A Work Progressing

The Crucible was not a fun book to read in Advanced English class in high school, but it was a requirement.

It was written by Arthur Miller, and I only knew him because he was married to Marilyn Monroe. It was a play, so that made it seem more like Shakespeare to us.

Our teacher gave us additional information, that it was written as a reaction to the McCarthy Era. We didn’t know about that, so in between acts of the book, we heard about charges of communism.

All this happening in eleventh grade advanced English class. We knew about Communism. We had scabby knees from crawling under desks in elementary school. They stole the atomic bomb and threatened to drop it on America, because we were bad, and Communism was better.

So this McCarthy guy was warning us about Communist agents in government, education, and entertainment. The problem was that we had been tricked, there weren’t hordes of Communists all around us. There were just bad people, pointing fingers.

Just like in the Crucible. There weren’t evil witches. There were just people who had good farms that somebody else wanted. If you got a bunch of young girls pretending to be bewitched, you could have the owner killed, and you could get the land at auction.

After all, there were no witches. Just like there were no hordes of Communists.

I’m not suggesting that this was the start of not believing in evil. People did believe that people did evil things. World War II had just finished, and people did evil things.

The Korean War had called a cease-fire, and that seemed like Communists did evil things. But we were protected, we had oceans to keep them away. Besides, it was some people that did evil things. Evil itself didn’t exist. We came to believe that evil did not live.

It is an oddity that in English, live and evil have the same letters, just opposite. That little oddity was the start of my pondering. Evil was not a noun, nor an object. I’ve been thinking about objects for quite a while. 

Evil used to be an object. Mostly we said they were demons, sometimes they were monsters like vampires or werewolves. But even then, our modern minds turned them into fictional tales to frighten us on dark stormy nights.

It was only the medieval, uneducated mind, that believed in physical evil, like demons hiding in forests, lurking in deserted castles.

We can still act medieval, like the Crucible, or the McCarthy Era, but actually, we know better.

Now that I’m old, I’m not so sure we have that right.

It isn’t an issue with religion or faith exactly. We have had revivals several times. True, evil is a concern, but even in our revivals the existence of physical evil is downplayed.

There was a television show that was very popular, a major hit for five years, then reruns for years afterwards. It was called ‘Highway to Heaven’. 

The show was about an angel that was assigned to travel about, helping people with their difficulties. The angel could not lie, or mislead. In order to solve some problems, the angel enlisted a human companion to assist. They traveled together, not being open that one of them was an angel.

I mention this because it was so popular. It has been calculated that perhaps tens of millions of people have witnessed this angel on that television show.

And not once was there a demon. Five years of episodes and nobody was troubled by a demon. Once, on Halloween, the Devil himself was on the show, he was defeated by a conman the angel hired.

The Devil showed up on one other show, but he only sold a sandwich to the angel’s traveling partner.

Our entertainment downplayed physical evil in comedy, and in drama. Literature sometimes referred to the medieval beliefs, but only to condemn them.

And here is the thing, if I were a demon, it would be so much easier if no one believed I existed.

The world is changing as is expected, but some of the changes seem extreme, and extraordinary. In many cases, I’ve seen the possibility of angels interceding, and that is encouraging.

In other cases, I’m left with people doing evil things without reason. This is compared with good things happening with angels’ help and assistance. Just maybe, some people with evil actions have been helped by physically present evil.

It’s true that some movies have been popular that have the existence of demons, of evil living. But it’s for entertainment and it’s only a movie.

Most of the movies still have the evil as a spirit that invades the body. The evil exists but it is invisable. It might throw objects, it might appear in a mirror. Rarely it appears as a physical presence with mass and weight.

For some reason it is more terrifying to see footprints in the mud without feet. Or to see a mattress sink as though someone had lain down.

It’s hard to remind yourself that this is written to scare you, not to inform you. Few people use movies as proof for anything.

It was purposeful to name this as physical evil, instead of an evil action. I just wish to express that I believe in both of them. And their impact on humans.

