Truth Unites - My Brother's Cosmic Horror Novel

Episode Date: March 29, 2022

My brother Eric and I discuss his latest book, a cosmic horror novel entitled I Am the Doorway.   Buy the book: https://www.amazon.com/I-Am-Doorway-Eric-Ortlund/dp/1739954009   Watch the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3WJLWlho2M   Check out Seed of Dragons: www.seedofdragons.com   Eric Ortlund (PhD, University of Edinburgh) serves as Lecturer in Old  Testament and Biblical Hebrew at Oak Theological College in London. Truth Unites is a mixture of apologetics and theology, with an irenic focus. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) serves as senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Ojai. SUPPORT: Become a patron: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites One time donation: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://gavinortlund.com/

Hey everybody, welcome to Truth Unites. Truth Unites is a place for theology and apologetics done in an ironic way. But today we're going to talk about my brother Eric's book. I am the doorway. It's absolutely fascinating. And I put a link in the video description, go buy the book, read the book, talk about the book. I think you find it absolutely fascinating. It's just such an interesting idea for a book. So Lovecraftian is the word that you use to describe it. And then you talk about it as a cause of make horror novel. So what in the world does that mean? Don't you just love the word Lovecraftian? Doesn't that just sound spooky and sinister? So

the short answer is the horror in zombies is mortality. That's what we're trying to make real to ourselves and try to deal with at some level. The horror with cosmic horror is insignificance. The key idea is that human beings are inessential and do

not matter. I could blip out of existence right now and the world would grind on and not care this entire planet could blip out of existence the universe would grind on and not notice actually Gav I believe that you have a passing interest in a figure known as C.S. Lewis would that be

fair to say? To the point where when I use a C.S. Lewis illustration at church the entire congregation groans and rolls their eyes. Yes, yeah. I've gotten my students to that as basically every lecture C.S. Lewis has to be quoted. When the gods descend in that hideous strength, Saturn is Lewis's category for what, for cosmic horror. And when Saturn

descends, like all the other gods felt young and an ephemeral compared to his lead-like antiquity. Just time and time and time and mountains of time and unredeemed time. Lovecraft, so I'd be so happy. I've got the page over. I'm so happy to quote it if people want to. H.P. Lovecraft, complete works right here, was a 1920s and 30s American weird fiction writer, convinced atheist, not a very happy man, not a very healthy-minded man, but he got at this so well. And for all his flaws as a person, for all his flaws philosophically and as a writer,

and he had them. Not many people have gotten at this aspect, as well as he did. He wrote a poem called Nemesis, just four short lines that sum up everything Lovecraft is worried about. He says, I have seen the dark universe yawning, where the black planets roll without aim, where they roll in their horror unheeded without knowledge or lustre or name. Not a very happy picture of the universe, but it's one that I respond to as a Christian, because I think it overlaps with Ecclesiastes in some significant... And I think Lovecraft saw things that are true. There's a profound sense.

As a child of God in my life in this age in the flesh, I don't matter. I really don't matter. And very soon I'm just going to be gone. It always interests me when non-Christians have profound insights into the human condition. And so that's basically what cosmic horror is. And I can talk more about why I like it, but I've already hit to that. And I've heard you talk about how these different genres of horror are all different ways of making certain points like zombies.

So your last fiction work was a zombie novel. Zombies are a way of making a point about mortality. I've heard you say that. Vampires. And I'd never thought about that before because you see how it's actually interesting. There's so much interest in like horror movies right now. And then you've got these different sub-genres. So maybe do you want to say anything about the role of fiction

and specifically horror type genres to make deeper points. Because most of my life I never really thought about, you know, what's the significance of these different genres. Yeah. There's a short book by Tolstoy called The Death of Ivan Illich. It's nice because it's not 900 pages long. It's about 150 pages. Spoiler warning, Ivan dies.

That's the title of the book. But it's about a nice. century, you know, relatively well-off man who gets the news from his doctor, he's dying, and at one point he's lying in bed in pain. And he keeps saying, Socrates is a man, all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal. All men are mortal, and so on and so on, going through the logical syllogism, and he can't make his own death real to him. He's working the syllogism through, and he knows he's mortal, but he cannot face he's going to die. Face the fact that he's going to die. I remember dear saintly wonderful Tim Keller,

saying something similar when he got the news about his cancer. He'd given funerals for other people. He knew he was mortal. But when the news reached him, it was like, wait, I'm going to die? Really? Like, it's so hard for us to make this real to ourselves. I have a friend whose basic category for all literature. It's a kind of imaginative rehearsal.

We are trying to deal with and negotiate and engage with our own lives, imaginatively, before we actually face things. I've said this before, a lot of horror movies. I won't watch, you know, for conscience's sake and the Lord's sake. And yeah, I mean, I guess, I can't get away. I mean, the Lord was very kind to me, and I got to publish a book on Joe. I'm so grateful for it. And the very success, as I was getting published,

I was thinking, it is a matter of time until this is forgotten. It's one of those books that published like in 1890 in this funny font with this weird style of expression and like you're kind of wondering what they're worried about and it's just not interesting to read or helpful. There are a couple books published in the 1890s people still read. My very success was a kind of failure. Interesting. It was a reminder of my own utter insignificance and just so soon I'm going to be in the ground. Everyone who ever knew me will be in the ground. Whatever books I read will be forgotten.

