it appeared in the magazine:

"Not Out for Blood," a letter of comment from Augustus T. Swift of Providence, Rhode Island, published in The Argosy, May 22, 1920, page 288. Contrary to stories bandied about, this was not the work of H.P. Lovecraft.

In this letter, Swift expressed high praise for three stories written by Gertrude Barrows Bennett (1883-1948), then known to readers only as Francis Stevens. The stories were "The Citadel of Fear" (Sept. 14-Oct. 26, 1918), "Avalon" (Aug. 16-Sept. 6, 1919), and "Claimed" (Mar. 6-20, 1920), all serials and all published in The Argosy. Swift's letter has been used not only with the assumption that Lovecraft wrote under the pseudonym Augustus T. Swift but also as evidence that he knew of Francis Stevens' work, moreover that he was influenced by it. Two of those claims are of course bogus, and the third--that Lovecraft knew of Francis Stevens' work--is open to question.

So for the record, Augustus T. Swift was not H.P. Lovecraft. I don't know how that story got started, but it goes back at least to 1949 and Chicago Tribune columnist Vincent Starrett, who was reporting on a newsletter, called The Lovecraft Collector, by Ray Zorn (Jan. 1949). (1) For many years it must have been common knowledge among pulp historians that Swift was Lovecraft. Here for example is a quote from 1991: "Yet the 15 November 1919 issue [of The Argosy] featured a letter from Augustus T. Swift, a name now known to be a Lovecraft pseudonym . . . ." (2) We can excuse mistakes or overenthusiasm on the part of researchers believing they have made some kind of discovery. After all, here was a letter to a pulp magazine from a reader in Providence, Rhode Island. The time, place, and interests in popular fiction were right. And that name--Augustus T. Swift. It must have been a fake. Only characters played by Groucho Marx and W.C. Fields have names like that. Lovecraft must have come up with it himself, for he was a great admirer of British writers of the Augustan period, one of the exemplars of which was of course Jonathan Swift (1667-1745). Augustus T. Swift just had to be Lovecraft.

Except that he wasn't.

Augustus Taber Swift was actually a teacher, writer, and investigator born on September 23, 1867, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, to John Franklin Swift (1836-1905) and Helen Taber (Foster) Swift (1837-1926). Swift's great-great-grandfather through his mother's line was Zenas Bryant (1753-1835), a native of Plympton, Plymouth Colony, Massachusetts, and a drummer in two different units of Massachusetts men during the Revolutionary War. By that descent, Augustus T. Swift was eligible for membership in the Sons of the American Revolution. When he applied in 1930, he was residing at 122 Rochambeau Avenue in Providence, Rhode Island, not far north of where Lovecraft lived on the peninsula between the Providence and Seekonk rivers. They may not have been the same man, but they were close.

In the 1880 census, Swift was, at age twelve, still in New Bedford with his family. His father was a clerk in a store. His older brother, Frank H. Swift, was employed as an architect. Also at home was younger brother John C. Swift. We'll hear more about the two of them in a minute. Augustus T. Swift graduated from Brown University with an AM and a PhD on June 19, 1889. Commencement exercises that year were held at "the old First Baptist meeting house" (3, 4), presumably the First Baptist Church, located at 75 North Main Street in Providence. Lovecraft fans might recognize the church for its connections to his life and writing. Swift delivered one of the orations at his graduation. For the next two years, he taught German at Brown University. In 1891, he applied for a passport in Providence. Giving his city of residence as New Bedford and his occupation as teacher, he planned to be abroad for a year. His brother, Frank H. Swift of Providence, witnessed the application, the fee for which was a whole dollar.

In August 1892, Augustus T. Swift accepted a position as master of modern languages at the brand new Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut (a school still in existence). By 1900, Swift was in Providence, living at 46 Rochambeau Avenue and working as a teacher. With him was his young wife, the former Emma A. Morris, whom he had married on August 3, 1898, in Rhode Island, probably in Providence. In 1900, she worked, too, as a type-writer, that is, a typist. In 1905, Swift applied for another passport, again in Providence. This time his younger brother, John Campbell Swift of 54 Moore Street, was the witness.

In the 1910 census, Augustus T. Swift was still in Providence, living at 122 Rochambeau Avenue and employed as a high school teacher. His wife served as a clerk in the office of the superintendent of schools. The 1915 Rhode Island census recorded the same information for the Swifts, who, despite their surname, were seemingly immovable for thirty or forty years. Emma Swift always worked for schools and her husband was always a high school teacher. And that brings up a question, namely, did H.P. Lovecraft know Augustus T. Swift?

