About Stephen King

May 3^rd 2009

One of the most famous living writers, possibly the one who sold the most books too, Stephen King is this chapter’s topic. But before I go any further into the matter, you have to know I haven’t read a lot of King’s writings, although the portion I read of his works far exceeds what I read of H.P. Lovecraft, and I read every single story the latter ever wrote.

My very first experience of Stephen King’s writings was a French translation of Firestarter, and it took me about 10 pages before I dropped the book. I thought it was awful. I remember feeling like it read really badly, and that’s probably due to the translation, although the plot wasn’t too interesting to me either (for the little of it I had discovered of it). For many years, this was all I knew personally of King’s writings, and judging by the movies based on his books, and what everyone seemed to say about them, I felt the underlying scorn was justified.

How wrong I was.

One day not too long ago I decided to give this author a more serious try. I picked up a copy of Different Seasons – made of four novellas – and started reading “Apt Pupil”, mostly because it had to do with Nazism, and because I had vaguely seen the movies years before, and it didn’t seem like a bad story.

I got hooked pretty quickly and read the whole thing in a few sessions. I wasn’t sure it was mind-blowingly awesome, but I damn sure knew I wanted to finish it, and that, in my humble opinion, means the story is good at least on some levels. That was my real serious first experience of King in the original text, and I had enjoyed it.

So then I thought I’d read the other novellas in that book. Having seen the Shawshank Redemption movie already, I skipped it (I would read it later) and began “The Body”. This one too has been turned into a movie – in the 80’s – but I had strictly no idea that it had at the time I read it. “The Body” is the story that made me think King was in truth a great author. There is nothing supernatural in it, but I wouldn’t say there is no horror, as a cold hard look at life can be the most horrific vision, and thus realism can be horror too. The story is about a group of friends going on an expedition to see a corpse that hasn’t yet been discovered by the authorities. The whole narrative is told by one of these kids, who since then has become a successful and famous writer. To this day, it is my favourite King’s longer piece (though I haven’t read even a quarter of his work). It’s well-written, it’s immersing, the characters have... character, without becoming stock, the narrative moves back and forth between a long since dead past (childhood) and a nostalgic present, etc. I have nothing but good things to say about this particular story. It deals with life, death, childhood, the past, writing as a job, friendship, and other important themes. It’s a very impressive story, and I can only recommend it.

After this, I read the rest of the novellas in that thick book. Good stuff too.

Then I decided to actually buy a book myself. Since I’m a huge fan of short stories (Poe, Lovecraft, Hemingway, Hawthorne, Buzzati, to name a few) and since King is something like the literary son of Lovecraft and grandson of Poe (although varying in style, they occupy a similar spot in literature, or something), I thought I’d get a book of short stories by King. That’s how I got to Night Shift. The first collection of stories by King, to my knowledge; it contains some really good ones, and some not so good ones. If you’re familiar with H.P. Lovecraft’s work, you’ll recognise the influence here and there, in some stories. That is not a bad thing at all, except when it feels like bad fanfiction, which I thought it did in “Jerusalem’s Lot”, not to be mistaken with the novel of almost the same name. I wrote an amazon review about this book, so I won’t rewrite it here, but I can’t not show you that King quote to be found in the foreword by the author:

"All my life as a writer I have been committed to the idea that in fiction the story value holds dominance over every other facet of the writer's craft; characterization, theme, mood, none of those things is anything if the story is dull. And if the story does hold you, all else can be forgiven."

My favourite story in this volume is without a doubt “The Last Rung on the Ladder”. I’d compare it to “The Body” in terms of goodness. That one, too, has no supernatural or strictly horror elements, but by God it’s a great story. To my knowledge, neither Stephen King nor J.D. Salinger appear in the Norton Anthology of American Literature, not even with a short story, and it’s a damned shame. King deserves to have at least a short in there, and I think “The Last Rung on the Ladder” is a likely candidate. I could write a whole chapter about the Norton Anthology and the general scholarly scorn of certain popular authors. I agree with King on the idea that skilled writing is nothing if the story is a bore. And now is the time when you decide whether I am a mere ignorant or an opinionated person with, perhaps, good taste. I enjoy King’s stories more than I enjoy Joyce’s. I read Dubliners, and I had to force myself to read for most of the book. I did like some of them, or parts of some of them, but on the whole, it’s not the sort of thing I’d want everyone in the world to read. It’s the sort of book that makes kids hate literature when they have to endure it as mandatory reading material for school. But enough on that issue.

After this volume, I saw that King had another collection of short stories, Skeleton Crew, and so I purchased that. At almost 800 pages, it’s one fat paperback. As of this writing, I read 440 pages. It contains “The Mist”, which has recently been turned into a movie (with a vastly different ending, from what I was told), and many others. My favourite so far is “The Jaunt”, one of the rare sci-fi stories written by King (I can only think of two, and that’s just me, I don’t know his entire body of works), and it reads like a Twilight Zone episode, which is probably no coincidence since, after inspection, that story was published in the Twilight Zone magazine. It basically deals with teleportation, and it will remind you of Portal, the Valve game that everyone thinks so much of (with reason, for all I know).

And that’s about it for my reading of King’s writings. As mentioned before, I haven’t read a whole lot, though it exceeds 1000 pages.

With this modest chapter, I wanted to say that one should not believe the general scorn towards King, because he is a good writer! Fair enough, I hear some books are really bad, and judging from the movies (which you shouldn’t do) it’s hard to be attracted to the books they’re based on (unless it’s the Shawshank Redemption). But yeah, King is worth at the very least a try. I have never read any of his novels so far, but you should try some of the short stories I recommended here; mostly “The Last Rung on the Ladder”, “The Jaunt”, and for a more classic King kind of story, “The Children of the Corn”, and for a longer piece, “The Body”, which is a classic to me now.

The Hollow Earth

26^th April 2009

The previous chapter dealt with earth as being possibly flat, this one will deal with its possible hollowness, and the theories around it. In fact, it will be more about the theories around it than its potential hollowness because I’m no geologist and don’t really have any arguments either way.

Be ready for some serious unprofessionalism as I will do everything by memory here, and it will be very general, abstract, all over the place, and it won’t even cite its sources. If you need a good reason for that unprofessionalism, feel free to imagine that I’m writing this chapter on a desert island, where dinosaurs start chasing me if I dare look up Wikipedia or other links on Google. And if I plunge my nose into a book, an evil deity of said desert island steals me a limb. Otherwise you can just assume that I feel lazy about this chapter.

So where to begin? That’s indeed a problem because I could start this from any end. Let’s begin with Hitler and the Nazis, as this is always interesting. At some point, these gentlemen thought that the earth might be hollow, but not the way we think of it. Imagine an infinity of earth – the matter – and in this earth, imagine a spherical hollow. Now, Nazis thought maybe that’s what the earth is like, and we’re living on the inner sides of this hollow bubble in the earth. With this in mind, they thought that if you aimed telescopes into the sky, you could perhaps spy on Great Britain. If this sounds obscure, just draw a circle, then draw a stickman inside it, with his feet on the edge, and then another stickman 90° to the left or right, and that should illustrate my point. Yes, I’m too unprofessional to actually draw it myself. And I wouldn’t want to deprive you from some stickman fun. Nah, I’m just unprofessional.

The usual model, though, is that the earth is as we imagine it, but hollow inside. Pleonasm? Likely. Problem? No. You can’t be hollow outside exactly, or everything is already, and this is more thought than I bargained for. So back on tracks. The thing is that we really don’t know a lot about what lies beneath our feet. We know more about deep space than we do about our inner earth. What do we actually know of that? According to science, our earth is divided into 4 zones: the crust, the mantle, the outer core, and the inner core. How did they find out about that? They didn’t go there. If I remember correctly, they sent sounds and analysed how these sounds came through at the other end and deduced what the stuff of the earth was like (in this sentence, I use a different meaning of “stuff” that you might be accustomed to, meaning material, what something is made of, etc.). And that’s how they came up with this idea of the earth’s innards.