It's just gone. So that connects with cosmic horror for me All my fiction, it's like self-therapy. I'm trying to deal with my own life and I'm trying to make these things real for me. So I think that's what fiction can do in multiple ways and at multiple levels. Yeah.

It was just fascinating for me to read as well. And my favorite part, later on, I want to quote from the conversation between Malachi and is it Dr. Leventhal? Dr. Leventall, and just get into this whole idea of cosmic insignificance, because the book helped me feel that, and just the horror of it, and so it's really interesting. But you mentioned Job, so I wanted to ask,

does your work in the Old Testament feed into your fiction at all? And if so, how? Oh, totally does. Totally does. In all kinds of ways, in ways that I did not anticipate when I started getting interested in the Old Testament. apologetically and culturally the way the Old Testament steals from its pagan environment is super interesting to me without ever compromising, theologically. The monsters in the Old Testament, the old, like, you know, Gavin, part of the reason I'm thankful for Marvel movies is that they're helping to develop this category of, I mean, I don't want to say spirituality, but bigger powers and beings out there that we can't quite understand, some of which are good and some of which really aren't.

That's closer to the Old Testament's worldview than a reductive materialism or something like that. The monsters in the Old Testament, Leviathan, and, you know, an interesting cosmic horror text in the Bible is actually Psalm 8, except it's not horrifying at all. When I look at David has this, you know, he says, when I look at the stars of the work of your handiwork, what is man that you remember him? David has had, he's looked into the night sky. He's had an experience of cosmic insignificance. And Lovecraft did as well. Now, David's a good theologian, so he has moves. There are moves he can make that Lovecraft can't.

But I think actually the stuff that convinced Lovecraft to be an atheist was a part of Old Testament wisdom. It was a part of the pedagogy. You would have had to have agreed with a number of things that Lovecraft really believed that pushed him away from theism as an Israelite believer. So, yeah, they're all, they're just, I just find all kinds of prayer loss there. Yeah. The reason I asked about that is in the conversation I just mentioned, there's a statement, humans in the past understood it better. This is from page 71, it being the sense of nothingness, chaos, insignificance.

Every time one of your poets spoke of giants or dragons or the immensity of the sea, they whispered of it. So, I mean, like with the Leviathan figure in Job, or is there anything like that you think is touching on this? Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. In fact, later on, so Ben Leventhal is a secular Jew in the book. Malachi says to him, you should have paid more attention to your own tradition. Tahom Rabah, the Deep Abyss, the Talon from Genesis 1, too, you know? It's really interesting to me that in Genesis 1, darkness is organized and given a function, but it's not obliterated. I think that horror for modern 21st century Westerners plays a similar role to tragedy.

for ancient Greeks. It's the things that we know are there that can't be assimilated within a secular religion, you know, a secular eschatology. And I think, yeah, I think ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians, ancient Israelites, would have been more aware of insignificance, monstrosity, uncleanness, mortality. You know, I read somewhere gap that 21st century Americans are much free or more open about sex the 19th century Americans were, but we're much less open about mortality.

If you mention death, everyone will get really quiet. And kind of like, oh. Like, we're not good at dealing with that. I think ancient peoples would have been much better than us. Yeah, yeah. I really want to ask more about this feeling of cosmic insignificance because the emotion that I was feeling throughout reading the book,

especially the early parts, was just that. And just, I don't know, it kind of brings it gripping. Can I ask? Okay, and how did you feel about the cosmic? Like, was that interesting to you? Was it oppressive? Did you want it to stop? No, it was interesting.

I didn't want it to stop. Yeah, I mean, it's like, so let me give the people watching this a flavor of kind of, so this is from the back cover. And there's a statement about the writhing chaos beneath normal reality and the horrors living there. Now, already that's got me thinking, wow, that's interesting. So what's normal reality? I have to play according to genre rules. Like the zombie novel really taught me that,

because I don't quite play according to genre rules, and people get really mad if you don't play according. And so that's how Lovecraft talks. It's rhetorically really overblown. And when I say Lovecraftian, I kind of, I got to give people what I say I'm going to get them. But please bear that. I kind of, I overdo it in the rhetoric sometimes.

Please bear that in mind. I'm sorry I interrupted. Go ahead. No, no. It didn't feel overdone to me. me. It felt, it just felt as like an interesting idea. And then you're seeing that idea dramatized. And then, like I said, the conversation that we'll get to between Malachi and Levanthal, where Malachi is just beating him into despair by forcing him to see it.

So anyway, the horror, the writhing chaos beneath normal reality and the horror is living there, the hollowness of the lives around him and the end of the universe approaching faster than anyone suspects. I mean, so yeah, so I guess that that's what drew me in is just this fascination with this idea and like, is that true? Is it true that beneath what we can take in with our five senses, what reality is really like is this, the words, the word emptiness and the word chaos. Those are the two words that really stood out to me that I'm grappling with as I'm

reading early on. Go ahead. Do you want to jump in? please know that C.S. Lewis has a category, he has the category for Saturn, right? But it's definitely not the dominant note. I mean, apparently the last battle is the Saturn, the Saturn 9, Narnia book. Okay. That's not the dominant note in his philosophy. I really do believe that that

ultimate reality is goodness, orderly beauty of truth. Right. I need to, I'm trying to tell the gospel in a parable like way. Right. I need to stay within the boundaries of the parable. And so that means I'm going to give a lot more emphasis to Saturn than I would. If you just said here, what do you think is real? I'm going to give a lot more aspect to the Saturnine. So maybe people listening don't quite know what that is. Oh gosh, Gav, help me out here.

