Flaker of Flints

What I wanted, most deeply, was to depict a case of religious hysteria or, if you will, a schizophrenic individual with heavily religious tendencies. Martin, the husband, struggles with his god in order to win Karin back to his world. But since he is the type of person who needs that which is tangible, his efforts are in vain.

Once upon a time, there was a city full of buildings. One day, the sun was not rising up. Then something worse was happening. All the buildings were wobbly. Crashing into each other. They used the magic wand again. Then something really bad happened. Everyone was falling off the buildings, the humans were switching buildings. So the humans put a magic rainbow. Every building was having little cracks, so then every day they glued them back. And it turns out the whole earth was upside down.

God uses the animals Behemoth and Leviathan to remind us that, like everything that exists, the enormous forces of chaos and disorder are subject to divine power, even if it does not annihilate them. From the opening words the emphasis is on the creatureliness of these mighty beasts: "Look at Behemoth, my creature, just as you are!" (Job 40:15). Job has a trait in common with these animals: all have come from God's hand. They are, as it were, holdovers from the chaos out of which the world, the cosmos, emerged. Because of his undeserved suffering, Job sees existence as a chaos, a continuation of the original disorder. God is trying to show Job that divine power controls these chaotic forces, although at the same time God says that they will not be destroyed. They represent the wicked of whom God has just been speaking (Job 40:11–13); they are forces existing in the world. The Lord does not forthwith put an end to these remnants of the original chaos (into which Job has

                                          ...see and hear the lovely shapes and sounds intelligible of that eternal language, which thy God utters, who from eternity doth teach himself in all, and all things in himself.

"We have many professors in the philosophy department who study and admire Plato, but none of them actually believes in the theory of the Forms, or feels it, or lives by it."

...Jeremiah had seen what there was for all to see if only they would look, but the others refused to look, simply denied, and were unable to see. The royal folk had for so long lived in a protective, fake world that their perceptual field was skewed and with their best looking they could not see what was there to see...

They still call themselves the intelligentsia. Writers! Scientists! They don't believe in anything. Their capacity for faith has atrophied through lack of use. My God, what kind of people are they? Their eyes are blank. They're thinking how not to sell themselves cheap, how to get paid for every breath they take. They know they were born to "be someone," to be an elite! They say, "You live but once." How can such people believe in anything at all?

The single individual is higher than the universal.

...[Coleridge] once believed he could grasp the truth of things in his pantheistic ecstasies; in the daemonic poems ecstasy is still a reality, but the possibility is raised of it being profoundly misleading....Coleridge is not just afraid of loss of self in ecstasy, he is afraid of hallucination, of being wrong...

...Make yourself thoroughly, intuitively, master of the exceeding difficulties of admitting a one Ground of the Universe (which, however, must be admitted) and yet finding room for anything else...

Train us, Lord, to fling ourselves upon the impossible, for behind the impossible is your grace and your presence; we cannot fall into emptiness. The future is an enigma, our road is covered by mist, but we want to go on giving ourselves, because you continue hoping amid the night and weeping tears through a thousand human eyes.

In the world, there might still be an obstinate residue of the unknown. We are still far removed from a completely transparent universe. Job still has many questions, but the unknown is no longer a monster that threatens to devour everything, including his few and fragile certainties. The beast that is his ignorance has not vanished, but, like Behemoth and Leviathan, it is under control because of what he now knows about God and God's love.

... (not that love and truth are ever finally separable).