I don’t think we actually went through the crust. As said before, we explored space far more than we did the underground. This becomes really fascinating when you start thinking about the gargantuan proportions of the inside of our planet. If that place was hollow, and/or inhabited, think of the space! Entire civilisations could live in there. We only live on a surface.

And now let’s plunge into the fancy theories people have about the hollow earth. These are the good, crunchy bits. There’s this fantastic theory that the Nazis somehow escaped to Antarctica and possibly found an entrance to the inner earth. Flying saucers and aliens are often involved in these, but it would take its own chapter to go into details about that one.

Edgar Allan (not Allen) Poe wrote a story called “MS. Found in a Bottle” (and for general information, you put short stories or poems or anything that’s only part of a bigger piece between quotation marks and any stand-alone volume in italics; for instance, a song from an album would be between quotation marks, while the album would be italicised; “Smells Like Teen Spirit” from Nevermind) Poe’s narrator ends up falling into some black hole of doom. Poe was inspired by old maps of the world which showed two giant black holes in lieu of the poles. In fact, I think Poe adds a note to this story, in which, perhaps, he says he didn’t know about that fact before he wrote the story and only found this out afterwards, which is interesting. And yes, I can’t go check my Poe book. Remember, the evil deity who’d steal my limbs. I like my limbs.

This idea remains in some people’s theories. Why didn’t anybody suddenly fall into one of these pole holes? Simple. The curvature of that hole would be so slight and over such a long distance that if you walked towards the hole, you’d never actually notice that you’re walking into a giant hole. The idea here is that the center of gravity of the earth does not reside in its exact core, but rather inside the earth layers, if I may call them that way. And I’ll correct myself right now, that’s not the actual center of gravity, that’d be just what pulls you “down”. We understand each other. Well, mostly you me. So you’d walk off this side of the earth and into the hollow, and you’d not even notice it because, apparently, the sky is blue there too. And they even have an inner sun. Or so say some theories.

Other theories suggest that there are giant cities underground, but that there is no giant hollow in our earth, just that it’s inhabited, massively. Who lives there? Why, aliens of course. Or “ancient astronauts”, or Reptilians. Or Nazis! Who the duck knows, I did my research on the Internet. Let’s go wild. “Ancient astronauts” is a term that originates with the phrase “the ancient astronauts theory” which is a theory that suggests humanity has been visited by superior species in the past. This was one of my first serious interests in life, when I was a kid. (And before I go on, let me emphasise that I do know that this is a digression that has little to do with the subject (NICOLAS, PLEONASM AGAIN!) – I am fully aware of that, but I, like Holden Caulfield, enjoy digressions, and so I indulge in them.) So, when I was a kid, I one day found a couple of paperbacks in the basement. One of them was entitled La Théorie des Anciens Astronautes, in French, please, because when I was a kiddo, that’s all I could speak or read. I don’t think you need a translation, thanks to the French invading England some centuries ago and injecting so much of their language into yours. Don’t feel violated, it’s all right. So, as a kid, I thought this was going to be a book about spacemen and all that cool stuff. I thought they were “ancient” in the sense that maybe they were just old spacemen. Boy, was I wrong. A whole new perspective on the world was exposed to me and I shat bricks of excitement at the idea that maybe there was such an enormous truth out there, waiting for us to discover it. I don’t remember what age I was, somewhere between 7 and 10. My interest in this never entirely faded, and it culminated when I was about 15 and gave an impressive presentation on that very topic to a mesmerised class of 8^th graders. (And I’m never sure about that American way of counting the school years, maybe I erred with this, so just think of the year when most kids are 14 or 15. That’s the year I mean.)

I read lots of Erich von Daniken – which I probably misspell, but remember the dinosaurs who’d start chasing me if I dare check it on Google – and later on found out that this author wasn’t very professional. Like me. And, like me, he’s Swiss. Hey, maybe he was writing from a desert island filled with anti-intellectual dinosaurs too. You never know. Switzerland might be quite different from what you thought it was.

Now I totally lost track of what I was saying. Ok, ancient aliens visiting us from outer space, or inner space, as some suggest. Some of you might know about Reptilians already. According to some interesting folks I heard on the radio (Art Bell’s radio show, yes), there are megapolis(es?) underground inhabited by Reptilians. If you never heard of that term – Reptilian – they’re thought to be humanoids of daunting proportions compared to us, very strong, scaly all over, and none too hot. Theorists typically link every serpent image in ancient history to that species, whether it’s the serpent of Adam and Eve, or traditional representations of dragons, demons, etc.

I stop here to say that I’m not discussing the veracity of these claims. That’s another topic entirely. I’m just disclosing this stuff to you, because stuff like that thrills me, whether it’s completely retarded, has some truth to it, or is factual. It makes the mind exercise in terms of world perception, and that’s what I’m into with this chapter and the previous chapter, about the Flat Earth Society people.

I recommend googling the “Dulce base”, provided there are no dinosaurs around you. You’d find more about Reptilians and conspiracies with this one. I don’t know if there is any truth to all this, but it sure makes for a good read.

Some people claim that we humans already have a massive network underground, made of tunnels and high tech metros and what not. In fact, and this is indeed fact, the USA have a very vast series of giant underground bases. Those bases were mostly built during the Cold War, to face the advent of a nuclear catastrophe. That’s where people would have saved their asses in case of a conflict. Supposedly, every state has at least one such underground base. Stories of people exploring underground structures and meeting weird stuff abound. But then again, what to make of them is anyone’s best wild guess. That huge underground network would be used by “those” too, meaning the aliens/Reptilians/whatever they are in any given theory.

On a more factual basis, we do know that pockets of worlds do exist inside our earth, as in Jules Vernes’s novel Voyage au Centre de la Terre, pardon my French. We didn’t find dinosaurs – dinosaurs! – exactly, but we found life that evolved on its little own for quite some time. Who knows how many such pockets exist? I heard rumors, or news, of some underground lake below the ice of Antarctica, in which there might be life, and which didn’t have any contact of any sort with anything outside its reaches for millennia, or more. Fascinating.

And I think that’s it for this unprofessional chapter about the hollow earth theory. I hope it served as a nice introduction, if anything. There are tons of information on the subject out there, including very serious books about the actual possibility of a hollow earth written by geologists (which don’t actually suggest our earth is hollow, just how a planet could be hollow).

The Flat Earth Society

20^th March 2009

If you thought everyone knew that the world was a sphere, you were wrong, or rather, not everyone is convinced. The Flat Earth Society is a group of people who believe the earth to be flat – quite a self-explanatory name, I know, but as some of you may not believe it, I insist. It’s an absolutely serious organisation, and in my experience of them, a group of absolutely serious people.

I will not go into whether they are right or wrong, though feel free to do that yourself, just into what they actually think and how they make sense of such a world, which is what truly interested me in the beginning, and still does now. Many questions arise when you start thinking about our earth as a flat one, and I don’t even know where to start with those.

What of space photos? Flat earthers, as they are known, think that Nasa is simply lying to us. If you have inquired about Nasa a little or poked around the supposedly moon landing hoax and the likes, you might very easily believe that Nasa is indeed filled with liars – but that’s an entirely different subject. Flat earthers do not accept space photographs as valid evidence of the earth being a sphere because any photograph from space was taken under their control, and nobody can go to space and take pictures on their own.

