Ragnarok and the Drift.

A Cosmic
Judgment Day
Arrives upon
the Comet's Back.

By Ebenezer Baldwin Bowles

Posted on Monday, August 18, 2014
from rural Washington County, Arkansas

The Drift, turbid and ill-defined, holds together vast surfaces of our Earth, keeping the planet from breaking apart and roaming helter-skelter into the open spaces of the Universe.

Delivered by a wrathful progenitor, The Drift arrived in the Long Ago as a writhing, twisting monster from the heavens, falling onto a pacific and fruitful Earth to destroy Paradise. It brought Severity to the Earth.

Now we drift, we humans, uncertain of our bearings, not sure about where we are going. We are lost in space.

A leaf from the tall tulip poplar
fell to earth on August 12, 2014.
It wore an autumnal demeanor,
out of season.
The summer now upon us
here in the Ozark Highlands
of North America
is the coldest on record.

Toward the Core
of the Milky Way.

"Seriously? You want us to believe nonsense? The Drift? I'd rather know why the dogs are sticking to the sidewalks. Can you tell me that? And the pixels. They're frozen and frosty on the screens. You watch. They'll fall off any minute. Explain that. I tell you, it's sixes-and-sevens for all of us. The sun's gettin' cold and we're runnin' outta fire and all you wanna do is talk about the Drift."

That's what she said. She was sowin' doubt. Thought we'd entered an ice age. Mustard seeds in a cranberry bog. It's cold enough as it is without all this doubt sowing.

OK. Maybe we aren't drifting. Maybe the comet didn't smash into the Earth in the Long Ago to doom the good life, kill the fruit trees and roses at Eden. God'd already kicked out Adam and Eve anyway. Maybe we do know where we're going. Someone said toward the core of the Milky Way. Maybe so. We're sure to collide with a black hole when we get there.

Ragnarok:
The Age
Of Fire
And Gravel.
By
Ignatius Donnelly.
New York:
D. Appleton And Company.
1883

Because they were made bitter …

being falsified by the mingling of truth with the falsities of evil
…

'Bitter' signifies in the Word what is undelightful, but one kind of undelightfullness is signified by the bitter from wormwood, another by the bitter from gall, another by the bitter of hemlock, another by the bitter from upripe fruit, another by the bitter that is neither from herbs nor fruit; this bitter signified grief of mind and anxiety from various causes.

from
Apocalypse Explained
By
Emanuel Swedenborg
Vol. 3 N. 522 Revelation 8:11
West Chester, Pa.: Swedenborg Foundation. 1995

The Camera Eye (1)

at the dig the scientist and her team excavated a mass grave of prehistoric animals two hundred bones of bison wolf horse and cheetah dead for twenty thousand years but no woolly mammoth no mastodon while they were digging a pack rat and a deer mouse fell into the sinkhole eighty-five-feet deep they rigged a bucket-and-pulley ambulance to save 'em the deer mouse made it but the pack rat was dead they left her in the hole to study how she decomposes in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming you should have seen that little hospital bed they made for the mouse

curly-haired Laura the paleontologist dreamed of becoming a saber cat she wondered what did those ancient carnivores eat? the Pleistocene extinction was an event for the ages! so she wrote a new proposal wanted to see the boy from Adelaide again he was so smart so sensitive at the Rancho La Brea excavation he could co-author the proposal maybe the two of 'em could figure out some new morphological biogeochemical and genetic techniques the climate was changing

Cataclysm, Conflagration
— Black Hole Dead Ahead.

Some call the Drift an act of cataclysm, but their choice of word is lazy and errant, for cataclysm is a nautical term bound-up at the source in the Noachian deluge — a wash of mighty and ceaseless waters called forth by a Divine power to destroy and submerge the land.

The Drift as event was a blunt-force conflagration, rising up from the surface of the Earth after a mighty comet smote our flourishing and pacific world to unleash an awful cosmic wind of dust and fire, ultimately transforming a paradise of abundance into a tumultuous globe of instability and constant struggle. That's a lot of wind for one sentence, but it gets us on-down the road. "Don't matter," she said, forever sowing. "Black hole dead ahead."

I wanted to contend that during the Drift Age following the comet strike, Palæolithic man and his animal friends the woolly mammoth and the mastodon were forever erased from the roster of living creatures, but I didn't 'cause the line was stretched too thin and I ran out of room. Maybe some day. Maybe before I become extinct.

