The Original Originality

“‘Every doctoral thesis is composed largely of others,’ Kolibri explained. ‘A new thesis is always an orgiastic agglomeration of old theses that, er, fertilise each other so as to give birth to something new and unprecedented.’”

Walter Moers, Rumo & His Miraculous Adventures, trans. John Brownjohn (2004)

You know how when you heartily recommend a novel you recently read to someone, that person tends to have an irritating habit of asking what said novel was about?

Granted, it’s a perfectly reasonable question; and granted, I myself display the same habit of asking it; but all the same, it’s proved a difficult one to answer in any kind of manageable, coherent, accurate, and appealing way with regard to the novel I’ve been most heartily recommending to people in recent months, namely Rumo & His Miraculous Adventures by Walter Moers.¹ This is because Rumo is a very strange book. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that I have never read anything else like it. In terms of subject-matter, it’s a sort of high science fantasy;² in terms of scope, it’s remarkably close to a traditional epic (though in prose); in terms of tone, it frequently reads like a highfalutin academic article. And as for what it’s about … well, I have tried to write some sort of a blurb that doesn’t give too much away and I just can’t manage it. I am simply going to have to steal the one off the back of the book.

 

This, of course, is the front of the book.

Rumo is a little Wolperting who will one day become the greatest hero in the history of Zamonia. Armed with Dandelion, his talking sword, he fights his way across Overworld and Netherworld, two very different worlds chock-full of adventures, dangers, and unforgettable characters: including Rala, the beautiful girl Wolperting who cultivates a hazardous relationship with death; General Ticktock, the evil commander of the Copper Killers; Ushan DeLucca, the finest and most weather-sensitive swordsman in Zamonia; Professor Abdullah Nightingale, inventor of the Chest-of-Drawers Oracle; and, worse luck, the deadly Metal Maiden.

Much as I take my hat off to the blurbist³ responsible for this description, it’s worth remarking that he or she hasn’t mentioned, for instance, the heart-restarting abilities of the Non-Existent Teenies’ subcutaneous submarine; or the floating rock populated by Demonocles who make a point of only eating things that are still alive; or the city of Murkholm, where the foul weather really is out to get you; or the long and bloody history of the monarchs of Hel, who have for some years operated a devious forced immigration policy inspired by a children’s picture-book; or the dead yetis who serve as Netherworld’s ferrymen, owing their continued animation to the powers of the Cogitating Quicksand in which they were asphyxiated; or the many sieges of Lindworm Castle, inhabited by highly intelligent dinosaurs who could rout armies just by dancing but were eventually brought to ruin through flattery of their creative-writing skills.

On which note, I’m strongly inclined to offer Walter Moers a good deal of flattery as regards his creative-writing skills (not forgetting the skills of John Brownjohn in translating Moers’ original work into such elegant English). I have no idea how he manages to come up with this stuff – one brilliant madcap invention after another, and what’s more, all the different brilliant madcap threads are beautifully tied together throughout the course of the story, so that none of the captivating bizarrities that populate it seems superfluous. Moers has put together this astonishingly rich and enthralling universe just from out of his own imagination – out of nothing.

Only that’s not quite true, is it? Because however stupendously original Moers might have been in creating the world of Zamonia – indeed, however stupendously original any author might have been in dreaming up his or her own fictional universe – it is nevertheless the case that all his raw material was already given him. Every product of the human imagination is only a variation on what already exists in the real world. Take Professor Abdullah Nightingale’s Chest-of-Drawers Oracle: chests of drawers and predictions of the future are well known enough to us already; what Moers has done is combined the two. Or take the Cogitating Quicksand that reanimates the dead yetis: quicksand is already a known quantity; what Moers has done is ascribed to it a characteristic – the ability to think – that in the real world belongs to other things, and then run with that idea by throwing in some more pre-existent ideas about the yeti and reanimated corpses. The same is true of everything supposedly original that a human being has ever produced. It’s like Professor Ostafan Kolibri, another of the unforgettable characters that Rumo’s blurbist failed to mention, said about doctoral theses (a particularly pertinent opening quotation given that I currently stand on the brink of starting a PhD of my own): everything we produce that seems new is just an agglomeration of what other people did before us. We don’t come up with this stuff in a vacuum; all we can ever do is push around the pieces of what’s already there into different arrangements. We build on what our predecessors have built on what their predecessors have built on what their predecessors have built on what THEIR predecessors have built, and so on and so forth, and push back far enough and you’ll reach a bedrock of something that exists in the world without any dependence at all on human imagination. There’s a sense in which human imagination is subordinate to the natural world: it cannot prescribe to it what it will be like, but only fashion Cloudcuckooland⁴ after its independently pre-existent likeness.