Another thing you will love to know is that flat earthers don’t believe in gravity. Although, some do, but all agree that the earth itself doesn’t cause gravity, while other celestial bodies do. The argument is that other planets are round, as we can see from down here, but our own mother earth isn’t, and doesn’t have to be. This wouldn’t be the first singularity of our home planet: the tectonic plates are another one that isn’t shared by most planets, if I’m not mistaken.

So if there is no gravity, how do we stick to the ground? Simple. The earth is moving upwards. Not only is it moving, it’s also accelerating exponentially. If it was merely moving upwards, we’d be flying at the slightest jump. What makes the flat earth accelerates upwards like this? They don’t know. I think they call it “dark energy”. To be fair, and for all I know, even today we can’t quite explain how gravity actually functions.

I questioned them on many problems I had with their model. For instance, if the earth is continually accelerating upwards, wouldn’t that mean that eventually we would be moving at the speed of light? No, I was told. Answers differed from a flat earther to another. Some said the earth would eventually slow down, which, I guess, means we will one day just fly away and get lost into space, or something. What I love about all this is how it makes your mind work out on figuring stuff out with new parameters. For instance, moving at the speed of light, you would be unable to see anything directly below 90°, because the light rays wouldn’t be able to catch up with you! [Upon further reflection, I think you would see absolutely nothing unless you were looking upwards, since even light coming from the side would not have time to reach your eyes, or maybe you'd see things in front of you that in reality are much higher in space; the light from them, going horizontally would hit you in the eye as you move up. This is hard to explain, I hope you can figure it out.] In theory, nothing can top the speed of light, so I assume we would float away at this point.

So what does the earth look like for a flat earther? And how do they explain circumnavigation (sailing around the world)? I want you to visualise the UN’s flag now. That’s how they see the earth. Here’s an image so you get a better idea.

The North Pole is at the center of our world, and the South Pole does not exist as a pole. Indeed, Antarctica is not a continent, but a gigantic wall of ice surrounding our world. This explains why sailors felt like they were going around the world, and whenever they went South, they reached “Antarctica”, or that giant Ice Wall, for the magnetic poles still exist.

Giant Ice Wall you say? Yes. Flat earthers differ on this. Some say what we think of as Antarctica is the Ice Wall, while others say it just lays before it, but isn’t said Ice Wall. What happens at the end of the earth? Here again, flat earthers differ, and mostly don’t know. But they have some interesting examples of what could be.

Some think that beyond the Ice Wall is nothing but barren wastelands that expand on forever. Others think the world just drops off, and others still think there might be other worlds like ours, like so many fried eggs in an eternal frying pan, separated by vast deserts of wind-beaten icy snow.

The Ice Wall itself is in fact a chain of mountains covered with snow and ice. How deep is it? Deep enough to keep the oceans in. Flat earthers tend to believe that there is a conspiracy meant to keep us from exploring Antarctica for ourselves, and that anyone who goes there is somehow lured and never really sees things for what they are.

As to the origins of such a flat earth, I asked, expecting some kind of astronomical explanation. The only person who took the time to give me an answer simply gave me a link to an online version of the Book of Genesis. I hadn’t thought of that one. Many, though not all, flat earthers are religious people, or so I am led to believe, but don’t be fooled, if you go in there and discuss, you might find yourself unprepared to argue physics with some of them, as I did. I did not know that “c” represented light, or the speed of light, or whatever, and apparently that made me sound like a retard. Sorry, I’m no physicist.

What of the sun and moon? Easy: they just hover over our flat earth in circles. Said circles vary, and this causes seasons and the moon cycle. The sun never sets, it just goes far away and creates the illusion that it goes below the horizon, when in fact, it’s just beyond.

What of the earth’s curvature? You know, as when you see a ship in the distance somehow sinking into the horizon, and not just getting smaller. I asked about this, and was told that we need special telescopes to see truly. I did not manage to know what there was to correct, just that someone whose name I do not dare deface here invented special telescopes that restored true vision. Why such a distortion happens, I have no idea. Why we haven’t been able to build another one of these correcting devices, I have no idea either.

What of satellites? Flat earthers don’t believe in them. Instead, they think that on the edges of the world are poles or some such things that emit signals simulating satellites, or something like that. I don’t guarantee exactitude on this one. Why would Nasa and/or others fool us on this? They admit they don’t know, but suspect that a financial gain is the most likely reason. How do you make money from that? I’m not sure, but what I do know, however, is that the exploration of space is not at all where it could be. Given the obscene amounts of money they make by launching billionaires into space, they have no interest in developing technologies that would make the travel cheap and affordable to everyone. This is how greed hinders us severely. The rationale behind convincing the whole world that said world is flat is nothing too clear to me, be it for money, power, or some almighty alien warlord we know nothing of.

There are many more questions to be asked about this, and I assuredly forgot a few that I wanted to deal with here. Flat earthers themselves don’t claim to have all the answers. Feel free to question them directly on their own forum, but be warned, most people are very impolite towards them and abusive, and as a result, many flat earthers have the reflex of being harsh, giving very short answers without explanation, or downright insulting you. This doesn’t happen much if you are yourself polite and respectful, but expect animosity. That was my disappointment with the forum. I didn’t go there for a fight, and if you are a flat earther, I wouldn’t see the point in posting in a forum solely for fights. Why waste one’s time? That goes for every side of the issue.

But don’t get discouraged, there are a lot of people there who have things to say and reasons to give, and if only for those, it is worth being courteous. Often, you will ask things like “Then will the earth reach the speed of light?” and your only answer will be “No.” and I just hate that kind of answer. It’s as if they got tired of explaining stuff over and over, and just decided to give us the truth in miniature format. Feel free to insist on an explanation! Someone will always try to explain FE models to you if you are genuinely interested in an answer.

Conclusion? I was decidedly happy to find that there are people who really believe the earth is flat. Imagining my world in a new perspective was great fun, still is, and the kind of hostility these heretics of science have to face reminds you how intolerant people can be and how little credit they give anyone who doesn’t immediately accept the official paradigm without questions. I doubt most round eathers have studied the question before accepting that the earth was a sphere. You may accuse the flat earthers of being this and that, but one thing you can’t accuse them of is to not have done any research. They have a whole bunch of references ready for your eyes if you feel so inclined.

The following chapter will be about the Hollow Earth, stay tuned!

The Flat Eart Society forum.

Easy Cheese

22^nd January 2009

I went to America in 1999, and one fateful evening I went to a grocery store with some friends, and that’s when we found it. “It” was a can of spray cheese.

Disbelieving my eyes, I looked closer, and closer, and closer. Once my nose was upon the dire artefact, I had nothing left to do but utterly change my vision of reality: I had found Easy Cheese.

The thing suggested it was essentially cheese in a spray can. Being European, that was a wholly new concept to me, and I couldn’t grasp it. How do you put cheese, a generally solid matter, into a can, from which you could spray the stuff? I pondered long and hard, and came to the conclusion that my friends and I had just found nothing less than the very end of civilisation.

Cheese, in Europe, is some age old tradition that moustached men in their 50’s create in rustic little wooden and stone houses up some mountain or something. That’s cheese. You can buy it at your grocery store, it comes wrapped in plastic, but it’s solid. For at least 6 or 7 years, the mystery remained. Until one day...

One day, then, a friend of mine from St. Louis, Missouri, decided to send me some fudge, which I had never tasted, and since I had mentioned time and again my encounter with the end of civilisation, she thought she’d put a can of Easy Cheese in her package, along with some crackers, which I had never eaten before either.

I tried the fudge first. Just looking at that can of spray cheese made me nauseous. I generally dislike anything in a can, really, all the more so when the stuff inside isn’t even supposed to be there in the first place. Fudge is delicious. For those of you who don’t know it, it’s chocolate something, extremely dense. You eat a handful of it and you’re stuffed for the day. I forget exactly how it tastes or feels inside one’s mouth, though. Maybe it was slightly melting on your tongue; at any rate, it was good stuff. It was fudging good.

