Charles Cameron

How confusing does Islamic eschatology (“end times theology”) get when it comes to the Black Flags of Khorasan — and the idea of AQ or the Taliban marching victoriously on Jerusalem?

Contrast the view from the site where I found this map with the view found in Bilal Khan’s informally syndicated piece, Where is Khurasan Actually?.

The two pieces seem to use much of the same material — including in both cases the suggestion that the Pashtun / Pathans are descendants of one of the Lost Tribes of Israel but whereas Khan’s essay contains a quote attributed to Syed Saleem Shehzad of Asia Times Online to the effect that “Al Qaeda shares this belief with the Taliban that Afghanistan is the promised land of Bilad-e-Khurasan”, thus suggesting that an AQ-Taliban combo might be the army of the Mahdi, the map itself portrays the Taliban and AQ as “Jewish Agents” killing the Mahdi’s followers…

If I can figure them out myself, I hope to have a more detailed exploration of these and some related matters up at Zenpundit — where I’ve been tracking such things for some time — in the next few days.

This will be a brief one.

A veteran friend of mine, Thomas Brinson, wrote something recently about violent video games that I found to be painfully honest and admirable.

He began by saying:

one of the things that has kept me away from the computer games is the inherent “violence”, especially warfare violence, in many of them –> as a “vet for peace” I have a knee-jerk abhorrence of anything that I judge “glorifies” war and warfighting.

But that wasn’t enough he carried on, as befits someone practicing self-examination:

That’s the ideal sentiment; the truth is that I enjoy the art of killing too much, and playing modern warfare games would reawaken how much I nostalgically miss the wargames, real and virtual, of my youth in Vietnam, as well as how much I envy, truth be told, the warfighting options available to youth today all over the planet …

I’d like to honor both sides of that statement the visceral feeling of a warrior, and the restraint of the man of peace.

Both, its seems to me, are truths — and we humans are complex creatures.

There’s something primal about play: it’s instinctual, it’s intuitive, it puts us in the moment.

And it’s where we learn competition and collaboration, strategy and spontaneity, bluff and honor — “poker face” and “fair play” alike.

• We’ve seen Kriegspiel used in training the Prussian officer corps.
• We’ve seen a chess set Harun al-Rashid supposedly sent Charlemagne as a diplomatic gift.
• We’ve seen chess in Reykjavik as a continuation of the Cold War by other means.
• We’ve seen Mao as a student of strategy in Go.
• We’ve seen the Olympics as a time of truce among the warring states of Greece
• We’ve seen soccer as a triumph of peace-making in South Africa.
• We’ve seen a soccer match trigger war between Honduras and El Salvador.
• We’ve seen the Olympics as a killing field in Munich.

Once you start thinking of play as a significant category in its own right not just as what kids can do with their free time, but as the very essence of freedom correlations between games and current affairs take on a whole new coloration. From a Jungian perspective, you might say that our play time strikes an archetypal chord in us: it carries profound and generally unrecognized meaning.

Our games are as close as peace can get to war, while remaining peace and when the whole wide world plays games, our feelings can get mightily involved.

*

I also think, for similar reasons, that it’s important to notice when games and play meet religion.

Back when I was Editor-at-Large for The Cursor, a magazine for game designers, I wrote a piece which was the featured article in their April 1997 issue under the title “Doom Goes to Church” — (there’s a version titled Games Lamas Play still available online). Edward Castronova recently hosted a discussion of “virtual communion” on Terra Nova and just a couple of days ago, Lisa Poisso posted an interview with a Lutheran pastor titled When WoW meets real-world religion on WoW Insider.

I am reminded …

• that Hindus speak of the activities of the avatars of Vishnu as lila sport, play, theater.
• that Christians are rethinking the role of Jews in the passion play at Oberammergau.
• that Shi’ites commemorate Huseyn’s martyrdom at Kerbala in ta’ziyeh passion plays.
• that Hesse’s Glass Bead Game has been compared to a Papal High Mass of Easter in St Peter’s.

And Hesse’s contemporary, the historian Johan Huizinga, tells us something of the power of sacred play when he writes in Homo Ludens:

But with the end of the play its effect is not lost; rather it continues to shed its radiance on the ordinary world outside, a wholesome influence working security, order and prosperity for the whole community until the sacred play-season comes round again.