Venus symbolizes love, Mars is war, Mercury is language. Jupiter is like regal generosity and forgiveness and Saturnus is like the empty waste of time like the millions and billions of years that have existed before he would be existed. Is that fair? Yeah. Go ahead. So I took the book not as an advocacy that that really like that part alone is what reality is like but as an exploration of that And as one who knows what that feels like, to wonder about that, to feel the emotions of that, I feel like it's really helpful to see that dramatized. And yeah, the book doesn't leave you with that, but it's exploring that.

And I would say that's like the book of Ecclesiastes. It's honestly facing the emotions of life in a fallen world. Yes, yeah, yeah. And how little difference we can make in the world. Yeah, I'm trying to make that real and salient and pungent and unassailable in a way of syllogism couldn't. And I'm trying to do that. I'm trying to deal with that myself. Excuse me.

It's not a COVID cough. Excuse me. I'm, I waver back and forth between forgetting that it's true and staring into the night sky or looking at graves. Like the lovely church I worship at in England, there's a graveyard in the back. And some of them I can see the names and the dates. Some of them have been effaced by time, and I look at them and I think, man, that's me. I'm trying to deal with this and, like, come to terms with it and live with it, live with, live in light of it. Yeah.

Now, in Lovecraft, it's all like negative gloomy dark. I think, I think ultimate reality is both terrifying and wondrous and ecstatic. The, the being, I tried, I don't think I'm spoiling anything if I say, I tried to keep two different symbolic registers. going in the book. On the one hand, a lot of Ezekielian language of lightning and fiery and fire and like dizzying momentum

on the one hand and all the Old Testament language of the ocean and chaos and, you know, the pool of the sea and dissolution and darkness and emptiness. If you're going to do the lovecraft thing, you can't just have good versus evil. It will not work.

Later imitators, there's one named Augusterliff who tried to do it. It's horrible. It just doesn't work at all. So it can't just be good versus evil. So within the framework, within the parable, it's two kinds of chaos invading reality. And that can invade a human being.

But what they leave when they're done with the human being is very different. It's so radically outside Ben's understanding, he can't call one good and one bad. They both terrify. Toward the end of the novel, he starts to react to one differently. Yeah. And that feeling of

in the moment, you're not sure which one is good and which one is evil creates this very unsettling kind of feeling, which is something I want to ask about more in a second. But let me put this to you. Here's an experience that I sometimes have, and I'll let you interpret, be the psychologist here. So when I stare up at the stars, in Ohio, where I live, it's very rural. You can see, you know, it's just amazing. It's so beautiful. So I'll go lie down and just stare up at the stars. I have a pleasant feeling that often comes with the sense of insignificance. I actually, it's this shrinking feeling that I love

with the sense of I'm so tiny and the stars and the universal I inhabit is so huge. How do you understand that? Do you think there can be any sense of a positive feeling with this sense of insignificance? Yeah. Well, again, that's very interesting to me because my experience of cosmic horror,

my experience of my own significance, is also pleasant, but in a different way. You almost describe that as sort of a comforting thing, if I'm hearing you right there. I find it sort of viscerally thrilling, almost like I'm watching an action movie or a martial... Like, I just...

It's not comfortable, and I don't feel relaxed or comforted, but I feel like I'm getting it the truth of things. I feel like illusions are getting stripped away, and I'm looking at how things are, and that's really exciting to me. So I find it pleasurable as well, but in a different register, you know, fascinating let's maybe we can kind of pause and pull back and just get what what about the plot for

someone who's kind of wondering what's the book basically about what about the plot without giving way too many spoilers what would you like to say about the basic plot of the book what's it what's it about yeah so just this is maybe like the first 20 pages I'm not getting giving away much of all ben leventhal is a psychologist and he kisses his wife on the cheek one day leaves for work There's a new patient on the psych ward who fascinates this other patient that Leventhal's been trying to talk to. And as far as Leaventhal can tell, at one point she goes into this alternate state and this big, vast presence enter this room, and she starts talking to this weird way and saying, like, a great end is coming on the world. Will you open yourself to me?

It's the only way you're going to survive. Levinthol is actually jealous of this. He thinks of his life project as into, he thinks of it as helping people, he cares about other people. But he also thinks of intellectual mastery of his domain. So anything he doesn't understand is offensive to him. He gets very interested in this patient named Alex. She tells the story about being an occult growing up. She got invaded by this weird power.

And then, well, spoilers. Ben gets invaded by it as well. There's a weird, creepy cult that knows about the power, but doesn't. really understand it and is going to try to use Ben to destroy the world and other stuff happens that's all I'll say for spoilers um when you're writing a novel you've got to keep asking what did the characters want and you've got to keep giving them realistic motivations that they're trying to achieve and to keep pushing Ben Levinthold towards the thing he does not he spends most of the novel fighting this to the nail you know I had to keep sort of

pressuring him and cornering him so that he do the one thing he really doesn't want to do. So he gets really desperate, goes to Alex for, for reasons I won't go into, goes for Alex for help, and then things go very badly. Okay. What can you tell us about the cover here?

