Page a Day: One Hundred Twenty Two

            My beast was turned broadside in the port city when it hit. The plaza lit up like someone dropped  a sun. The world turned gold. Air hissed. Time stopped. Mastodons bellowed and men screamed. Jerem Cozak’s warning cry came late: “Artillery!” And the world resumed in time to rearing beasts and crumbling buildings and the stench of burning flesh. I could not see who had been hit. The herd next to mine panicked and burst back through the streets and alarm escalated to frenzy all the will in the world could barely contain. “Retreat!” Jerem Cozak’s voice cut clear through the morning fog, though I could not see him anywhere. “Behind the buildings! Disks first! Move, move!” And the whole army turned, so that the entirety of it, fifty thousand men and five thousand artillery, stood between my position in what had been the front ranks of the mastodons and any cover whatsoever.   

            So I sat upon my mastodon and cringed and sweated and feared while the whole herd turned and filed back, utterly exposed. I could only hope to not be hit. So when the hiss came I flinched and when the blast fell I shuddered and could not understand where it was coming from. It must have been high overhead. That’s the only way the angles made sense. It hadn’t hit me. It hadn’t hit anyone in the herd or my part of the line but scorched the open plaza in front of the wall. By the time it was my mastodon’s turn to file back the street I still hadn’t figured it out. Barrage after barrage filled the emptying plaza behind us.

            Jerem Cozak explained when he gathered the herd around him, tucked behind an enormous building that could only once have been a warehouse. As always, messengers came and went away among the buildings, up and down our haggard line.

            “It’s the greatships,” he told us all. “The nightwind lowered the west wall so that artillery positioned atop the greatships’ decks could fire down into the city. It was a trap. The spearmen in the city were only a distraction. But they’re firing blind because of the nightwind and the fog.”  

            “Why not just leave?” someone asked behind me.

            “Because the port authority may direct the navigation of any greatship in the world. Whoever controls that machine commands them, and it is housed upon the docks. They cannot leave while the city is contested. In fact they cannot even seal their ships.”

             “I meant us,” came the rejoinder. Men laughed.

Page a Day: One Hundred Twenty One

           After the walls had fallen we had marched into a city filled with those who did not even have shrouds to wake, who did not wear the armbands that protected them with shields of projected energy. Marcus took the infantry into the city and hunted the rest of them out. The White Swarm went with him.  I remembered that reversion was not a gentle process. From my vantage I saw some sit. Some knelt, many were sick. Some lost consciousness.

            We spearmen had sat mounted with the sun on our backs and could not believe there had been so little fighting. Our beasts trumpeted uneasily because they were not used to the smell or feel of the nightwind which was still all around us, though it steadily thinned as Marcus went into the streets with infantry and broke the relics apart. Julius dismounted and went to talk to Jerem Cozak. I followed suit, finally catching up to them as they began tending to the reverted.  

            “But I don’t understand,” I said, basking in our easy victory. “There must have been five thousand people here. I thought the Augers sent everyone, either to take this world or others. And these aren’t even soldiers. But I thought the nightwind made fanatics out of everyone.”

             Jerem Cozak grunted. “We are more than five years from Earth at the very swiftest speed. Other worlds may lie beyond it, and many have perished there. Conquest is the victory of many generations. These cities were only to have children."

            He shook his head. “They left a skeleton crew, to delay us only. The scouts report the tracks of thousands heading west. At the end of the Free Cities and the river lies the port city Wesing, a citadel of the Profusion, where the greatships of the world have always gone for maintenance and repair.”

            He waited until I came to the conclusion for myself. “They’re gathering their strength,” I said. 

            He nodded. “In the war that took this world they sent millions against us. Wave after wave wore down Sepira and Nogilia and Redmarak. Now the tide goes out, their numbers decrease, and so they must pull together, or lose all advantage. Wesing will not fall easily.”