It’s curious, I was reluctant to type ‘helped by demons.’ I almost didn’t type that because I want to come across as sane and reliable. Evil has managed to edit my communication.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Author’s Note

The title of this essay is Live vs. Evil. The word ‘live’ can be pronounced two different ways, with two different meanings. Both can be applied to evil. I want you to consider evil living. Not in a human that is doing evil. But evil being alive in itself.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reader’s Note

Have you seen Evil?

 

 

An allegorical blog

I have been thinking about darkness as an object. Something more than an absence of light. A creature of accumulation.

 

We vaguely call it evil, as if giving it a word explains it. But suppose it has substance. Suppose what we call evil gathers, remains, and adds to itself. Suppose it infects people and changes them.

 

This is an allegory. The Darkness is its creature, and the people who follow are figures within that telling.

 

I begin in Africa, among the developing early humans. The Darkness lives there for generations and generations. It has time. It is present when the stick becomes a club because of jealousy. Something useful has become an instrument for hurting another. The difference is held in the hand that lifts it.

 

The digging stick becomes a club for murder. Afterwards it is dropped and becomes a stick again, but the murder remains.

 

The Darkness has a quirk. It must be invited. The invitation need not look like an invitation. It could be a good lie, a lie that seems to serve a good purpose. It could be a bad thought given room to grow. It could be a bad promise. 

 

There are many doors, and the Darkness has learned how to approach them. It does not need to control everything. Much of the time it is content with a place to live and something to feed upon. 

 

It can remain within a person who has other qualities, other talents, other purposes. It need not consume the whole person to change what that person does.

 

It is not like fire, burning through everything until there is nothing left to sustain it. It can persist. It can wait.

 

But every now and then it goes berserk. The killing becomes so great that progress is delayed and populations fall dangerously. The Darkness damages the very lives through which it travels. Still, enough remains. There are survivors. There are memories.

 

The Darkness never quite gets defined. Its opposite does. Light. Goodness. Godness. We have names for what we reach toward, even while the thing that draws us away remains difficult to hold still and examine.

 

Wherever Homo Sapiens go, the Darkness travels. It goes with us out of Africa and into the rest of the world. Some of it remains in the old places, carrying ancient memories. Some of it acquires new memories elsewhere. 

 

Generations come and go. The accumulation continues. It is in the Horn of Africa.

 

An individual witnesses the murder of his father. In this telling, the Darkness enters his life through that event and takes hold. 

 

He is one among many. His suffering alone does not explain every choice that follows, but it is where this thread begins.

 

Over the years, his core becomes sadistic. He has other talents, however, and those talents propel him toward leadership. People find reasons to follow him. Eventually, he controls an army.

 

Now he can lead thousands of young men into the genocide of others. The Darkness grows. What had lived within individuals moves through commands, obedience, and participation. It accumulates in what is done and in what is left afterward.

Eventually the man dies.

 

The debris spreads.

 

There are people who have lost their families, their homes, their country as they knew it. There are people carrying memories they cannot put down. Among the scattered lives, the Darkness also remains. The death of one source has not ended what he helped spread.

 

The Darkness does not need to follow the survivors anywhere. It is already waiting in the countries of light. It left Africa with everyone else, long ago. It has had time.

One country is far from perfect. It has failures, some serious. But it keeps trying. The Darkness is patient with trying. It knows how to use what is already wrong.

It can live on the surface of the body, it can travel, it can divide, it can whisper. But to come inside it must be invited.It is invited in the old ways. A good lie. A bad thought given room. A promise no one means to keep. Sometimes the invitation is fear itself: fear of the stranger, fear of the door that compassion opened. The Darkness likes that one. It can enter through the very fear of its entering.

Some who invite it become leaders. They are elected. They are applauded.

 

Good leaders shake hands. They hear a lie that serves a purpose. They let it pass. The invitation need not be spoken. Darkness infects. Some change their opinions. The changes spread through the people they influence. Like a virus, the infection moves beyond its first contact.

 

The flaw within is reached and fed.

There is no need to manufacture every weakness. Something is already there that wants to hear the lie, accept the promise, or excuse the thought. The Darkness finds it.

 

What begins as a small permission can become a place for it to live. The accumulation is no longer somewhere in the distant past. It is no longer held safely within the story of a dead man and his army.

It has traveled through generations, through disaster and compassion, through promises and ordinary human contact.

 

It has reached the present.

