So, two things:
1, the bizness:
2, I ran out of pages from issue 289/290 to run in front of Dave's Genesis Question commentaries. Dave suggested I use Jewish, Christian or Muslim religious images. But then, Superman's Frenemy: David Birdsong sent in a bunch of (so far) unused Cerebus in Hell? images and now I'ma gonna run them. So:The Jaka's Story remaster has a Starcode! APR191258 First month orders will be signed and numbered! "However many orders there are in the next 3 weeks, that's how many signed copies there will be. Diamond will order over the initial orders by some other amount, and those will become inventory books available after the initial order...but they won't be signed." [Thanks again, Sean!-Matt]
Greg Hyland is Kickstartering the second volume of the Monster Atlas, and if he gets another fifteen hundred and fifty-eight bucks [Erk! I'm using the AMERICAN figures. in CANADIAN, he needs another 674 bucks CAD-Matt], it'll have Gerhard art like the first volume. It'll look a little something like this.
There's more auctions up at ComicsLink (eight days left). And last week's update has a special AMOC auction. (Seiler's winning at $100 US.)
If you're waiting for a Indiegogo live for the Postcard Kickstarter, like the one for the birthday card Kickstarter, I don't know if there will be one.
The remastered Volume 1 is available digitally for $9.99.
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21 December 14
Hi Troy & Mia!
Short one this week: trying to catch up on
my sleep after getting back from the Kitchens' last night:
Psalms 19:1-6
To the chief musician, A Psalm of David.
The heavens declare the glory of God: and
the firmament showeth his handiwork.
It's interesting that these are expressed
in the two different manners, allowing
for a multiplicity of inferences. The
fact that the first half of the verse expresses it as "declare" --
which can suggest either actual OR metaphorical speech --
that is, the heavens actually speaking in a language while the second
half of the verse expresses it as "showeth" (which limits the meaning
to a depiction or incarnation or both) suggests to me that "showeth"
is used to COMPEL the inference (or what I would INFER to be the right inference)
that "declare" is used literally: the heavens do actually speak.
The references appear to hearken back to
Genesis 1:6-8, but with a slightly different nuance, because the reference here
is to "heavens", plural, while Genesis 1:6-8 addresses the creation
of THE heaven, the firmament that separates "the waters" -- waters
under the heaven and waters over the heaven.
So, it seems to me there is a comparable compelled inference being
offered here. Just as there is a
suggestion of speech OR demonstration (first half) so there's a suggestion of
demonstration, only (the second half), the way it is expressed suggests that
There isn't just one heaven, there is more than one and that these "plural
heavens" are different from, not only the firmament (Heaven), but from
each other. BUT that -- however many
heavens there are (The Koran tells us that there are seven) -- each heaven, by
means of literal speech, declares the glory of God.
Day unto day uttereth speech, and night
unto night showeth knowledge
As I read this, it seems to me obviously to
relate to the dichotomous relationship between "day" and
"night" -- that the day is God's first creation, while the night is
God Himself. And that they are separate
consciousnesses. God isn't His first
creation, but God knows what His first creation is thinking at all times.
Thinking is, by its nature and in many of
its aspects, self-directed. We literally
talk to ourselves inside our heads. What
this verse appears to suggest to me is that this is an invariable conditional
aspect of creation itself.
God's first creation, "day" has a
specific consciousness and that consciousness speaks to itself.
"Day unto day". And that "day speech" takes many
forms. Some of it is lucid and some of
it is just speech -- talking for its own sake "talking just to hear myself
speak". Whereas, in the same sense,
God doesn't speak to Himself in the same way.
Whereas "day", as a limited construct and entity, muses upon
things, speculates, declaims (the actual AND the fictitious AND the
delusional)...
…and I would argue that that's what
Scripture IS: mostly "day" musing, speculating and declaiming and
God, intermittently, interjecting Reality…
…"night unto night" -- God
speaking to God -- is just a pure demonstration/expression of invariable
knowledge. God doesn't speculate because
God Knows. It's the definition of God:
omniscience. God doesn't declaim in the sense that the YHWH does -- rule upon
rule upon rule, proscribing and attempting to micro-manage human behaviour --
God just expresses the nature of Reality, the construction that God made in
which we ALL enact our lives.
