Setting Fire to Life

Hello my furry friends,

First things first (never second): I love you guys! Each and every one of you. I love how beautiful, intelligent, patient and just generally awesome you are. I would like to marry each and every one of you guys and because I'm Xhosa-ish I can. I'll get cows and everything. It'll be nice.

Second things second (never first): I'm falling in love with this rag called life and I'm setting it on fire, arsonist that I am. My life pretty much sucks right now but God gave me amazing friends and some useful family members to help me on my journey to becoming the absolute best that I can be. If I'm going to set my life on fire I might as well do so with the best team available to me.

Phoenix Rising

Here's the bulletproof plan:

1. Land the epic librarian gig I've been gunning for all this time. I would be South Africa's best librarian. No question about it. Books, talking with and helping people are where it's (I'm not too sure what 'it' is) at for me. I am also interested in the Big Five literacy programmes that the City of Johannesburg's libraries host annually - that's my wheelhouse and all.

Jo'burg Libraries

2. Be money wise. The thing that always kicks me in the head all the time is that I am stupid with my money. I'm sad to admit that I'm too compulsive a creature and that I go too far in spending money on too many things that aren't important for progress in my life. That's not cool and I should stop it. Just stop it, Charlie. *the moving, wagging finger*

3. My new favourite real life hero is Pierre Spies. He's, like, so totally awesome hey. The man's just a tank whose life is on Wizard's Fire. He is the inspiration behind my new workout routine and health plan. This guy. He's rad-ical. I also want to buy a mountain bike and hit the off-road for that adventurous healthy sort of lifestyle.

Pierre Spies

4. I miss taking some time out, connecting with the 'verse and talking to the Big G. I should do more of that, more of the time. I miss You Big G, I miss our dialogue. Please forgive me for being silent for so long. I also miss C.S. Lewis and Peter Kreeft a lot. Those guys know God's heart very intimately.

5. Work harder. Work smarter. I'm the laziest person I know and it's my lethargy that's been the source of many a failure of mine. I'm also pretty dumb about how I work. I've no plan of attack; I just wing it, which ain't too efficient or sensible. This is one of the important tasks to get done.

6. Read more. A book a week keeps the ignorance away. I want to expand my reading material to more than comic books, graphic novels, horror, fantasy and sci-fi novels. I'm going to annihilate the 101 Books to Read Before You Die list this year. Bam! Just like that. Better and smarter Charlie, always a hit at upper crust parties.

7. Game more. I miss gaming and tech so much that my soul actually hurts. Gaming is to me what boobs (lol) are to awesomeness - essential dammit! I have so many titles to catch up with: replay Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 in preparation for Mass Effect 3, Skyrim, Batman: Arkham City, Deus Ex: Human Evolution and many other titles beside.

8. Get my driver's licence. This one has been a thorn in my side for some time and it's time to be a road warrior and just do it once and for all. Get it out of the way as they say. Also, there's the fact that bitches love being driven around in cars and stuff.

9. Be adventurous and tick off exciting things on the impromptu (we'll pretend I know what that means) bucket list: surfing, sky diving, banging dirty hippies with ginger dreadlocks, climbing a mountain - any one will do - and winning fights against annoying assholes.

10. Finally, do some good for change. I'm a fan of literacy programmes so I'll do something selfless along those lines.

Okay. That's the list, give or give a few more items. Other than Pierre Spies, and a host of others, I'm being my own hero. No cape, no tights or cool Bat toys - just me.

Thank you for sticking around and indulging me my little speech. I ask only that you join me in forging (I like that word - and know what it means) an alliance of everyday heroes that set the 'verse alight by being super awesome at living our lives.

Fire Dragon

Also, happy Chinese New Year for tomorrow.

Cupboard Person of the Week

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.”

- Nelson Mandela (quoting from Marianne Williamson’s Return to Love)

So I've been watching The Pick Up Artist of late and I'm quite impressed with Mystery and his wings.

I read The Game some years back and liked the concept of the seduction community because meeting women is an important area of any heterosexual male's life. It's one of those areas that you can never be too good at, it takes constant work in every other area of one's life to stay afloat in this one.

I love the fact that pick up artists like Mystery have been able to build an industry for this area of people's live. The world already caters for almost every other social and sexual need that people have (in a tacky and crass manner for the most part)so why not this area? Many people I've spoken to concerning the topic of 'pick up' think it's beneath them somehow but the sad truth is that they are still unable to approach beautiful women in many social settings. It's something worth learning is all I'm saying.

