TRTR - a little bit of raving

[Michael Bailey]

In chapter 1, all the devolutions of the recognition of Jesus as
Savior, the development of Christianity -

so like, what is the Good Stuff? is the question, and the answer is
God, all the good stuff is wrapped up in God (if you learn about some
new source of good stuff, you can be sure that God is responsible for
that too, like St Paul's Mars Hill speech)
- God and Jesus, and the Holy Spirit - comfort and joy --

so they had a winning ad campaign going, this new God with a human
aspect, and it probably could've gone global - the charisma of a guy
who's Stronger the Dirt, survives death, does and inspires miracles,
and yet *not even there in the sense of displaying observable
imperfections like everybody else around* but is perfect, available
24/7 to supplant the various local charlatans and villains and
demagogues and give people a moral cynosure; what a great idea!

 but then they had to quarrel so one side said Jesus was like God but
man, while the bossy Romans said, "Jesus, is, like, God, man!" and
Europe went off into Catholicism and those other guys sailed to
Byzantium and grew long beards...

so then some people eventually and quite reasonably objected to some
things about that (about Catholicism, that is -- those other guys in
the East, who knows what they were up to?) & started Protestantism and
inevitably some of their human fallibilities became entangled with the
new version of the Gospel and enshrined as truth and became
shibboleths in their own right...causing discord and unhappiness and
palpable uncomfortable contradictions in the lives of practitioners
(like when Aunt May describes what a hero is to Wyatt...)

and then Gwyon came along and looking -- as we all are -- for the Good
Stuff, and being (as maybe not so many are) willing to put aside his
tradition a bit...

looked to Mother Church and Spain, for a taste of the actual comfort
and joy, and after the rather spectacular contretemps associated with
his and Camilla's trip, began shoring fragments against his ruin

while Wyatt, being a kid, seeking (as we all do) the actual things of
comfort and joy and (in theory, as an innocent) not prone to
over-intellectualizing -- nevertheless feels the Godly joy and comfort
rise in him, but IN RESPONSE TO A TOY RABBIT! ----------- so that is
like the ur-artistic urge in a nutshell, attachment to artifice - and
expression thereof even knowing that punishment will ensue.

Once you've done that, why, we've established what you are (as the old
joke goes), any questions of fakery and genuineness in art are just
establishing the price????

or something like that...