"Here's where you are, here's the order everything was created in,
'Be fruitful and multiply'" and in God's sure Knowledge, that's really all
that's needed to be expressed. We, as
human beings -- and "day" as God's first creation with delusions of being
God -- will pursue multiple enactments and examine all possibilities over
the course of our billions of years on planet earth and, at last, thoroughly understand
Reality.
As if this wasn't complicated enough --
but, I have to say, very lucidly and specifically expressed so as to limit --
but not eliminate -- incorrect interpretation -- the third verse seems to
create no end of problems for the KJV translators. I suspect because they didn't really
understand what the first two verses were saying, so it was impossible for them
to arrive at a translation that continued the sense of 19:1 and 19:2 as they
read it. What they came up with was:
[interpolated: There is] no speech nor
language where their voice is not heard.
and then added, as an alternative
translation in the margin:
No speech nor language without [interpolated:
these their] voice is heard
And only after these variations, do they
offer the literal English translation of the Hebrew:
No speech nor language without their voice
heard.
Which follows naturally and smoothly, I think,
from how I'm reading it. God's first
creation expresses him/her/its self in terms of thought and speech -- musing
and speculating and declaiming -- while God expresses Himself in demonstrations
of God's Knowledge which is Absolute and Irrefutable…BUT! characteristic of
God's grace, God's undeserved kindness: there is "no speech nor language
without their voice heard".
That is, that that's the purpose of
speech as an attribute of human beings.
Everything we say, we express either what
God's first creation is musing, speculating and declaiming upon or we express
God's Reality. ALL voices are heard,
though. Arguably -- and I think it's the
purpose behind the Psalm itself -- this is the driving idea behind
creation: expression. The sheer magnitude and panoply of ideas,
good, bad, indifferent, right, wrong and everything in between that came into
existence as an implication of God's first creation having autonomy and free
will needed something as immense as the known universe just to make sure that
it could all -- however long it took -- find voice, express and enact itself.
This thought, as I read the text, continues
in the subsequent verses:
Their [line/rule/direction] is gone out
through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world: In them hath he
set a tabernacle for the sun
Of course, at the time, David wouldn't have
had an idea of the immensity of what was being expressed. To David the sun was just a ball of fire that
passed through the heavens every day. He
had no idea of the relative size of the earth and the sun or the implications
of the context as expressed. He would have read it as being aligned with what
would be revealed in Ezekiel with the eastward facing gate: sun worship, but in
the name of God/YHWH.
"Day unto day" (YHWH) expressing and
"night unto night" (God) demonstrating not only holds true as the
nature of human beings and human societies, but also as the nature of the earth
itself -- "THROUGH ALL the earth, and their words to the END of the world"
-- and extends from there to the
sun. The discussion, the expression,
musing, speculation and declamation in tandem with God's knowledge, is taking
place on and in the sun as well: as the roiling conflagration/discussion
between helium (YHWH) and hydrogen (God).
And then God provides an analogy of what
this Reality is, the nature of What God Is Doing and Has Done and Will Do which
couldn't really be appreciated until our present day with our own Sure
Knowledge: that the earth is a tiny chunk of rock orbiting a mid-sized star and
that all the stars visible in the night sky are a mere fragment of the totality
of God's creation. It took literally
thousands of years to go from God's revelation of His Reality in Psalm 19 to
the point where a human being would know enough to understand Who He Is which,
as I read it, is expressed as:
Which is as a bridegroom coming out of his
chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race
His going forth from the end of the heaven
and his circuit unto the ends of it: and there is nothing hid from the heat
thereof
Next week, God willing: More Psalms.
A Very Merry Christmas to both of you and
to Drexel!
Best,
Dave
____________________________________________________________________________Next Time: Alright, enough of this Aardvark bullshit, I'm switching this blog to a REAL comic book treasure: Rob Liefeld!