Anyhoo, back to the issue at hand, Mystery and his awesomeness!!! The guy is a freakin' tall mofo and has a scarecrow presence that's quite lovable. He's like a bony teddybear. This guy leads the sort of life that most dudes just dream about as they drive to some office in the morning and that is what I think is the coolest thing about him, he just does what he wants and is, as he calls it, the 'tribal leader' in his circle of friends. Everyone in the world should be as out there as this dude :)

Heaven's Magic Machine

This is the magical scene that will play out in Heaven as I awake from death, as though it were a dream:

‘“Well, Master Samwise, how do you feel?’ [Gandalf] said.
But Sam lay back, and stared with open mouth, and for a moment, between bewilderment and great joy, he could not answer. At last he gasped: “Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What’s happened to the world?”

“A great Shadow has departed,” said Gandalf, and then he laughed, and the sound was like music, or like water in a parched land; and as he listened the thought came to Sam that he had not heard laughter, the pure sound of merriment, for days upon days without count. It fell upon his ears like the echo of all the joys he had ever known. But he himself burst into tears. Then, as a sweet rain will pass down a wind of spring and the sun will shine out the clearer, his tears ceased, and his laughter welled up, and laughing he sprang from his bed.’
- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

I’m sitting here pretending to be marking first year English assignments but because I suffer from ADD (or whatever they call it these days) I can’t pay attention to another string of words that make no sense to anyone in the universe or any of the infinite ones parallel to ours – not even the person who wrote them. Unlike J.R.R. Tolkien my mind does not conjure up hobbits when faced with the deadly dull task of marking, mine wanders to random things instead, like whether or not there will be magic in Heaven. The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings have me convinced that there will be tonnes of it.

What sort of magic will it be though?

To use Terry Goodkind’s terms, will it be additive or subtractive? Will it be the sort of magic worked not by our souls but worked on our souls as Peter Kreeft puts it? Will it be the charming magic of animated Disney movies that sees dishes washing themselves and beautiful Princesses aroused from eternal slumber by true love’s kiss? I’m secretly hoping for dragons and centaurs. I’d love to have tea with a majestic dragon, assuming dragons care for tea that is. Imagine how big a dragon’s tea cup must be!

I went to see Thor some time back and if Heaven’s anything like Branagh’s vision of Asgard I’d be quite chuffed; all the best parts of a fantasy medieval setting merged with futuristic technology that has no side effects like pollution. It would have to be bigger than Asgard though, so as to accommodate my dragons. I’m a big fan of flashy and destructive sorcery I must say: Wizard’s fire, the fiery tempests in Dragon Age, crazy chain lightning and such. I doubt there’s place for destructive magic in Heaven though, especially since I’m referring to post-apocalyptic Heaven, when Satan and all his crazy minions have been smote down by Heaven’s awesome Secret Fire-wielding host and the Flame Imperishable has been sent to burn at the centre of the universe(s) forever and ever. Amen.

I should expect a behind-the-scenes sort of magic then I guess, only a little more overt than can be glimpsed in Nature. God is a big fan of espionage after all, what with Him always working His magic from the least likely of places and in a most covert manner. Take for an example in The Lord of the Rings He doesn’t make so much as a peeping sound but in which His presence makes all the difference.

Heaven’s magic is, no doubt, rooted in beauty – the lofty beauty of an Elvish Princess like Lúthien that captures the hearts of admirers the world over but can only be won by the most noble of beings, and yet it is a beauty as humble and accessible as a Samwise Gamgee of the Shire. Beauty alone is not enough though, for it to be truly magical it must be accompanied by truth, wisdom and all that good stuff.

Arcane arts like necromancy are out of the picture then; zombies, as cool as they may seem, are only a mockery of real life after all. Such arts are of a lower type of magic, not that of creation (or sub-creation).

I would venture to say that the purpose of magic is not to be seen but to be experienced. Real magic feeds a deep human need for wonder. It speaks to us as though we are children exploring the world and looking at everything in it with awe. Scientists experience the universe’s magic as they set out to unravel its mysteries and theists (the real ones) encounter this magic in their unshakable faith.

In the Middle-Ages it was said that God wrote two books, the Bible and Nature. The world in which we live is a magic making machine and many of us don’t even notice it. Nature is God speaking to us of love, beauty, perfection, imperfection, death and many other such lessons beside. The universe, as such, is a picture of what the magic of Heaven will be like, the sort of magic whose presence is never noted but whose absence is immediately apparent.