My Missourian friend also sent a jar of peanut butter, which is available in my country, but I had never really had much of it. I had some hate/love relation to peanut butter at first, some taste you don’t really like, but you want more anyway, like a sore tooth you need to pull at. I eventually really liked the stuff, but that’s another topic entirely.

I handled the can of spray cheese as though it was some alien unhallowed item of horrendous blasphemy. I questioned the motives of the person who invented this, the person who one day thought, “Gee, cheese is good, but couldn’t we possibly put it in a can and spray it?” Why would anyone even conceive of such an evil plan? My uneducated guess is that I don’t have a clue, except that I suppose the idea wouldn’t have emerged in the brain of a European, because that’s not how we think of cheese at all. Again, for us, cheese is made by middle-aged men with moustaches that are extra long who wear white aprons and are a little bit overweight. They stir some giant pot of molten cheese – milk, in fact – and then they store big round chunks of cheese in dark caves, beside thousands of other identical big round chunks of cheese. That’s cheese in the European mind.

So there was this can, and allegedly, there was cheese in it, and according to the legend, I could spray cheese out of it. Paraphrasing Mitch Hedberg, who said it better than I ever could, crackers is a product that has, on its very wrapping, suggestions as to what you could put on them; in other words, other products; and thus, crackers are a product that has no faith in itself. Liking just crackers is probably cheap as dirt. I mention crackers because that’s what spray cheese is usually sprayed onto. That’s why my friend from St. Louis sent some along.

It took me around 20 minutes to actually mouth some of that cheese. Seriously. First I analysed the appearance of the can, its opening, etc. I thought I was going to witness a miracle if I pressed on that thing like you do a whipped cream can. I took a cracker out, and prepared myself for the impossible.

I pressed, and sure enough, there was cheese on my cracker. Some yellow cheese at that. The yellowest cheese. I’d never seen cheese this yellow outside of cartoons. This neon-colour-like substance was much less solid than cheese habitually is, which was to be expected, seeing as it can be sprayed out of a can, for God’s sake.

Apprehension was all the rage as I beheld this exotic amuse-gueule. I thought I might vomit. This wasn’t cheese, this was an extra long line of snot at best. But I had gone this far, I had to continue, like a brave European crossing the culture boundaries of his native nation. You can’t get Easy Cheese here unless you smuggle it in, an offence which is likely entirely legal.

Then, finally, I tasted the stuff. I was so repulsed by the appearance of this thing, from the can to the substance itself, that at first, I couldn’t even think it might taste anything but synthetic chemical crap, so when I actually had it in my mouth, my brain couldn’t neutrally analyse Easy Cheese’s cheese. It took several mouthings to get past the biases of my European brain. But eventually I managed to realise it actually tasted good. It tasted just like the cheese you find in McDonald’s cheeseburgers, which I worship.

The repugnant thing turned out to taste good. I had to deal with conflicting signals in my head about this. It took many a sprayed cracker. But then I really enjoyed it. In a couple of days I was coming to the end of the can.

The end of the can is actually quite some fun. Since it’s pressured air that propulses the yellow ooze, when the stuff runs out, it sputters out too. Concretely, this means that you’re pressing the can, and nothing comes out for a split second, and then, oh oh, miniature chunks of ooze come out at high speed, like a shrapnel explosion. Sounds fun, but by God is it messy. It also makes a little explosive sound. The image this gave me was that of a diminutive dwarf trying to shit through a painful constipation, his yellow turd breaking off into explosive segments of constelised microscopic bits of cheese. (“Constelised” doesn’t exist, but I invent it right here, so it does now, feel free to use it and spread it, one day it’ll be in the dictionary with this chapter as reference for origins, believe it!)

So there I was, eating the golden excrements of an imaginary dwarf whose sphincter was possessed with the nastiest constipation ever. And the sputtering out does sound like mini farts. This was just what you needed uh. Not only does it sound monstrous as a concept, Easy Cheese, but then it also makes fart sounds. Thing is, this did not deter me from eating more. This is revealing. It means I’m definitely crossing cultures there, I eat food that sounds like farts. And I like it! God have mercy...

Is there a moral to this story? Maybe you could say that like so many other American things, they look like ass on the outside, but if you care to try it, and I mean really try, you might find those things are good. Sure it looks like shit, sometimes, and sometimes it even farts, but at the core of what matters, it is good stuff! And don’t ask me about how healthy Easy Cheese is, I suspect it may not be the American equivalent of a salad. But hey, health matters only to a point, everybody dies eventually, and nobody needs to be a healthy corpse in the end.

Interview with Christian Oliver Cruz

1) At what age did you start drawing? What drove you to it?

I really couldn’t remember at what age I started drawing, but my first memories actually involved drawings. I remember myself (I was around 4, I think) fumbling through the drawers of the office desk of my parents, looking for paper I could draw on. And I would usually end up getting the expensive linen papers that I knew my parents were reserving for important business letters. I really loved the smell and texture of those linen papers, and the effect it made on my doodles. Soon, my parents would find out I was looting the paper and would be fuming mad, and would try to hide it in other places. But I would always eventually find it. I remembered being always hungry for paper, and when there was no paper in the house anymore (or I just couldn’t find them anymore), I ended up drawing on the walls, floor and ceiling of our home. And I did cover every inch of the second story of our house with doodles… Airplanes, stars, planets on the ceiling, animals, towering trees and buildings on the walls and rivers and fishes on the floor. And they’re not just simple drawings. I knew I was creating this virtual environment that I with my brothers could play in. I was a silent kid (in fact, my mom suspected I was autistic) and really couldn’t express my thoughts and feelings straightforwardly all the time, so I guess I was trying to express myself though drawing. And the lack of paper didn’t stop me from doing so.

2) How come you work in Moleskines? And how did you find out about those things?

Well, I don’t just work in Moleskines, but it just so happens that my recent journal drawings have found their way in this nifty notebook. The first time I heard about Moleskines was when I was browsing the internet looking for sketchbooks and notebooks. And I happened upon this forum describing Moleskines as the “legendary notebook used by European artists and thinkers for the past two centuries.” That intrigued me a lot, and though it was expensive, I knew I just had to experience it to believe it. So I bought one, and the art that you’re seeing now, is actually on my first Moleskine. I already have another one waiting after I fill up the first one, another for my clinical notes. I know a lot of people complain that these notebooks are very expensive. But I guess it’s that knowledge that when I’m writing or drawing on something of great value that prompts me to make every entry worthwhile. I have a lot of sketchbooks but I reserve my special drawings in this notebook.

3) Your art is rather deep and very thoughtful, do you read a lot?

Thanks! I do read a lot. I love books. I actually grew up around books (as you can see in one my journal entries) of all sorts: encyclopedia, story books, textbooks… and I devoured every page of these books. I remember lingering over interesting photographs and drawings in those Time Life books. I enjoy staying in school libraries and book shops… I have a wide taste in books so I really can’t say which genre of books I enjoy reading. But among the authors I’ve read, I tend to really enjoy C.S. Lewis especially his theological treatises, and most other Christian writers (Scott Hahn, Laurie Beth Jones, etc.) I read a lot of self-help inspirational books, fantasy and even children’s books (Children’s books are the way to go when you’re stressed!). These days, I find myself reading a lot of graphic novels by independent artists.

4) Are you really a doctor?

I’m not a doctor. But I actually work as a clinical director of Quality Life Discoveries (http://www.qualitylifediscoveries.com/), an integrative rehabilitation center. By profession, I’m a physical therapist specializing in ergonomics (I have a masters degree in Ergonomics) and aquatherapeutic interventions. I wouldn’t be surprised you would ask me that, because a lot of my clients also mistake me for a doctor.