So however in awe I am of Walter Moer’s creative abilities in dreaming up the astonishingly rich and enthralling universe of Rumo, it’s got to be nothing next to how in awe I am of God’s creative abilities in dreaming up the astonishingly rich and enthralling universe we live in. God started with nothing. He didn’t just think of every single one of the items that exists in the universe – stars and solar systems and galaxies and air and water and rocks and mountains and volcanoes and trees and flowers and insects and animals; the daffodil and the duck-billed platypus, the northern lights and Niagara Falls, the moon and the Milky Way – but conceived of the whole framework within which all that stuff would exist. God dreamed up gravity. He dreamed up the atom. He dreamed up dimensions and the passage of time. He dreamed up the five senses and the four seasons. If the universe were a symphony, God wouldn’t just be its composer, but the inventor of the entire concept of music.

For Jesus has been counted worthy of more glory than Moses – as much more glory as the builder of a house has more honour than the house itself. For every house is built by someone, but the builder of all things is God.⁵ – Hebrews 3:4

Whatever we build, and however new and unprecedented our constructions may seem, God remains the builder of everything. He gave us not only the natural-world items and phenomena that ultimately inspired our creative endeavours, but also the imagination to push around these pieces into different arrangements – brilliant, madcap, astonishingly rich and enthralling arrangements. However in awe I am of Walter Moers’ creative abilities, it’s got to be nothing next to how in awe I am of God who gave him them; indeed, the more in awe I am of Walter Moers’ creative abilities, the more and much more I must be in awe of God who gave him them. God built each of our brains. There is, there can be, no invention we have the capacity to dream up that could ever stray beyond God’s capacity to dream things up. That’s not to say we don’t distort our use of our creative abilities to dream up things that stray beyond the goodness of his nature, but even that is only distortion and so, again, not true originality. God’s creativity is the ultimate creativity, the original originality to which every other creative invention owes itself.

And so how much more glory than Moers or Moses or anyone is God worthy of? Every creative endeavour – be it novel, doctoral thesis, or blog post; be it music or visual art or drama or whatever else – is built by someone, but the builder of all things is God.

Footnotes

¹ It was given to me as a present by two extremely lovely friends – several years ago, actually, but it’s an intimidatingly large book and it was only earlier this year that I actually managed to settle down and finish it. Here it is on Hive, https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Walter-Moers/Rumo/145408, which if you didn’t know is a way to shop online for books while supporting local independent bookshops; win-win.

² ‘High fantasy’ means fantasy set in its own fictional universe, rather than the same one we inhabit. ‘Science fantasy’ means fiction that sits somewhere between science fiction and fantasy. I call Rumo ‘science fantasy’ because the universe in which it takes place seems to operate on scientific principles rather than outright magic, but it’s still all extremely far removed from the world as we know it.

³ Which is a real word; scroll down to ‘related forms’: http://www.dictionary.com/browse/blurb?s=t.

⁴ Here meaning not the bubblegum happyland that gets destroyed in The Lego Movie, but the general realm of fantasy and fiction and creative ideas. The term comes from Aristophanes’ Birds, by the way, a fifth-century-BCE comedy in which a couple of Athenians decide life in the polis isn’t really working for them and set off to found their own utopia on the aerial border between gods and mortals.

⁵ Whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=hebrews+3&version=ESVUK.

Trailers

“Hurry up. Tick tock. Don’t want to miss the previews – and all of the excessive commercials.”

A Series of Unfortunate Events S1 E3, ‘The Reptile Room: Part One’ (2017)¹

I love trailers.

 

These seats aren’t as fancy as the ones in the last cinema I went to. Then again, I probably paid a lot more than I would have at the cinema in the picture.

Honestly, I find myself genuinely saddened when I arrive to the cinema late and miss out on a portion of the specially-selected audience-appropriate run of trailers shown before the feature film. The trailers are where the magic begins. Unlike the parade of consumer advertisements that invariably precedes them, they don’t belong to the mundane outside world and its endless mechanical exchanging of goods and services; they are little nuggets of other worlds, three-minute glimpses into the lovingly-drawn private universe of this director or that.² It’s during the trailers that the dull concerns of reality are stripped away and one’s soul is reawakened to the teeming possibilities of the human imagination, and so primed to plunge straight into the story of the following feature presentation without needing the first few minutes of exposition to really settle down to the thing at hand. By the trailers one’s appetite is whetted for what follows; they are the canapés where the feature film is the main course.

What they are decidedly not is films in their own right. They may perhaps be well-crafted and enjoyable pieces of cinematic artistry in their own right,³ but at the end of the day, a trailer isn’t designed to make you love the trailer; it’s designed to make you want to go and see the film it’s promoting.

