At least once a day I stop and think to myself, “I have some talented friends.” It can be a joke on social media, a piece of artwork I see, a snippet of writing, or just a stray thought that triggers that phrase. I find myself lucky in that regard, having surrounded myself with people of tremendous skill.

Luke Crane is one of those people, which is why I asked him to write the foreword for my five part book, Testament. He is a frustratingly good writer, as in it is frustrating that he barely understands how good his writing is and that he doesn’t do enough of it for my taste.

So, since this is my newsletter and I make the rules, I am going to share the foreword he wrote for me this past year. It is better thought through and researched than some short stories I have read this year. It is really something. I hope you enjoy it.

Foreword

You say we are the future
When will you ever learn?
A testament
Born out of desperation

Disfear, Testament,
Live the Storm, 2008

Dear reader, you hold in your hand a most curious object. It seems a book, but if it is, it is a rare type, not often produced in our over-manufactured age. Regardless of its nature, its origin is singular. Conceived by one mind and executed painfully—every letter, every brushstroke—by a single set of hands. Like a monk at his labors in the scriptorium, the author laid upon each page each word, each wash of color, with brush and pen. His was a desperate and futile prayer to contain the gods and demons within.

Permit me to point to the most obvious detail regarding what you hold in hand: Its creator has seen fit to title it testament. Obvious yet significant, the word repeats on the frontispiece, a gorgeous painted block print of a lectern piled with book, quill and candle. The scrollwork contains the unequivocal bold lettering: TESTAMENT.  And the word recurs again in the first sentence of the work as an attestation by the book’s titular narrator, Kask: …this is my testament. And thus we ritualistically intone the word thrice to signal that, by taking up the book, opening its covers and reading its first sentence we, the readers, enter a new world. The world in which this testament was born out of desperation.

The choice to dub this collection Testament is no superficial flourish. It is the first and perhaps most direct clue pertaining to the mystery contained within. Certainly, to call this tale a testament in the literal sense is accurate. Kask, our narrator, feels he must unburden his soul before a panel of unnamed, unknowable, immortal judges. Thus he testifies in a most real way. But beyond its mundane use, the idea of the testament calls to mind the two segments, Old and New, of one of the most influential mythologies in human history. Conscious or not, that association can be no accident.

But this work is no Christian allegory, no Pilgrim’s Progress. To your humble writer of this foreword, the most Christian-like aspect of the book seems to be that it is a revelation. It was not written, created or constructed by its author in the traditional sense, rather it was revealed to him by some power or deity, just as the terrible querubim visited awful knowledge upon Saul on his doomed road to Damascus.

I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation…”

Galatians 1:11–12, NIV[11]

Rather than cursing him to preach as Saul was, whatever unhuman power that visited the author has infected him with a disease of the mind that commands him to disgorge onto the page in word and image all that was revealed, regardless of whether or not our minds (or his) are prepared for it.

Before we continue and you find me raving, I must explain that in order to join you at the beginning of this work, dear reader, I had to submit myself to the trials hidden within and, through them, gain wisdom enough so that I might act as your guide, your lantern bearer, as you enter the strangely illumined chamber beyond. So I say with confidence that what lays before you, dear reader, is neither simple testimony, story, narrative, tale, nor saga. Contained in the form of this sumptuously illuminated tome, the author manifests no less than a mythology.

The first function of a mythology is to reconcile waking consciousness to the mysterium tremendum et fascinans of this universe as it is: The second being to render an interpretive image of the same, as known to contemporary consciousness.

Campbell, Creative Mythology,
Ancient Vine, page 4

As Kask attempts to communicate his experiences, the author frenetically translates the narrator’s inscrutable thoughts, cryptic words and garish imagery of these dire events for our unprepared collective consciousness. That said, as you explore it, you will find that this testament contains what Campbell refers to as a “profound respect for the inherited forms” of the myths that precede it, drawing the reader through a veil of familiarity. Within you will encounter shades of heroes from the Sagas to the Silmarillion, comforting and alien all at once. Yet this Campbellian respect is a ruse, a cleverly sculpted clay pot that the author fills with wonder and horror and then smashes to shards before the reader’s eyes.

Beneath the cloak of its mysteries a mythology must have gods, heroes, and monsters. Testament has them aplenty. Beings of every stripe and form strive to elevate their families, clans, and desires over all others. One theme in particular recurs throughout that I believe attests to the mytho-revelatory nature of the text. Kask recounts many cycles of uplift and downfall, and at each nadir, as if manifesting a biologic survival imperative of the doomed culture, a hero appears. This figure gathers their wits and spears, repulsing the devouring darkness at extreme cost. To my mind, these figures echo the spirit of wrecca that Professor Tolkien discusses in his translation of Beowulf.