So, the Drift settles, dissipates, becomes a remnant of the ancient conflagration.... Sonorous and restive at first. Then, slowly, growing quiet, joining together, combining and uniting animal ⇔ mineral ⇔ vegetable, the Drift coalesced into a geologic form. "You can prove none of it," the doubt sower said. How true! But who can? [My O my how comely ist this sassy li'l sower He'll put up with might-near anythin' to git another peek at her evening smock, her midnight treasures.]

The Drift.... Existing today — perhaps at a region near you. Stick around and we shall tell you about its composition.

Ragnarok appeared as the Destroyer, roaring from the fiery conflagration to bring a bitter rain of smoke, dust, and ashes upon a stunned world. Demon of cold space, Ragnarok rode to Earth on a Comet to create the Drift and exact a day of storm and judgment. Blazing debris fell from the torn sky, forming a thick clay, which stuck to the shattered bones of the mastodon and Stone Age man, stuck to the broken limbs of the great trees, stuck to the shattered rocks of mountains. The lifeless clay spread o'er the land. Chaos, vanquished in the Long Ago by the act of Creation, returned to the Earth.

The Skin of Our Teeth
By
Thornton Wilder.
New York:
Harper.
1942

'The Latter Rain'
Song

Oh, I'm glad
   the promised
   Pen - te - cost has come,
And the 'Latter Rain'
   is falling now
   on some ;
Pour it out
   in floods, Lord,
   on the parched ground,
Till it reaches
   all the earth
   a-round.

Rev. D. Wesley Myland,
1907

the Drift settled, and the Latter Rain fell upon the crops of newly risen women and men, and they laid hands upon one another to heal the sickness of the race, and they began to speak in strange tongues, and they cast out Ragnarok and his ilk, the demons from cold space — and the humans became the manifest sons and daughters of a mighty God, became pure Spirit, immortal and victorious

Newsreel II.

Ice Age Beasts Were 'Home Bodies',
Tooth Analysis Reveals

new U.S. study suggests mammoths and mastodons were 'home bodies' and particularly enjoyed spending time in the area of Cincinnati. These ancient Ice Age relatives of the elephant weren't the nomadic beasts that people previously believed, Professor Crowley said.

MRS. ANTROBUS:

Walks slowly to the middle of the room.

All right, let them in. Let them in. You're master here.

Softly.

—But these animals must go. Enough's enough. They'll soon be big enough to push the walls down, anyway. Take them away.

ANTROBUS:

Sadly.

All right. The dinosaur and mammoth—! Come on, baby, come on Frederick. Come for a walk. That's a good little fellow.

DINOSAUR:

It's cold.

ANTROBUS:

Yes, nice cold fresh air. Bracing.

He holds the door open and the ANIMALS go out.

---------------------------------
Danish Punk Band Iceage Announces New Song
---------------------------------

H A N G E D
Robin Tied Belt Around His Neck

“there’s an Ice Age coming but the good news is there’ll be daiquiris for everyone and the Ice Capades will be everywhere and the lobster will keep for at least 100 years that’s the good news the Swanson dinners will last a whole millennium," the comic said in an interview "the bad news is the house will basically be in Arkansas”

---------------------------------
Last Hiroshima Bomber Crewman Dies

93-year-old Theodore VanKirk also known as Dutch died on Monday July 29 in 2014 at Stone Mountain in Georgia he was navigator of the Enola Gay the B-29 Superfortress it dropped Little Boy the world's first atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6 in 1945 the bomb killed about 140,000 humans three days later another bomb killed 80,000 in Nagasaki VanKirk was 24 years old at the time

---------------------------------

SABINA:

That's all we do—always beginning again! Over and over again. Always beginning again.

She pulls on the rope and part of the wall moves into place. She stops. Meditatively:

How do we know that it'll be any better than before? Why do we go on pretending? Some day the whole earth's going to have to turn cold anyway, and until that time all these other things'll be happening again: it will be more wars and more walls of ice and floods and earthquakes.

Cruel Cosmic Accident
or Judgment Day?

"Continental, world-wide, globe-embracing" — the Drift, born in violence and stalking humankind under the name Ragnarok, began to reshape the Earth during a bleak, unbroken run of seasons rent by incessant wind, snow, and intense cold, Ignatius Donnelly tells us. "We are not dealing with little things," he wrote.

Most of our ancestors perished, but a few, sheltering in caves or dens in the densest forests, survived to renew humanity. "Man is saved," Mr. Donnelly wrote. "The world is once more fair. The sun shines again in heaven. Night and day follow each other in endless revelation around the happy globe. Ragnarok is past."

But only for an eon. The Deluge — destruction by water — was yet to come.