The title of the book is I am the doorway, and there's a figure on the cover who's half one person, half another person, seems to be... Yeah. So the guy with the glasses there is Ben. The woman on the left there, is Alex.

When I was in early drafts of the novel, have you seen the show Breaking Bad? Yes. The character, Jesse, you know? I had him in my mind as like, that's the character, and he was actually male to begin with. I switched him.

First draft, everyone is a white male, and I got to mix things up to make it interesting. So I made her a female. I thought that would make the relationship more interesting. But she's this tough, desperate, hard-bitten young woman who's doing what she needs to survive. and I sort of heard Jesse's voice in the background as I was writing her.

Okay, cool. All right, so let me ask about this. So I'm going to read a couple of the blurbs here. One from the front cover says, A beautifully unsettling vision. Each word tipping you further into its darkly surreal depths. On the back cover, Ortland Weaves a chilling tale that blurs the line between reality and insanity, leaving the reader wondering who is friend and who is foe.

So some of the language here gets at how I was feeling, I was reading early on. Chilling. Unsettling. In a good way. I like that experience as a reader. But there's kind of this eerie, dark mood to the atmosphere of it. And, you know, like I'm reading and there will be a dialogue and somebody will say something

in the dialogue. Then, like, several pages later, that sentence from the dialogue will be inserted into someone's thought process or something like this. And then you'll have rapid transitions from one. chapter to another, a cliffhanger, the next chapter will start. It's not totally clear where you are or what's going on quite yet. So the mood and the atmosphere has this kind of unsettling feel to it. And I'm just curious if you anticipated readers responding like that. Yeah. Well, I mean, part of it, part of it, Gav, is when I'm communicating, when I'm using a

genre to communicate, I have to play fair to the reader. I have to, it's a kind of contract or even a kind of covenant with my reader where they owe me certain things. them certain things. If you want to talk about cosmic insignificance, if human beings can completely understand the universe, then we're significant. We matter. So a sense of incomprehensibility is just essential to this genre. So that feeling of like everything is going blurry, I don't quite, that's got to be some readers that might frustrate them. I hope. I've been through this novel obsessively. I think the explanation of the answers are there. You stick with it. I don't like violence and gore.

I don't like seeing people getting hurt. I don't like reading about it. I do really like eerie, you know, late night. I kind of like that's kind of viscerally pleasurable for me. I like that. I don't think that's what ultimate reality is. But I don't know why. Did you ever see Princess Mononoke, the Japanese anime film?

It's a gorgeous film. It's just a gorgeous film, totally different genre. In one point, the hero there said, I want to see with eyes unclouded by hate. It's very noble, you know. I just want to see with eyes unclouded. I just want to see what the truth is, and I don't care what it costs me. But in Lovecraft, characters see human insignificance,

and it either fractures or breaks their sanity. Like, we can't bear to see that we just don't matter, and we don't really accomplish anything permanent in life. so that's why there's not a clear good versus evil structure in and that's why there's such an unrelenting sort of eerie tone i just love that feeling like there's more going on here than i can understand something huge is about to break yeah i really like that yeah but if to talk about insignific insignificance it's not going to be very pleasant i know you're not saying ultimate reality is dark and eerie but do you think darkness and eerie is something that can help us have less clouded eyes and can help us see what reality is like? Well, sure. I mean, I think if we're going to see what reality is like, there will be a lot of darkness. I think Leviathan, to switch from Ecclesiastes to Job, is a lot scarier than only God knows how scary Leviathan really is. That's why he described him at such length.

I think if, I don't know, Gap, if I could see everything about myself that God sees, I would probably be on the floor bawling my eyes out. If I could see all the evil that's going on in the world and the satanic evil at work behind the scenes. Probably, probably. Probably I'd also be seeing how, you know, hell is just one tiny little speck on one flower in the Valley of the Shadow of Life and the Great Divorce as well. That's why I like Lovecraft.

You often get these staggering, dizzying vastness and vistas. I think that's true to reality. Just I'm going to be honest, ultimate reality is going to be really beautiful as well. Yeah. Another thing that the book did for me in terms of the feeling you have as a reader, or I had as a reader, is this feeling of it being kind of psychologically complicated and psychologically unsettling. So, like, you know how it's like if you're watching a movie, and I'm not comparing it to these movies, but just to give the sense of this feeling. You're watching like Shutter Island with Leonardo DiCaprio or Memento or movies like this where the narrative point of view suddenly you start to question it at a certain point.

Like, you're assuming somebody, the narrator is telling you the truth. And all of a sudden, you're like, wait a second. And I had that feeling early on just as a question. Like, to what extent can I trust the narrator, Ben Leventhal? Because there's just these things that happen. Like, at one point, I don't think this is too big of a spoiler. He gets a note on his door, and he realizes it's written in his own handwriting. And the way he experiences that, you know, he...

So it's like, you're wondering, well, is he... Like, I'm wondering if he's crazy at points. So I'm curious if you were anticipating that reaction from readers at all? Yeah. I actually wasn't. I don't want to play games with readers or keep them guessing. I want there to be as much of an explanation as possible in the text somewhere. And there actually is an explanation for that note.