Born in 1890, Howard Phillips Lovecraft would have graduated from Hope High School in Providence in 1908 if he had not suffered a breakdown of some kind. Established in 1898, Hope High School is now located north of College Hill and not far south of Rochambeau Avenue, more or less halfway between Lovecraft's stomping grounds and the Swifts' home. So if Swift taught at Hope High School, and the school wasn't an especially big one, then maybe Lovecraft was in Swift's classes. But we still don't know.

By the 1920 census, things hadn't changed much in the Swift home: same place, same jobs, even Swift's widowed mother, at age eighty-two, was still in the household. By 1930, she was gone, and the Swifts, though working their same jobs and living in their same house, were nearing retirement age. Unfortunately, Swift didn't make it to the next census, for he died on November 4, 1939, at age seventy-two and was buried with his parents at Riverside Cemetery, Fairhaven, Massachusetts. His wife, Emma A. (Morris) Swift, followed him to the grave on February 4, 1943. She was interred with her parents at North Burial Ground in Providence.

Frank H. Swift (1860-1934), older brother of Augustus T. Swift, was an architect in Providence. In 1893, he entered into a partnership with Frank W. Angell (1851-1943) and Thomas J. Gould to form Gould, Angell & Swift. Upon Gould's retirement, the firm was reduced to Angell & Swift, which remained in business until Swift's death in 1934. Thereafter, Angell went into semi-retirement. These various firms and their predecessors designed homes and other buildings in Providence. As a fan and student of architecture, H.P. Lovecraft must have walked by them hundreds of times. You can read more about Frank W. Angell on Wikipedia, here. You can also read about Lovecraft's Providence at the website hplovecraft.com, here. For a map of a walking tour of Lovecraft's College Hill, see the same website, here.

The youngest of the three Swift brothers was John Campbell Swift (1872-?). He graduated from Brown University in 1895. In 1918, when he filled out his draft card, he was living at 60 Summit Avenue and employed as a high school English teacher on Pond Street, both addresses in Providence. The school at which he taught was one of a complex that included Classical High School and Central High School. I can't be sure which it was, and I don't know anything about the schools in Providence. Maybe someone in that neck of the woods can tell us more. In any case, Swift later taught at Central High School, where he was head of the history department. By the way, C.M. Eddy, Jr. (1896-1967), a friend of Lovecraft and a writer of weird fiction, graduated from Classical High School.

That still leaves the question of Augustus T. Swift's career. In 1930, he called himself an investigator, but of what? Was that a simple business title, like an insurance investigator? Or was it something more exotic? He also called himself a writer. So what did he write, other than letters to pulp magazines? And what subject or subjects did he teach? Well, I found Swift and his wife in a directory of public school employees in Providence from 1904. Emma A. Swift was a clerk in the office of the superintendent of public schools, while her husband's name appeared below hers as a teacher of English. I also found the name of the school where he taught, English High School, also called Central High School at some point. So unless he worked at more than just those schools--unless he worked closer to home at Hope High School--Augustus T. Swift may not have known H.P. Lovecraft, thus a possible connection between these two fans and readers of pulp fiction was seemingly missed.

There's one more question to address: Was H.P. Lovecraft influenced by Francis Stevens? I have better questions: Did Lovecraft even know of Francis Stevens? And if he did, did he ever make a written comment on her stories? The answer to at least two of those three questions is probably no, but if you pay attention to this lousy Internet, you'll see the same garbage recycled again and again: That Francis Stevens influenced both H.P. Lovecraft and A. Merritt, a claim made without any substantiating evidence. That Lovecraft is quoted as calling her among "the top grade of writers," a quote without a citation and essentially a rephrasing of Augustus T. Swift's opinion that "Mr. Stevens" was "the highest grade" of writers contributing to The Argosy. And perhaps most egregious of all, that Francis Stevens "invented dark fantasy," another claim made without any substantiating evidence and one that I thought had been pretty thoroughly debunked already. This is my best and last question: Why do these things go on? The last claim especially can be considered little more than puffery, even an outright lie. And yet it goes on. Why?

Notes

(1) See "Books Alive" by Vincent Starrett, Chicago Tribune, Mar. 20, 1949, p. 124.

(2) From "Lovecraft and the Pulp Magazine Tradition" by Will Murray in An Epicure in the Terrible: A Centennial Anthology of Essays in Honor of H.P. Lovecraft (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1991), p. 105. I don't want to single out Mr. Murray, for he was obviously not the only person to believe that Swift was Lovecraft. The idea goes back at least to 1949, as we have seen. I have used his quote here only as an example and because it is so readily available.

(3) "Commencement Exercises,"The Evening Leader (Wilkes-Barre, Pa.), June 20, 1889, p. 1.

(4) Swift was also a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

English High School, Providence, Rhode Island, where Augustus T. Swift taught for many years.

