Personal: Road of Faith and The Second Apocalypse - part 3

The Second Apocalypse

This next bit won't be for everyone because I noticed that it might be very incoherent for anyone who hasn't read the books.
But because of some of the bleed-over of the negativity and the fact that these days it is almost inextricably linked to the Road of Faith stuff, and of course the fact that this whole Faith post has had its ultimate origin in this; because I wanted to talk specifically about the hidden end goal (by my thinking) at the heart of the Second Apocalypse's narrative, It still is the final part.

As such, this isn't a review and should maybe not be read if you haven't read the series. Because I think I'll be revealing its end, or what I hope to be its end.
For that I need to talk about crucial elements and plot developments of the books.
That means massive spoilers, people.
Or at least I think they might be spoilers; this is mostly speculation and interpretation and I might still be way off. But I don't believe that I am.

I'll put a jump-break before I begin to spoil in earnest though, because I'll first try to convince you to go and read the books yourself.

Everything but the Unholy Consult

Anyway, before I jump into it I should maybe say that if you haven't read anything about this series and you like challenging Epic Fantasy fiction, this might be something you want to take a look at.

Scott Bakker's the Prince of Nothing trilogy and the following Aspect-Emperor quartet (it was supposed to be a trilogy too, but you know how things go) together form parts 1 and 2 of the Second Apocalypse series. It's not tacked on either. The whole thing was supposed to be three books, but every book has since escalated into its own cycle.
And this is because the story needed that room. It simply has to be so, there is no redundancy here.
The books themselves aren't even that long either.

The Prince of Nothing trilogy is set in a world of religion and war. There are various forms of deliciously complicated, but structured, magic systems and an eclectic assortment of gods.
Also, for once humanity is not the worst thing under the sun; they are outstripped by vile monsters that prey on them in all the worst ways; the Inchoroi.
There is a once upon a time great and mortal race that has since, at a terrible and unforeseen price, left its mortal tethers behind; The Non-Men, who now live on at the world's fringes, possessing power and madness in equal measure.

Written by a philosophy teacher, the series has got the deep philosophizing in spades and this is reflected in the characters, who are exceedingly well realised, though they might not necessarily be likeable.

If you don't mind drowning in a tide of human filth and darkness, go check it out yourself.

Despite of that darkness, to me, the world of the Three Seas felt like coming home.

Like those times when I was reading the Bible.

I've seen the term applied willy-nilly to books before and when read afterward they have always disappointed me, but Scott Bakker's Second Apocalypse is truly 'Biblical' in scope.

Old Testament Biblical.

Like in the Bible, Bakker's world is filled with prophets, holy men and holy wars, a higher calling, faith and strife, divine purpose and divine reward and the like.
A culture near an inland sea, old sandy desserts and old sandy cities and an entire people marching from them to get to their promised destination, raping, killing and burning their way across unfamiliar lands because their gods tell them that it is right of them to do so, justified, and how the power of belief makes this possible and, of course, it talks about the darkness from where all of these things originate.

A book of Iron men and their Saints.

It's geared and designed to strike a chord with the subconscious upbringing of people raised within a Christian society, whether they believe or not. This goes so far as to include the same reverential tones even during the most dire subject matter and the manner of description, up to and including the same type of philosophical and biblical ambiguity in its various expressions.
I'm not sure how these books would connect with people not raised with christianity but I'm guessing that there might be some difficulties in identifying with them in those cases.

It bears repeating here that the books are extremely dark. This is mostly because there is little or no way to get away from the darkness, apart from the phenomenal world-building of course, the layers of the world bubbling up behind every sentence and every conjured up vista.
The acts are horrible and violent and the characters aren't likeable because the introspection present in the first Prince of Nothing trilogy is all-encompassing. It is in fact an overpowering level of introspection stripping characters bare to the dirty core of their selfish humanity. These are the most realistic characters that I've ever read, with nothing of them hidden. And at times it can be like looking into a too honest mirror, with all those things you might not want to look at or think about laid bare. They add a realism to the series that is hard to find anywhere else.
Sure there are supernatural elements, but they're mostly all evil.
And in real life there always seems to be more evidence of evil and sin anyway. That's why in fiction demons and bad beasties are generally more credible than angels or even a benevolent god. The horrors are easier to accept than any form of benign supernatural influence.

And the bad beasties here; the Inchoroi, are the most evil antagonists ever created. They can be brutally and horrifyingly over the top, but I believe there's a reason for this and I'll mention it after the jump somewhere.

The series is truly pitch dark and I can't stress enough that I am always shocked, time and again, whenever I read it.

But if you can take them, they're worth it.