Glory, Splendour, Hierarchy, Height, Formality

“Here is a sentence that no man who hath uttered it really believed it: I’m just as good as you are” – C.S. Lewis

I’ve been told that I’m arrogant by people who think I think I’m better than they are in some manner and this has baffled me for the longest time because I don’t have much to be arrogant about! I’m not outlandishly handsome (though I’m not ugly), I’m not wealthy as far as money goes, I don’t have the best fashion sense, I’m rarely the centre of any social gathering and though I’m intelligent I’m by no means the most intelligent person I know. I’m merely a chocolate Columbo, a winsome character in his bumbling manner. The answer to this question came to me as I was listening to Peter Kreeft’s talk on the beauty of language. In this talk he points out that people actively hate words! The very idea causes anyone who can claim any sort of humanity’s soul to cringe because, as Kreeft points out, words are not merely labels for things but rather it’s in words that things live, move and have their being, in words they come to us; language, according to Heidegger, is the house of being. It is in words and language that things first come into being and are, thus the misuse of language destroys our authentic relation to beings, because what you do to words you do to things. I’m a lover of language and when I speak I tend to do so as juggler, I love to play with words, not very ‘big’ words mind you, just your normal, everyday sort of fare and this irks people. I don’t know why but it immediately puts me on their radar as someone who is trying to belittle them, which is never my goal. I’m blessed in that the majority of my friends are more intelligent than I am so I’m always the one learning new things from them and listening in wonder at how they spin their stories. I can sit for hours on end and listen to people tell me about themselves because they are so ‘other’ from me and the words they use are like a song I cannot emulate. This obviously applies only to interesting people. Thus, it’s not people’s cold intelligence that impresses me but the way in which they present their being, if that makes sense at all.

I’m in love with beautiful words and ugly words grate my soul, which is why I cannot listen to most popular music, I can find no beauty there. I guess that this goes a long way in setting me up as an elitist. People are not happy when you tell them that the things they like are ugly. I happen to like a great many things that friends I respect tell me are ridiculous and thus my opinion on a thing should not be taken as an attack but rather as a misunderstanding thereof. I like being schooled and once you point out the beautiful side of a thing to me that is the only light in which I will see it from then on. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion is the most beautiful book I’ve ever read but most people hate it! They tell me it’s dull and unnecessarily difficult in its language usage. I understand exactly what they mean because the first time I read it grasping the language was a herculean task. This was a failing on my part though, not Tolkien’s. When I tried again a few years later I could understand the language and thus Tolkien’s poetry. The beauty I found there was like Lewis’ comment on The Lord of the Rings, lightning from a clear sky. People, especially students, have the same problem with Shakespeare; they hate him only because they don’t understand him. Once they learn how to read him they realise that no one sets up the drama to a story like that man! Mathematics is another example, I just don’t get it but when mathematicians speak of it I can see its beauty for a brief but clear instant. There’s a quote whose source I’ve forgotten that says, “Euclid alone has looked on beauty there”. That is to say that Euclid saw geometry as one would poetry and thus found beauty but we look at it from a utilitarian vantage and it’s drab and ugly from where we sit.

Going back to what I was saying before I started down this side road. I like language that portrays Glory, Splendour, Hierarchy, Height and Formality because it hearkens to a better time in humanity’s history, a history that didn’t really exist in the ordinary sense of the word but a history that’s as real as you and me nonetheless. I speak of a time that every civilization in our past strove for but failed to hit the mark. Here in South Africa many of us still remember the atrocities of Apartheid but now that I, as a black person, can look back at that sordid past with a sort of fascination it’s apparent that people like Verwoerd were racist but in their own crazy way they were trying to preserve the purity of the ‘race’ and their biggest fear was the pollution of their blood so they did what people who are afraid do, they attacked the monster before it could get a chance to attack them. Every mess that has ever been made of governments in our history was made in trying to create a Utopia. Though we fear words such as Splendour and Height it’s what our souls yearn for, our souls believe in a monarchy. Our souls want to inhabit a kingdom ruled by a just King where we all observe manners and customs. Our souls love obeying the righteous law and modern people make the mistake of seeing people who live in accordance to the universal law of humanity and thinking they’re arrogant when in fact they’re the epitome of humility.

That’s the end of my winding argument to prove that I’m not arrogant but simply aligned to the natural law of things and that I like words and thus speak a lot. Also, I’m a bit more of a saint than you are :P