Sanction Log
I’ve only read thru ~1/3 of Sanction 2 (S2) but the whole path has been a bit of a trigger. Clearly it is a thinly veiled story of Roman’s life — and no doubt a very challenging work for the politically sensitive -- but it is also a window into the self if not just Roman. In the vein of the former, I will note that one of the heavier burdens I once placed on myself was to get a relatively useless Religion BA from one of those small Midwest liberal arts colleges (oof, the career consequences were manifold). Otoh, as I read Sanction 1 (S1) I got a ton of triggers on what I’ve read both in college (’80) and over a life. During the intermission between S1 and S2 I deliberately extended my time in order to take stock of “me” and also what I was reading in general and also to re-read or skim what I thought what would inform my reading of S2. The list was supposed to be pretty long cuz Roman reads a shit-ton. But I couldn’t really pull it off in full before I re-started, though. Here is a tiny selection of what I at least picked up and held in my hands if not actually read through: The Old Testament, Iliad, Taleb’s Incerto, Montaigne, Icelandic Sagas, C Hitchens, Zen Camera, Dante, Stochastic calculus texts, etc not all of which were relevant, this is just the scope of my interregnum. I have forgotten some; I’ll flesh more of this out later. I also am taking breaks during S2 to pick up texts one at a time that I think will inform my reading. The breaks and interludes and side-reads mean that this will be a hyper-slow process. At 62 there is no guarantee that I can do this exactly within a lifetime, especially if I plan to go through all this again.
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Taleb, N N -- Black Swan
"Ideas come and go, stories stay." NNT"Black Swan was a book that was crucial for the moral and logical skeleton of Sanction..." RM
"instinct was older than reason" RM
I had a "personal catastrophe" [like an earthquake or forest fire, eh?]
a is called "the" productivity
b is called the b-value in some range
M is magnitude
g. Forest Fires. I put forest fires near last in the bullet list above for a reason. This is the metaphor that we see over and over and over in Sanction. Roman uses forest fires as a metaphor for a reason. First, he lives in the mountain west. Second, fire magnitudes follow a chaotic power law curve as above, like earthquakes do, for a reason. In his case it can be due to human malfeasance, something with which Sanction loves to deal.
"the Black Swan changed my focus from information to preparation""he changed how I saw the world"
12/14/2020
I read the Iliad at an age that I want to say was about 42. For background: I was nearly illiterate going
into an elite college – ranked #5 by US News by way of brag – and as nearly
illiterate coming out; heh. I did not recognize this problem -- and frankly no
one now (or ever) will care -- until I was about 39. Then I embarked on a reading journey. I’d like to say that I methodically worked
through the appendix of Harold Bloom’s “Western Canon” but that wasn’t it.
Here is what happened. I once read a book by Bruce Chatwin:
Songlines. I mean, I hear it was a fraud but whatever, I really enjoyed it. So,
I embarked on a Chatwin journey, one book of which included “In Patagonia.” That,
then, led me to reading Paul Theroux’s “Patagonian Express” among others. When
Theroux was in Buenos Aires he interviewed the old, blind Borges. I, fascinated,
wondered “who the hell is Borges?” That then led to reading both his fiction
and non-fiction. That, in turn, led to
pretty much everything else in all of western literature. Bloom was a
nobody in this context. Borges was god.
But I digress. Borges
mentioned the Iliad somewhere along the way. I then realized I had totally missed
it. But I had a reasonable translation
by Fagles on my shelf so I sat, one day, down to read. Holy crap! This was a
smoking story of war and passion and violence. It was poignant, harsh and
touching. In particular, the story of Achilles and Patroclus was heartfelt (as
was the story of the Sicilian Campaign in Thucydides which is a separate story).
So a few paragraphs of riff here? What, exactly, is the link to
Sanction? Hmmm, I’m not sure. The basic idea is as follows:
- The Iliad is literally THE epic story of war. Sanction
- It is touching and affecting in its way. Sanction
- Achilles is motivated by what? Rage. Sanction!
- I would never ever ever read Sanction without reading the Iliad. This is a must-read
Proust
I do not literally see Proust in Sanction. I mean, maybe a
little. Who reads Proust now? He was a giant in the early 20th C along
with the likes of Joyce and Gide and Elliot. Otoh, he stands alone. One work, one life. He, Roman and Proust, is not radically different
than the points I made about Kafka and Borges, just more so. There is one work one man. This is, so far as
I can see, Sanction, right? But then again Roman is not dead yet nor is he living in a corked room...maybe a container home at 8600 ft is the same as a corked room. Idk.