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The Shaver Mystery-Part Four

March 25, 2018, 3:00 am

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Sophie Gurvitch (1903-1936)

Richard Shaver's first wife, Sophie Gurvitch, was born on May 2, 1903, in the Russian Empire. The city of her birth is pretty well certain. It's the spelling that's the problem. Her death certificate says Mirgorov. AskArt spells it Mirograd. The closest thing to that spelling in Wikipedia is the Ukrainian city of Myrhorod, but there is also a reference to Mirgorod, a collection of stories by Nikolai Gogol named for "the Ukrainian city of the same name." So Mirgorod it is, I guess.

Sophie Gurvitch's father was Benjamin Gurvitch, a coppersmith born in December 1874 in Russia. Gurvitch came to the United States in 1904 to escape the infamous pogroms of 1903-1906. He sent back for his wife Anna and daughter Sophie, who arrived here in 1905. The Gurvitch family settled in Detroit, and that's where they seem to have lived for the rest of their lives. Benjamin Gurvitch eventually opened a paint and hardware business. AskArt gives it a name, Star Hardware and Paints.

Sophie's mother was Anna Mintz Gurvitch, nicknamed Annie. Born on October 28, 1878 (her headstone says Oct. 20, 1870), she bore three daughters, Sophie (1903-1936), Evelyn or Eva (Aug. 16, 1908-Aug. 17, 1990), and Rose (Dec. 5, 1919-Jan. 17, 1986). Sophie was of course an artist, while Evelyn was a well-known concert pianist. Rose Gurvitch married Saul Holzel in Detroit in 1942.

The Gurvitches were Jewish and spoke Yiddish. Benjamin Gurvitch died on June 14, 1949, at age sixty-four and was buried in Workmens Circle Cemetery, a Jewish burial ground in Detroit. Anna Mintz Gurvitch died on April 8, 1980, at age 101 (or 109 according to her headstone) and was buried in the same place. Anna Gurvitch's death announcement in the Detroit Free Press (Apr. 10, 1980, p. 44) gives another daughter named Mrs. Evelyn Bryant of Israel. We'll figure out who she is after a while.

Sophie Gurvitch attended schools in Detroit and studied at the Wicker School of Fine Arts, the Chicago Art Institute, and the Art Students League of New York. She was a commercial artist, fine artist, muralist, graphic artist, and illustrator who worked in oil, watercolor, and other media. A list of her accomplishments as an artist:

December 1928-Exhibited with the Jewish Centers Association, Melbourne Avenue, Detroit
1928-Executed the painting "Night" (see below)
January 1929-Exhibited at the Michigan Artists' annual exhibition, Detroit Institute of Arts, where she won the Boulevardier Prize of $50 for "best picture exemplifying modern tendencies in art" for her painting "Morning" (1)
November 1930-One-woman show of thirty watercolors, 250 Warren Avenue East, Detroit
January 1931-One-woman show, Detroit Civic Theater
December 1932-Exhibit of Detroit Jewish artists, Temple Beth El Social Hall, Detroit
1933-"Farewell exhibition" at the Phoenix Club, Detroit, before leaving for New York City to embark on a career in illustration (2)
April 1934-Exhibit with the Society of Independent Artists, of which she was one of the directors, J.L. Hudson Company, Detroit
November 1935-Dedication of murals completed (with Harry Long) at the kindergarten of William Ford School, Dearborn, Michigan; this was a CERA (County Emergency Relief Administration) project under the direction of Mrs. Nora Crump
Date unknown-Completed murals at the Visual Education Museum, Lumkin Avenue, Hamtramck, with Frank Gray, Florian Rokita, and Afrem Simon, all of the Michigan Art Project

Then, in January 1937, a memorial exhibition at the Jewish Community Center in Detroit, for Sophie Gurvitch, a young, up-and-coming artist and her parents' oldest child, had died in the last week of 1936.

* * *

Sophie Gurvitch studied and taught at the Wicker School of Fine Arts in Detroit. Presumably that's where she met a young art student from Pennsylvania, Richard Sharpe Shaver. He started at the Wicker school in 1930 and eventually became an instructor as well. The two were married on June 29, 1932, in Detroit. He was twenty-four. She had just turned twenty-nine. Neither was employed at the time. Sophie Gurvitch Shaver bore a daughter in 1933. She was named Evelyn Ann, presumably after Sophie's younger sister. Sometime in 1933-1934, Richard Shaver found work so that he might support his new family. Fred Nadis, biographer of Raymond A. Palmer, quotes Shaver regarding this period in his life: "I had studied writing and science and art, was married, almost owned a seven thousand dollar home and was well pleased with myself and the world." (3) Considering the things that happened over the next couple of years, no one could have blamed Shaver for believing that malign forces were at work against him.

