Post # 10 DEEPEST FRANCE: Anti-Mystery as Ante-Mystery

Somewhere along the evolution from Edgar A. Poe's esteemed detective Auguste Dupin to the contemporary cinema in which Sherlock Holmes and the 'Iron Man' have become one inasmuch as both are played by Robert Downey, Jr., literature of mystery and detection seems to have lost its way. The wit and imagination of Dupin and Doyle's original Holmes have given way to the violence of Downey's Holmes and the even greater violence and noise of the other Hollywood special- effects mystery-solvers who rely upon car crashes and weapons of nearly mass destruction more than upon their brains.

For such reasons, the first novel in the Paired Mysteries: DEEPEST FRANCE & MYSTERIOUS DAYS is, in many ways, an 'Anti-Mystery' inasmuch as it attempts to raise serious questions about the simple-mindedness of many contemporary mysteries that appear interested in little more than finding and incarcerating or blowing away whoever dun'it. Although faux villains are sometimes tangled before the reader or viewer as a tease, once the 'true' prep has been identified and disposed of, a curtain of something like righteous stolidity descends over the events and there seems to be little room left for reasonable doubts and no purpose left for second guessing.

Joe Friday in the popular "Dragnet" programs of the mid-twentieth century certainly contributed greatly to this sort of stolidity with his incessant refrain, "All I want is the facts, ma'am. Just the facts." But some of this single-minded authority already existed in the self-satisfaction with which both Dupin and Holmes would announce their solutions as smug triumphs over the dull police officers they had outwitted. Indeed, this sort of one-dimensional belief in the use of facts in solving problems, solutions worked out in an almost mathematical or scholarly way, fitted perfectly with the positivistic assumptions about men and nature that marked the intellect of the late nineteenth century.

Mystery stories still offer readers comfort because they preserve a simpler nineteenth century sense of reality with their predictable forms and conclusions. In the twentieth century, however, many other fields moved beyond a positivist, objectivist notion of what exists and how we know it. The interior, subjective realms have grown increasingly important through the contributions of Freud and Jung and their many followers. In fact, one can argue that the subjective universe has become almost the equal of the objective inasmuch as all phenomena are filtered through one's perceptions. Finally, the subjective and the objective become one in the "SelfObjects" so important in the helpful Self Psychology of Heinz Kohut.

Consequently, even the size and age of the universe itself as become relative to the ability of our minds aided by new instruments like the Hubble telescope to grasp it. And still the mystery fictions, placing old comforts above knowledge, trudge along content with the 'facts' and iron-fisted final solutions.

Strange to say, we are more likely to encounter wit, reasonable doubts, and the free play of imagination when the contemporary 'Holmes' (pronounced 'homes') a.k.a. 'Dr. House' of television fame (think of the many parallels) ticks off diagnosis after diagnosis, rejecting and revising his guesses as he goes, until he finds a solution that may or may not work. With Dr. House we are far more likely to come across imaginative detection than in the movies starring Robert Downey as the kick-and-punch version of the original Holmes.

To correct the stunted nature of so many recent mystery stories, Milt Walters in DEEPEST FRANCE raises questions about the ways we construct knowledge in the contemporary world, fragmented as it is by the varied media with their raucous voices competing for attention and power. Walters attempts to bring imagination back to mysteries by self-consciously foregrounding his acts of invention when he boldly moves, in the 'Pop Ups,' from his own point of view into the minds of the French characters, Little Charles, Philip and Christine Plantard, as well as those of Little Jeanne and the adult Charles Plantard. Each shift in point of view overtly takes us into another world, although at base each world is invented by Milt Walters (a new 'Walter Mitty'), who has the audacity to cross all the boundaries in the novel. Lacking aid from the Greek muses, Walters admits that for him this Imagination consists of powers such as Selection, Interpolation, Extrapolation, Projection, Interpretation.

Finally, caught in his own inventions, Walters feels he may have made a horrendous blunder. The worlds he invents are no more perfect than those dreamed up by all writers who have come before him from Homer and the Gilgamesh poet through this morning's news report. But his imaginings seem not to have been pointless ones since he, assisted by his daughter, appear to have discovered the murderer(s) of Little Charles.

Through interrogating the conventions of contemporary mysteries, DEEPEST FRANCE becomes an Ante-Mystery that clears the way for a less naive (but simpler) mystery in the second novel, MYSTERIOUS DAYS. But even here there is some ambiguity regarding its author because Milt Walters, no longer an ineffective Mitty (not after his encounter with the Dark Madonna of Limoux) nudges his own daughter toward becoming the imaginative author of the events described in the novel. This maneuver raises a question regarding the fictive nature of all our seemingly real constructions of our world, constructions that are our most vital Self-Objects.

