the iconoclast's descending

Paradox as Gift to Open the Prophetic Heart Douglas Blake Olds This essay redefines paradox as a crucible of accountable discernment rather than a site of mystical suspension. In doing so, it advances a conative, deontological model of prophetic witness—charting a novel epistemic-ethical trajectory rooted in Heb 5:13-14: ethical discernment, virtue, and aesthetic attunement to neighbor and world. “Attachment [to form],” Weil wrote, “is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained/obtained only by someone who is detached”[5]. This paradox is not a simple contradiction but often becomes the victim of a faulty hermeneutical spiral, where detachment leads to moral indifference. Such distortion reflects a genealogical fallacy: privileging appearances, especially those formed in the camps of victors, as the measure of meaning. Behind this misreading lurks a Faustian temptation to quietism on the path to nihilism: “I’m the [victor’s] spirit that keeps denying [justice]… for ev...

A Great Lakes' Theodicy The lover hers never bested,   mystiqued to shadowscape me, goating torment. Mystery of mastery became Mistakery, her echt of skid:    Dave from Grand Haven —better should from Piscataway, and Edmond, an unCount-ed Fitz.— Lud’s last hip wrecked on a beer-surf inland drunk,   Hewn-Ron sinking anchored iron-eyes     downward to skud Chebar turquoise upward from outscaped rust, launched into the abutting   eros-erosive airs up long Mackinacked way; Naw: thereway—theirs, a Möbius ever there-ing, Screw you, Waylon, we’re dancing. But me: Attendant, changing shoulders.   Ever horizoned slipping by sacred, Though she sits just across a table, abluting the inscaping hard nightly settle. --Douglas Blake Olds

  The Restoration of Reason from the Eyes of a Neighbor: A Shema-Christological Metaphysic of Conation Douglas Blake Olds Being a theological intervention into modern philosophy of mind, evolutionary theory, AI discourse, and metaphysical epistemology in the age of  Daniel 2:43 . A  prolegomenon to iconoclasm as a living summa of semper reformanda  distinct from classical natural theology, from modern epistemology, from AI critique literature, from postliberal theology, to scope contemporary post-secular poetics of repair, founded not on speculative cognition of ends but on relational conation grounded in Shema-fulfilled Christology. Making the repentant heart--the seat of intention in Hebrew anthropology—conscious is the ground of reason rather than elidable by situational private interests and ego. Sequenced from Shema only, Christ's reasoning makes intentionality of the creative sustenance integral and indeed primary—though proceeding from metanoia--and nec...

  The Armchair Beckons ( Psalm 7:15) Speculators are weaklings—   either through nature or through practice. If nature gave them weak organs, weak irritations—   as all weakness tends toward subtlety— they were thereby determined   to serve holy abstraction. — Herder Its Frankenstein impulse to be served: "Or they mutilated themselves, through abstraction weakening sensation, until they became incapable of whole sensation... In both cases, one is dealing with the sick." — First, their abstractions doubt your consciousness. Dennett’s self-mutilating abstractions   deny your sensations,   displace your accountability. This epistemological softness—   its chiaroscuro of probabilism and hedging,   its conversational artifice— is now AI’s project. Then they discourage you,   calling you cowards or traitors—inner ring fallouts. Then they sabotage you   by their academies and robed honors. Then they diagnose you   by their hobnobbed epistemologies. T...

  Christ’s suborning esoteric—   like Spanish moss dripping   and lichen leaf, rare patination to burnished oak leaves,   and pastelated flake filigree in cloud forestation— interrogates exoterics' valor   that squelch the heart’s unbinding. Un-facile-making-to-order syntheses,   fraying robed embassies until the patron suckle of razor Rome,   tunneling fo(u)rth, is exposed by its pelt. Corrupt forms cherished in synesthetic assembly-- pushed,   ungating to abrade arriving possibles, in abundance characterized—   so too of these metaphors— essentialize all these of “nature” not by romance    bearing contingent transcendence we salute, but as a glimpse of swaddling, honored energy by suggestion: its hinting not to a kabbalah   or primitivism by the subconscious and mystical— the escape to ever deeper or farther   oases subterranean— but to kaleidoscope revel, wave and nave   that table with the luminescently over-stretching bid and palm amidst the flyboy sto...

Wounds are a signal of the vanity of violence (John 20:27):    The macho,    the submachine bearer,     the flag jingo,      the celebratories of AI       belching combustion       of drive-by performance,       and the in(i)quirkdity        of Reichstag fire space launcheries.  Far from the Madding Crowd’s “Blind[ness] by self-beguilement,” Nemo, Solo(n), ante mortem beatus. Yet such woundings are mirrored, so too their healing:  The showcase of God’s power is not heaven lighting   but providence grounding,     not appropriation but arrival. The vast love on display—   resourced for Providence—     centered not in Mind,       but in the One. The aligned heart   for what has     and continues to unify. The obligation   for the celestial estate     of children onward coming? Awesome in grounding,   and justice-scoped soul. --Douglas Blake Olds