Today is the edge.

 

 

A brutal name, full of want unfulfilled. A horrible name for a place made for mining gold. ‘On this hill, you will not find anything, but poverty.’ Someone must have said it. That would have been in the 1850s. I wouldn’t know, I was only eleven in the 1960s.

I tagged along on someone’s quest. I had to. He was my father. Every summer he sought the unfished stream teeming with rainbow trout. Sometimes it was a small lake. It was always three or four hours away in the Northern California Sierras. In particular Plumas and Sierra counties.

My father picked the spot, my mother made it our home, I helped unload the car. It was always shades of dark green in the pines. Shadows in the ferns, bark and needles on the ground. All that was needed was a level place for the tent, we brought everything else.

The constant pounding of logging trucks on the dirt road into Poverty Hill had left a thick layer of fine dust. It was almost like powder, it made a soft crunching sound when you walked on it, and filled the cracks in my father’s face with fine brown outlines.

I stayed off the road, preferring the trails. Someone made these to go to somewhere, it was always exciting to find out where. After the tent was up, I went for a walk. The path twisted a little through a stand of young pines, with the sun mostly blocked.

Then, almost like a door opening, there was full sunlight, and a landscape that I had never seen before. It was so starkly different that I had a hard time making sense of it.

White stones, tons of white stones, most of them the size of a man’s fist. Bleached by the sun because the trees were absent. They lay in low piles several football fields long. In the middle was a pond that nearly glowed an emerald color, unnaturally. Not a trace of soil or dust.

The path ended there, I could walk on the stones, but with some difficulty. I went to the edge of the pond. There was a faint metallic smell, copper but not copper. There was no plant growth, no movement of creatures, bug or fish. It was still greenish water.

I turned to go back to the camp and report. My father would be disappointed, but maybe he could explain to me what I saw.

He was troubled by the pond, and warned me not to drink, or even wade in it. That was not necessary but I was fascinated by the rest of the story. The ponds were made by damming the creek, once the pond was large enough, the men built a floating barge with a huge water cannon, a steam engine to give the cannon power, then a sluicing system to separate the gold from the hillside. It was a mine turned inside out, all on a floating barge. The pond moved down the creek, the muddy earth moved down the creek. The bones of the earth, the piles of white stones were left behind.

I’m not sure how my father knew this, and perhaps it wasn’t completely accurate. It was at least a better explanation of the blasted landscape. I was thinking aliens.

Another longer walk with my father revealed two more ponds, two healthy ponds with plants, bugs, and fish. It wasn’t disappointing after all.

Heading down the valley we came upon several abandoned buildings, one still locked up, the others empty but open. They had typical log foundations and lower walls, but the upper part of the walls and roof were framed in lumber. They were old, maybe a hundred years. That seemed very old to me.

One building may have been a kitchen, it was more out in the open and my father told me that the kitchen had fire. It was better to place that fire away from buildings that were important. Kitchens often burned up.

The buildings were not on the accessible dirt road, but I could see where there was still a trace of the early road, now covered in pine needles and shrubs. It would only be a matter of time before more people would find them.

We got back to a meal my mother had prepared combining the campfire and the two-burner stove. Another mystery I could not fathom.

The early evening was used for cleaning up, and storing the food safely. We rarely had bear issues because we camped in areas that were rarely camped in. The bears liked the steady campgrounds of forgetful campers.

Later, we sat by the fire and listened to the wind in the tops of the trees. We slept in folding beach lounge chairs made comfortable with air mattresses, warmed by big, plaid-lined sleeping bags from Montgomery Ward’s. There was even room left over in the tent to stand up and stretch.

After a few hours sleep, I woke up. It was silent in the tent and that was unusual. I had learned to fall asleep quickly to avoid my father’s snoring. Sleeping on his back in the lounge chairs aided the amount and volume of his snore. But it was quiet. Was he awake? Was he even there?

I moved to raise up a little in order to see. ‘Shhh…’ a low whisper came from that general area. Then I heard something outside. A close howl.

It was one long howl that was answered by another not far off. Then more howled, the sound came from all directions, surrounding us. My mother slept, my father and I listened.

