Please Hold For Dave Sim 2/2020(?)

Hi, Everybody!

Green Dante/Green Virgil!

And Dave's gonna be at Cerebus Archive Number Eight: Women around 3:30 PM Eastern.

And since I had a thing on Thursday, there is no Please Hold video today.

But Dave sent me:

A left-handed typing PLEASE HOLD FOR DAVE SIM overlapping the last few days of the CAN8 Kickstarter (we are nothing if not unconventional, right?) 1) because Matt's meeting with his accountant Thursday when we would ordinarily do this and 2) I can type this left-handed ahead of time (thus creating the ILLUSION of timely, new content produced on the fly) and 3) CEREBUS Superfan JEFF SEILER's question is the only one that came in so far. Take it away, Jeff!

JEFF SEILER, VETERAN OF ALL NINE CEREBUS KICKSTARTERS (AND THANK YOU, JEFF) "Dave, to what extent did you refer to our mythological histories of antiquity in CEREBUS? The most obvious, to me, was utilizing elements of Homer's THE ODYSSEY, in GOING HOME, but what about, say, BEOWULF or GILGAMESH? Or, as a corollary, any of the classical Greek tragedies or comedies? I know that you have said more than once (while stealing the line) "If you're gonna steal, steal from the best." But how far back did you go? Okay, thanks Matt. Best to you and the lovely ladies, Jeff."

Hi, Jeff!

Yes, best always to Matt and Paula! Janis Pearl! and Natasha!

As usual my "take" is a little different on these things. I think the enduring mythological histories (and THE ODYSSEY, BEOWULF and GILGAMESH seems to me very good examples of enduring mythological histories) are actual histories, documenting actual events. And that those events were/are/will be enactments of the God/YHWH relationship. That is, the YHWH is the living thing within the earth, earth's molten he/she/it core and God is The Universal Awareness, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent.

Human life, I infer, enacts itself between the two -- between God and the YHWH -- on the surface of the earth. Usually just "strutting and fretting its hour upon the stage" (as we all do), but occasionally enacting an iconic narrative which endures because it's iconic. And consequently possessing a core relevance to the God/YHWH relationship. The further back it goes -- and I assume earthly enactments go back to the Big Bang and the cosmological events subsequent to the Big Bang -- the more iconic (it seems to me) it is, the more solidly it endures. Gilgamesh and Gilgamesh's behaviours replicating those of, say, one of the first of the post-Big Bang Giant Stars. If you scale one of these Giant Stars down to a human level it will enact itself as the Gilgamesh narrative. As it did. As it does. As it always will.

It seems to me to be the essence of the fifteen-billion year Education of the YHWH:

No, you aren't God, but you think you are. You don't know the difference between Truth and Illusion, but you recognize -- and are the impetus behind: you are God's motivation in setting in motion -- a core relevant enactment of your relationship with and to God. You recognized/recognize/will recognize it as a core relevant enactment over the long term because it endures. And gradually, by putting those enduring enactment pieces together, you attain to accurate -- or less inaccurate -- perceptions of What Is Going On Here. Foremost of which (in my view) is accurate perception of yourself as one of God's creations and accurate perception that you're not God Himself.

Homer's ODYSSEY, I infer, is an enactment of the outward expansion of the known universe from the Big Bang. These are human-scale enactments of the implication events which followed from the Big Bang (the implication events of which we human beings are an end product: the Giant Stars leading to the early galaxies, the early galaxies leading to the later galaxies, centrifugal and centripetal motion powering the whole "outward bound" thing, eventually generating Sol and, 93 million miles away, Sol generating the earth and the earth "generating" us: actually God using the earth, the dust of the ground, to make our progenitors, A Dam and Chauah. Who "strut and fret their hour upon the stage" enacting their own relevant enactments: a handful of words and actions out of 950 years of life).

Put another way, centuries after the events documented in the ODYSSEY, I infer, a more refined form of that enactment takes place: The Second Book of Moshe, called EXODUS. You can't have the one without the other in the same way that you can't have university without high school and high school without public school. The YHWH graduated from ODYSSEY public school to University EXODUS. EXODUS is a foundational text for our society and particularly our epoch because of its greater refinement and greater relevance to our situation. No one bases their theology on the ODYSSEY, although at one time they did. The events in the ODYSSEY happened, they're just less relevant "going forward" than are, I infer, the events in EXODUS. In the same sense that the dinosaurs enacted Grand Scale Conflict that gradually refined itself to more pertinent and more nuanced enactments like the original ODYSSEY enactment from which Homer's version is derived.

I'm a human being, so I'm an enactment which exists between God and the YHWH.