I read Proust once as I also did Thucydides. Seemed
necessary. I was 45 or so. Both took me 18 months. My ex resented every sentence I
read, if sentences were to be denominated in “time.” But what the hell, she was an
abandoner of husband and children in favor of ambition and money. I wonder if
she knew how masculine that was? Me and three daughters did not see her for 5 of
7 days for > 12 years. That is almost 9 elapsed years of near total solitude. Fuck her
for resenting my reading. Where was she when it was time to read the children
to sleep, or go the doctor, or go to the parent-teacher conferences, or put on
a band-aid. Oh yeah, that’s right: not there. Or asleep on the couch under a
pile of Horschow Home catalogues while her daughters begged for her. They both hate and remember that absence now.
How is that for legacy. Ha. Not my legacy, brother.
I read Proust in an English translation by C S Moniceff, a
translation which has since been criticized. But whatever. His voice was
contemporary with the language tones of the time. Plus, I tried to parallel in the
original French. That failed. The distance between subject and object in the
sentence was vast and left me adrift, like looking for the ship one might've fallen off of
in a roiling sea. I stuck with the translation.
Ok, so what is my point? I’ll try to make the link in a "reader’s
digest" brevity way:
- Proust retreated to write a work of art that was the one work of his life. Sanction
- Proust wrote something like 1 million words. Sanction (1.2...winner)
- Proust viewed his opus as 1 continuous work but it got broken up by editor. Sanction
- Proust viewed words as both cage and art. Sanction
- Proust viewed writing as an expository journey through memory and artfulness. Sanctionesque
- Proust irritated readers of the time. He was “wicked.” Sanction in spades.
I am sure there are other affinities. I’ll update this riff if I think
of something new. My point is not precisely that Proust = either Sanction or Roman, it is that
it is not entirely unreasonable to link the two. Marcel McClay, right?
Asimov, Isaac – Foundation
I am certain that my memory will betray me here. The last time I read Asimov was in 1970, 50 years ago. A non-trivial number of the people I know, except me and my gf, are < 50. But as I read through Vol 1 of Sanction, I could not shake the feeling – the feeling, not the words or story – of having been somewhere near here before. In Foundation, the set-up is not too dissimilar to 2020…and Sanction for that matter. We are in a Bronze age by which I mean not the historic one on earth but Bronze in the sense that there is a cycle: Golden age, Silver, Bronze, Dark+cataclysm à Gold (this was loosely based on the fall of the Roman Empire; he could not have seen where we are now). In Foundation, as well as in 2020, the feeling is one of "Bronze." Hari Seldon, the main protagonist of Foundation, with almost my last name, knows it is coming and his discipline – Psychohistory – is able to mathematically predict the future within some framework that also allows for some degree of uncertainty. He and his associates see war and darkness coming (Sanction?), a dark age predicted to last 30,000 years, galaxy-wide. Rather than accept the coming onslaught and oppressive darkness for so long, the plan, if I remember right, was to accelerate the dark age by bringing it on faster and to create conditions that will cause a 1000 year dark age vs 30,000. This is Sanctionesque, right?
Then, the fly in the ointment is that uncertainty I
mentioned. There is a mind-reading character that subverts the 1000 year plan.
This fly can be called non-ergodicity (S2, Taleb, Ole Peters). It is the Self-organized
criticality thing. It is Chaos Theory. If I took one thing from S1 it was this. So
these two works are aligned. Both acknowledge both the decay of a bronze age and coming cataclysms as well as the life of a Thanksgiving turkey:
Predicting the future based on 364 days of history is both fraught and has consequences
unforeseen.
Here, btw, were a few posts I did on the finance of chaos in my retirement blog, heh:
Both of these thoughts, on both Bronze age mindsets (punish twitter reference) and Turkeys, reminded me so much of Sanction. Also, it has been noted that Asimov took some influence from Montaigne (see my riff on Sanction and Montaigne or maybe google Asimov and Montaigne). Also, the "turkey story" reminds me a bit of Taleb’s Incerto which plays a large role in Sanction, something on which I have yet to riff. I don’t remember how Foundation turns out but that is maybe a blessing for now.