5) Tell us about your relationship with God, as I understand you are Christian, Christian.

Although most of my friends call me REV, my real nickname at home is IAN from Christian. I remember this bit of teaching one of my high school professors taught me… “What happens when you remove CHRIST from CHRISTIAN? Well IAN is left… which means I AM NOTHING” I’m a Roman Catholic and I was raised as one and studied in a Catholic school. There was a time in my life when I actually contemplated becoming a priest, actually applying to seminaries, but I guess I really wasn’t called to be really one. I have a very personal relationship with God, and just like any relationship, there are numerous times when I have turned my back on Him, lost my trust in Him and even doubted his existence. But almost every time this would happen, I would always find myself yearning for Him. In very brief terms, I can really say that without God’s presence in my life, I really would be nothing. Hehe, I really don’t want to sound so preachy here, but that is exactly how I feel.

6) Do you have artistic influences? What people inspired you to draw among visual artists and authors, and others?

I have lots of artistic influences. When I was a kid, I looked upon the drawings of the great masters (like Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, etc…) and made my versions of their works. I also grew up inspired by the works of Filipino local artists (Amorsolo, Botong Francisco, Blanco, etc.) My art is quite diverse in styles, as I adjust my style depending on what I think is best for a particular project. I think it helps to be in constant awe of the skills of many artists, trying to emulate them, and finding your own “voice” through these styles.

7) Have you published any of your work so far? Do you have projects?

I haven’t published any of my work yet, but hopefully by February, the children’s book entitled “Spinning” will be published by Anvil Publishing Inc. I illustrated this wonderful story by Irene Sarmiento about a boy with autism and his family. I’m pretty excited about this because I myself through my professional work as a physical therapist am quite involved in improving the quality of life of kids with autism and helping their families cope with this. So through this book, I hope to help kids and their parents.

I have several projects ongoing. I have a bunch of ambigram and logo design commissions I have yet to finish, and other book illustrations (wink wink) and personal paintings I have yet to complete. I have many T-shirt designs in my mind that is just waiting to materialize – and I have yet to print one of my T-shirt designs. I have a project in mind which involves sculptures, but I already have the conceptual sketches ready. I have comics and a graphic novel brewing with some writers. I guess, the main issue here is TIME, TIME, TIME. Haha.

8) What materials do you use?

For my moleskine art, I use a variety of materials. I start with ordinary pencils for the sketches. Then I ink them using ordinary tech pens. I usually use from 0.2 to 0.5 for the graphics, and 0.1 to 0.2 for the texts. After inking it, I use watercolor pencils for the color.

I basically use whatever materials I could get my hands into for my other projects. I do watercolors, oil and digital stuff, so I really have to use a variety of materials for it.

9) How important is the written word in your Moleskine drawings?

You will notice that there are some entries that are stand alone illustrations without any text on it. But there are some that are heavy on the text component. I guess, it depends on the context of the particular entry. If I feel that the illustration is enough, and would want the viewer to be inspired with their own interpretation of it, I minimize the use of text. You will see this in most conceptual pages. But in some pages where I draw inspiration from a particular material (for instance books, or historical facts, or specific personal experiences), I feel the need to write. It is very important for me in these cases that the text flow from the pictures or at times the pictures flow from the text seamlessly. I hope I was able to achieve that.

10) Do you listen to music when you draw?

Now that I think about it, I am not really particular whether I listen to music or not when I draw. I don’t set up my environment in such a way that I choose what music I would have to listen to in order for me to draw. Oftentimes, I prefer to work in a silent environment as I find certain music to be distracting. But when I work on my moleskine, I tend to be in different venues (oftentimes, passing time in café shops, in my office, in the commute), so I really can’t control the auditory ambience, but if there would be music, I tend to be more “productive” in soft mood music.

11) Tell us about your country, the Philippines. How is life there? And how did living there influence your work and life?

The Philippines is a very lovely country, with a colorful history and cultural heritage. We have several natural wonders that I think people around the world should visit, see and experience. Life here is just like life in other countries - there are some things you can brag about, and there are some that you feel ashamed of talking about. The Filipinos are a very talented people and we tend to excel in any endeavor we put our hearts into. But sometimes I wonder when our country as a whole will be able to stand on its own feet again, be able to solve its problems ranging from poverty to poor governance and corruption. It’s this interplay of positive and negative emotions you feel about your country which tends to inspire you to strive for the better. And I see this in my work and life. Most of my friends have gone abroad to seek “greener pastures” and more adventures, but some of us have stayed, though not as rewarding financially, but rewarding nevertheless. I admire people who stay here to do charity and service work when you know that they could earn a lot more if they do otherwise. But you can’t otherwise judge those who have left, because they have their families in mind to support. That’s also one thing I admire… Filipinos have a deep sense of FAMILY and TOGETHERNESS… and you could feel it in our works.

12) What are your dreams?

Dreams? My mission in life is to “inspire faith, learning and creativity in others” and I hope I am able to accomplish that throughout my life through whatever means and context. Of course, I can’t help but wish that I find success in everything I do… become a published artist, a respectable physiotherapist and specialist in my own field and a successful entrepreneur in the near future. But most importantly, to be able to find peace with myself…

13) Do most people in the Philippines speak English as well as you do?

You may say that English is the 2nd language of the Philippines. It is the main language used in our government and educational system. And with the proliferation of American films and shows in our media, you wouldn’t be surprised why most Filipinos can speak English very fluently.

See more art by Christian Oliver Cruz here.

Sister Sin: The Incestuous Seed of the Insidious Satan

The following is an essay from 2006, which I wrote for a class on Paradise Lost. It is about Sin and Death, from said epic poem by John Milton. Those are two very interesting characters.

Sister Sin: the Incestuous Seed of the Insidious Satan

Fallen, wretched, doomed to perpetual agony and suffering; this is the state of Sin when we first meet her in Hell. Dreadfully deformed by the birth of her first child, Death, raped by the latter, and further abused by the fruit of that rape, the Hell-Hounds, whose ordeal repeats itself in never-ending cycles. Few images in Paradise Lost are so horrifyingly striking, and one wonders whether any of the fallen angels, Satan included, were befallen by comparable torments. The lover of her own father, the mother and sexual victim of her incestuous offspring (who also happens to be her brother), the violated and cannibalised prey of her more than inbred Cerberean beastly children, Sin, the God-appointed guardian of the gates of Hell, does not have it easy. It is hard to find another character who suffers this much, the Son included, and even in her condition of guardian, she is within the very prison whose doors she keeps shut: she is, after all, still in Hell.

Sin and Death are two quite interesting characters in that they form the first order of creatures born not directly of God; indeed, Sin is the first entity that can call God her grandfather, for she is the very first being born from one of God’s creatures, namely Satan. As to Death, he is the first Hell-born character and, the Hell-Hounds excluded, the only one. Every further visitor of Hell will have been born on earth, and all those who have been sent to Hell were born in Heaven prior to their Fall. The hellish pair has that in common that their very creations were not usual and a complete first on all aspects. While Sin is the first creature made not directly by God, Death is the first to be conceived by two parents, the way Adam and Eve will procreate mortal children.

Moreover, the strictly visual aspect of the two keepers is by itself worthy of much interest. Sin is a monster in the traditional sense of being a crossing from two orders (in this case animal and angelic) much like a siren or a centaur. Death, for his part, lives in the no-man’s-land of definition; a shapeless shape, his appearance can only be guessed at. All of this contributes to make of Sin and Death special characters on more than one count; whereas the angels and our general parents have rather classical shapes and appearances, Sin and Death strike us as the first two monstrosities of the poem. They are indeed a creation of Milton, imagined from his own initiative, and the status of these two oddities has been much discussed in literary debates. Some think them mere allegories, and not good ones at that, others barely pay attention to them. Be it my own faulty research or the lack of criticism on Sin and Death, I have not found much material on them, and I did not find any work solely dedicated to their study. For all these reasons, I decided to choose them as the topic of this essay. To begin, I will focus on the aspects of each of the Hell-Gate keepers and on their possible origins and reasons of being. Although the potentially seminal line that gave Milton material to create Sin and Death is to be found in James 1, 15: “Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.”,[1] I will show that Milton used other references as well.