* * *

Richard Shaver was not at home when his young wife died, nor was their daughter. Sophie's body was instead found by two men who had come to see her about a commercial art job. No one knows exactly how she was electrocuted, but it was apparent that she had handled an electric heater while she was in the bathtub. The place was a house, no longer standing, at 3009 Holcomb Street in Detroit. The date was December 29, 1936. "Illness had brought misfortune to Mrs. Shaver's family in recent years," wrote the Detroit Daily News the next day. "Her husband, Richard Shaver, also an artist, was stricken with sunstroke three years ago, and never fully recovered. Her only child, Evelyn Ann, 2 years old, is in Herman Kiefer Hospital with scarlet fever." (4) Shaver probably didn't know about either event at the time, his wife's death nor his daughter's hospitalization, for he was hospitalized, too, and had been since suffering what the newspaper--and later he himself--euphemistically called "sunstroke." The newspaper probably just got that story from the Gurvitch family. Evelyn Ann Shaver didn't know what had happened to her father, either. She was told by the grandparents who reared her that he had died. I wonder now if he ever again saw her or any member of the Gurvitch family, or if he ever knew anything about his daughter or his wife's family. Her grandparents took custody of her in 1937, and Evelyn Ann Shaver grew up as Evelyn Ann Gurvitch. She evidently married a man named Bryant and moved to Israel, for it was Evelyn Ann Bryant who was listed in Anna Gurvitch's death announcement as the third living Gurvitch daughter. By that late date, Richard Shaver was gone, too. His first wife, Sophie Gurvitch Shaver, who died so tragically at age thirty-three, was buried at Workmens Circle Cemetery like her parents. Her epitaph reads: "Her character was her finest work of art."

To be continued . . .

Notes
(1) "Make Awards for Artwork,"Detroit Free Press, Jan. 3, 1929, p. 5.
(2) "Shock Victim," Detroit Daily News, Dec. 30, 1936.
(3) From The Man from Mars: Ray Palmer's Amazing Pulp Journey by Fred Nadis (2013), p. 64.
(4) "Shock Victim,"Detroit Daily News, Dec. 30, 1936.

"Night," a painting by Sophie Gurvitch from 1928. It reminds me of the work of another Russian-born Jewish artist, Marc Chagall (1887-1985). Could it be a self-portrait? A dream-portrait?

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The Shaver Mystery-Part Five

March 29, 2018, 3:00 am

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Taylor Victor Shaver (1903-1934) and the Dero of Detroit-Part One

It isn't clear what drew the Shaver family to Detroit in 1930. I suspect that they followed Taylor Shaver to the city, for the third of Ziba and Grace Shaver's five children was holding a good job there with the Federal government. Although we as a nation had fallen on hard times in that first full year of the Great Depression, America's Motor City was still humming as it went on manufacturing and selling the automobiles that would, as Will Rogers observed, carry us to the poorhouse. Maybe the Shavers wanted in on the action. In any case, at the very least among the Shaver family, Ziba, Grace, and Richard made the move from Pennsylvania to Detroit, a city that would prove a fateful place for the future co-creator of the Shaver Mystery.

Richard Shaver attended classes at the Wicker School of Fine Arts in Detroit beginning in 1930. Young Sophie Gurvitch was also a student, then an instructor at the school. Shaver became an instructor, too, but when they were wed on June 29, 1932, in Detroit, both claimed to have been unemployed. Sometime in 1933 or 1934 (Mr. Childress, below, says 1932), Sophie Shaver bore a daughter, Evelyn Ann, presumably named after Sophie's younger sister. "During this time," writes David Hatcher Childress, "Richard took a job as a welder at Briggs Body at Highland Park, Michigan, working on an assembly line making bodies for the new V-8 Fords. Pay was 10 cents an hour and the work was hard, hot and dangerous." (1) While working on the assembly line, Shaver began undergoing strange experiences, but not before tragedy befell his family. Or maybe that tragedy wasn't just some random event but the first action taken against him by malevolent forces he found to be afoot in the world.

* * *

Taylor Victor Shaver was born on November 9, 1903, in Fairmount Springs, Pennsylvania. He was the middle child and middle son of Ziba R. Shaver (1875-1943) and Grace T. (Taylor) Shaver (1871-1961). Richard Shaver was younger by four years and no Shaver child came between them. Many years later, Richard Shaver said of his brother that their plans were "intertwined." (2)

Taylor Shaver graduated from Valparaiso University (as did Astounding Stories editor F. Orlin Tremaine, who was Shaver's senior by four years). According to a later article, Shaver served in the U.S. Army Air Corps and the Pennsylvania State Police. (3) Sometime in the 1920s (and no later than 1930), Shaver started working for the U.S. Immigration Service in Detroit and became chairman of the Board of Inquiry. It was by these occupations that Shaver gained the experience needed to write adventure stories for boys.