Now on to that thing I was talking about.
How that it's linked to my faith and what I'm getting out of it.

Definite SPOILERS for the Prince of Nothing and the entire Second Apocalypse up next.

Personal: Road of Faith and the Second Apocalypse - Part 2

Depression and Nihilism

With the loss of a man's faith, something necessarily has to come in its place. To keep the mind balanced lest it eats itself.

But to this day, I have not succeeded in giving meaning to my life without it.
Where once was my faith, there is now a bottomless hole, and it devoures everything that is tossed in. Without divine meaning and purpose, death becomes the end, and since death is inevitable, nothing we do matter.

Without meaning I instead stand at the yawning hole of the abyss, unable to look away from its darkness. And with every distraction, capable of turning me away from its dark contemplation but a fleeting fancy, I am forever teetering on the edge.

As a pessimist by nature I usually see only the worst in things. And every worst thing leads to sorrow.

These days I mostly rationally choose to believe that nothing truly matters. There was never anything greater guiding us, there is no goal and no purpose; we lead an aimless and painful existence, and when we die, we simply end. Our brains halt and we stop functioning. We decompose and our bodies are reintegrated into the energy that is cycled throughout the living things of this world. There is no damnation and no exaltation because there is no design. And that in itself has become both excuse and goal.

Because of the above it might seem that the depression that comes and goes is entirely contingent on my relationship with my faith and upbringing. This is of course not true.

There are various factors, not all of which I'm able or willing to share.
But one major thing is that I'm a sensitive little fucker. A stray word, an odd look, a huff or a puff can unhinge me enough that my day is ruined. It becomes my mind's focus for the longest time. It makes me think and think and it's always in the direction of the worst.
I suppose I should call it 'Highly Sensitive' but labels have always been annoying to me. Nobody fits in anywhere perfectly, and when one is labeled it gives others the license to look at you one way while dismissing all that you are.

So, one of the consequences of that is that I severly overthink things. Like a dog worrying at a bone I can't stop chewing at the images and sounds and my pessimism obliges by then immediately offering me the worst case thoughts and scenarios.

That way I risk slipping further into the self-defeating spiral of depression and when that happens the nihilism comes into play.

I seek reasons to stop caring, to make the thoughts diminish,  and sometimes it is with nihilism that I take away their sting. 'Nothing matters' becomes the excuse. it becomes the balm and then in the bleakness it also becomes the goal. It is a trap and it gets me every time.
I know that, as an individual I can't go through life thinking everything is useless. It leaves me uncomitted, uninvested and very much adrift.

But I can't help it and I can't look away. The serpent bites its own tail and the venom makes its jaws lock tight.

It's something that continuously saps my strength and something I keep struggling with every day. And as someone who can't talk to others easily and whose friendships dwindle with the passing of the years, It's hard to speak of these themes and these horrors. because no-one else is willing or is unable to truly understand or has in fact no need to adress these things.

So, isolated, I try to shunt it aside and find an outlet somewhere else. Mostly, and most benignly, in fiction.

Meaning through stories

Games, tv-shows, movies, comics and above all, books.

Fiction is safe because for fiction to work, there needs to be a purpose, there needs to be meaning to the narrative.

And it is almost always made clear to us. Willing investment is a prerequisite. And immersion takes care of the rest.

Things start to matter, because we're told that it matters. We follow the characters along and their views become our views. We follow along and ready ourselves for the coming of joy and heartache. But it's always at a safe remove. And these stories will never end if we don't want them to. Things cycle and purpose becomes ever renewed.
It is Heaven.

But it's a choice. and not everyone can commit to it.

I used to be able to commit to any kind of narrative. Until I started thinking about what I read. This is not an indictment of those books or the age at which I read them. It's rather more something like wistful regret. Of a time when I didn't continuously think. when I didn't seem to have this inability to switch off. When meaning didn't need to be found and I could just enjoy the story for its own sake.
Most likely this is just another rose-tinted lens through which I view the past. I likely always overthought things too much. But I'm digressing.

In fiction there is meaning, but there was once a time when there was also meaning in my life.
So I seek out works inspired by the tenets of my upbringing because they still resonate with me. Because they can not help but connect on a very deep and almost spiritual level.
I don't think I purposely seek out these stories to find a meaning to ascribe to the reality through which I move. But I can not deny that it is the stories that could possibly slot into my past upbringing and the world-view that came along with it, that have hit hardest with me.
When you label something, a guiding influence, that was and still remains important in your life, as a fiction, everything that is associated with it or that draws inspiration from it, becomes fair game.

That's why anything demonic is so interesting because it is only tangentially related. Because as it's not the center there can be no real need for purpose here and it becomes mostly just for fun. Mythological stuff and meta narratives are also a huge draw. They don't even have to be dark.
I'm digressing again.