Page a Day: One Hundred Twenty

            But at Wesing, the Augers didn’t charge. They slipped away. After the snipers in first row of Wesing’s buildings, we did not encounter half the resistance Marcus and Jerem Cozak expected. My mastodon was not hit again. I heard the crush as other sections of the wall gave way and caught glimpses of the other columns taking the streets the same way we were. We crossed the square and the armories where so many of the battles for the Free Cities had been decided. It stood empty. The further west we went the more we saw the rest of our army and the less we saw resistance. “Units of Augers retreating,” came the reports from the scouts. “In the nightwind they move like ghosts.”

            As the relics came down visibility got better again, maybe fifty paces in the fog where it sat heavily around the port. When we saw the west wall, commands went up and down the line to move the artillery into position because of course the retreating Augers had sealed the gates behind them. Jerem Cozak swore because always before the city had been taken by the time we reached the square. We had never had to fight our way out of one. Now we had to do so for a wall not half as high as all the rest of them. We started awkward shuffling in narrow urban confines. Then we did what soldiers do. We waited.

            The Augers that had charged out from the first of the Free Cities were not many, perhaps a thousand. They were not well equipped. Not all of them carried quickswords. And they were not well organized, for they did not march or run together, but only came in a sort of uneven trot. Still they came regardless, and they made straight for the artillery. At three hundred paces, Julius had us hold our fire. At two hundred, he had every other squad shoot into the ranks. I was not among them. At one hundred, everybody shot. The barrage on the walls continued all the while.

             We cut them down. They fell like grass. As targets they were larger and slower than anything I’d fired at before. They fell every third, and then every other. I could not tell whether I hit anyone or not. We did not call our marks. When they were fifty paces out and I was astounded that this could be so easy, another herd of mastodons charged from the side and swept them all away. Augers were thrown in the air. Men screamed. Some were gored all the way through. When the dust from that charge cleared, there were none of the enemy left standing.

The Psychology of the Hebrew Bible

The Jewish scholars Matthew Schwartz and Kalman Kaplan find in the Hebrew Bible, the Christian Old Testament, a satisfying alternative to the Greek inflections of even the most modern secular psychology. We can hear this by, among many other ways, contrasting the pathology of the Hippocratic oath with the holistic care articulated in the physician’s prayer attributed to Maimonides.

 For Hippocrates, the physician serves nature and regards the disease as the enemy, along the way enlisting the patient’s aid and cooperation and refusing to do any harm, if no good is possible. But for Maimonides, the physician serves God by caring for God’s creatures, regards the disease as a messenger of God sent to warn the patient of danger, and along the way prays to God that he or she might care for the patient without the frustrating interference of the world.

 Such a different understanding of disease and the role of the patient continues today in our possible understandings of psychology. For example, Freudian insight, while astute, remains shaped by the confines of tragic Greek myth. These stories of belief favor insurmountable fate, the cold comfort of suicide, and the inescapable pathology of psychoses. Yet a psychology based on Hebrew myth would emphasize hope, meaning and purpose, and human responsibility in free service to God and others. The Hebrew Scriptures look dimly on suicide, and believe that body and soul should act together in obedience to God’s commandments.

 These assumptions carry through many areas of psychology. For example, Hebrew scripture may be said to approach the subject of self-esteem by asserting that humans are created by God and in God’s image. God grants each human gifts and talents to be employed for good and for which they are responsible, rather than insurmountable flaws which doom persons to resignation or despair.

 We can see this in the Hebrew and Greek tales of Adam and Narcissus, particularly. Narcissus, the product of the rape of a nymph by a river god, spurns all his potential lovers, only to fall prey to a vain self-love. In the end, we find that this was neatly circumscribed by the prophecy at his birth that he would live to old age so long as he never knew himself. Adam, on the other hand, is uniquely valued by God as the first of the highest form of creation, and is cared for when God gives him Eve as a helper and companion. And though Adam also fails, he does not pine away unto death, but fulfills his purpose of fruition through children with Eve.

Other narratives of the Bible speak to many other themes that are perhaps not quite as emphasized in Greek stories and Western secular psychology. Joshua demonstrates loyalty by completing Moses’ vision and leading the Hebrew people to the promised land. Solomon asks for, and receives, the unqualified benefit of wisdom, and successfully employs it to resolve the seemingly insoluble problem of the two harlots and the dead child. Jepthah’s foolish and arrogant oath that leads to the sacrifice of his own daughter and reveals the folly of trying to ingratiate oneself with God or others.