Remember my riff on Kafka and Borges? My belief is that Roman literally created his own precursors with Foundation now being an example. This connection was something that was not real in the world until he wrote but now it's there. Who creates whom? Pretty cool, right? Roman might have mentioned an affinity or link with Asimov in a call. I can’t remember. That’s the problem when giants leave the world. Once can no longer pester them with questions.
My guess is that even Roman would scratch his head at these references. But Stegner, a lit professor at Stanford when
he was alive, was a student and chronicler of the American West. His most
famous work – Beyond… -- was a history of what he called the 2nd
opening of the west: the geological surveys, post Lewis and Clark, by men like
John Wesley Powell. The main history was
the stories of the first passage down the Colorado River and the survey of some
the surrounding plateaus. The Colorado river journey alone is enough to convince
one that the soy-men of today are radically and entirely fragile and prepared
for nothing of any seriousness. Were I to be in a time of affliction, which may or may not describe 2020 and beyond, the one-armed Powell, even
when starving, would have been a formidable companion and ally.
Angle of Repose is fiction, and a fiction based on a slightly
different place and time than “Beyond…”, but very much of a piece with the
other work. Both are what I describe as
the literature of hard men doing hard things in a hard time. All of the characters, real or fiction, would
have been perfectly aligned with either the war of Sanction (haven’t gotten
that far) or, especially, building the world to come after whatever cataclysm
is at hand. Both the fiction and the non-fiction
are, as I describe in my riff on the Icelandic Sagas, like this: reading one informs the
other and vice versa even if there are no direct references. On the other hand keep in mind the hard geo-setting
of both Sanction and Roman in mountain-south CO. We are certainly on the same terrain
both geographically and psychically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Stegner
Icelandic Sagas
This will no doubt be my dumbest riff on Sanction. This is because I literally do not have the depth of subject matter knowledge to do justice to the subject at hand. On the other hand, at the exact moment I write this sentence, I have blood dripping down my right typing hand so perhaps I have been given a very brief dispensation to opine. Or maybe it’s a warning, idk.
It’s not that the Icelandic Sagas are or are not referenced
in Sanction or are relevant to my reading, it is that Sanction is very very heavily
infused with Norse sentiment, mythology, language, and ideas – one book club
member called Sanction 66% Norse, 33% Old Testament, and 1% new Testament; that
is probably a good place to start. The Sagas,
of which I have only read a few, just happen to be a good representation of family
histories of the Icelanders and contains a little about the cultural ethos and mythology of
the middle ages of the North. In this sense
the Sagas and Sanction are aligned. To read the Sagas is to read Sanction (in a
way) and vice versa. One informs the other.
If I were up to it, I would probably go on a long disquisition about
Norse Mythology and images and motifs and ideas and tie them to the work. Nope.
Can’t do it…yet. But just for fun, I’ll mention part of the only story I remember and let
that stand as something on which we can reflect. In one of the Sagas, a Norse
(Southwestern Norway if I recall) teenager is affronted by someone by way of a
casual insult. The teenager (in context it was clear that he was not yet a
fully formed man) responded to the insult by cleaving the insulter’s skull in two with an
axe. This is the kind of fast, direct, blood soaked, feudish, grudge-ish, rageful, politeness-inspiring-in-the-end
retributive justice with which Sanction struggles on almost every page. One informs the other.
As a side note: in my re-read of Norse Background I did enjoy the story of
Odinn and Skoldi – he the one eyed, raven- and wolf-flanked god of things like wisdom,
culture, language, and fury and she the mountain-loving, shore-forsaking, skiing,
bow wielding goddess of the far north – and can imagine myself a distant, human
child of such a union. In fact, I can say with some certainty that my forebears came from the general area of Yorkish, Northumbrian Danelaw. That's Viking (or Saxonish) enough for me and 23 and me confirms it. This may be why I am enjoying my read.
My typing hand...minus the blood:
Kafka, Escher, Borges
That paragraph header is a playful riff on the book title “Gödel, Escher, Bach” but not an unserious one. For while I could not read GEB for more than a few minutes and I know neither Gödel or Bach, I am not totally unfamiliar with the concept of repetition, patterns, recursion, tessellations, and infinite loops. For one example, I once took a class on the mathematics of symmetry from Sy Shuster, one of the top US mathematicians on that topic (I squandered the opportunity in the end). Then too, and very certainly, I found it in the retirement finance and stochastic calculus I stuck my head into for 8 years. The idea of replication and recursion and multiplicativity (compounding) are at the very center of that enterprise.