As I explained just above, Sin is a monster. She is endowed with serpentine features (which motivated the hissiness of this essay’s title) even before Satan chooses the snake to deceive Eve and before God turns the devils into reptiles. I suppose this fact alone could provide some valuable argument to say that God had it all planned, but that is not the object of the current essay, so I will not go further into this. The serpentine features are traditionally given to evil creatures: sirens, dragons, etc. And Sin is indeed compared to Scylla, (II, 660),[2] who at once had her lower body turned into barking dogs and then preyed on sailors, the usual activity of sirens in the Hellenistic tradition. Another figure of famous snake-like creatures I can think of is the Mélusine of both Jean D’Arras and Coudrette. Whether Milton knew of these works I do not claim to know, and the following lines may be sheer digression, but I think it is worth mentioning. Mélusine is a cursed fairy who turns into a half snake every Saturday. She is the child of a human king and of a full-blooded fairy (which makes her a hybrid, a crossing of the orders just like Sin is too) and she herself marries a human to whom she will give a whole empire and countless sons of great value. Her husband triggers the fall of himself and his empire the day he calls her a serpent (there was a pact between him and Mélusine: he was to never inquire about her on Saturdays and never to seek to know why she wanted to hide away) and that brings to mind Adam’s sentence to Eve: “Out of my sight, thou serpent”, (X, 867). This alone of course does not make for a sufficient connection and I therefore will not endeavour to make much more out of the Mélusine parallel; but on the possibility that Milton knew of her, I venture a few comments. Mélusine starts off as a doomed creature too, and she ends up even more doomed, condemned to wait until Judgement Day to terminate her fairy life (she is otherwise immortal). Milton did not make Sin out of the blue, though she is among his most creative figures in Paradise Lost. There are several models he could refer to, and did refer to; among them are sirens, Scylla, and possibly Mélusine.

Much closer to the text, Sin seems to share some of Hell’s own features. Only a few lines away, Hell is said to be “thrice threefold”, (II, 645), like Dante’s Inferno, and Sin “… end[s] foul in many a scaly fold”, (II, 651). The word “fold” occurs in either line and the description of Hell is put side by side with that of Sin. Whether there is a wish to connect the two in such a way as to make us assimilate them, I am not sure since I am running short of arguments for it. But there certainly is a connection to sin as being “fair” at first sight and then “foul” on further examination; this may be far-fetched, but Sin could be said to be a representation of venereal disease and how sinful sexual behaviour leads to “foulness”, shall I say. This two-face aspect is a most important feature in Sin’s visual appearance. For one, it breaks unity, and thus steps away from God, I would argue, because the division from order to chaos comes in great part because of the uprising of a second will (and individuality), namely that of Satan. In other words, when all are one with God everything works out fine, but when a differentiation comes to be, problems begin. Sin embodies duality that way, and although she was not born like this, she is the first example of when one became two, as Satan gave birth to her by himself. So even if she did not start off as a two-natured monster, the beginning of her existence is tightly connected to duality nonetheless. I am usually wary of the use of numbers in analysis, so I hope I am not making too much of the dualities involved here. After all, the schism in Heaven was also a case of “when one became two”. And this can further be applied to Adam desiring a companion of his own kind, and the following catastrophe. Duality is always made better by the addition of a third party: Hell and Heaven are then completed by the creation of Eden, Adam and Eve are to be redeemed by the Son. If duality is intrinsically evil, trinity always saves the day.

Let us turn to Death. The aspect of Death is mostly one of absence (his evasive ontology I tried to reflect in the title of this essay, as he is the only character to whom Sin is a sister). Indeed, Milton first mentions this creature as a shape, “If shape it might be called that shape had none”, (II, 667). Death is black, or rather, he is not of any colour, since that is what black is. Fearful uncertainty characterises Death, and rightly so as it embodies one of the greatest mysteries of life. Other features of Death are his crown and his dart, to which I will come back in the following paragraph. This here paragraph is indeed quite short, but that is because Death’s aspect is a negative. Yet, there is more to say on Death’s appearance; especially his having a crown and a dart.

Death has a weapon, and not just any weapon: his is the instrument that will kill all that lives. But why did Milton choose a “dart”? My suggestion is the following: Milton may have used elements from the Book of Revelation to constitute Death. In 9, 10 of that book, we find these words: “And they [locusts] had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails: and their power was to hurt men five months.” That alone would not be enough, but there is more to support my suggestion that Milton refers to the Apocalypse of John in the making of Sin and Death. According to B. Rajan, “Usually … it is a tenth, not a third, of the heavenly host which rebels.”,[3] he tells us in his comment on the hexaemeron. In Paradise Lost, a third of the angels rebel and consequently fall. This, I think, may originate in the Book of Revelation as well. See 12, 4:

And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth: and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born.

These words do not refer to actual angels (at least I do not think so, though it could very well be according to one’s interpretation) but it would not be unusual to compare angels to stars. Satan is traditionally the morning star, and more to our point, he is compared to a comet in the very passage I discuss here: “Unterrified, and like a comet burned”, (II, 708). A few lines lower, “pestilence and war”, (II, 711), are mentioned in relation to the hair of the comet, and these two are half of the four horsemen to be found in Revelation. Moreover, 12, 4 also has interesting things to say about a woman and her ready to be devoured child. Should we see a connection to Death as the ready-to-be-slain son of Sin when Satan gets ready to fight him? I am aware of the rather rich images provided by the Book of Revelation, likely one could find there anything he wanted to fit his theories, but as the coincidences pile up, the case seems to be a more and more valid one. For instance, the locusts described by John are not only armed with deadly stings like Death owns, but they also have crowns too:

And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle; and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men. (Revelation 9, 7, italics mine)

The only two identifiable features of Death can be found together in the locusts of the Apocalypse. Both locusts and Death have for main mission to do harm to men, to torture them or to kill them. Death’s purpose in life is a little more varied than that, but essentially they share the same common objective: to deal with humans. The fact that Death is first mentioned on line 666 of the book may not be a coincidence at all, as the infamous number is only to be found in the Apocalypse.

Still in the Book of Revelation one can find these rather interesting words:

… and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit. (Revelation, 9, 1, italics mine)

In view of the passage that concerns Sin and Death, it is difficult not to think of Sin’s key, especially as her key opens onto an “illimitable Ocean without bound/ Without dimension, where length, breadth, and heighth,/ And time and places are lost” (II, 892-4). Any of these elements taken separately may be revoked as purely coincidental, but taken all together they tend to trace a coherent set of references to the Apocalypse. Given the roles attributed to Sin and Death, the references to the Apocalypse are not mismatched; Death’s similarity to the locusts sent to torture men perfectly fits with his future mission to appease his famine by feeding on human life. While the Book of Revelation looks a lot like a bad drug trip for the most part, it is not impossible, indeed arguable, that Milton used the imagery there to constitute Death in his aspect, as well as other elements in the poem, though I cannot say that there is a very strict coherent pattern in the borrowing of certain features. Possibly some of those features entered the poem half-unconsciously as Milton knew his Bible. However, coherence is achieved by the apocalyptical purpose of the hellish pair of gate-keepers, the Sin and Death squad of God.