Posting #9 Origins of DEEPEST FRANCE & MYSTERIOUS DAYS

DEEPEST FRANCE & MYSTERIOUS DAYS: Paired Novels
Copied from the Official Blog of Julius Raper, FirstPosted on August 11, 2011
The two novels in DEEPEST FRANCE & MYSTERIOUS DAYS came to me in very different ways, but each was exciting to write. After the research for the first novel, DEEPEST FRANCE, I had to wait for each of the characters to come to life for me. The French family, Christine, Philip, and little Charles Plantard, were there from the start, but others were several years in arriving.

For MYSTERIOUS DAYS the dramatic ending came to me first—loud and clear. I arrived at the other chapters like a man walking in a dark tunnel, not knowing where his next step would take him but knowing that each day he would find what he needed to keep him on his way to that ending.

DEEPEST FRANCE opens with a gruesome 1984 news report, then jumps to a message the American Milt Walters sends from Virginia to Anthi, his adult daughter living in Paris :

Rennes-les-Bains—A four-year-old boy missing since last Thursday from his

home in Rennes-les-Bains, Deepest France, was found this morning in the

Salz River just below this charming little village of fewer than a thousand

inhabitants. Local officials have identified the boy as Charles Plantard, son

of Philip Plantard, the maire (mayor) of this small resort known chiefly for its

thermal baths and historical importance.



Officials added that the body was discovered, with arms and ankles bound

in rope and drawn tightly against the torso, lodged under a low footbridge

over the Salz within 100 meters of the village. Preliminary indications, they

continued, are that death occurred before the boy entered the river inasmuch as the body bore upward of a dozen wounds probably inflicted by a long knife or other sharp instrument.



Young Plantard was still wearing the blue trousers and shirt and purple coat

he had on when his mother, Christine Plantard, twenty-five, also of Rennes-lesBains, sent him to the baker’s for bread and, according to official reports, kissed him good-bye for the last time.

Investigations are continuing.

•••

Since you asked, dear Anthi, this is the story that gripped the heart of the French nation that spring we spent in France, the drama that millions of French men and women rushed each morning to their newsstands and televisions to follow, as layer after appalling layer revealed itself to them, like the proverbial onion of truth peeled before their eyes.

MYSTERIOUS DAYS , in contrast, begins with ”Day Seven,” the final day of the story:

At least his cell was a modern one, by the standards of Hurricane Pointe back in Virginia. The bed hung from heavy chains and folded up to give Milt room to move about now that it was almost day again. The mattress, grey vinyl, was not soft but still thick enough to rest his depleted body. A metal toilet and washstand protruded from the rear wall. Aside from the sting of disinfectant, the odor seemed almost bearable. Walls on three sides were solid metal or stone, so he had a modicum of privacy despite the fourth wall of bars. Since no cell opened directly across from his, he didn’t have to worry about eyes except when a jailer came along the walk between the compartments.
What worried him most was the accusation the gendarmes, who he now realized were an arm of the French military, planned to lodge against him. During the night of interrogation, they failed to explain his rights under French law and refused to detail charges. These could include kidnapping and assault—even murder if Shanti didn’t make it. He hoped they wouldn’t dream up some phony child abuse claim, the way Christine, psychotherapist that she was, feared they might. And there was no way, was there, that they could go back and try to pin a rap on him for colluding in the death of Claud Plantard twenty years ago. He no longer considered it possible that the cops would suspect he’d played a part in the worst of recent crimes in this part of their nation, since it was ridiculous to imagine they had even read Deepest France, his novel about the brutal murder nearby of little Charles.
His best defense, he told himself, would be to get his story straight and trust that it would agree with whatever statements his wife Christine, daughter Anthi, and Gloria might give. To that end he had spent his solitary hours of the night in a disturbed reverie sorting events of the past six days. He intended to do the same until the gendarmes came for him again.

DEEPEST FRANCE is a good deal more complex than MYSTERIOUS DAYS. Some readers may elect to read the second story first and then go back to the first to fill in gaps in the histories of “little Charles,” the Plantard family, and the murders of the region. The “Paired Novels” format of this book facilitates a back-and-forth reading. My hope is that you have as much fun reading the two mysteries as I did writing them.