The thing I'm talking about is stories with Christianity as its foremost understructure, (Here read Christian Doctrine, meaning; The Bible, this is not Protestantism or even Catholicism, I always identified just as a Christian, basing myself solely on the Bible.)

Some of the things that have been special:

-Clive Barker's Next Testament, which could give an explanation for the madness of the old Testament and the 2000 year gap where it seems God isn't active.
-The Third Testament by Xavier Dorison, proposing that things were supposed to go different and God might have abandoned his ideas of apocalypse.
-The Goddamned; The Old Testament viewed through an ultra-violent lens. Noah, the same. Exodus: Gods and Kings, with God as a lunatic child.
-Hellblazer, though it rambles on and broaches alot of topics, it's very good at times. Preacher, with its crap comic that has a great central idea and nothing else, but it did give rise to a potentially very good tv-show. Lucifer, which goes too fantastic sometimes but damn me (haha) if it isn't magnificent.
-Penny Dreadful ,which was cut way too short, with its introspective look on good and evil. With the main character; the beautiful and incredibly tormented Vanessa Ives forced to take a choice between God and the Devil, it was taken from us too soon.
-American Gods and Small Gods, with their very similar takes on power through belief. Though these books aren't really about Christianity and with especially American Gods taking a coward's road in not adressing Christianity in a world filled with active gods, they are centrally about power through belief.
-Vikings, in its inclusion of gods both old and new, and how the characters deal with this. I've already mentioned the quote above, and it gives a good insight on how deep the show can go. It's mostly up to the viewer though; not everything is shoved right in your face.
-Malazan, also not about christianity per se, but it's got philosphising on anything under the sun, including beliefs and gods and how they interact with the world of men. That and I have some ideas about the Crippled God himself.

And lastly, but firstly in meaning and importance.
-The Second Apocalypse, with its secret reactionary subversion to the themes and central tenets of the Bible. I'll talk about that in the next post. But I'll be unable to do it justice regardless.

There are of course alot more narratives and types of narratives that have drawn my attention and that I have ended up loving. But this is only about those narratives that I'm drawn to because of their relation to my past faith and upbringing, though these are hardly the sole reasons why these books, comics and tv-shows are so good. Each has their own merits.

These stories will inevitably attract me because it is very much a primal thing, isn't it? As a person raised within the tenets of Christianity, draped and hung with chains and tethers of guilt and shame, sin and love, sacrifice and redemption and who, most of the time, has cast off his religious convictions and beliefs, to actually have been immersed inside all of that religious imagery and faith for half of my life, and devoutly believing it too... Regardless from what environment you're raised in and how far you end up from it; the things you were raised with as a child, never truly leave you.

-----

These days I have less time for fiction, and this is partially because of the blog, partially because of work. With less actual reading time and not alot of down time in between work and blogging; what I consume, inevitably gets to be ruthlessly analysed. I'm not sure yet if this is a bad thing.
As I've said before, it is my hope that the darkness will be left for a large part behind in this post.
I'll have to see how that goes. Now on to the finale.

Personal: Road of Faith and The Second Apocalypse - Part 1

This is about my Road of Faith and the things that go with that, and ultimately, finally, in the third part, how my religious upbringing influenced my reading experience with Scott Bakker's Dark Epic Fantasy Series; The Second Apocalypse.

Along the way I will be talking about my personal views, depression, nihilism, christian doctrine and some of the religious fiction inspired by it (that I've read). I've tried to keep it down where I diverged too much from what I originally wanted to talk about and I've kept it in check for the most part, but forgive me if I sometimes ramble.

You might get annoyed at what lies ahead and I urge you to please not take any offense, as this is quite personal and probably isn't even really meant for people outside of my personal circle. If it does happen to leave an impact in unknown, likeminded souls; good, it might help somebody.

Some people need the bad, in order to feel like themselves, and I've begun to fear I might be one of those people. In response to this I will be trying to condense the negativity that has threatened to de-rail the blog at several times into this one huge post (now three), so I can figuratively and literally leave it behind me here, in case of future reference, or in case somebody might be interested.

After this post it'll be a slow climb back upward into positivity, I hope, but Long is the way, and hard, that out of hell leads up into light.

The Road Of Faith

As a kid growing up in a christian household, having to go to church on a weekly basis and not much liking the congregated mass of people desperate to show their devotion; standing, singing, raising hands, forcing everyone else to join in though sheer eye-balling pressure and despite being very honest in my faith, I did not much like all the effort and being a very shy, uncertain and introverted kid, the public displays of worship smacked (true or not) of posing, of liars and deceivers.