If it sounds as if I’m stating the obvious, good. Now that we’ve all got a picture in our heads of someone obsessing over how cool a trailer is and yet failing to express any enthusiasm whatsoever to watch the film it’s about, and a sense of how odd and amiss such an attitude would seem, it’s time for me to throw this week’s spiritual analogy into the mix.

See, I think this world is and has been strewn with a whole variety of things that can be plausibly understood as trailers for the world to come. A bunch of the miracles Jesus performed while he was walking about on earth – ‘signs’ as the New Testament calls them⁴ – can be put into this category. It’s often emphasised – and very rightly so, I might add – that Jesus’ signs were designed to demonstrate his identity as God by proving his power over creation, but there are any number of ways he could have demonstrated that: the fact that a comfortable majority of the miracles recorded in the gospels consist of the supernatural healing of diseases and disabilities⁵ reveals something more than Jesus’ divine power. It reveals something of the nature of the coming kingdom he preached about – in this case, that there will be an end to physical suffering. That’s not the whole picture of what the new creation is going to be like, any more than a trailer gives you every detail of the plot of the film to which it pertains,⁶ but it’s a nugget, a glimpse.

Another example is marriage. Paul wrote that marriage is an analogy for the relationship between Christ and the Church; John recorded a vision of the ultimate cosmic wedding-feast in question; Jesus affirmed that after the resurrection, people aren’t going to get married to each other any more.⁷ Marriage as we know it now, then, is a trailer for what God’s relationship with his people will be like in the world to come. It’s not the whole picture, but it’s a glimpse.

In fact, there’s arguably an extent to which every good thing God gives us in this age is a sort of trailer for the utterly, exhaustively, and unimpeachably good world to come, if not as clear a one as the above examples. After all, if that world will exhibit goodness to its fullest extent, everything good we have now must be a tiny piece of it, however dim a reflection it may represent.

Now go back to that image of someone obsessing over how much he or she loves a trailer, yet showing little interest in the film said trailer was designed to promote. Isn’t it arguably just as odd and amiss when we obsess over the good things of this world and show little interest in the ultimately good world to come?

I’m not saying, just to be clear, that supernatural healings and marriage and all the good things of this world aren’t actually good or worth wanting after all. Didn’t I start this post by saying that I love trailers? And indeed, trailers can be excellent bits of cinematography in and of themselves. On top of that, when one has to wait a really long time for the actual film to come out, one appreciates every frame of trailer one can get one’s hungry eyes on all the more; I lost count, for instance, of how many times I watched the Spider-man: Homecoming trailer before I was able to actually go and see the film.⁸ (It was well good, by the way. Would heartily recommend.) Since we haven’t been issued with a release date for the new creation, then, it’s no wonder we’re keen to enjoy as many trailers as we can in the meantime.

What we mustn’t do is forget that the trailers are only trailers, and the point of a trailer isn’t to make you love the trailer, but to give you a flavour of how good the feature film is going to be. Every trailer of the new creation that we get to enjoy should increase our longing for when we finally get to see the real thing. Equally, if God in his wisdom and his steadfast love denies any one of us access to a particular trailer – if no physical healing comes despite prayers that it would, if we don’t find a spouse despite dearly wishing for one, whatever it may be – we can be reassured that, ultimately, we’re not really missing out: the trailer was only a trailer and we’re still going to get to see the feature film. That doesn’t make waiting for the release date magically easy, but it offers great comfort nonetheless.

In fact, the only way to really miss out isn’t by failing to experience any particular one of the trailers, but by failing to take advantage of the opportunity to see the feature film. Advance bookings are open; Jesus already paid the ticket price; the release date is unknown, but sooner every day. Tell your friends. This one really is a must-see.

Footnotes

¹ I finished watching the first series of the Series this week. It’s very nicely put together, faithful to the books and in some ways improves on them. Good show, Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/watch/80114990?trackId=200257859.

² As lovingly-drawn private universes go, the trailer for Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is too spectacular for me not to put a link to it in this post:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8oVfkZM3pA. I hope the film lives up to it.

³ The UK trailer for The Pirates! In an Adventure, with Scientists is a good example of a trailer that’s kind of its own thing as well as a promotion for the feature film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWOFLtsDvbw. Or, indeed, think of this ‘first look’ trailer for Frozen that’s essentially a short story in its own right, with barely a hint at the actual contents of the feature film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WdC4DaYIeQ.

⁴ The Greek word is σημεῖον (sēmeion). It means ‘sign’. There’s really nothing more to it than that.

⁵ If I can count (which is somewhat doubtful) twenty-one of thirty-seven recorded miracles of Jesus were healings, not counting driving out demons or raising the dead. That’s about fifty-seven per cent. (I totally cheated and checked a list, https://www.thoughtco.com/miracles-of-jesus-700158, by the way, just in case you were under the impression I could spontaneously reel off a list of Jesus’ recorded miracles off the top of my head.)