Despite Taylor Shaver's authorship of several published short stories, including at least one science fiction story, I have not found a biography of him anywhere on the Internet. I'm writing this now in part to correct that oversight. (It's the same reason I wrote about Sophie Gurvitch the other day, although there is a secret biography of her on the website AskArt.) But there's more to this biography than just a few facts about Shaver's life. First, he was co-author of a story that appeared as part of the Shaver Mystery of the 1940s. It seems certain to me that this story, "The Strange Disappearance of Guy Sylvester," was an outline, fragment, unfinished story, or unpublished story that Richard Shaver had among his papers and that Richard submitted to Raymond Palmer for publication in Amazing Stories. Palmer's workhorse Chester S. Geier must have then brought it to a publishable form, thereby winning himself credit as co-author. In any case, "The Strange Disappearance of Guy Sylvester" was published in Amazing Stories in March 1949, perhaps when the Shaver Mystery was beginning its downward slide.

Second, Taylor Shaver wrote a story that only by an occult coincidence has a connection to later speculations made not only by Raymond A. Palmer but also by Albert K. Bender, Gray Barker, and other authors of Forteana. (See, we're still on Barker and Bender, even if they haven't reared their heads lately. Just remember this word: continuity.) Before getting to that, I would like to show the storytelling credits for Taylor V. Shaver, taken from The FictionMags Index and the Internet Speculative Fiction Database:

"The Right to Solo" in Boys’ Life (May 1928)
"Sky Shy" in Boys’ Life (Sept. 1928)
"Snakes Alive" in Boys’ Life (Apr. 1929)
"Parachute for One" in The Open Road for Boys (Sept. 1929)
"Army Medicine" in Boys’ Life (Oct. 1929)
"Successfully Completed" in Boys’ Life (Feb. 1930)
"The Strange Disappearance of Guy Sylvester" with Chester S. Geier in Amazing Stories (Mar. 1949); reprinted in Amazing Stories Quarterly (Reissue) (Fall 1949)

As far as I know, Shaver never had a cover story, but here are three covers for magazines in which his stories appeared. Pay special attention to the second one.

Boys' Life, September 1928, an Aviation Number that included the story "Sky Shy" by Taylor V. Shaver. The image is small and hard to see, but I wonder if it has any sea monsters or other cryptozoological creatures hiding within. The artist's name appears in the lower right corner, but it's too small for me to see. Notice that he has obscured the continent of Antarctica with a cartouche. Was he trying to hide something?

Boys' Life, February 1930. Among its contents is Shaver's story "Successfully Completed." The title is ironic, considering this was Shaver's last story published in his lifetime. The cover artist is unknown. Now, note the writing on the side of the airplane (a Fairchild FC-2W2): Byrd Antarctic Expedition. We'll soon see why that's significant. Like in about thirty seconds.

Amazing Stories, March 1949, in which "The Strange Disappearance of Guy Sylvester" by Taylor V. Shaver and Chester S. Geier appeared. According to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, this was Shaver's only published work of science fiction. The cover artist was Edmond Swiatek. The scientist here looks like the Green Arrow without his cap and mask.

On November 29, 1929, Commander Richard E. Byrd, Jr., and his crew, flying a Ford Trimotor named the Floyd Bennett, reached the South Pole by air. For his heroism and accomplishments, Byrd was promoted to the rank of rear admiral in the U.S. Navy. (The Boy Scouts of America had previously made him an Honorary Scout, in 1927.) Admiral Byrd made four more trips to Antarctica, in 1933-1934, 1939-1940, 1946-1947 (at the height of the Shaver Mystery), and 1955-1956. He was also invited by Nazi Germany to take part in the Neuschwabenland Antarctic Expedition in 1938-1939, but he declined. The Nazis went ahead and built a secret Antarctic base without him, and that's where they kept their flying saucers, where they sent Adolf Hitler after faking his death, and where they must have competed for building space with other operators of flying saucers, who came either from outer space or from the interior of our hollow earth, the opening of which is at the South Pole and through which Admiral Byrd had previously flown or would one day fly (in 1946-1947) to find a place that looked from the air like Edgar Rice Burroughs' Pellucidar or Marvel Comics' Savage Land. If you think that sounds like the ravings of a lunatic, you could be onto something. And yet these are the things that hundreds, if not thousands, if not millions of people of today believe.

So in the 1920s, Richard S. Shaver, who began reading Amazing Stories soon after it came out in 1926, who had a vivid imagination and at least the beginnings of mental illness, and who was a writer and the brother and son of writers, would have known of the Byrd expedition to the South Pole of November 1929. One of his brother's stories even appeared in an issue of Boys' Life, the cover of which showed an image of the Byrd expedition. (I don't know what the contents of that issue might have been, but I feel certain that Richard Shaver saw it and read it.) The Shaver brothers' plans may have been "intertwined," as Richard Shaver said, but I suspect that for him, everything was intertwined, everything connected, everything continuous. (4) Everything meant something in the big scheme of things, and only he could see the big scheme of things because only he knew of Earth's secret history in the form of his experiences with a prehistoric subterranean civilization of extraterrestrial origin. Only he was aware of the dero. (5)

To be continued . . .

