in verba magistri

[SubRosa]

ONE

It had been the most mundane of reasons that had drawn me into the orbit of Peter Danielson. I was a young scholar at the time, nearly destitute and subsisting off yet another stint in postdoctoral research. My third in as many years and my bank account reflected it. While it felt as if my scholarly career was already decaying, Peter’s own was positively desiccated, though you’d have never known that by listening to him. Outrageously, people often did.

My first encounter with Peter was barely that. I had meandered into a colloquium intending to watch a panel on Nicolai Hartmann’s Ethik and discovered that I was early. The room was currently occupied by a smattering of folk who had just crossed the threshold of proper adulthood and a smaller contingent of what appeared to be stately bureaucrats forlornly listening.

Nearby a posted schedule informed me that a group of undergraduate finalists were in the process of reading essays that had been submitted to a competition. I should have recognized it at first glance, the young faces whose sense of wonder had been blunted by textbooks paired with those who were both inert and responsible. It was a shapeless cancer familiar to me and immediately I felt at home.

I had just found a seat when what could only be described as a bespectacled wisp of a man had taken the podium and was struggling with an uncooperative laptop. This signaled the heraclitean damnation of Panta Rhei; accompaniment by PowerPoint. In anticipation I had begun to wonder if someone in the room had just solved the Lament Configuration and Pinhead himself was soon to arrive.

“Hello there, I’m Lewis Lute” squeaked our next speaker, “Had to reboot, I’ll be ready momentarily.”

Lewis seemed more tendril and ethereal than student and budding scholar once you really drank him in, but there was an earnestness about the lad that indicated there was more to this boychick than mere appearance suggested.

With PowerPoint launched, Lewis confidently navigated us through some piece of pseudepigrapha attributed to Moses. naïvely I went into the presentation thinking that something like the Assumption of Moses was being discussed, but Lewis kept referring to the text as The Book of Moses, which was unknown to me. Eventually it dawned on me that Lewis spoke of the text in such a manner that he actually considered it Divine writ, yet this was the exact providential moment that my gaze seemed to be tugged by gravity itself towards my right and I saw him. Dr. Peter Danielson.

If the nebbish spirit and neurotic mannerisms of George Costanza had taken up long term residence in the frame of Jackie Gleason, you’d have Peter Danielson. He rocked with a nervous energy and laser focus as Lewis just read to us his Powerpoint slides verbatim to a room of silent agony. Peter seemed to nod along to the plodding cadence of Lewis and every so often a grin would creep steadily across his face whenever a name was mentioned, as if there was some hidden joke or unspoken slight inferred.

Flummoxed by the spectacle in front of me and next to me, I began to lose the thread of the presentation. By the time I had pieced together that Lewis was part of some Restorationist group, a round of brisk clapping brought me back to the present. Peter was already nimbly weaving his way towards Lewis to either offer praise or criticism, but my vision was quickly obscured by shifting bodies.

I would see Peter again.

[Kishkumen]

More, more!

Thanks for posting this!

[Gadianton]

This feels like a highly credible account to me. I think you are correct, that the presenter was likely part of a restorationist group of some kind. The presenter seems to have crafted his presentation mainly to be a series of implicit running jokes he has going with his friend.

Do you know if they went out for lunch together?

[Tom]

I look forward to the rest of the story. I must confess that I had to look up several references (e.g., the Lament Configuration), but I am pleased to fill in gaps in my knowledge of intellectual and cultural history.

[Bret Ripley]

Experiment: I am going to try to believe with all my might that the next installment will appear any ... moment ... now ...

[Everybody Wang Chung]

Excuse my language, but dammit guys!!

How many freaking stories have been started on this board, but not finished?! I want to wring Bob Bobberson's neck!

It's like a drug dealer getting someone addicted to crack, and then the drug dealer just disappears, never to be seen again.

Finish the freaking stories!!!!! Please.

[drumdude]

While it felt as if my scholarly career was already decaying, Peter’s own was positively desiccated, though you’d have never known that by listening to him. Outrageously, people often did.

How did I miss this gem of a post?

[SubRosa]

TWO

The Gilgal Gardens is a paradoxical place. I say this because it is a place that is out of time and space. When one passes through the black wrought iron gate and ambulates down its pathway and confronts the creation of Thomas Child, you are no longer under the malaise of the oppressive urban atmosphere of Salt Lake City. It feels as if one is following the meandering trail of countless nomads and the pioneers are not polygamous Americans, but the remnants of Atlantis fleeing Mu itself. You are in the present, but feel as if you were outside it simultaneously.

True, these are not the thoughts of a mind steeped in the rational and analytical canons of modernity, yet they are inescapable when one is confronted with a sphinx bearing a visage quite unlike the original in Giza. I was transfixed. Who did this face belong to?

“What walks on four legs, then two legs, then three legs?”

My solitude had been shattered by none other than the same Peter Danielson from the colloquium. He seemed impossibly light on his feet given his girth and his tone struck me as being grossly overfamiliar, but that is how Peter sidesteps the usual societal boundaries of polite society.

Clearing my throat I said, “A human being. First we crawl, then we walk, and finally we need the assistance of a cane in the twilight of our existence.”

Peter chuckled and stood beside me. We shared a moment of silence as we both admired the reclining myth carved from stone that bore what I thought were exaggerated Aquiline features. His question had made me uneasy, as if Peter were suggesting that perhaps I was Oedipus and some horrible fate was before me.

“Do you know what this sculpture reminds me of?”


Peter answered the question as soon as he had finished asking it, “Plato’s Timaeus. The World Soul being crucified on the World Body. The moment of consciousness”

I immediately heaved a sigh and shot him a sideways look of annoyance before saying, “Not really in the mood to hear about how I could have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.”

Peter gave a deep belly laugh in response, the kind of bellowing that made one see the vanity of my assumption and clearly communicated his supreme contempt for the banality of historical Christianity.

“You misunderstand me, my young friend. The Sphinx embodies four constellations of the zodiac: Leo, Taurus, Scorpio, and Aquarius. The four elements that constitute the material world. I believe this one here marks the very spot where wave after wave of holy emanations from the Cosmic Mind first gave form to the very atoms in our bodies.”

I was paralyzed by the sheer absurdity of what I was hearing and seeing. Where was I? Who talks like this? Who sculpts like this? Peter took my silence as an invitation to continue.

“It is the sphinx that guards the way back to Eden, that splendid place of the First Time. By ‘First Time’, I of course mean Zep Tepi. You have to reckon it all according to the Sothic cycle, the real dispensations spoken of in Scripture. The Holy Spirit wasn't a dove, but a Bennu bird. The Greek is a corruption of Reformed Egyptian.”

Truly that was Peter Danielson for you, a man who spoke all languages and none of them. By now my faculties had returned and in a desperate attempt to change the topic of conversation I asked a question that I truly wanted him to answer.

“Who is the face in this sphinx?”

Before I even finished speaking Peter had pivoted away from me and started down the pathway. He glanced over his left shoulder and shot an answer back to me, “That face belongs to the very same man who in 1843 wrote the words ‘There is no such thing as immaterial matter.’ ”

Just like the Sphinx who leaped into the precipice after Oedipus answered his riddle, Peter Danielson was gone.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

[Everybody Wang Chung]