The references to be found in Sin and Death do not stop there. There is a whole range of elements that clearly put Sin and Death in parallel with their Heavenly counterparts. B. Rajan, like many others, considers Sin, Death, and Satan, to be part of an “Infernal Trinity”.[4] Exactly what roles would the three Hell-Hosts have is not clear, but one can assume that it would be something like the Mother, the Son, and the Unholy Ghost. Unlike the set of references drawn from Revelation, the elements that call for a comparison to traditional Christian doctrine seem to have a more clearly defined purpose. Sin refers to Death as Satan’s “only son”, (II, 728), she further describes him as his “own begotten”, (II, 782); also, she tells him she will reign “At thy right hand”, (II, 869). In all of these instances, Sin definitely calls for a parallel between her own unholy family and that of Heaven. Arguably, she even lies to get to that parallel, for after all, Death is not the only child of Satan, she is herself his daughter, but one could say she is only a “daughter” and not a “son”, literally speaking. Sin is however not the only character to draw our attention towards the heavenly hosts; Satan does his share as well: “… I go/ This uncouth errand sole, and one for all/ Myself expose”, (II, 827). Throughout the poem, many are the instances where Satan can be compared to the Son, this is not something exclusively used in Book II; Satan’s very volunteering in place of all the fallen angels is mirrored by the Son’s proposal to sacrifice himself for humankind, and there are many other examples I could refer to here. What happens in this passage is that this scheme of mirroring the heavenly ones spreads out to Sin and Death so as to form the “Unholy Trinity”. Because of this, we cannot argue that Sin is individually mocking God and the Son, rather, the pattern of parody seems to come from a higher level, namely that of the author, Milton. He did not think much of the dogma of God being three, so it is possible to interpret the parallel as a potential jab against that dogma. Were I writing a longer work, I think it would be worthwhile to comment on all the other structural effects to be found in Paradise Lost, such as Hell resembling Heaven and other elements that tend to echo each other.

I propose now to take a look at what would characterise Sin, Death, and Satan, as an “Unholy Trinity”. In the context of the entities completing this unhallowed triad, Satan could be said to be a counterpart to God (I know this may sound like stating the obvious) because of his quality of creator: he made Sin out of nothing, so to speak. Sin is the parent of Death, the Son, and he is the one through whom all humans will have to pass to enter Hell, which is what Christ is to Heaven, though it is true one also has to pass through Death to enter Heaven. Sin as the infernal Mother takes the role of the procreating Father of Christian traditions, yet things are not all that simple. Their family tree looking like a stump, the relationship of each entity to another becomes relatively complex.

Incest is met at every branching of that Satanic tree. Sin is born of Satan alone, which does not exactly qualify as incestuous though it is obviously unnatural for a creature of God, Death is born of the union of Sin and Satan, and finally the Hell-Hounds are born of Death’s mating with Sin. The father mates with the daughter, who, unwillingly, becomes the lover of her son. What can be done of this rather dysfunctional family? According to my relatively humble knowledge of Greek mythology, incestuous unions are not a seldom occurrence, and as we know, Milton can heavily refer to Greek myths. Yet there certainly is more than that to it. There is a pattern of degeneration in the family of Satan; if he starts off as a beautiful angel, his daughter turns out to be a hybrid mixing humanness and reptile features. Furthermore, the child of their incestuous union is a complete figure of otherness as he cannot be distinguished perfectly even by Satan’s gaze, whose ability is thought to be much more efficient than that of mere humans. As to the fourth “member” of the family, the Hell-Hell hounds, they are mostly an unindividualised pack of beasts; they lost all angelic features, and they lost all unity too. The loss of unity, I think, is to be connected with what I said earlier about chaos and order and the structure of Hell resembling Sin. If this family went on, the descendents of the Hell-Hounds would probably be malefic maggots.

It is noteworthy that incest characterises Satan’s family; not only is it considered a sin, religiously speaking, but it also marks procreation as a less perfect creation than the kind God achieves. Similar to Adam and Eve’s only way to create offspring, sexual intercourse, the two-partied making of Satan and Sin create a monstrous child (however, Adam and Eve expected to have children before they knew of the Fall, but that is not a typical feature of the Christian tradition). The idea that every human is born sinful because of the carnal union of their parents can perhaps be found in the comparison between parthenogenesis and the immaculate conception God, the Father, can perform.

The question of hate in Heaven has always been a theologically loaded one, but along with Sin as the first female being of the universe comes the question of sex in Heaven. The one reference to this comes from Sin herself when she tells Satan her story: “… such joy thou took’st/ With me in secret, that my womb conceived/ A growing burden.”, (II, 765-7). The question of joy in Heaven may be much less interesting than that of hate, but that of physical, sexual joy, can be thought of more peculiar (though Milton clearly portrays a vision of sex that is sinless with Adam and Eve and how promiscuous they get, especially considering the above mentioned future children they expect to have to help them with their daily work). Thus sex per se is not automatically a sinful thing, yet what to think of Satan and Sin’s relationship? Well, for one, she is his very daughter, and while Milton could conceive of sinless sex, I would not suppose he would consider sinless incestuous sex (given that incest is not only a religious taboo but very much so an inherently human one, even atheists do not copulate with their daughters, generally). This incestuous nature is the first clue that something is not quite right, even in Heaven. The second point I ask myself about is whether the “joy” Satan took with Sin was shared. Indeed, Sin nowhere tells that she herself enjoyed the act, or even agreed to it, and so it is not inconsiderable that she may in fact have been raped by Satan. Raped in Heaven and raped in Hell? The story of Sin being what it is, that would not be unsuited. A third point is that this relationship with Satan was lived “in secret”, (II, 766), and that too brings up some questions. First of all, can there be secrets in Heaven? Whereas we have seen that there could be hate and even sex in Heaven, whether or not there can be secrets is much less certain. God is omniscient, after all; so there can be no secrets. What is most interesting, however, is that likely Satan believed there could be secrets and that God did not know everything. That argument is of major importance for critics who argue that Satan was tricked into doing what he did and that ultimately God is responsible for everything that happened, Fall included. This notion of secret also brings the fact that there was something to hide, something possibly wrong that needed to be kept from others, something possibly sinful. If Satan felt the need to hide, then surely he must have thought that what he was doing was not all that correct. But why exactly? If he thought the joy he took with his own daughter a thing not to do, then why did he do it at all? This would mean he knowingly chose to do evil. Any reason for the hiding can only be conjectural, since neither Sin nor Satan explicitly explains the why of the secrecy. There could be several origins: Satan could have been aware of the incestuous nature of the relation, and that it was “wrong”, he may have wanted no one to know about the affair, though why exactly I do not know (except for the reason previously mentioned), perhaps he discovered a new kind of joy with Sin and that raised suspicions in him (and perhaps also he did not want any other angel to find out “sex”, maybe Satan discovered sex, since Sin is the first female being of them all; although angels are traditionally genderless, Milton refers to them as males: Satan is a “he” and so are the other angels), lastly, if Satan was indeed raping Sin repeatedly, then he would not have wanted others to find out his crime. Whatever the reason, Satan, according to Sin, decided to keep the act a secret, thus admitting that he was not entirely at ease with the relationship and that probably, he was experiencing evilness.

To go back shortly to the idea of sinless and sinful sex, it is very likely that Milton differentiated sex as an act of love and sex as an act of lust; the latter characterising the relationship between Satan and Sin (and later on Sin and Death), as well as the first intercourse of Adam and Eve after the Fall. I will now pass on to the last topic of my essay: the allegorical nature of Sin and Death.