- Julius Raper -


Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Black Madonna, Copy-cat murder, descendents of Jesus, Eccentric Fiction, elderly heroics, family crimes, fiction as knowledge, French Grail mysteries, French Pyrenees, general literature, Grail quest, Mary Magdalena, murder mystery, murdered children, Rennes-le-Chateau, rescue | Leave a reply

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New Thoughts about the NPPT Approach: Post #8

Reconsidering the postings in this blog, I think I can now add some depth to the origins of the Neo-psychopolytheistic approach to religious matters. Perhaps these reflections can also help us move beyond the too frequent religious conflicts and wars.

Earlier I said, truthfully, that the NPPT label first came to me from Henry Adams's calling himself a Radical-Conservative in politics. In the seventies, I believed that Adams was playfully attempting to avoid being pigeonholed in one political camp or the other, a position that any large-spirited person who was not seeking power but truth might reasonably choose. Since my pursuit as always been truth rather than power, I wished to avoid any of the too familiar religious pigeonholes.

What I failed to remember in the early post on the origins of NPPT turns out to be that not only did Adams want to frame politics with the new psychological theories of his time but he in fact did much the same thing for religion. He turned himself into a flesh-and-blood 'barometer', an instrument to measure the various forces or energies at work in the culture of his time, especially the transition from his century to the 20th century. He does this most effectively in "The Dynamo and the Virgin (1900)", a chapter in his famous THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS. In an earlier book, MONT-SAINT-MICHEL AND CHARTRES, he are tracked the force of the Virgin that had brought, or at least, symbolized, the unity of European culture in the 13th century. But in the great hall of the dynamos at the Exposition of 1900, Adams felt that "the dynamo became a symbol of infinity, . . . to feel the forty-foot dynamo as a moral force much as the early Christians felt the Cross. . . . one began to pray to it." But the age of the dynamo was the age of multiplicity rather than unity because the dynamo would spread cultural energy away from the center in Rome, or Chartres, to all corners of the earth.

Adams's barometric reaction has a lot in common with the early phenomenological approach to measuring the sense of the holy that Rudolph Otto proposed near the beginning of the 20th century. The power Adams felt before the dynamo resembles the divine fear and trembling of Kierkegaard and Rudolph Otto much more than it does the gentle Enthusiasm of 18th century England or the comforting calmness of the Virgin at Chartres.

Looking back over the posts of Ceriustuff, I realize that he, like Milt Walters and myself, has proposed NPPT as a new barometric or phenomenological approach to religion. But Ceriustuff has the added advantage of employing the Hubble telescope, the psychology of Jung, plus that of the object relations psychologists, in trying to understand why religions persist. These perspectives allow Ceriustuff to choose among deities and to decide where best to focus his attention since, as Sartre's phenomenology contends, we become the objects on our consciousness.

After viewing the Hubble universe universe, Walters and Ceriustuff decide it is counterproductive to focus on deities of numinous awe and fearful trembling. Why? Because the violent destruction and creation of the Hubble universe lacks qualities we need to worship and emulate any more than we would want to emulate Darwin's universe bloody in tooth and claw (though like Darwin we might find comfort in the study of lowly earthworms and other gentle, creative creatures).

We now recognize that the worthiness for worship of any deity of power depends on two factors: the qualities of the deity and the projections of the believer. All the gods of the volcano, the thunder, or the threats of death and punishment depend upon the craven fear and helplessness we project upon them and seek protection from. They are the threatening father and angry mother gods we come to on bent knee and with crushed will. Yes, there is power in the volcano, the storm, the icy look of maternal rejection, but the guilt, fear, and helplessness we paint upon them is our own. So, in the language of Self Psychologist Heinz Kohut, our gods belong among our selfobjects, those entities that though they may have some natural existence of their own, are also parts of our selves that we project because we don't see them within us. We may not give the storm its power to destroy, but we give it the intention to choose minute 'us' as the intended object of its destruction.

In addition, we have to choose our adult selfobjects as carefully as we can because selfobjects become the models for behavior and personality. They become our ego-ideal, as Hitler did for his followers. They, the selfobjects, also become the carriers for the traits and projections we will come to introject or internalize, the way a child slowly internalizes the qualities seen in the first selfobjects, one's mother and/or father.

This internalizing process is one thing that leads both Ceristuff and Milt Walters to transcend the sky gods of the metallic grail and of the unwitting neo-Catharistic, child-slaying Shanti, Shanti and seek the comfort of the Dark Madonna from the simple earth, the Dark Virgin of Limoux who seems to represent life-creation (sex), birth, and protection. Surrounded by those who pursue wealth, power, purity, perfection even through infanticide, Ceriustuff and Walters prefer to 'become conscious of' the Dark Madonna, and they choose thereby to introject her qualities.