It bears stating at this point that my native language is Dutch...I know, I'm sorry.
Original copy presented here in its very well-read condition (read: falling apart).
'Groot Nieuws Bijbel' translation.

Always pushed into bringing and reading my Bible, I began to do just that; I consistently, almost exclusively, began to read it in church, but to bury my face from the sight of the older churchgoers frowning at the kid sitting in the back when the proper form would be to stand up in front, raising your hands in the air and showing the Lord you were praising Him, shouting your devotion, singing songs of eternal love, asking forgiveness for all your horrible sins because you are not worthy you small sinful child nothing without his grace.

With humans at large generally of the opinion that more knowledge is always better, few people would feel the need to admonish the small boy reading in the ultimate book of wisdom and they would leave me be. Also, for myself, I figured I might as well learn something by reading and learning more in and of the Bible during this time of forced devotion, give or take about 2 hours on sunday morning.

As to the belief that more knowledge is always better; No, looking back over the years, it really is not...: ironically I can paraphrase the Bible here, via the rather amazingly good tv-show Vikings;

 Ecclesiastes 1: 17-18 via the 1917 Tanakh translation (I think)

He that increases Knowledge, Increases Sorrow.

 "I have seen all the works that are done under the sun. And, behold, all is vanity and vexation of the spirit. I communed with mine own heart, saying, Lo, I am come to great estate. and I gave my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is vexation of the spirit. For in such wisdom is much grief, and he that increases knowledge, increases sorrow."

It is the cautionary tale of a man in torment because of his accumulation of knowledge.

As usual it's one of those passages that encourages closed-mindedness and to take the good book as the sole measure by which to view, understand and interact with the world. 

That doesn't make its core truth any less true though. More knowledge, and it's a specific type of knowledge meant here of course, leads to a soul in turmoil. This isn't about knowing how to start a car or how to build a rocket capable of space-travel.

Anyway, when I opened my book, I almost always read the Old Testament.
The dark, the violent and very much the bloodiest part of the Bible, barring the unrestrained madness that is Revelations, of course.

Tales of a God of blood sacrifice and horrific plagues, apocalyptic floods and columns of fire, of a God so petty and so sadistic that he'd send 2 she-bears to tear apart 42 children because they dared call an old man "Baldie". Of ascendancy by fiery chariot, wild visions in the dessert and of a whole people getting preferential treatment by dint of simply being the first on this blessed, blighted earth.
Of a man spilling his seed on the sand rather than granting his late brother's wife children and of God murdering him for it, because he is a voyeur who likes a happy ending.

You know, the fucking horrific tales.

Now that I'm older I wish I could say that I was fascinated by these tales because I noticed the incongruity between the bloodthirst of the First Testament and the forgiving message of the New. But that'd be a lie: It was definitely the violence, the tales of war and forced marching in deserts and God's horrific supernatural interventions in the affairs of men. I've matured enough to appreciate the difference between the two, though.

Somewhere in the years of endless questioning why, the continuous heaping up of misplaced guilt and shame; I inevitably lost my faith. This did not come down to one moment, but it was rather the consequence of alot of things. Too many things to mention or to go into really. I'm not even sure when it happened.

We can never really know all the influences that led us to make a decision, or even assuming we are capable into making a decision that is not already determined based on every influence that we are made up out of. The decision of a puppet held up by a million strings of influence is not really a decision made by that puppet.

And you know what;
maybe I still believe and this is just a protest. A refusing to acknowledge, a refusal to give credence that a being so horrifically arbitrary could or even should have this much power over me. In that case, I suppose I would be one of the people thrown into the eternal pool of fire who even in their agony, knowing the truth, would still renounce him. Helplessly, endlessly, railing at the dealt injustice.

Today

As someone who grew up inside what is probably some subsect of protestantism, I once devoutly believed in a personal, caring and loving creator.

These days, I might believe that the God of the Old Testament was a spoiled and bloodthirsty child. That the New Testament demonstrates the actions of a more mature God; still dabbling in his creation, still convinced of his own moral superiority, but with a more lenient, less blood-drenched hand.
Of these days, I might believe that God has finally attained wisdom enough that he knows better than to take an actual hand in his creation. He lets us run rampant because nothing he does can alter the wild abandon that is humanity's urge for self-mutilation.
That or he is dead. Or he has taken his bags and left in utter frustration. leaving behind an aimless, warring humanity that is sat like a bloated leech on what was once a garden Paradise, but now a dying husk. Aimless, pointless, and utterly without redemption.

In the next part I talk about nihilism and the exact opposite of believing in God and where that leads me. Oh, joy.