Patrick Cullen considers Book II to be “the most openly allegorical book of the poem – a book in which virtually every event has an allegorical dimension of one sort of another”.[5] With names such as “Sin” and “Death”, the allegories to be found in them is unmistakable, obviously. However, the evident allegory may not be all that simple, after all. Did Milton really mean to make these two allegorical beings at all? One would think that there is no question about it, if only because of the names perfectly fitting the actions (although this is more easily said of Death than of Sin), yet there is potentially another kind of interpretation. The idea is to take Sin and Death literally. One of the angels who teach Adam and Eve explains that it is somewhat difficult to describe heavenly things to mere humans (unless my memory fails me); from that, it is arguable that all these things that are beyond human perception have completely incomprehensible natures. Thus, Sin and Death could be said to be entities that literally do what they are called after, Death kills and Sin leads to Hell. The highway to Hell they build can be said to be equally literal in that frame of thinking. Ironically, arguing that these are not allegories backfires with the fact that if this is not an allegorical use of Milton’s, it is one from the angels who teach the human couple (yet, that does not work with either Sin and Death or their bridge, since only the narrative voice of the poet relates them, not the angels’). I realise my argument is fairly brittle. The nature of Sin and Death tends to push our conceptions of the world in which they (and we) live so far as to make it quite confusing; which led many a critic to be heavily disappointed and displeased by and with the infamous duo. Thus Samuel Johnson wrote:

To exalt causes into agents, to invest abstract ideas with form, and animate them with activity has always been the right of poetry. But such airy beings for the most part suffered only to do their natural office, and retire. Thus Fame tells a tale and Victory hovers over a general or perches on a standard; but Fame and Victory can do no more. To give them any real employment or ascribe to them any material agency is to make them allegorical no longer, but to shock the mind by ascribing effects to nonentity.[6]

Johnson has a problem with allegories doing actual things, things that go beyond the nature of the thing which they are allegories of. He would not allow Fame to have a cup of coffee, or Victory to take a bath, God forbid Sin and Death to build a bridge from Hell to Earth. This critic probably has a point when he says they are no longer allegories, in that the two entities exist as true characters within the poem; they are not a mere figure of speech. The question is whether or not an allegory has to remain an obvious allegory to be considered one. Many are the examples where allegories have features that do not belong exclusively to that which they allegorise. All of the allegorical characters of Everyman for instance have the ability to speak, which none of the allegorised concepts actually have. Thus Beauty, Faith and Knowledge do things that Johnson would not quite like. They are indeed anthropomorphised, yet I have never heard or read anyone arguing that they were not allegories. Another important question is whether allegories can do things without turning these very things into allegories too; can allegories live in a non-allegorical world. Sin and Death build a bridge, is the bridge an allegory if the builders are? Technically speaking, sin and death, as we know them in daily life, do not build any bridges, so it must not be that part of Sin and Death that enables them to do more than sin and death can do, in Johnson’s vision. To be perfectly honest, I am not sure where this is going, the question belonging more to a linguistic essay than the present one. Are Milton’s Sin and Death allegories that are given extra possibilities or are they simply not allegories at all? Does an enlarged allegory remain one? Can Sin and Death even be non-allegories given the names they bear? The last question I tried to engage in the beginning of this paragraph, to mild results. It could be interesting to venture the idea that Sin and Death not only are monstrous characters of the poem but also monstrous entities as literary ones, that is, that they escape even critics’ comprehension in their very nature. Many critics have been somewhat shocked by the obviousness of the allegorical use made with Sin and Death, and that puzzled them quite a good deal to see those two allegories from Hell doing so many unallegorical activities. Perhaps Milton aimed for a pair of entities that would seem out of human comprehension, as was my argument earlier, or that he wanted to have them monstrous and “other” on as many sides as he could. I would not exactly support that view myself as this seems a bit far-fetched; nonetheless, this could be interesting.

Although I certainly have not covered all the topics related to Sin and Death, I hope to have dealt with the main ones, at least partly. The children of Satan prove to be worth the close inspection which I could not find in most of the criticism I read (and I repeat that this may be due to my research rather than the lack of criticism on the issue). From their origins to their aspects, both Sin and Death are challenging us in a way that is never quite reached by other characters in Paradise Lost; although this is a bold claim, and likely wrong on certain levels, the Guardians of Hell, and its subsequent feeders, have that unique trait of being original creations of Milton, a characteristic that even God cannot claim to possess. I demonstrated the amount of coincidences to be found in Book II (for the passage that concerns us) and the Book of the Apocalypse, coincidences that stop being ones as they pile up to the level of organised references. I may have failed to provide those references with a strict reason to be, unless the apocalyptic roles of Sin and Death are to be compared with the frightening fate John of Patmos warns us of. Concerning the incestuous nature of Satan’s family, I have showed that it was a rather loaded issue since it begins in Heaven with the strange birth of Sin, and is further continued with the no less strange father-daughter sexual relationship between the two. In this I demonstrated, I think, how Sin and Death can be significant elements in arguments that do not directly concern them (as literary characters in a literary study), such as God’s omniscience and Satan’s knowledge or ignorance of it (the latter is what Sin suggests). Nevertheless, as I tried to show, Sin and Death per se are worthy of much scrutiny, scrutiny which they may have gotten from critics I have not read. Taken individually, Sin strikes us as a most damned creature. The first female ever to live, she is also the first being created not directly from and by God. Her only partner in womanhood is Eve, and both possess a “Sad instrument of all our woe”, (II, 872); for one an apple, for the other a terrible key. The connection between Sin and Eve is the one topic I omitted from my essay, but it too is a relevant theme. As to Death, the first procreated being of the universe, he is a black-hole of an entity. A shadow made of darkness, lusty like a brute beast, the self-declared king of Hell sounds a lot like his rebellious father, only worse and not romantic for a second. Although he shares that weak spot for incestuous affairs, and that sense of bravery, he is more of a debased version of Satan rather than a heroic saviour, which Satan devotes himself to be. Death’s main mission, unlike his father, is to satisfy his hunger to kill; he is not here to save anyone and is endowed with the most powerful weapon of all, he can kill everyone and everything save the Almighty and the Son. In Sin and Death, suffering and pain as well as grief and agony are polarised at both ends of the line: Sin does not in effect hurt anyone, nor does she wish harm to anyone either, her only major act in the epic is to keep Satan and Death from fighting, a noble and peaceful act; as to Death, he is the complete opposite: he never seeks to protect anyone from his selfish hunger, not even his own mother from his malevolent lust, his only wish in existence is to kill as much as he can. Satan’s offspring thus combines the conditions of being the aggressor and the prey, as Satan is God’s victim and Man’s misery-maker.









Bibliography
Primary Source

- Milton, John. Paradise Lost. London: Penguin Classics, 2000.

Secondary Sources

- Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: John Milton. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986.
- Cullen, Patrick. Infernal Triad, The Flesh, the World, and the Devil in Spenser and Milton. Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 1974.
- Empson, William. Milton’s God. London: Chatto & Windus, 1961.
- Forsyth, Neil. The Satanic Epic. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.
- Kean, Margaret. John Milton’s Paradise Lost: a Sourcebook. New York: Routledge, 2005.
- Rajan, Balachandra. Paradise Lost & The Seventeenth Century Reader. London: Chatto & Windus, 1947.

[1] The Holy Bible, Authorized King James Version. Thomas Nelson Bibles, 1970, 2001. All further references are to this edition.
[2] Milton, John. Paradise Lost. London: Penguin Classics, 2000. All further references are to this edition.
[3] Rajan, Balachandra. Paradise Lost & The Seventeenth Century Reader. London: Chatto & Windus, 1947, p. 40.
[4] p. 50.
[5] Cullen, Patrick. Infernal Triad, The Flesh, the World, and the Devil in Spenser and Milton. Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 1974, p. 104.
[6] Cited in Maccaffrey, G. Isabel. “Satan’s Voyage” Modern Critical Views: John Milton. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986, p. 32-33.