This kind of idea, in art*, is easiest to see in MC Escher and for
which he is well known. His images are
somewhere between familiar and iconic. Here is one example among many that
expresses the idea of the infinite loop; I could have pulled a hundred more:
In literature, Kafka is the most Escheresque to my amateur
eye (maybe some older Hindu literature but idk). If we know anything of Kafka,
we certainly know of the loops and recursions and circles…and likely as well: the
dark confusing despair. And almost as certainly,
in 2020, via the absurdities of critical theory, we are more conversant now,
even if we haven’t actually read Kafka, with the phrase “Kafka trap”, a
conversational loop that leads nowhere and can be solved perhaps only through violence.
This is as close as I can come to making a link between Kafka and Sanction (a
link which I have not seen directly and explicitly…yet) where the image of the ouroboros
– the snake eating its tail...generally speaking a metaphor for wholeness or
infinity – (and the vivid violence for that matter) repeats over and over. I have not
read enough of Sanction yet to really intuit entirely what Roman is trying to
do with the asp but I will at least note that it, and the violence, is there
and they repeat and seem to be important.**
The difference, however, between the intuition on the Escher repetitions,
along with the classical interpretation of the circular asp – peace and order for
Escher, wholeness and infinity for the ouroboros – and Kafka is that in Kafka the
circle becomes nightmare and disorientation rather than order peace and
wholeness. But maybe that is the other
side of the circular asp-y coin. My guess is that Sanction, in its use of the
image, can perhaps be interpreted both ways. Maybe should be. TBD for me.
Now Borges. Borges
is, a little like Kafka, well known for his use of patterns, circles, forking
paths, limitless libraries, and infinite regress among other ideas. He also
shares with Kafka the distinction, in at least my opinion, of being totally solitary,
unique. It is very very hard to categorize them with other literature. They, a
little like Montaigne in another riff, had no precursors…until they wrote, at
which point the antecedents became obvious, but only in retrospect. And then the
writer and his precursors stood to look at each other like mirrors facing each
other creating an infinite recursion: who begat whom exactly? Whether there were followers is, what shall we say, uninteresting? Here is how Borges
put it:
“If I am not mistaken, the
heterogeneous pieces I have listed resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all
of them resemble each other. This last fact is what is most significant. Kafka’s
idiosyncrasy is present in each of these writings, to a greater or lesser
degree, but if Kafka had not written, we would not perceive it; that is to say,
it would not exist. The poem “Fears and Scruples” by Robert Browning prophesies
the work of Kafka, but our reading of Kafka noticeably refines and diverts our
reading of the poem. Browning did not read it as we read it now. The word “precursor”
is indispensable to the vocabulary of criticism, but one must try to purify it
from any connotation of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that each writer creates
his precursors. His work modifies our
conception of the past, as it will modify the future. In this correlation, the
identity or plurality of men doesn’t matter. The first Kafka of “Betrachtung”
is less a precursor of Kafka of the gloomy myths and terrifying institutions
than is Browning or Lord Dunsany.”
[1951]
So now what of Sanction in the context of my Kafka, Escher, Borges riff?
1. Roman makes heavy use of the ouroboros image, repetition, circles, etc. As I said, my interpretation is incomplete still, but it is there and I do pay attention to it. I used to have a boss that would fire people if he had to tell them something three times. The first time you might not notice but the second time he said something you were totally wired and sitting on the edge of your seat. I have effectively been told twice now in Sanction so I pay attention,
2. Sanction is unique in a very Kafkan/Escherian/Borgesian way. I mean try to categorize it. Sci fi? Uh, no. Love story? Certainly not. Boy’s adventure story? Perhaps but that is pretty far off. Faulkner in CO with AI? Maybe. Something else entirely, though, I think. Uncategorizable at this time. In addition, once written -- and written only in a way possible by one person at one exact point of time – it now creates its own precursors in an infinity-mirror kind of way. Ouroboros.
12/12/2020
Montaigne, Essays
Roman, back in the time when we inhabited more or less parallel worlds and he was still present on earth, when I told him I was ¾ of the way through Montaigne’s essays on a start and stop 7-year effort, told me there were direct references to Montaigne in Sanction. I haven’t seen it yet or maybe I missed it so I’ll have to take his word for it. But I also told him I saw some affinities...which he did not deny. I am not a deep reader of Montaigne – or anything for that matter – but I’ll take a shot at explaining what I think I mean.