Part of it is I'm just trying to keep people interested. When I write, I'm competing with Instagram and Netflix. I've got to keep it moving or people are going to put it down and move on. As far as I'm concerned, Ben Leventhal is a reliable, narrator. He just doesn't understand what's happening. So he will say as much as he understands and describe as much as he can. Okay. And I went through, I'm fairly certain at some point that hundreds of pages later there's

an explanation of that note of where it comes from, but it is there. Yeah, I think, I think, it's less that characters are being unreliable is that they do not understand the forces they are playing with and can only describe them insofar as they understand Okay, got it. So Levinthal has a vision of this greater, well, it's God, even though he doesn't know it's God. And he's describing it in this Ezekielan way. And he says, and I knew I wasn't seeing what it was. I was only seeing the best way my eyes and my brain could take it.

Okay. That's helpful. So it's not Leventhal. It's just the realities he's facing that creates that sense of, because I was just asking those questions. I'm saying, you know, what exactly is going to be? going on here? What is he experiencing? Yeah. There's not a clear, good, evil dichotomy in the book.

There are two, there are different kinds of chaoses, but all of them destroy your old life. And all of them will destroy the person you used to be and the person you used to think mattered. So they're all dangerous as far as, so, and that makes it harder to figure out what's going on in the book. Right. Okay. All right. So now let's talk about this feeling of cosmic insignificance, okay, a little bit. And I don't really have a question from this. I just want to read a little bit and then ask you to comment on it. This is fine.

Thank you. Thank you for reading it, Gab. I know you're so busy. I'm flattered you did. Thank you. Oh, yeah. It was fascinating. Reading fiction is fun.

It's kind of a nice change. So, yeah, so, okay, so there's this conversation between Malachi. Do you want to say anything about who Malachi is? I would love to say a ton about who Malachi is, but I'm going to spoil some things if I do. I'll tell you what, okay, if people don't want it spoiled, just mute the video for about 20 seconds. Alachi is the ancient Egyptian god Anubis, and he's also a character from Lovecraft called Naira Thotep, who's a messenger of the gods. And there's a short, four-page, short story Lovecraft wrote called Nairaithotep.

It's the coolest name, and I really like the story. So he's a kind of mid-tier, mid-level spiritual being, who's not a chaotic power himself, but definitely not. a human being and does not pretend to be. Right. Okay. Okay. So he's having a conversation with Ben Leventhal, and my own experience of this, and you can correct this if I'm not reading it rightly, but my own experience of this is he's just, he's sort of breaking Ben Leventhal down by forcing him to see this sense of chaos, emptiness, and insignificance.

And go ahead. So Malachi can see Levinthal's been invaded by a kind of cosmic power and he wants to get at it because he feeds off of it. He's a god who needs to feed but he doesn't know what it is he doesn't understand it so it's not going to go very well so

okay well so go ahead and the way Malachi is going to feed is by getting Levinthal to admit that he doesn't understand his life and he's not in it he doesn't have he doesn't possess intellectual mastery of his world and his life

and that's going to help the power sort of come out and let Malachi feed. Fascinating. Okay. So he's describing, he says, the only way you can produce the illusion you call reality is by screening out many other things. And Levantal response is such as. And he basically goes through and says,

you know, look at reality, look at reality down to the smallest level. You know, you go to subatomic particles and you ask, well, what's underneath that? And he says, there's this emptiness. And then he says, look at it at the biggest level. Look, go back in time before the big bang. Go forward in time. to, you know, what's the ultimate result of your life and of all lives?

And he's trying to get him to basically say, there is no ultimate significance, and it's hard to communicate in words, because that's what fiction can do. It's hard to regert, but it's this feeling of chaos and this feeling of nothingness that's put before him. And then there's this one point that was particularly poignant,

where he's basically saying, like, oh, but that feeling of nothingness and chaos, you can use that to become stronger as a person. And he says, that dissolving emptiness underneath everything you do, you actually think you can tame it to serve you? Men greater than you have tried and failed.

Some try to welcome those dark powers inside our universe and others sacrifice everything to stop them. Both sides fail. To bring it inside is to define it and thus lessen it. Yet it can never be banished. For everywhere it attends each one of you. It does not, act or move as you do. It does not even exist as you think of existence. It cannot be described.

And because of that, it has no limits and is so powerful, more powerful than anything inside reality. That was a moment for me within the conversation, that's on page 62, where it just was particularly poignant, just the sense of the horror of that feeling of insignificance and just being forced to come to terms with it. I'm curious if you want to comment on that experience. I mean, thank you, Gavin. I'm glad it worked. I'm glad you weren't just rolling across.

I was depressed for a week, so thanks a lot. I saw YouTube video once where it took like an ordinary human being and just zoomed in, zoomed in, zoomed in, zoomed in, zoomed in, zoomed in, molecules, atoms, electrons, the subatomic particles, and after a while you get nothing. And then it just zoomed out, zoomed out, zoomed out, until you could just get nothing both ways. I never forgotten it.