In the same way that the YHWH is imprisoned within the earth and putting the pieces together -- getting it occasionally right and mostly wrong -- my soul, I infer, is imprisoned within my mind, my mind is imprisoned within my brain, my brain is imprisoned within my skull and is also trying to put the pieces together -- getting it occasionally right and mostly wrong.

So -- getting to your question per se, Jeff -- it seems less a case of what, from antiquity, I referred to in CEREBUS and more a case of how many prior earthly enactments unconsciously (unconsciously on my part) incarnated through me into CEREBUS and how relevant or irrelevant those enactments appear to be now and will appear to be in the near future and distant future. What of my works originate in God's Truth and what of my works originate in the YHWH's perversions and mischief-making?

Call it The Shakespeare Factor. Shakespeare's major plays (HAMLET, KING LEAR) become progressively more relevant rather than less relevant the further we get from their incarnation. They're historical fiction -- he made them up, or, rather, thought he did -- but iconic in their relevance to the relationship between God and the YHWH or we wouldn't still be familiar with them 400 years later. Lear's relationship with his daughters and the witches being an obvious example.

The Greek myths, I think, are actually PRE-Greece enactments. Whatever culture of which Greece is a residue (Atlantis?) actually conducted itself, I infer, at its cultural apex in exactly the perverse YHWH way that has come down to us. We have the know-how, let's make centaurs, let's make minotaurs, lets create new forms of pregnancy, let's make a sphinx. Let's graft snakes onto people's heads. Abominations in the Sight of God but perverse "day at the office" all-in-good-fun stuff for the YHWH.

Hey, why not?

"Why not?" can, I infer, take tens if not hundreds of thousands of years to fully hatch out and is, I infer, doing so everywhere in the universe that the God and YHWH relationship is enacting itself. (i.e. every habitable planet). But that, I infer, can be temporary as well. The Greek "myths" had become a horrific pan- and trans-civilizational Cautionary Nightmare throughout the centuries where the Redeeming Power of God's Christ held sway throughout Christendom (now eroded into the soulless YHWH-based troglodytic G7) and did so until very recently (i.e. the 1960s when Frankenstein science started making its big comeback). The steep erosion in (literally) un-Godly bioethics is well advanced -- a woman's human right to murder her fetus is the thin end of the wedge -- and possibly irreversible, already.

Let me put it this way, if there weren't laws against it, how many people would be lined up around the block to have their genes split and fused with their cat's? Yes, you can have a cat/human hybrid offspring with your kitty! Not EVERYONE was horrified by the CATS trailer and movie, I don't think. Half-cat and half Taylor Swift? Now THERE's a Democratic Presidential candidate who could even beat Bernie Sanders!!

I wish I was kidding.

It ended VERY badly the last time it was tried on planet earth, but an ancillary enactment element which resulted, I infer, was Greek philosophy. Which meant it was possible for God to explain creation in an even more refined and nuanced form than EXODUS: John's Gospel. With the intellectual progression from Aristotle to Socrates to Plato it became possible to understand -- and, more importantly to explain -- the Logos. Starting with "In beginning was the word and the word was toward the God and god was the word" and proceeding to "the being into the bosom of the father that explained." We're human beings so we understand it imperfectly, but Truth based in Knowledge which originates in God (Gnosis) has its own form of efficaciousness. It, at least, distracted us from Greek-myth Frankenstein science, however temporarily (roughly 2,000 years, which isn't bad) although we're now blundering cheerfully along making up for lost time.

So, I would express the concept you're asking about more accurately as: How many accurate beneficent God-based Truthful enactments incarnated themselves through me into CEREBUS? (speculation: "You can get what you want and still not be very happy" is in that category) and how many inaccurate, malign Illusory YHWH enactments have enacted themselves through me (speculation: throwing a baby into the crowd to illustrate the point is in this category)? No idea, but I assume I'll find out on Judgement Day.

It's why I'm so strongly wedded to Scripture. Scripture, to me, is Truth. Reading all of John's Gospel aloud over the course of 2 1/2 hours (at least!) once a week (sometimes three times a week) is, I infer (perhaps wrongly) making the conscious choice to focus on Truth and to subject my soul and my mind and my brain to Truth to the exclusion of all else for that period of time. A much better use of my time, I infer, than watching a hockey game or a long movie or reading THE ODYSSEY or discussing Scripture, eating unhealthy food, drinking, taking drugs, hanging out, fornicating, masturbating, surfing the net, etc.

I'm a human being so my opinions of Scripture are, I infer, fundamentally flawed. But Scripture itself, I infer, isn't flawed. A man's reach should always exceed his grasp.

Thanks, Jeff!

And Thanks, Dave!

Next Time: Oliver