It was probably coyotes, although I don’t know if I knew the difference between coyotes and wolves. The sound was not comforting, it was mournful. It wasn’t baying at the moon, it was crying out for the lost. The dark of the tent, the lonely sounds outside, the blasted landscape…

It was several hours before I heard the sound of snoring that gave me the confidence to go to sleep. In the morning we briefly talked about the coyotes over breakfast, my mother didn’t like the idea of little wolves prowling about. My father said his familiar refrain, ‘Oh, Billie…’ stretching out the last part of the name.

I didn’t like the little wolves either. I knew they were hunting. Smaller game than wolves would have hunted, but they were still hunting. We have had many pet dogs, and I have playfully opened their jaws to discover teeth. Looking back they looked more like Tyrannosaurus teeth than pet teeth. Coyotes had the same teeth.

 

I began the day thinking about mini dinosaurs stalking our tent. I went for another long walk. I was entering another stand of very tall, slender pines. Some had been damaged by the lack of water or bark beetles. In any case, they were dead but still standing.

I heard a sharp crack from above. Looking up, I saw an eight-foot top of a pine snap off, and fall to the ground. Not like a gentle leaf, more like a hurled spear. It impaled the ground not ten feet in front of me. I’m sure this has happened before, but I had never seen it, and haven’t seen it since.

It became my walking staff, later in life it became my cane, my walking stick. I still have it today, more than sixty years later.

We stayed there for four nights. The coyotes were there for two nights. My mother did not sleep one of those nights. My father caught dinner every night. I looked at old wood and tried to see the men in their work clothes. We returned a few times the next year.

As an adult I traveled the mountains to some of the places in my youth. I went to Poverty Hill. The buildings were gone, burned, and hauled away. The ponds were still there. The poisoned pond was fenced off with cyclone and barbed wire. I spent the night. The coyotes were still there, and the bears had discovered the campers. 

It was not a safe space. I left in the middle of the night. It wasn’t frightening, it was just too sad.

I once saw the killer of poems. He was not intentional, he simply moved through the world with such disdain that poetry could not survive near him. Not even poetry that was awful.

I followed him for a while, wondering what agendas he might have. Not too closely, for fear of being discovered, and for fear of my safety. Flowers wilted in his passing. It was not obvious, but I know it was true.

His clothes might be called shabby, but they weren’t dirty. Shabby because they didn’t fit well, one size bigger than it should be. The weight was all wrong, they were heavy, with creases that didn’t match the structure of the man. His shoes did not match. They were close, black with laces, round toe, serviceable. At a distance you couldn’t tell, but upon closer inspection one shoe had six holes for laces, the other had eight.

His gait was also unusual, his arms swung loosely from the shoulders, moving like a clapper in the bell of his heavy coat. It gave the illusion of a distorted timing of a natural swing. His shoulder roll projected his neck to go forward almost horizontally and his  head tilted up to compensate.

I notice that he comes to a complete stop on the curb, before stepping down to cross the street. This causes confusion for pedestrians behind him, there is a repeating ripple in the flow of traffic.

He appears to be traveling from the more residential areas to the city center complex. The dozen stairs up are as wide as the building. He shifts to the far right, then walks diagonally back to the center doors. I see his reflection in the glass doors. The gold lettering says ‘Senior Services Center’. He is old.

I see my reflection in the glass doors, with my mismatched shoes. I am old.

A friend once stated, “History is  not the past. The past happened. History is what survives of it.”

This takes a little time to unwind. It has become popular to assume that history is a construct of “his story.” Linguistically, that is false. Yet, like many false etymologies, it reveals something worth considering. It suggests both a narrator and a gender bias. More importantly, it directs our attention to the second word.

Story.

Is it fiction? A myth? A rumor? A testimony? A narrative? A fabrication? Those are very different things.

For now, let’s set that aside and return to the Greek etymology. Historia did not mean “the past.” It meant inquiry—knowledge gained by investigation. History, then, begins not with an event, but with a question asked of events.

I’m struck by a modern ad phrase, ‘Inquiring minds want to know…’ it is a well used constructed phrase, it is circular, it’s an Ouroborus. And it does not help define the boundaries of the word.

A historian uses disciplined inquiry constrained by surviving evidence. The questions are asked of events through the evidence they leave behind.