Was the Drift a cruel cosmic accident caused by the collision of two heavenly objects crossing paths by chance in an indifferent, mechanistic Universe? Or was it Judgment Day? Can there be more than one?

"The Drift fell upon a fair and lovely world, a world far better adapted to give happiness to its inhabitants than this storm-tossed planet on which we now live, with its endless battle between heat and cold, between sun and ice," Mr. Donnelley wrote. "Man dwelt in this fair and glorious world — this world that knew no frost, no cold, no ice, no snow — for thousands of years. He witnessed the appalling and sudden calamity which fell upon it. And he has preserved the memory of this catastrophe to the present day, in a multitude of myths and legends scattered all over the face of the habitable earth."

Could the Drift be 'preserved' in another way, through the measured findings and arcane metaphor of geology? If the solid matter of the planet speaks to us about the past — and we know it does — then the Drift could be validated by an analysis of vast swaths of the Earth's surface. Ignatius thinks so. Here we go.

"It came with terrific force. It smashed the rocks. It tore them up. It rolled them over on one another. It was accompanied by inconceivable winds — the hurricanes and cyclones spoken of in many of the legends. Hence the Drift is whirled about in the wildest confusion. Hence it fell on the earth like a great snow-storm driven by the wind. It drifted into all hollows. On the earth the till was lifted up by the cyclones and mingled with blocks, rocks, bones, sands, fossils, earth, peat, and other matters, picked up with terrible force from the face of the earth...."

Geology of the Drift.

At the bottom of the Drift is the thick and sticky hard-pan, spread o'er the surface like a broad and ragged quilt. Mixed and stirred by inexorable forces of creeping change, this great mass of clay — confused, tumultuous, unstratified — was formed from soil, sand, gravel, pebbles, and fragments of rock. It contains not a single trace of organic life.

"Where on the face of this life-marked earth could such a mass of material be gathered up, and not contain any evidences of life?" Ignatius Donnelly asked in 1883. "It is as if one were to say that he had collected the detritus of a great city, and that it showed no marks of man's life or works."

Seamless, without crack or joint, the hard-pan is tougher to remove from the path of progress than the stoutest rocks or the densest forests. Dynamite will not blast it away. Dig an opening into it with a great motorized machine and, almost immediately, water fills the hole and the edges collapse inward.

Above the hard-pan and composing the second layer of the Drift roils a formation of 'bowlder-clay' — "This is not so tough or hard," Mr. Donnelley wrote — with boulders as large as barges and some heavier than a diesel locomotive. The boulders can be dug-out if one is so inclined to marshal the resources.

At the top are beds of loose gravel, sand, and stones with traces of the remains of humans and animals.

A loopy analysis if there ever was one, the sower of doubt thought. Pseudo-science, she thought. She isn't speaking, having stuck to the sidewalk next to the dogs and the dinosaur. Her teeth are chattering — and we are driven by necessity to read the doubt sower's mind. We listen for prophecies in the chattering of her teeth, but the soothsayer does not speak.

It is cold tonight in the Ozark Highlands. The low temperatures, experts tell us, are on average as low as ever be the lows for August nights. We are cold. We ask: What shall we do now that the Oracles fall silent? What shall we do?

Struggle

The family, the church, the state, the workshop, the market, agriculture, mining, transportation, literature and art — all these have come to be what they are, not by the invention, contrivance or decree of any man or million of men, but as the result of struggle and the slow growth of the life of the race through a thousand centuries.

And this long struggle has always been at bottom a struggle for existence; that is, for the means of life, a struggle for food, fuel, clothing, shelter. This struggle necessarily always comes first in all personal and social life. Only when this struggle has been successfully made can there be any struggle for the higher comforts and refinements of modern civilization.

from
The Struggle
for Existence
By
Walter Thomas Mills.
Chicago:
International School of Social Economy.
1904

∞ End Monday, August 18, 2014 ∞

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Ragnarok and the Drift.

A Cosmic Judgment Day Arrives upon the Comet's Back.

Toward the Core of the Milky Way.

Cataclysm, Conflagration — Black Hole Dead Ahead.

Cruel Cosmic Accident or Judgment Day?

Geology of the Drift.

Spectacle.

Death from Above.

Pray Tell No.

A Cosmic
Judgment Day
Arrives upon
the Comet's Back.

Toward the Core
of the Milky Way.

Cataclysm, Conflagration
— Black Hole Dead Ahead.

Cruel Cosmic Accident
or Judgment Day?

Death
from
Above.

Pray
Tell
No.