⁶ Unless it’s this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXSj1y9kl2Y. Nailed it again, Studio C.

⁷ You’re looking at the end of Ephesians 5, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ephesians+5&version=ESVUK, the middle of Revelation 19, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelation+19&version=ESVUK, and the middle of Matthew 22, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+22&version=ESVUK (or Mark 12, or Luke 20, but there are only so many hyperlinks it’s seemly to put in one footnote).

⁸ And now I really want to see the film again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0D3AOldjMU. And am also already raring to go for a sequel. *Sigh.*

Ever Restless: Thoughts on Scriptural Acquaintance

Pintel:                  You know you can’t read.

Ragetti:                It’s the Bible; you get credit for trying.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006)

You know, guys, it’s all very well making a lot of noise about how much importance we place on what the Bible says, but how good a grasp of what it says do most of us actually have?

 

What a snazzy arty picture of a Bible.

For instance, I was browsing the book (or books?) of Kings the other day and found a whole load of stuff I don’t recall ever having encountered before. My favourite new discovery was the story of Ahab king of Israel making a fateful attempt to reclaim Ramoth-gilead from the Syrians despite a warning that his four hundred prophets were speaking falsely when they promised success in this endeavour.¹ And if you’re shrugging your shoulders to the effect that that story didn’t come up in Sunday school – first off, you should go and read the story because it’s great, and second, that only adds weight to my case. Why don’t we know these obscure stories? Why doesn’t it bother us that we don’t know these obscure stories? Much as we’d situate ourselves in the orthodox camp with our declarations that all scripture is the word of God, do we really believe that the story of Ahab’s last stand is as inspired as, say, John 3:16? Plus, to reiterate a point I heard a very clever and godly person make earlier this summer, why would we not bat an eyelid at Jewish or Muslim children learning to recite their scriptures in their original languages, and yet consider it pretentious for an adult to have her Greek New Testament out during a church service?² Why can’t we identify half the scriptural references in the hymns we sing? Why is it not normal for the Christian to have in her head a basic outline of the history of Israel during the first millennium BCE? Why am I so much better at Sporcle’s Harry Potter Top 200 character-naming quiz than its Bible Top 200 one?³

Why do I find it so easy to prioritise blogging about what the scriptures say over actually going and reading what they say?

On which note, I’ll leave you for today with a little poem I recently put together. It’s designed as an encouragement to explore and get to know the Bible better, but frankly, if it should instead deter you from continuing to read this post any further, such that you seek solace in the next hyperlink on which your eyes alight (which happens to be in my first footnote below), it may have fulfilled its purpose just as well…

I want to chart the scriptures as one charts a sea,

Not just hiding in the harbours most familiar to me,

But proceeding boldly with my flag unfurled

To discover where those harbours fit within the wider world.

I want to plot each island, grasp its shape and span,

Trace its every mile of coastline as exactly as I can;

I want to mine its treasures to their deepest seams;

I want to slake my salt-soaked thirst from its forever-flowing streams;

I want to trek its contours, every ridge and fold,

And appropriately marvel at the wonders I behold;

And then I’ll hoist my anchor and I’ll spread my sails

And set off to chart another one, whatever that entails.

I want to chart the scriptures as one charts a sea:

Though I’ll know them ever better, they’ll wrongfoot me constantly.

I want to learn the rhythms of their pulsing tide

And know at any point just where I am and what’s on every side.

I want to sift old wives’ tales from the true report:

How does what I’ve seen myself align with what I have been taught?

I want to feel my smallness when the waves rise high:

To explore is not to tame; it would be foolishness to try.

I want to come back changed from every voyage made,

What I’ve seen etched in my countenance, too awed to be afraid.

I want to tell these stories with my eyes aflame:

There are whole new worlds I’ve glimpsed and I want all to glimpse the same,

And though there’s no exhausting what might be explored,

May my soul be ever restless to explore it further, Lord.

Footnotes

¹ I found it pretty hilarious, to be honest: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Kings+22&version=ESVUK.

² The said conversation took place at Tyndale House, whence a new edition of the Greek New Testament has gone to press and will hit the shelves later this year: https://www.crossway.org/bibles/the-greek-new-testament-produced-at-tyndal-hconly/. It’s a specially good one not least because lots of manuscript evidence has been taken into account when determining things like spelling, diacritics, and paragraph divisions. Although you should probably know that I’m kind of biased in its favour on account of the fact that I did a microscopic smidgen of work on it last summer.

³ Go on, have a go: https://www.sporcle.com/games/Sforzando/bible_200. If you get all of them first try, I’ll buy you a Tyndale House Greek New Testament.