Hezekiah’s trusting obedience to God in removing Judah’s illegal altars ultimately trumps the cynicism of Rabshakeh when he construes Hezekiah’s act as sinful self-promotion. And Jacob’s individual blessings of his many children formally recognizes the unique character and talents of each, refusing to either privilege one over another or to fail to differentiate them entirely. Many of these notes resound through much ancient and religious literature, but hardly appear at all in secular psychology.

But we can perhaps see the greatest contrast between Greek and Hebrew understandings of human nature and health in the narratives of Oedipus and Abraham and Isaac, respectively. Schwartz and Kaplan point to the work of Eric Welisch, whose Isaac and Oedipus imagines a psychology based on Hebrew story rather than Greek myth, and one that offers better resolution.

The love displayed between father and son and the ultimate mercy of God certainly contrast markedly with the enmity between Oedipus and his father and the uncaring doom of prophecy. Though himself a Jew, Freud may have preferred the Oedipal tale because it asserts nature as primal even to the gods, and Greek origin myth itself in the tale of Chronos and Zeus offers severe father-son antagonism. Foundational Greek myth is itself deterministic.

Yet the Hebraic origin myth is quite different. God precedes nature and endows humankind, which barely factors in Greek origin myth, not only with God’s own image, but also with responsibility and the choice that makes obedience valuable and possible. Such is the foundational tension of the Hebraic origin story: not, why can I not escape my fate, but instead will I do the right thing? Will I obey God? And it is that anxiety instead of the Oedipal one which echoes in the story of Abraham’s binding of Isaac. 

Such ability to change, to act rightly, contrasts markedly with the Greek anxiety that all is determined by nature, even the gods. Of course, as a Greek-inflected European rather than a Bible-inspired Jew, Freud preferred the latter. And all psychology which focuses on pathology more than health, on natural determinism more than free responsibility, has been influenced by this choice.

Page a Day: One Hundred Nineteen

            The first of the Free Cities of the Fackablest had not been like this. It lay at the very headwaters of the Dicean River on the edge of the tundra, amidst scattered pines only as high as one’s own waist. We would follow the river south and west along the foothills of the Gidwinn Mountains. And we would pass into the Fackablest, the vast coniferous forest that covered two thirds of the northern half of the continent in nearly unbroken wilderness. Our targets were the Free Cities, those experimental settlements of the reforming Faiths that had at first consisted solely of stone and timber and had only been sustained by river trade and lush, machine-laden soil brought up from Nogilia . There hadn’t even been any Temples in those places, only markets and shipping docks, places of exchange. 

            But the first of them we came to had been rebuilt by Augers. The black walls made by the nightwind around it stood ten paces high and thick, pricked by towers half as high again and concealing all but the roofs of the barracks and warehouses and the tops of the billowing clouds of dark machines roiling inside.

            “Deploy!” Jerem Cozak had shouted, in that voice the warlord used only for command. I had been near enough to hear the gruff tones of it. And I always would be. He had taken personal command over the mastodons. He still rode the matriarch, and I still rode second-in-the-line. I was going to be near enough for everything.  

            Marcus had lead the infantry to the fore, in squares with great spaces between them. The aisles would allow our mastodons to pass. Directly behind us, Julius led the great golden disks of the artillery, shining in the sun. We all advanced together, and the world turned beautiful again.

            Jerem Cozak had called the halt three hundred paces outside the city. We were just even with the front ranks of the infantry, the disks just behind us. You can’t imagine the space ten thousand soldiers must occupy. My mastodon stood with a group of only one hundred of its kind, and I felt we could not be stopped. All the universe stood still.

            Then Julius has spoken, and three hundred artillery fired at once. Ten suns arched over my shoulders, and joined thirty times that many soaring toward the wall. There came a hiss louder than any roar I had ever head, and I understood that my lightspear must utilize the same energy. I blinked at the brilliance. I’ll never know how the first barrage went, because I did not see it. I was watching the Augers that poured out from some gate in the south wall, and ran in our direction.