Crowley and mystery

David Stockhoff · 18 Dec 2008, 14:34 · from 2008-December.txt.gz

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From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2008 09:34:07 -0500
Subject: (urth) Crowley and mystery
In-Reply-To: <mailman.814.1229565241.16269.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
References: <mailman.814.1229565241.16269.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
Message-ID: <494A5F5F.5080809 at verizon.net>

Speaking of the Jerusalem Quartet---I'm not very familiar with it though 
I have read reviews. A quick google came up with the following description:

Sinai Tapestry, originally published in 1977, is the first book of 
Edward Whittemore's Jerusalem Quartet: four novels that make the long, 
complex history of the Middle East comprehensible as no other books do, 
and that do so by creating an alternate version of history - part real 
and part imagined (and what pleasure, while reading, to speculate on 
what, in the novels, is real and what imagined!) - that begins, in this 
first book, by telling the story of how early in the nineteenth century, 
Skanderbeg Wallenstein, a fanatical Trappist monk from Albania, comes 
upon what is "with out question the oldest Bible in the world" and 
discovers that "It denied every religious truth ever held by anyone"

What would happen, then, he wonders - in ways not so different from the 
actual speculations of twentieth century Biblical scholars - "if the 
world suddenly suspected that Mohammed might well have lived six 
centuries before Christ" or that Christ had been a minor prophet in the 
age of Elijah" or "that the virtues of Mary and Fatima and Ruth had been 
confused in the minds of later chroniclers and freely interchanged among 
them?"

"Melchizedek must have his City of Peace," Wallenstein. concludes, just 
as men must have their Jerusalem" Believing that faith must be sustained 
in the world, Wallenstein also believes that if the cause for faith is 
absent, then it is his duty to provide it. "The decision he had made in 
his cell," Whittemore tells us, "was to forge the original Bible."

But this forgery - what has led to it, and what issues from it-becomes, 
in Sinai Tapestry, an imaginative conceit that informs the entire 
Quartet: It is Whittemore's way of asking us to consider the many ways 
in which illusions can give birth to realities, by which realities can 
be transformed by dreams, and - above all - through which the real and 
the imagined can conspire to create those events and legends that 
determine how we live, love, and die.


At a high level of abstraction, this sounds not very different from 
TBotNS. Wolfe also forges an alternate history but on a vaster scale, a 
history in which the miraculous truth and mundane deceit are conflated. 
Note the line about Mary and Fatima and Ruth; after chiliads, the same 
has occurred on Urth. And the last paragraph especially.




>>>
>>>
>>>       
>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> From: Dave Lebling [mailto:dlebling at hyraxes.com]
>>>> Sent: Wednesday, December 17, 2008 04:08 PM
>>>> To: 'The Urth Mailing List'
>>>> Subject: Re: (urth) Crowley and mystery
>>>>
>>>> I've read all of the Jerusalem Quartet books, and Quinn's Shanghai
>>>> Circus, which has a similar style but is more-or-less unrelated. They
>>>> actually remind me more of Pynchon than Wolfe or Vance or Crowley,
>>>> though it's hard to articulate why. Probably because the whole quartet
>>>> has an overarching theme and some consistent macguffins but is mostly
>>>> episodic. I like them, but then I like Pynchon, and Flann O'Brian, and
>>>> other strange more-or-less modernist types. Wolfe tells stories with
>>>> plots, but tells them obscurely. Pynchon's books, and Whittemore's,
>>>> have
>>>> plots but they are at least in my opinion secondary to the desire to
>>>> produce effects. Wolfe is in many ways a very traditional writer on the
>>>> surface.
>>>>
>>>> Whittemore was out-of-print for a long time, but recently (the last
>>>> couple years) his books were all republished in rather nice trade
>>>> paperback editions.
>>>>
>>>> -- Dave Lebling, aka vizcacha
>>>>
>>>> Son of Witz wrote:
>>>>
>>>>         
>>>>> anyone read Edward Whittemore's Sinai Tapestry.
>>>>> that's a strange sort of puzzle.  Odd book. One of those ones where I
>>>>> didn't like it until about a month later, when, not having thought
>>>>> about it since closing the pages, the symbols jumped out and started
>>>>> making sense.
>>>>> very curious work.  I'm not sure if it's scifi or not.  The cover
>>>>> would lead you to believe it, and many elements.  I suppose New Sun
>>>>> fans might find a lot worth pondering. Jerusalem, repeating Anchors in
>>>>> history, time paradoxes. I just found out it's the first of the
>>>>> Jerusalem Quartet. I suppose I should read the others.  very strange.
>>>>> the blurb on the cover compared it to LOTR, which left me scratching
>>>>> my head big time.
>>>>> ~witz
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>           
>


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