This is complicated by the shape, quality, and verification of the evidence.

Evidence does not speak for itself. It must be interpreted.

Time is full of events, not all are noticed, very few are recorded. The record may have survived as artifact, but even that must be interpreted. They may have survived as a sort of textual communication. Making sense of records requires training and discipline.

This is ongoing, so we must revisit what ‘we know’ with the better tools that we make. History may have stones, but our inquiries are not.

The past does not change, the inquiries do.

Since inquiries are made by humans acting as witnesses, let us break that down.

The Trained Witness: They know where to look, but they carry the biases of their training. A 19th-century archaeologist saw a burial mound and looked for kings and gold; a modern archaeologist looks at the exact same dirt and analyzes pollen grains to understand climate and diet. The evidence didn’t change; the framework did.

The Accidental Witness: Often the most honest, yet the most chaotic. The merchant’s ledger or the private grocery list isn’t trying to sway posterity—it’s just recording the price of grain. Yet 500 years later, that accidental record tells us more about economic collapse than a king’s official decree ever could.

The Reluctant & False Witnesses: This is where history overlaps with detective work. Propaganda, self-justification, and trauma mean that the record is often actively trying to mislead us. A document doesn’t just tell us what happened; it tells us what the writer wanted someone else to believe happened.

The Absent Witness: Perhaps the most haunting category. The vast majority of human experience—especially the lives of the non-elite, the conquered, and the marginalized—leaves no written trace. Silence is also an artifact, and learning how to interpret what is missing is often a historian’s hardest task.

I recently read about a claim for a pottery stamp on a bowl. There is a known pottery maker in England called Dedham. Pottery found with this stamp can be very expensive.

This stamp appeared to say DEDHAM in all caps. No other piece of Dedham pottery has this form of stamp. Other humans thought they saw an R instead of an E. They suggested it was BIRDHAM. 

Some scanned it with Ai, and Ai saw the R and the I. So it concluded it was BIRDHAM.  

It was interesting in the comments how many people still concluded it was Dedham.

Being trained is not based upon opinion. Being trained provides the basis for opinion.

My friend wrote, ‘History is  not the past. The past happened. History is what survives of it.’

I would write, ‘History is the edge between what survives and what inquiry can reveal.’

History does not advance because the evidence changed. It advances because someone asked one more question.

Yadaphenia is a failure to witness—to recognize or accept the significance of genuine patterns.

This failure is not singular. It may arise from several distinct causes:

* Refusal — “I won’t accept what this pattern implies.”
* Inattention — “I never really noticed it.”
* Habituation — “I’ve seen it so often I no longer see it.”
* Premature closure — “I already know what this is.”
* Lack of inquiry — “I never asked the next question.”

When these failures persist, they often culminate in cognitive closure—the mind becomes satisfied with its present map regardless of how reality is arranged.

The most reliable sign of cognitive closure is simple:

The question stops.

Speed leans toward processing.

Time leans toward thinking.

Attention leans toward meaning.

Meaning leans toward wisdom.

Wisdom leans toward knowledge.

Knowledge leans toward humility.

Humility leans toward wonder.

Wonder leans toward inquiry.

Doom Cycle
I am on a ship, a steady place with warmth, food, entertainment, and more food.

When you step out in the bow of the ship, you may witness dolphins keeping pace, sometimes cutting across the bow, leaping, zig zagging for miles. If you are focused you may also see something curious.

In the front of the ship, on the distant horizon, you can see an island rising from the sea. The closer that the ship comes, the more it rises. The proof is that if you reverse it sinks again. If you turned 90 degrees to the left or right it stops sinking, but it does not rise.

Only if you move directly towards it, will it rise from the depth.

When you arrive at the island, you have a decision, ‘Do I get off?’, and if I get off, what happens if I stay? Does the ship leave?

Let’s witness each case independently. If you get off you will notice something immediately. Everything seems normal. The island should still be drenched, it rose from the sea just a few hours ago!

There is water here and there, but much less than expected. The good news is that there is shelter, warmth, and food similar to the ship, but in a different style.

As long as you stay on the island, and the ship stays, things are in balance and life goes on as expected.