…wrecca means in origin an ‘exile’, a man driven out from the land of his home — for any reason: crime, collapse or conquest of his people or princely line, economic pressure or the desire for more opportunity, and often (if he was of high birth) dynastic struggles among members of the ‘royal family.’

JRR Tolkien’s Beowulf,
commentary, page 293

Kask’s Testament is replete with wrecca. Skadi, Fiolsfid, Beli, Kernobog, Sanhet—not just one outcast forced to throw lots with Death, but dynasties of them, lineages, rising and falling in bloody contest, betrayed by fickle fate, pride, and time. Much like the heroes of old that among whom, Professor Tolkien notes, Beowulf was just one of many puissant exiles to live such a doom. And we note that this mythic association cannot be accidental. Beowulf itself being such a powerful and ancient myth that it has no human author.

In Creative Mythology, Campbell also notes that mythologies serve another function: to undergird the “larger, more enduring cultural body.” Not only do they speak to us of the tremendous and fascinating mystery of the eternal struggle of life and death, but they seek to bestow morals and values, teaching us compassion, generosity and justice among many other virtues.

Amongst the blood-drenched wars and doom-spells recounted in Kask’s ravings, we hear the strain of the familiar. The narrator speaks again and again of a people struggling to create justice, to define evil and sustain compassion. In the tempestuous struggles of the God-Queen Beli, we hear faintly the author’s own voice straining amongst the unhuman chorus for which he is the medium. For this mythology reflects the powers and uncertainties of the author’s own time, his fears and his angers. And no less a being than the great saint of fantasy fiction, Ursula K. LeGuin reminds us that this is no accident. In fact, such expressions of our world are inextricably bound into our fantastical creations:

The politics were there all along— the hidden politics of the hero-tale, the spell you don’t know you’re living under till you cast it off. … the world apart of a fantasy inevitably refers back to this world. All the moral weight of it is real weight. The politics of fairyland are ours.

Ursula K. LeGuin,
Revisioning History

The tangled images and emotions of frustration, anxiety and rage conjured by the author, the recognizable icons that recall the politics of our own convulsing world, summon to our minds the rasping prophecies of Tomas Lindberg and his punk band, Disfear. Though separated from the vessel of Kask’s testimony by 15 years and a massive ocean, we hear his voice chanting similar chords and polyphonies. Tormented by the same unhuman forces as the author, Lindberg creates his own Testament. And reflecting Kask’s imagery, Disfear’s distorted chords and driving beats ring with familiar anger, frustration, fear, and defiance.

We dream of poison
Of annihilating liberation
We are too young for mercy
We are the revolution
Come on!

Disfear, Testament
Live the Storm, 2008

We could imagine Hardrik’s bereaved son Eisolos shouting the very same before his oppressors.

Beyond the angst and fear, gods and heroes, beyond invention and time, I detect another, mournful strain interweaving the mad melody of both Kask’s Testament and the author’s own voice, struggling to be heard through the tumult. These chords resonate so low that one can only feel them, rather than hear them—deeper, unanswerable fears for one’s children, for the destruction of the natural world through humanity’s carelessness, and a creeping existential dread. For us death is a singular experience, perhaps even a mercy. When we pass on, we are reassured that our world continues and our works still live within it. But within Kask’s Testament we feel a chthonic hum building into a scream that will not dislodge from the throat: it is the mortal fear of annihilation.

Not the mercy of death, but an atavistic horror that our struggles were never to amount to anything because darkness, time and tide shall crush us under hoof like so many ants or—even more chilling—an inchoate panic that our very own works will unleash a Hell upon creation and destroy us and everything we could ever hold dear.

In these reflections, I am reminded of another author who struggled to express this abject terror in his works. He writes:

We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

HP Lovecraft,
The Call of Cthulhu

Dear reader, I am confident you will find that Kask attests to Lovecraft’s prophecy: He witnesses this selfsame madness and flight into ignorance, time and again. Thus I submit that this is no mere story—no biography of a single person’s life—but a warning “not of human origin” regarding the tremendous mystery of life. A life so terrifying no fearsome band of heroes can stand against it and remain unscathed in mind or body. And so shall you find yourself friend, at the conclusion of Kask’s utterances, scarred, changed utterly and fearful—but forewarned.

Luke Ansgar Crane,
Astoria, New York City, New York State, United States of America, Earth, Sol, Oort Cloud, Local Interstellar Cloud, Local Bubble,
Orion Arm, Milky Way, Local Group, Virgo Supercluster,
Laniakea Supercluster, the Universe, Prime,
2/29/2024

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