*

So when I read yesterday that the Commonwealth Games scheduled to take place in New Delhi in ten days had been threatened by the “Indian Mujahideen” who recently attacked the Jama Masjid, I was concerned at the volatile mix of games and religious warfare on the world stage.

I was particularly struck by the jihadists’ phrasing, “We will now rightfully play Holi with your blood” a reference to the Spring festival of Holi, in which Hindus douse one another playfully in colored water in memory of a devotee named Prahalad, until they are literally and metaphorically awash in the “colors of devotion”. The jihadists consider their Hindu fellow-countrymen to be “Indian idol-worshippers”

Also relevant, it seems to me, is this ruling on India’s equivalent of the disputed Temple Mount / Noble Sanctuary in Jerusalem — the Ayodhya Babri mosque / Ram Janambhoomi dispute:

Indian Court Delays Ruling on Mosque Site
 
India’s Supreme Court on Thursday postponed a ruling on whether Hindus or Muslims would control the country’s most disputed religious site.
 
A lower court had been scheduled to issue a verdict on Friday, and the Indian government had issued national appeals for calm. The case involved the site of the former Babri mosque, which was destroyed by Hindu activists in 1992, sparking riots that killed about 2,000 people, mostly Muslims. The Supreme Court’s intervention came in response to legal appeals arguing that the mosque ruling could incite a new wave of violence as India is preparing to play host to the Commonwealth Games in New Delhi for two weeks starting Oct. 3.

We can only watch and pray.

Today, September 20, Catholics would be celebrating the feast of St Eustace according to the liturgical calendar had the legend of his conversion not been found “completely fabulous” by the Church and fabulous indeed it is. As the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine recounts the story of the Emperor Trajan’s general Placidus, known after his conversion as Eustachius / Eustace:

on a day, as he was on hunting, he found an herd of harts, among whom he saw one more fair and greater than the other, which departed from the company and sprang into the thickest of the forest. And the other knights ran after the other harts, but Placidus siewed him with all his might, and enforced to take him. And when the hart saw that he followed with all his power, at the last he went up on a high rock, and Placidus approaching nigh, thought in his mind how he might take him. And as he beheld and considered the hart diligently, he saw between his horns the form of the holy cross shining more clear than the sun, and the image of Christ, which by the mouth of the hart … spake to him, saying: Placidus, wherefore followest me hither? I am appeared to thee in this beast for the grace of thee. I am Jesu Christ … I come hither so that by this hart that thou huntest I may hunt thee. And some other say that this image of Jesu Christ which appeared between the horns of the hart said these words. And when Placidus heard that, he had great dread, and descended from his horse to the ground.

*

Pisanello’s “The Vision of Saint Eustace” in the National Gallery in London captures the fabled scene wonderfully:

There is also a Durer engraving of the scene.

*

Catholic doctrine requires that the commemorations of saints should remain faithful to historical fact and not legend, and accordingly the commemoration of St. Eustace passes into the hands of those for whom dreams can carry as rich a freight of meaning as waking life.

John Fowles, in his journal for 1 August 1963, writes of Pisanello:

Over all his paintings hangs ‘the strangest poetry of situation’… I see in his paintings all I have tried so many years to do in certain poems that is, to rise above the mere gimmickry of ambiguity of metaphor and image and to achieve a kind of meta-allegorical, the strange moment caught, as he perfectly catches the haunting and multiple mystery of the man riding through the magical forest and coming on the stag with the crucifix.

His painterly alter-ego, Breasley, in Fowles’ magnificent novella The Ebony Tower, speaks of Pisanello as his “central source”:

Breasley himself had partly confirmed this, when someone had had the successful temerity to ask him for a central source and for once received a partly honest answer: Pisanello and Diaz de la Pefla. The reference to Diaz and the Barbizon School was a self-sarcasm, needless to say. But pressed on Pisanello, Breasley had cited a painting in the National Gallery in London, The Vision of St Eustace; and confessed it had haunted him all his life.

The St Eustace turns up again in Fowles’ novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman and in his essay The Tree — where he admits that Breasley’s “central source” is among his own:

We all have our favourite pictures, or ikons, and one of mine has long been a painting by Pisanello in the National Gallery in London, The Vision of St. Eustace: the saint-to-be sits on his horse in a forested wilderness he is out hunting arrested before his vision of a stag bearing Christ crucified between its antlers. Other animals, birds and flowers crowd the background of the small picture… What is truly being hounded, harried and crucified in this ambiguous little masterpiece is not Christ, but nature itself.