I was reading Richard Dawkins, the God delusion, which, oh man, that book, that really shook my faith. He has some good arguments. Wow. Like, man, he makes it tough for the Christian apologists in that book. I have to laugh out loud in your book when, in a footnote, you're talking about the God delusion,

and you really kindly, and not at all in the snarky way, you said, the only sentence I can 100% agree with in this book is when Dawkins says, am not a philosopher. I just laughed out because it was such a nice way, but anyway, Dawkins talk, he uses the metaphor of a burqa as a biologist for the way human

beings relate to the world. That we're good at seeing three-dimensional, I mean, the desk that my iPad is resting on is mostly empty space, but I can't see it because my body doesn't help me see it, you know? There's just like there's a lot of reality that we're

just not good at picking up and perceiving. There's actually a lovecraft story called From Beyond. where a scientist stimulates a certain part of a patient's brain and they start to see things, you know. So in the quote you kindly read, some try to welcome these dark powers within our universe, others sacrifice everything to stop them. That's a genre thing. In Lovecrafts, some cults are trying to manifest, you know, these dark ancient gods.

There's some lovecraftian fiction where the hero manages to stop them just in time and keep the world going. And I'm trying to do something new. I'm trying to crack the universe open. And I guess, part of what was in my mind a particular quote, I'll never forget reading in Karl Barth's dogmatics in the third volume.

There's a chapter on chaos and the nothing there. They have no idea if he's right. I'm not a card carrying Bardian by any means. I've just never forgotten it. That there's a kind of negation or unreality that attends every positive good created thing. and that in the new creation

God's going to change the nature of reality so there's no more darkness or anything like that this I mean as I said earlier this book contains its own defeat I mean I care that people read this book I'm trying to communicate with people I'm trying to engage with people

this is significant to me it's going to be gone so soon so when Malachi says always you fail it always attends you all the time not by manifesting as a positive, limited, created thing, but always attending you negatively, so to speak. That's part of what was in the back of my mind. It seems to me that's part of the nature of

things in this age before the escapon. Yeah. It communicated to me the sense of the relentlessness of that feeling of insignificance. But there's also this theme of light. So that, you know, you don't just lead, that's not like the terminating point. There's this theme, and I don't want to get into all the events of the plot later on. But what would you like to say about the theme of light and also another theme I'm picking up on is the theme of immensity. There are also these forces in the world as well. So what would you like to say about those?

Yeah, maybe if I can flip through and find it, when Ben gets seated, rest of your, I rent, yeah, when Ben cede, when Ben cede, when, when Ben cede, when, this easy Keeleian power, this page 42, for the first time, he sees a vision of a mountain, and he says, trees casting dancing shadows before the searing, unquiet luminosity at its top. Above us, something sharper and greater than stars fell, which ripped the sky like a curtain speeding toward the flat earth. Past the sky, I saw what every storm was trying to be, every flash of lightning trying to remember, an infinity of nameless color and sucking vortices,

a radiating explosive epicenter, a pure fiery presence beyond intention or thought. It made the sun a spark. I screamed and made no sound beneath the crushing presence. The earth seemed to bend around this new impossible way so that I thought I would fall upward. I was naked. I was nothing.

I mean, wow. people meet Jesus. He's this completely ordinary first century of Palestinian Jew, but man, if we could see God, like, it would kill us. It would destroy us. I'm trying to stay within the parable, and I'm trying to talk

about the death of the destruction of the old self. At one point, Ben says, I can see things that aren't there, and I don't care about any of the stuff I used to care about. What other definition of insanity do you need? I'm trying to talk about the reality of God within a certain genre limitation and still be true

to it. And the thing that will burn away your old life and who you used to be. And it's and it's I mean the story is that the more Ben, the more Ben's, he just hates

this other presence in him because it means he's not in control anymore. But he starts to like it more and more. And it changes him. Yeah. I'm guessing viewers are getting a flavor of what I found so fascinating about the book. And I have this feeling like a lot of modern people will really resonate with it because both of these things, the feeling of chaos and this feeling of like the way you described it in the passage you just read.

To me, the word that comes up in my mind is the word glory. You know, this just the sense of the weightiness of this light. Both of those things are kind of outside the orbit of what I think a lot of people are thinking about day to day. Yes. I mean, do you think that a lot of sort of moderate, so, you know, Pascal talks about how we kind of, we fill our lives with distractions so we don't have to deal with the ultimate things of life, meaning and mortality. That's what it all comes down to if you really want to stop and say, what are we all doing here and what happens after it ends? Yeah. And so he says, we distract our stuff.

with all these diversions, so you don't have to think about that. Do you think modern people feel that sense of the writhing chaos underneath reality, cosmic insignificance? Do you think a lot of people today in our culture feel that, or do you think we're so distracted by our iPhones all the time that we never even stop and wonder about it? Yeah. I'd love to hear your answer to that question, Gap.

I think the answer is yes and no. I think it always attends us, and we're always suppressing it. to some extent. It's really hard to look in the eye, but we can never look away. That's my sense. What's your sense, Gav? Yeah, I try to think about it. Is our culture different from other cultures in that? Like what's changed in the modern West, because that's really interesting to me. And I don't really know fully, but what you just said is really profound of like, on the one hand, it's always there. On the other hand, you're always sort of looking the other way. I don't know. Part of me just wonders if there are a lot of people right now. And I think about it with my YouTube

channel. I have a heart to try to help people with doing apologetics, things like this. I just have this feeling like there's a lot of people, especially younger people, and there's a sense of instability, there's a sense of a lack of weightiness, there's a sense of flimsiness. It's like what, there's no sense of what you just described on page 42, a sense of glory, a sense of weightiness, something big to live for. I feel like there's a lack of transcendence across the board. So, you know, I've thought a lot about in my book, I talk about music and math and things like this is like avenues of transcendence. And I think there's a good way to point to God and the divine.