Notes
(1) From "The Shaver Mystery" by David Hatcher Childress in Lost Continents and the Hollow Earth (Kempton, IL: Adventures Unlimited Press, 1999), p. 219. Fred Nadis is more precise, calling the company "Briggs Auto Body Plant" and Shaver's job "spot welder."
(2) Quoted in The Man from Mars: Ray Palmer's Amazing Pulp Journey by Fred Nadis (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher-Penguin, 2013), p. 65.

(3) "Taylor V. Shaver" (obituary), Detroit Free Press, Feb. 26, 1934, p. 3.
(4) In his article "UFOs and Antarctica" (in Lost Continents and the Hollow Earth) David Hatcher Childress discusses the American author and crackpot F. Amadeo Giannini, who propounded a theory of the Hollow Earth and the interconnectedness of worlds (i.e., a theory of Earth's secret history). Giannini called his theory "Physical Continuity of the Universe" and is supposed to have issued it in 1927, before Commander Byrd made his first flight (i.e., Giannini's theory has the Fortean quality of continuity and the crackpot's insistence that he came first, was there first, and knew first). Here is a quote from Mr. Childress' article:

Giannini was the first to quote Byrd after he said "I'd like to see this land beyond the Pole. The area beyond the Pole is the center of the great unknown."

Giannini believed that Byrd, speaking literally rather than figuratively, flew beyond the pole into the rest of the "physically continuous universe." (p. 258)

Joshua Blu Buhs has more to say about Giannini on his blog From an Oblique Angle (Aug. 25, 2014), here.
(5) Incidentally, in 1916, Richard E. Byrd, Jr., was assigned to the Rhode Island Naval Militia in Providence, Rhode Island. Not long afterwards, H.P. Lovecraft tried breaking into the Rhode Island National Guard. He might have come close to enlisting in the coastal artillery, but his overly protective mother stopped that from happening. I don't know whether the coastal artillery was a naval unit or an army unit, but is this another case of a missed connection? Anyway, Lovecraft went on to write "At the Mountains of Madness," a two-part serial in Weird Tales (Feb./Mar.-Apr. 1931) about an expedition to the South Pole involving the use of an airplane. The scientists in that expedition discover--what else but--a prehistoric subterranean civilization of extraterrestrial origins. Incidentally also, Byrd's middle name was Evelyn. Richard Shaver's daughter was also named Evelyn. I know, weird, right?

A U.S. Post Office commemorative stamp of the second Byrd Antarctic Expedition of 1933. There is not yet a hole shown at the South Pole, but this stamp was made before the story of its existence was blown wide open by conspiracy theorists.

Here is the emblem of the Deutsche Antarktische Expedition of 1938-1939. I think it has been cleaned up a little for publication on the Internet, but you can at least see the hole. The problem is that if you're a Nazi and you're going to build a secret base at the South Pole, you don't want people to know about. (It wouldn't be a secret then, you know.) So instead, you disguise the hole as a circle of latitude.

In December 1959, Raymond A. Palmer published a Byrd-themed issue of his magazine Flying Saucers in which the idea of a hole-at-the-pole and flying saucers from Earth's interior passed from F. Amadeo Giannini's imagination into his own. (Gray Barker also had an article in this issue.) I skimmed through Palmer's lead story in the magazine but didn't find any mention of Shaver or his ideas. However, Palmer stated: "If the interior of the Earth is populated by a highly scientific and advanced race, we must make profitable contact with them . . . ."

Finally, in Palmer's Flying Saucers #69, from June 1970, we got to see the "First Photos of the Hole at the Pole." The resolution on this image is of course not fine enough for us to make out any dinosaurs, woolly mammoths, or Caroline Munro in an animal-skin bikini (darn it), but they're there, I tell you. They're all there.

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The Shaver Mystery-Part Six

April 1, 2018, 3:00 am

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≪ Previous: The Shaver Mystery-Part Five

Taylor Victor Shaver (1903-1934) and the Dero of Detroit-Part Two

Taylor V. Shaver was only thirty years old when he died at East Side Hospital in Detroit. The date was February 24, 1934. The cause was lobar pneumonia and enlargement of the heart. Shaver had been sick only briefly. His younger brother Richard was devastated by his death. "I drank a pint of whiskey right down after my brother died," Richard remembered, "and I guess it helped--but it was agony anyway for we were very close." (1) In his grief, Shaver

became convinced that a demon named Max was responsible for Taylor's heart failure. "The thing that killed him has followed me ever since--I talk to him--many times every day . . . . He has killed many people. . . . Others are holding him [Max] in check." [Ellipses and brackets in the source given below.] (2)