If the ship plans to leave temporarily, and then come back for you, you face another more serious dilemma. As you watch the ship leave, it slowly sinks, taking your former safety, comfort, shelter and tremendous amounts of food with it.

Your island is now safe and stable, but something has transferred to the ship, and now it sinks. This appears consistent.

Here is further proof. If you land, it appears to be dry. You walk about, get back on the ship and sail away. If you go to the stern you can look out and witness the island sinking again, the farther you sail, the more it sinks, until it completely returns to the depth of the ocean. And this too, is continuous.

Here is the deeper question, and it refers back to the old adage, ‘A tree falls in the forest, you are not there to hear it or see the fall. Did it make a sound?’

Does the ship sink and rise, does the island sink and rise, without you?

If it continues, that points to one thing.
If it doesn’t… what does that mean about the universe we witness?

The world is filled with these examples. But it is less consistent than our thoughts. The rainbow is witnessed, but disappears upon approach. The tree disappears when we approach to see the leaves. The forest disappears when we approach the tree.

All of this can be a case of ‘incomplete witnessing’ but it is still suspicious to me.

The ground had always been there, a counterbalance to the sky. The ancient ground looked different—rough, jagged, ready for erosion and shaping. It waited for a very long time.

Eventually the ground became soft mounds, connected to other soft mounds, that were connected to larger mounds reaching the mountains. It was a cascade to the sea. Rainwater ran over them and between them, carrying away varying amounts of surface earth until the water met rock, and slowly, even the rock wore away.

But this place remained a series of soft mounds. Plants came and went, and came again. The earth became soil, enriched with generations of plant debris. The debris fed smaller lives, which drew larger ones, each in search of something edible.

The animals, too, became food, and the cascade continued.

Eventually humans came near the place, but not until a very long time had passed. So much time that the soil had become deep and rich, while the water lay far below in the water table.

Humans followed the traces of other animals and the traces of edible seeds. There was enough to gather, but not enough to settle for long. Other places offered a steady supply of shellfish.

So steady, in fact, that after harvesting, the shells were thrown to the ground and stepped upon, over and over, until they formed mounds of their own—places upon which humans would eventually live.

This place, this mound, was not made with human hands. It was made from debris of far greater magnitude.

Everything waited for the next great change, and that change was humans choosing this place to live. They came with tools to level part of the mound. They came with tools to seek the water deep beneath the soil. They came to plant their own seeds and place their own animals in pens and corrals.

They thought themselves masters of this place.

Yet the place had already hosted forests, grasses, countless lives, and kingdoms of creatures that had come and gone without ever knowing they belonged to something larger than themselves.

They built a structure to shelter themselves from the weather. The shelter almost seemed to morph on its own, growing taller, growing wider, giving shelter to a growing family.

In the lifetime of humans, it seemed forever. In the lifetime of the soil, it was only a moment. In the lifetime of the ground, it barely registered beyond the present.

In the ‘now’ the structure still exists. It is a shadow of its former self. Paint blasted by the weather, bare wood desiccated by the heat of the sun, a dry, mottled place, abandoned by humans.

In their time, it seems old. They never look at the ground, or the plants surrounding. There may be a dim reckoning that the tree may have been a sapling, but only because they are slightly aware of how a tree grows.

In the ‘now’ it has become an image, a frame of the surrounding landscape. Bringing meaning to a place that has already been a place for eons.

For humans it is a discovery, that tells us something significant.

refursive (adj.)

Characterized by recursive return, reflexive examination, and revision through recognized discrepancy. A refursive process returns to a point of fracture, refuses concealment of what has been revealed, and allows that revelation to alter future operation.

refursion (n.)

The process by which consequence reveals a discrepancy between expectation and reality, leading—through recognition and revision—to an altered future state.

Usage note:

Unlike recursion, which repeats a process, or reflexivity, which examines a process, refursion describes a process that is changed by what it discovers upon returning.

A refursive process returns, but not unchanged.

This word is the result of needing a blend of ‘recursive’ and ‘reflexive ’, with a touch of Edge Theory’s ‘fracture’.

It was a tedious push and pull, but the end definition fits the condition that has been occurring in my recent writing and thought. It might even be helpful to others.