But I just have a feeling a lot of people could read this book. And it would sort of be an invitation to consider the supernatural. And an invitation to kind of just consider reality from a different standpoint, I guess. Thank you for that, Gav. Yeah, I'm trying to help reader suspend. their disbelief and to say let's pretend together that there's more than just atoms in the universe what would that be like what would that look like um yeah exactly it's an invitation to consider reality differently and lovecraft is going through a huge renaissance right now he's really popular

and a lot of bookcraftian fiction is getting written so i think this is resonating with people yeah Could I ask you, just this kind of stuff we've been talking about, does this make you look at pastoral work any differently? Yeah, I do, I think it does. I mean, I think one of the things that I often feel as a pastor is it's easy to get pulled into routine sort of just managing administrative stuff as opposed to real heart and soul care. So that's one constant tension I'm wrestling with is getting pulled towards, oh, we've got another meeting rather than really thinking at a spiritual level about my schedule. And another thing is sort of just constantly functioning as a chaplain for people, being kind, praying for people, but never having that sense of weightiness to ministry that provokes people and disturbs people and calls people up. I'm preaching on Daniel 4 tomorrow, finishing my sermon before and after we're talking. And God sends a dream to Nebuchadnezzar, and the dream is like disturbing.

The dream he can't sleep. And then Daniel interprets it, and Daniel is disturbed by it. It's disturbing. So I think about as a pastor, how do I not, how do I kind of have an element in my ministry that is disruptive in a good way and calls people to think in different categories, calls people to consider. the ultimate weighty things of life. And your book is disruptive in that way. So that's how it connects with my thinking of just, especially for those in a culture who are lost

and who don't have any sense of transcendence. And they're just wondering, like, I think a lot of people have the feeling, I'm here for something. Human life is significant in some way, but I have no idea what it is. And there's a sort of a gap. So I just,

I feel like your book breaks open those kinds of questions. I really like that phrase you used just a minute ago about something big to live for. That's there in the human heart. Yeah. I believe that our lives are eternally significant. Every day matters. This conversation right here matters.

Like this really matters. And I believe that my life is deeply insignificant. Ecclesiastes are going to be in the great, you know, under the sun in this stage my life is insignificant. and eternally my life, both at the same time. And I'm trying to force Ben to look at both sides of that equation. At one point, he sees a blade of grass, and he starts crying because it's so beautiful to him. I'm trying to get both sides of the equation, and I think the lovecraftian genre was the best way to sort of unearth that and make that salient and real.

Yeah. One other thing that was interesting to me is the way, this theme of redemption, I think, of it in until we have faces, Lewis's novel, where basically Orwell is saved because finally she realizes I'm wrong and she has to turn in her whole thinking. But in Ben's relationship with his wife, there's some ways he breaks through and comes to a realization at key moments of where he realizes kind of, she wasn't the problem. I wasn't the problem. I was trying to analyze things as a psychologist from the outside. You know what I'm saying? He kind of, there's a theme of of redemption and that theme of like

to what we ultimately need is not what we think we need and not what we're aspiring after. We have to have some alien force invade our life and change us. That's something I was thinking about as well with Ben's relationship with his wife. I don't know if you want to have any thoughts on you.

So every major character in a novel, I've got to write out what does the character want? What's going wrong? What's blocking them from getting what they want? and what they want, and then what actions are they taking dread of what they want, right? So it's so easy to write badly and just write about what people are thinking and feeling. You only write about what people do and say to achieve that goal.

And then you say, what do they want and what do they need? What Ben wants is, well, it's obvious. What Ben needs is very, very different. And when you write a story, you put your characters through hell. You torture them. You push them. you break their hearts like the ultimate nightmare

that every character has you need to make that happen to them and then realize something worse can happen to them like you have to have this feeling fiction is so easy to write badly you need to show a character striving to get something that the audience

resonates with in some way so like breaking bad I never want to sell meth but I understand why Walter White wants it and so I'm engaged like will it work what's going to happen what was I saying, Gab, I completely lost my creative thought. You show the distinction between what people want and what people need. Yeah, yeah.

And you just absolutely break those characters. Oh, yeah, yeah. And even if what the character wants doesn't matter that much, if it matters to them, then if it feels significant to them, it'll feel significant to the reader. After every scene you have to ask, what's changed and what is at stake? has to be something big at stake in every single scene or it's going to get boring and they'll put it down and go on Instagram or something like that. So that feeling of a ton of stuff being at stake, I don't know. Those are the best stories, right? Yeah. And if you can put the meaning of the

universe at stake in some way, and if human beings can be involved in some way in the meaning of the universe, then to me that's a fascinating story, but not omnipotent and not fully understanding what's going on, but able to act in a deeply significant way in the world, maybe for the worst, you know? That's a good story to me. Yeah. Yeah, man, fascinating. Well, I'm tempted to start talking about movies

and other things that are related to what you're saying. But then we wouldn't have any time to quote the office either at the end. Before we finish it off, are there any other passages from the book you want to discuss anything in the, any passages you're proud of, or you want to draw attention to or talk about it before we finish. Do you want to just read through the whole book for us? I mean, this might say, look, I know I'm not like a great writer.