Montaigne, 1533-1592, (again, because he is not strictly a 2020
political object, Wikipedia still has a pretty benign and useful cover), was, if nothing
else, an innovator. He wrote in new personal skeptical essay form and titled the books Essais which is
some variation on “try” or “attempt” or “test.” I’ve also heard someone refer
to the translation as “I try myself” though that is stretching it a bit even
though poetically pretty accurate. Think of him as the first (16th
century) blogger who was a "cool-temperature" skeptic and self-explorer with a very modern voice.
Maybe a little like a more secular St. Augustine but then I have not seen that
comparison before. He is known, among other things, for his frankness;
honesty; casual form in some cases, formal dialectic in others; his heavy use of
quotations from classical sources like Plutarch, Seneca, and Juvenal; and introspection.
Here are some self-descriptions in his own words: I am exploring “some traits
of my character” and “I am myself the matter of this book.”
The death of his friend Etienne de La Boétie was said to have both deeply affected him and acted as a spur to write as a way to offload
emotion. The link, as it were, to Sanction, might be clear if you know a little
of Roman’s backstory. The work itself that came out of his solitary effort in
his tower (not quite 8600 feet of elevation but you might get the parallel) is a compendium of essays on pretty much everything. It is one work, in three volumes
– my edition was produced in two – with a large number of chapters, each of
which is a deep dive into some topic of personal interest. It was originally intended to
only be of interest to himself and some “inner circle.” For what it's worth, the inscription he had installed over his
bookshelves in the tower went like this:
In
the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of
February, his birthday, Michael de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of
the court and of public employments, while still entire, retired to the bosom
of the learned virgins, where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend
what little remains of his life, now more than half run out. If the fates
permit, he will complete this abode, this sweet ancestral retreat; and he has
consecrated it to his freedom, tranquility, and leisure.
A couple snippets of more modern commentary should round out
some of my initial thoughts on Montaigne:
“He was writing about me. He knew my
innermost thoughts.” Eric Hoffer
“That such a man wrote has truly augmented
the joy of living on earth.” Nietzsche
So, what exactly is the link here? Idk, let me try:
- Sanction, to my untrained eye, while a whole piece, is, if looked at carefully, a very long collection of introspective, fragmented essays rather than a full-arc classical Novel; I might be wrong on this. But look how deeply he dives down on things like genes or hill culture or justice or language or violence or rationality etc. each with its own lengthy discourse. He told me he wanted his work to be printed as one thing but there were practical constraints so: one work, three volumes, many chapters, and a shit-ton of individual, very personal essays. This is, very clearly, to me, the work of a Montaigne.
- He is “trying himself.” Essay-ing. He is himself the “matter of this book.” It carries “traits of [his] character.” The book is no more no less than Roman. Forget the AI cover story.
- It is frank, honest and introspective, often brutally so.
- It is, if you have heard him talk about it, a way to “off load emotion” akin to what I mentioned about Etienne de La Boétie. I can’t remember if it was on one of our calls or on a podcast or something where he said that the book was a way for him to channel “betrayal” energies that otherwise might have resulted in mass violence against the betrayers.
- He strikes a personal chord: “he was writing about me…”
- “that such a man wrote has truly augmented the joy of living on earth.” This is a true statement.
- The book, as far as my untutored self can tell, is innovative. I have read a fair share of the W cannon and cannot place it in a category very well. I might be off or under-read. Idk. TBD.
- Roman told me once that Sanction is sorta kinda only for people that can see it, each in his or her own way. That is Montaigne's inner circle. Probably Roman's too.
- Both retreated to a "tower" at more or less a similar if not same age to write intensively.
12/11/2020
Job
I feel like Job shows up all over the place in Sanction. It is certainly explicit in the first part of S2 and a little more implicit in S1. Either way it seems essential to a read of Roman's work if not essential to an understanding of reality or at least the reality for those of us rooted in the western tradition. Wikipedia, of course, can give a good shallow cover of Job (I won't do more than a micro-cover here for that reason) but I'd highly recommend the original text for the full force of the poetics of the Old testament. I happen to use the Oxford Annotated RSV which has followed me since ~1979.
The basic idea is that the book of Job is a inquiry into suffering, justice, righteousness and the unknowability of God. Satan tries to tell God that self interest and piety are tied at the hip and that piety will fade with suffering. Job, unaware but righteous, then becomes the object of what is basically a wager, kind of upside down from Pascal, which is also a test. He is afflicted with various losses (death of animals, servants, sons and daughters) and afflictions (sores, an eve-esque temptress of a wife imploring him to curse God and die) to see what happens to his piety.