5 comments:
Man. These David Birdsong collages are getting better and better. This is the one that made me realize something cool is happening, here. At some point these should be collected in some fashion. I get the impression he's trying to subtly outdo his previous effort with each subsequent effort, rather than just "eh, I have to do this today, here we go". I'm at the point now where I'm looking forward more to what he's going to do each Sunday than the actual post itself.
Thank you, Mike. I was really trying to get Cerebus deep into these images. One of the biggest differences is that I attempted to adjust the shading on Cerebus to match the scenes he is in. You may also notice that they are not from Dore’s Inferno (the ones with Dante and Virgil are from Purgatory). The idea is that Cerebus is “somewhere else” before he got to Hell? Or after? Dave has copies, but hasn’t done anything with them yet. Matt came up with a funny caption for one of them. It might be another fun audience participation activity.
Hiya David -
I have a Dore question for you, how can I contact you?
Steve
and yeah, I second what Mike had to say.
Steve, you can reach me at birdsongdr@gmail.com
Thanks a lot Dave. Man, that is something what you said! Like your earlier statements in a commentary that God's chariot possibly literally divided Elijah in two, making it possible for Elisha to receive the double portion of his spirit, I like how your literal word for word reading of the scriptures thinks of these things. You are like the Bereans and search the scriptures daily to see how these Godly things are true, and Jesus Lamb will continue to bless you.
As for the 19th Psalm, first let me say that you saying its opening would mean that the heavens do speak, to me spiritually is just what it was pointing to because it meant God's people. I also like your use of the word showiness for this, which goes along exactly with what I said last fax to you about the meaning of Eve's Hebrew name being sheweth, in relation to what you said about that in another commentary.
The above helps me see, how Genesis 1:6-8 is talking about Jesus as the heaven, but that Psalm 19 is talking about his followers. The separating of the waters from the waters by the heaven in Genesis, points to Jesus separating his followers from Satan's. John shows this too in his gospel by explaining how John the Baptist, who took Lucifer's place, is likewise separating those living waters (Those being baptized) from Satan's (The Pharisees who come to question John). Thanks for helping me see this.
As for, "Day unto day utterth speech and night unto night showeth knowledge.," I think the Day points also to Jesus, not as created, but manitested into the world because of Satan. I think night was first Lucifer, but replaced by Jesus who became sin and darkness for us by his death on the cross. Your thoughts on the day being an actual creation and the night being like God are interesting. I see Jesus as the living 7th sabbath day of rest also (I see him as all 7 days). You having said that God was like the night, to me points out where Lucifer got it from. Light and Darkness or Day and Night or the Law and The Law of Liberty, have to exist and both scriptures say are holy and just, but once Christ came and comes into one's life, the school teacher falls away, and Jesus fulfills the scriptures.
When I learned about the law of inference, I next used a Bible concordance. My thought had been, that any Old Testament word or thought, had to have its fulfillment in the New Testament, and I found the inference does simply that. In the case of the words about how scriptures say, "And the evening and the morning were the (fill in the blank) day.," I quickly found Psalm 19, and then the New Testament scripture saying how, have the people not heard the gospel, but they have it says, and that the saints voices went around the earth testifying to God's words, which perfectly ties into what verse 9 says in Psalm 19. Yes, in a much better living way, creation points to what you called the expression, of what I call the gospel.
I believe the tabneracle for the sun pointed to Jesus as that Light that spiritually fulfills the 6 days (Days and nights) of creation in that Jesus and Satan wrestling match over our souls, where I think the tabernacle more so points to our temples being where the Holy Ghost dwells. There are other scriptures that imply the duo meaning of sun (Like in Malachi) also meaning the son, and how it like a bridegroom (Jesus) makes it circuit from one end of the heavens to the other (Jesus' bride and followers through faith before he came, or those afterwards until this time.).
So, yes, I think God's relationship with his Father as he described in his prayer to him in the garden, shows simply as you say, how that in my thinking, the son's relationship to the Father, was constantly God's expression of creation pointing to him fulfilling it, inside of the son, who asked that we could someday be in God as he was also in Him before time began.
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