I'm okay as a writer. I think I can say I'm a good writer. I'm not a great writer. I know that. I'm fine with that. But I write stories because they're the stories that I want to read. So I will read them a lot and they mean a lot to me. There's a conversation between Ben and his wife.

about two-thirds of the way through the book and man I'm gonna I'm just gonna torture Ben and it means a lot to me and it really breaks Ben's heart how it plays out um there's a point where toward the very end where Ben is looking into the past and he can't see any version of the past where he and his wife were happy together and he still loves her um there's there's I I love Alex um I care about her. I admire her. And there's a scene where she manifests the presence inside her. And I'm proud of how I got it to come out. And I like the ending. I don't know.

There's one... Let's see. I'm not trying to praise myself when I say that, Gav. I'm just saying I write because I'm thinking, I want to read a story like that. I'll just read one paragraph. This is on page 22 or no, no,

no, that's not what I want. Page 1, 2, 3. Where Alex is talking to Ben, and he's talking about the two different kinds of chaos and how they're both dangerous, destructive, and unknowable, but they're still different. And she says, and she says, what's left after the stripping?

They're opposite. And then she says, on the one hand, dissolution and unbordered emptiness, the remnants of your humanity, growing ever more ghostly in the cold, but never dying. On the other, an infinite weight which crushes, a light which blinds, a supernova which

consumes, until you are reborn into something no human can look on and live, something which cannot live inside this universe without bursting it. You choose out of fear, so your suffering will be greater, but your final end is the same as mine. You know, C.S. Lewis talks about the redeemed soul

as being a kind of god or goddess that we'd be tempted to worship if we can see. I like Malachi as a character. he's so gleefully malicious and arrogant, but Ben keeps meeting him in different forms and I like how it plays out. I'm going to stop

talking that all sound like I'm praising myself, but yeah. And the 35th thing I like about my book here. I'm glad you mentioned the Alex Jesse connection from Breaking Bad because I kind of thought of that. I didn't, but as soon as you said, I thought, oh yeah, that's exactly how I pictured

that character. All right, well, let me encourage people to buy this book and it out. I think they'll find it absolutely fascinating, unable to be put down, and check out the video description, click on the link, and buy a copy for a friend. Yeah, could I just really

quick, I'm so sorry to interrupt. I'm starting a writers' collective with a friend called Seed of Dragons. We've got a website that is not totally put together but you can read some things there. I can send you the link, and there's a book trailer as well that's on YouTube. We've got a YouTube channel, Seed of Dragons.

There's a trailer for the book, and your nephew is in it and your niece as well so if people want to check that out if people can tweet about this stuff Amazon reviews it is so hard to sell fiction it's so hard to get noticed Amazon reviews good reads

reviews just putting stuff online is a huge help if people wouldn't mind do it and if you don't like the book put an honest review on there as well that actually helps as well I'm very sorry to interrupt gap but seat of dragons if people want to check it out we'd love to have you stop by

Perfect. So check out Seed of Dragons. I'll put the link for that in the description as well. Share on social media about the book. Leave a review on Goodreads, Amazon, etc. Why don't we leave them with a quote with our favorite office quote? Just because we want to end on a more spiritual note, you know? Well, we can't disappoint people, right? You want to go first? My favorite quote is always when Michael doesn't jump off the building and says, I saved a life today, my own. Does that make a lot? me a hero. I can't really say, but yes, it does. My favorite quote is when Michael says to Dwight, what's something I told you that

changed your life? And without skipping, Dwight says, don't be an idiot. It changed my life. And then it cuts to him, and he's like, whenever I think about doing something, I ask myself, would an idiot do that? And if the answer is yes, I do not do that thing. Well,

this is something I've asked you about before, but why? Because I find that show comforting. Like when I'm, when I've just kind of like, I don't know, the world feels bad, I just watch the office. Absolutely. And it's something about it. What is it that, about that show that is comforting? I think, okay, I think because it takes a completely unpleasant environment and makes it fun to be in. A completely boring, annoying, we're in love with someone and they're with, they're engaged to someone else.

It should be miserable and it's fun. That's redemptive. and because Michael keeps trying to manipulate friendship and admiration from people and it never works and at the end of almost every episode someone does something kind for Michael that he can't manipulate

so there's a kind of grace to it which is really touching and we know that we need we need kindness to others that we can't manipulate yeah it's and I love the way another thing I love about that show

is the way it ends where Jim and Pam's marriage is held in tax when you're worried about that. And then I like the final quote where they're looking at the picture, I think Pam Drew, and it says there's a lot of beauty and ordinary things, which kind of relates to some of the things you were just saying. But anyways, we'll have to leave people in suspense for more discussion of the office next time we talk. I've done more interviews with you than anyone else.

This is our third time. That's great. Thank you very much for having me, Gavin. I'm sorry, I couldn't ask you more questions, but thank you. And thank you for reading the novel. I'm really grateful to you and for putting me on your channel.

You have way more followers than I do. Not anymore. I think they might no, I think people will find it fascinating. So yeah, so thanks for watching everybody.

Check out the book. Check out Seat of Dragons in the video description. See you guys next time.