In addition to believing in the demon Max, Richard Shaver became convinced that people were following him. He also began hearing voices. The first time this happened, he was operating his welding gun at the auto body plant. The voices he heard were actually the thoughts of his co-workers, influenced by still other voices, mocking and derisive voices, harmful and destructive voices that only Shaver could detect. Then came the sounds of torture, and the voices were there, too. Where were they coming from? Who was saying these things? If Shaver didn't know then, he would later develop a system to explain the voices. His system--what we might as well call the Shaver Mystery--involves Earth's secret history, a history influenced by beings who came from the stars in the immemorial past. Long ago, when men were savages, these beings developed an advanced civilization, but they became increasingly damaged by what Shaver called the dis energy of the sun. In seeking shelter, these damaged individuals retreated into subterranean lairs. Shaver's name for them, derived from his secret alphabet, is dero, for detrimental robots. (Corpulent and repulsive, they are not mechanical robots at all but living beings.) The beings opposing the dero are called tero, for te, Shaver's concept of a growth force or integrative force, and robot. They, too, are confined to the underground, but they are benevolent rather than disintegrative. The dero and the tero waged a war inside Shaver's mind, a war he believed extended into the real world. Shaver himself fell in with the more human and noble tero and opposed the dero, who acted so detrimentally against him, his family, and the rest of humanity.

David Hatcher Childress refers to Taylor Shaver by the nickname "Tate." (3) By Shaver's "Lemurian Alphabet,"Tate might mean, by my own translation, T (Taylor) a te (integrative force), or Taylor [is] a te. Could there be any higher name in Mantong? And what of the place name Detroit? Was Taylor or integrative energy itself--t--destroyed by or caught between de and ro? And what of -it? I can't say, but the interpretations, translations, and permutations of these words, syllables, and letters are endless. They must have whirled away inside Shaver's mind for years as he lay in the grip of insanity. In his letter to Amazing Stories from September 1943, he wrote that he had been working on this new-old language "over a long period of years." I don't doubt that. It must have given him some solace to believe that a world that seemed so random and incomprehensible in its events was actually orderly and could be understood if only a person could find the key. Mantong and the story of the people of the caverns were for Richard Shaver that key.

According to Mr. Childress, Richard Shaver was committed to a mental institution on August 17, 1934. Some sources say that it was his wife who had him committed. We might understand why she would do such a thing, considering what we know of Shaver's mental state by later evidence. No one seems to know how long he was there, nor very much about what happened to him or what was done to him while he was in the hospital. No one knows, either, what his diagnosis might have been, but it seems almost certain to me (a non-psychiatrist) that Shaver was schizophrenic. One of the most powerful of indicators in this diagnosis-from-a-distance is the concept of the "influencing machine" in schizophrenia, one developed by the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Tausk and published in German in 1919 and in English--coincidentally in Shaver's case--in 1933. (3) If you read about the influencing machine (I encourage you to do so) and know anything at all about Shaver, you will immediately recognize its occurrence in his case. In fact there may be no better example of the influencing machine in the annals of psychiatry than in the case of Richard Sharpe Shaver.

Like I said, no one knows how long Shaver was institutionalized. He was still in the hospital when his wife Sophie Gurvitch Shaver was accidentally electrocuted in December 1936, and he was still there--at the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Ionia, Michigan--in 1940 when the enumerator of the U.S. census came around. By the time men were filling out their World War II draft cards in 1942-1943, Shaver was back home with his parents in Barto, Pennsylvania. Unfortunately I don't have a date for his filling out of that card. If it was 1942, then that would fit with the bit of information I have that Shaver was institutionalized for eight years, with a release date perhaps in early or mid 1942. Fred Nadis, biographer of Raymond Palmer, sets the date of his release as May 1943. (5) In any case, when Ziba R. Shaver died on June 10, 1943, Shaver was at home, and he helped bear his father's casket to the grave. If Shaver was released in May, then only four passed before he wrote his initial letter to the editors of Amazing Stories. In it Shaver claimed discovery of an ancient and secret language encoded in and underlying our own. Raymond Palmer ran the letter and the alphabet in the January 1944 issue of Amazing Stories. And with that, the Shaver Mystery began as one of the strangest episodes in the history of science fiction.

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) Quoted in The Man from Mars: Ray Palmer's Amazing Pulp Journey by Fred Nadis (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher-Penguin, 2013), p. 65.

(2) Quoted in Nadis, p. 65.

(3) "The Shaver Mystery" by David Hatcher Childress in Lost Continents and the Hollow Earth (Kempton, IL: Adventures Unlimited Press, 1999), p. 219.