This is rather Sanctionesque, in a way, I think. In S2 there is a fairly extended section that deals with Job which I had trouble finding on a lookback. I am not entirely sure what Roman is up to here but the S2 narrative reads, to me, a little like an epistemological game-theoretic discussion of the final move in a game where force or violence is justified because there is nothing else beyond. "Might makes right" is repeated almost as a prayer. When there is nothing else or ideas conflict and reason fails, strength might have to at least be a tie-breaker. If this is the read, and I am not saying it is, I personally don't quite agree with the conclusion. Maybe Roman is going somewhere else with this, idk. The lesson, for me, in Job is the unknowability of God and his reasons and that a humble man shall not demand answers from God: "Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?" ... "have you commanded the morning since your days began?" ..."have the gates of death been revealed to you?" ... "have you entered into the storehouses of the snow" ... "shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty?" etc etc. To me this is less force or might than a humbling of man in the face of an unknowable God and his unknowable intent. Yes it demands an unconditional surrender so maybe I'm off here since there is some force here. But to me it is less coercive-might makes right than you just literally can not know or understand. Maybe that amounts to the same thing because either way a knee is bent.
In the end, Job remains pious in the face of his various afflictions. This is a power-move of faith by Job and is the more interesting part of the story. His losses are then restored. Wiki says that this redeeming payoff also restores the pre-Job world of assumptions about the covenant with God vis retributive justice concepts. I guess so but certainly Sanction is intimately interested in retributive justice and Job as an afflicted, steadfast, and redeemed man would be, in secular form, a character right out of Sanction. I can see why the story of Job is interwoven into the narrative.
12/10/2020
Isaiah
Of the list of works in the intro, I consider the Old Testament to be the most important. The first volume makes this clear and the topics and names of characters should make it obvious. I have not read the OT end to end exactly but I did at least revisit Job, closely studied in college, as well as read-from-scratch Isaiah as a critical text for the project. There were other books, some of which I had covered before and some new. I skimmed selections that seemed relevant and will revisit all of them if I live long enough to take in everything I want to read. In this era, one can’t read everything.
The book of Isaiah deserves a longer treatment, but I won’t give it here due to imposter syndrome and time constraints. The basic thing I see is that, given the thinly veiled Roman life-story, Isaiah makes sense as a theme and character. But then I have not read too far. The thing I see in Isaiah, which can be lifted in a second from Wiki -- not to mention a direct dive into the power and beauty of the OT text -- but probably takes a lifetime to absorb, are the general themes. These look to my naïve eye like the following:
- God the judge and redeemer of the righteous and the oppressor
- God the punisher of iniquity
- The restoration of the righteous and justice to the iniquitous
- The power of the language
- The intimate, present God of the OT and the fraught relationship with the flock
All of these, if one tunes into the assumption of the
affinity of Sanction with Roman’s self-described life story, make a ton of
sense. Personally, I know in my own story the arc of a 30 year male friendship that
ended in a tri-partite betrayal in one instant. That kind of thing demands a
response or at least a casting of the offending body to the ninth circle. That
Roman was betrayed seems clear. That he has written an old testament testimony
to the need for redemption and punishment of the iniquitous seems equally obvious. The restoration of the righteous through war
and the provision of justice to the iniquitous is made crystal clear in the death
of the 46 along with what I’ve tracked so far into S2. Clearly that path has not
been enough. The entire world needs to be set up-end right so a bigger war is coming
(don’t spoil if you know). The name of the AI = Isaiah cannot be an accident.
But then again I have not read the whole.
This following quote is apropos of nothing really but as I read Isaiah, these particular words really stood out to me for some reason. I do not necessarily tie it to the S text as such although Roman did like my pull once but then he is now more like the abstract absent god of the NT than the avenging, present one of the OT 😉. Me? I just liked the sound of the quote plus I used to trade silver. It goes like this:
“Behold, I have refined you, but
not as silver; I have tried you in the furnace of affliction.”
My guess is that this could as easily describe the author as much as myself. Certainly, anyone that has lived 62 years – anyone that has lived at least 10 lives – can attest to being tried in a furnace of affliction at some point. This was the kind of tone and tenor I lifted from my read of S1 that is slowly eliding into my reading of S2. We’ll see.
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