More Kraken Musing

Continuing on Kraken, by China Miéville:

China Miéville imagines a wizard who, unable to defeat death, manages to cheat. Grisomentum burns himself on a funeral pyre, has his ashes gathered by a devotee, who then combined the ash with water and gum arabic. The devotee then picks up the ink of his master in a fountain pen, and writes out his thoughts, orders, commands... on paper. Grisomentum lives on in the ink, he has BECOME the ink.

It's important to look away from the page as the devotee scrawls his pen across the paper. It's curious because I have a friend who's father was a missionary, and he once asked his dad how he thought the bible was actually written, and this devout Southern Baptist pastor described a process we might easily call "automatic writing".

"In the beginning was the Word"

I'm enjoying the idea that Abraham/Jehovah was just such a magician. He attaches himself to any war-mongering race with "chosen people" aspirations in order to spread his holy book, the more copies, the more likely he would be to succeed. The Gideon's must be his most noble of knights, as well as the Jews and of course the Mohammedans, who forbid the destruction of the Koran as a mortal sin.

It would be clever to foster three religions that all include your basic book as holy writ, and yet all feel they are in direct competition. Sort of encourages printing. If God is a book, I wonder what it would take to remove Jehovah/Allah from the world? One hell of a bonfire...

Curiously, I accidentally drowned my Kraken library book this week, carrying it in my bag that was in the roof rack, driving through a pouring rain. Instead of a book burning, I had a book drowning.

This syncs with a number of strange submarine or subconscious syncs of the past week. As if there were a blurring between consciousness and the subconscious going on. For instance, I was creating an illustration of a yacht just before Thanksgiving, but for some reason I forgot to include the waterline stripe. This stripe symbolically divides the above from below, the light from the shadow. If the stripe is gone, then what is now separating these two worlds?

Exactly. The barrier is down. Make a run for it.