(4) Shaver began having paranoid delusions and auditory hallucinations before he could have heard of the influencing machine, but was he exposed to this concept while in the hospital? If so, could his hypothetical knowledge of the influencing machine have influenced his ideas about the dero? In other words, could a concept in psychiatry have provided Richard Shaver with some of the material he needed to construct his system of belief? It seems unlikely, but again, we don't know what happened to him while he was hospitalized. Incidentally, "the supposed faculty of perceiving, as if by hearing, what is inaudible" is called clairaudience. Shaver, then, might have been called a clairaudient. Well, his older sister, named Catherine, went by her middle name, Claire.
(5) Nadis, p. 68.

The Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Ionia, Michigan, where Richard S. Shaver was confined for some time. According to Richard Toronto, Shaver was originally in the Ypsilanti State Hospital in Saline, Michigan. On release to see his daughter, he is supposed to have escaped. When recaptured, supposedly in Canada, Shaver was placed in the hospital in Ionia. In all, Shaver spent as many as eight or nine years in an institution, from August 1934 to about 1942 or May 1943.

HappyEastertoReadersofWeirdTales.

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The Shaver Mystery-Part Seven

April 4, 2018, 3:00 am

≫ Next: The Shaver Mystery-Part Eight

≪ Previous: The Shaver Mystery-Part Six

"I Remember Ionia"

In May 1943, Richard Shaver was released from a mental hospital in Michigan and returned to his parents in Pennsylvania. I'm not sure that anyone really knows how long he was in nor whether the period of his hospitalization was continuous. There is a story that he escaped from captivity and tramped in the north woods before making his way to Canada. If he was originally at the more progressive Ypsilanti State Hospital, Shaver was afterwards committed to the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

Once returned to the world, Shaver went back to work as a crane operator at Bethlehem Steel. He also continued to work on Mantong and the system of belief that backed it. In September 1943, Shaver wrote to the editors of Amazing Stories regarding his beliefs. Raymond A. Palmer, one of the canniest of science fiction editors, then or now, published Shaver's letter and alphabet in the January 1944 issue of the magazine. (1) More letters started coming in, seemingly in confirmation of Shaver's insights. In the meantime, Palmer and Shaver began a correspondence that would culminate in a near lifelong friendship and partnership. In the meantime, too, Richard Shaver remarried.

Shaver's first wife, Sophie Gurvitch Shaver, had died in a bizarre and tragic accident in 1936. He found his second wife, Virginia Fenwick of Brownsville, Texas, by correspondence. A graduate of Mary Hardin-Baylor College in Belton, Texas, and a former officer in the WAAC, Virginia was a pianist, writer, and singer. It was their mutual interest in writing that seems to have drawn her and her new husband together. They were married on January 29, 1944, at the Berks County, Pennsylvania, courthouse. An announcement of their wedding observed that Shaver wrote "fiction of a scientific nature" and that his latest story, "Warning to Future Man," had "just been accepted for publication by a popular magazine." (2)

Shaver's second marriage didn't last, for Virginia Fenwick divorced him in pretty short order. (3) I'm not sure whether "A Warning to Future Man" lasted, either, at least in its original form. But it's interesting that the story was accepted for publication as early as January 1944, for in its final form, as "I Remember Lemuria," Shaver's accounting of his beliefs did not appear in Amazing Stories until March 1945. Raymond Palmer had to rework the story to make it publishable, of course, but did it really take that long? Or was there opposition among the editorial staff or from the publishers themselves to putting into print the delusions of a madman? Whatever happened, "I Remember Lemuria" became the first published story in the Shaver Mystery, a cycle that would occupy Ray Palmer and his twin magazines, Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures, for the next five years.

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) I think Richard Shaver's original name for his new-old language was Mantong. To make it more palatable to readers, Raymond Palmer must have re-dubbed it "Mr. Shaver's Lemurian Alphabet."

(2) "Fiction Writers Are Married in Court House,"The Morning Call (Allentown, Pa.), Jan. 30, 1944, p. 13 (image below). The marriage was solemnized at an Episcopal church in Philadelphia on January 30, 1944.

(3) The reason for the divorce is supposed to have been Shaver's false claim, made on his marriage license, that he had not been institutionalized during the previous five years. I suspect that Virginia Shaver found out pretty quickly that her new husband was mentally ill, even if he was out in the world again and gainfully employed. She wouldn't have needed a falsified document to want out, but it must have given her a way out.

From The Morning Call (Allentown, Pa.), Jan. 30, 1944, p. 13.

Amazing Stories, March 1945, the first published Shaver Mystery story and the first of many cover stories in that cycle. I don't know that Richard Shaver considered his to be a "racial memory story" or that he set it in the fictional (and Theosophical) land of Lemuria. Those may have been Ray Palmer's innovations. In any case, the Shaver Mystery was off and running. The cover artist by the way was Robert Gibson Jones.

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