At least that is the fictional truth of this blog and of the paired novels, DEEPEST FRANCE & MYSTERIOUS DAYS, now available through local bookstores as well as from Amazon and Barnes-Noble online.

Black Sara photos: Beyond Religious Conflicts: Supplement 2, Post # 7

Black Sara photos: Beyond Religious Conflicts: Supplement 2, Post # 7

"Photo of the Dark Madonna and Black Sara": Supplement to Post # 7

The French Grail and the Dark Madonna: Post # 7 of Beyond Religious Conflicts

The French legendary history that interests mystery writer Milt Walters in Deepest France: A Novel of the French Grail and in Mysterious Days: Return to Deepest France affirms that the Grail was/is a woman.  It is not a cup made of expensive metals.

In the two novels (now in production) the woman is Mary from Magdala.  This Mary is said to be imperfect in the same sexual way the Gnostics' Sophia is flawed, but just as Sophia brings the divine spark of philo-Sophia into the world, Mary carries the divine blood of the sky gods from the eastern Mediterranean to western Europe.  In contrast to sky gods in general, she does not command men, or women.  But her fundamental humanity nonetheless commands their respect.

In the legend, Mary was the disciple and consort of (perhaps) the least patriarchal of the sky gods, Jesus.  In competing  versions of the account, she is either pregnant by him at the time of the crucifixion or assists him in escaping the crucifixion altogether (probably by having the Cypriot Simon, from Kyreni, not only carry the cross but take Jesus' place).  In the second version (the 'Laughing Jesus' version), during their stay in Egypt she conceives a daughter named Black Sara(h).  In both versions, Mary then travels on to Marseilles to join the sizable Jewish community living there in the first century AD.  Sara's offspring eventually mix their 'divine' blood with the royal blood of the Visigoths in the south of French just north of the Pyrenees.  Finally they marry into the Merovingian royal line, thus giving a literal meaning to the so-called Divine Right of kings.  Although the Merovingian royalty was thought to have been eliminated by the forces of Charlemagne, members of the royal group survived and passed on their blood to a family that still lives in the region and in other parts of France--and is the focus of the events portrayed in Deepest France.

Both the French Grail legend and the English Grail stories attempt to bridge the gap between the earth and the sky.  The Anglo Grail consists of metals found in the earth that are refined to gleam like celestial bodies.  In the French version, Mary is a biological vessel created by one of the fundamental human acts, sex, which in this case allows the living blood of a deity to reside in a (despised?) woman's body for nine months before it becomes an ordinary human.

Rather than re-fashion a metal to suggest sky entities, Mary Magdalena brings the sky down to the earth in a form totally familiar to humankind.  The degree to which this familiarity brings great comfort is apparent in the type of Madonna known as the Black Virgin.  In the numerous churches of the Black Virgin scattered about the earth, many in France, the Blue Sky Virgin of the Roman church has often been blackened by the soot from candles burned in her devotion.  When the priests threaten to clean her up, make her white as new, the parishioners are said to rise up against the effort.  Apparently they find the Black Virgin more comforting to them because she is more human and flawed, closer to themselves.  The same impulse seems to exist for those African and Asian parishioners who prefer their Mary (and their Jesus) to be made of dark materials or colored with dark paints.

The Madonna that impresses Milt Walters in Mysterious Days resembles the African versions made of dark materials.  But she is a special case.  She is carved in a dark wood that has long lain in the earth.  And she holds a dark child in her lap.  Because she seems to mirror his own parental and sexual drives, he feels she is the necessary antidote to the madness of all the high-minded infanticides in the novel.  Since the church where Walters sees her lies so close to Rennes-le-Chateau's church of Mary Magdalena, he suspects this is a statue of that Mary with Black Sara, whom some view as her daughter.  In the midst of a desperate search for a missing child, Walters finds the two figures very comforting.

Sara, however, has her own heritage in addition to that she received from Mary and her consort.  Gypsies who gather at the shrine of the Three Maries in the Camargue, in the delta of the Rhone river, call her Kali and observe rituals that their ancestors in India devoted to Kali-Durga.  Like her 'mother,' Mary, Sara represents the wisdom, the philoS-ophia, the often-affirmed, ancient 'wisdom of the serpents,' which comes from the earth.  Since she was conceived in Egypt, some feel she also possesses the healing energy of Isis.

Although Walters knows nothing of the Kali, Sophia, and Isis connections, he nonetheless senses she is a mighty, syncretic symbol who combines the forces and values needed to remedy the evils of the particular  idealists who in their confusion seem responsible for the atrocities occurring in Deepest France.  For him,  she is a necessary fiction--and one of the comforting forces in the two novels.