Fowles is not alone in his appreciation for the legend: another of the greatest writers of the recently-ended century also found inspiration in St. Eustace.

Russell Hoban’s masterwork Riddley Walker carries us into a post-apocalyptic world with its own transfigured English language. Hoban wrote his novel under the inspiration of a mural he saw in Canterbury Cathedral, here described by Charles Eveleigh Woodruff in his 1912 Memorials of the Cathedral & Priory of Christ in Canterbury.

In the recess of the blocked window nearest to the transept in the same aisle a faded representation of the legend of St Eustace may still be traced. … That this picture is meant to illustrate the life and martyrdom of St Eustace is clear from the crucifix between the antlers of a large white stag, which is in accordance with the legend of his conversion; and the brazen bull, with a fire burning beneath, into which an executioner is forcing the martyr.

In Hoban’s telling, St Eustace becomes Eusa, and his legend as depicted in that mural at Canterbury Cathedral the center of what memory survives the holocaust. Here is the Cathedral as Hoban’s post-apocalyptic narrator finds it:

The wood be come stoan in the woom of her what has her woom in Cambry. That place unner the groun where I wer it wer a wood of stoan it wer stoan trees growing unner the groun. Parbly that stoan ben cut and carvit by them as made them jynt music pipes I never seen. Roun trunks of stoan and each 1 had 4 stoan branches curving up and over Norf Eas Souf and Wes all them curving branches they connectit 1 tree to a nother. Stoan branches holding up the over head and growt in to it. Stoan branches unner a stoan sky. A stoan wood unner the groun the hart of the wood in the hart of the stoan in the woom of her what has her woom in Cambry.

In Hoban’s own Glossary on p. 235 of Riddley Walker: Expanded Edition, the entry for “wud” reads:

Means wood as in forest; also ‘would,’ intention, volition or desire. The hart of the wud is where Eusa saw the stag who was the hart of the wud. The heart of the would is also the essence of one’s wanting, the heart of one’s deepest desire. The crypt in Canterbury Cathedral with its stone trees is the spiritual hart of the wud.

*

Jacobus de Voragine, an anonymous mural painter of Canterbury, Pisanello, Albrecht Durer, John Fowles, Russell Hoban…

The church of the arts does not fail to commemorate and celebrate the sanctities of the imagination.

Okay, this is my first post since I joined up as a member of Chicago Boyz, and I’m delighted to be here — thanks to Zen and Lex for the introduction and invitation!

I’ve had a couple of guest-posts here already, one for the Afghanistan 2050 roundtable and one on the topic of religion and violence — a perennial interest of mine — and I’d like to take the opportunity now to address another of my passions.

*

I’m deeply interested in games and play.

It’s my contention that play is the mode in which children learn and masters create and express themselves. And with the coming of modeling, simulations and scenario-planning I think we’re deep in a movement away from the binary opposition of theory and practice and into a zone where play occupies an intermediary position between the two — with simulation and modeling giving us the opportunity to practice our theories in a “safe” zone which allows us to learn positive lessons from both positive and negative decisions, without suffering from the negative consequences of poor decision-making in the “real world”.

I try to keep tabs on games of war — and peace — because of this, and would like to offer you one of my “DoubleQuotes” based on a couple of things I read recently. The idea behind these DoubleQuotes is to drop two quotes into the mind simultaneously, like two pebbles dropped into a pond, and see how the ripples intersect and interact.

Here’s today’s example:

I’m not arguing for or against anything here, just inviting you to consider the implications of two related but different news items: one one of them, the US army is thinking of banning a game because it allows players to play an insurgent role, in the other the army is using insurgent role-playing as part of training.

Josh at Al-Sahwa has an interesting recent post on the same conundrum, and links to this CNN video, which shows some of the training in action.

What do you think? It’s your thoughts I’d like to get at here, my own contribution is mostly intended as an opening salvo to get a conversation going.

*

So: should Paul van Riper have been allowed to play Red in a game like Millennium Challenge 2002?

I know, my own bias is beginning to show … I favor modeling, scenario-planning and gaming with as much intelligence and creativity as possible.