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CHAPTER ONE

LIFE IS FOR THE LIVING

There you are, said the magpie.

Where in particular am I ? asked the swallow.

Can't you see anything at all ? resumed the magpie pettishly.

I can hear, but not the requisite syllables! retorted the swallow who, like many a human, could swallow only so much.

Must I spell it out for you then ?

If  you can spell sufficiently well, I suppose, tweeted the swallow.

Well you can put it all there, nerve by nerve - I was dissecting a corpse only yesterday.

Yes, they are complex, but I never get involved, said the swallow.

And next to the nerves, a sheaf for protection, what do you have, but capillaries and tissues of muscle and sympathetic elements in the nervous system and unsympathetic bits of dirt which the defence system seeks to get rid of, depending on where they are, and bacteria when they decide to found a colony, which alike is tagged by antibodies and swallowed by any spare macrophages that resort to arms, and digestive stuff twining itself in 26 feet of intestines alone, and gullet leading in, and colon leading out, and ear pieces with their fastidiously constructed bones and nerves and protections, and eye pieces with their romantically precise and encompassing provisions, enough to make the heart rejoice, and then moving up, you see the billions of little cells in the brain, like so many monks in the rooms of a monastery, except that these monks are well organised and disposed and ..

Could, said the swallow with a flying leap at the topic, could I perhaps be excused for asking if there is some point to all of this ?

The body is rounded, rather than pointed, on the whole, said the magpie, and stopped.

Now the swallow was all but astounded by this device. The droning verbal virulence of the magpie had seemed by its natural force, like water falls, to be continuing as long as life, or in the case of falls, water, lasted. Now silence.

Leaving the metaphor, could we have the import.

Certainly, said the magpie, I just wanted to know that you were listening in your mind, and not just in your ears.

Without being  too pressing, then, said the swallow who had collected some 50 insects during this conversation, is there any issuance from these words ?

Put all those bits down, near and far as the case may be, and let it all just BE there. You have death. That was the corpse.

Certainly, said the swallow.

Now make them come ever so close to their original position in life, and not only is the thing not alive, it is not systematically integrated. It is merely geometrically apposite.

There is that difference, said the swallow.

To get into life, said the magpie, you need to have a language commanding action, in the usual form of programs, which emanate from conceptual wizards who know how to symbolise desire into information, and information into direction and direction into integrated commands, with these to relate to originating thought and that to purpose and desire.

It is one language, I hear, said the swallow.

Precisely, said the magpie, always the same, called DNA. Not by any chance did chance ever affect it, since it is as much chance as an English series of lessons on grammar and syntax, semantics and romantics. It is a conceptual coup, wrought where such things have meaning and method, dynamic and doability.

That is an atrocious word, declared the swallow, who had a fine taste for things.

Replace it then with executive force.

Righteo! concurred the swallow.

And it is one language in symbolic system at that - not a lot of nuances and growths in degrees of perception and usage over centuries, such that it takes a brilliant etymologist to see how the dictionary fits together, without even entering into the way the words fit together when they are crafted into sentences, paragraphs and chapters.

You need, then, said the swallow, now well fed for at least 10 minutes, systematiser for system, linguistic articulator for its information components, verbaliser for concepts, issuer for the verbaliser, to control what is to be said, understanding for the issuer, to give the right perspective the correct purpose, and brilliance overall, to set up that integrated, self-perpetuating, control centred, command composed, system incoporating, issuance enabling totality which working like a living thing, then lives.

Of course, said the magpie, it is not at all enough for it to work LIKE a living thing. It must live.

If it were like a living thing, it would be a sort of imitation ? asked the swallow.

Show me anything that is alive, and I will show you what is not, and where is the rest ? asked the magpie.

We concur, said the swallow.

That does not mean we have to stop talking, said the magpie, perhaps a little anxiously.

To get it to live, then, said the swallow, you need to have an impetus of force, a composition of virtue, an essence of energy, with the necessary production units for it, a engineering unit to turn physical into biological energy, and all the components of that particular system, and to have all these systems, whether micro-systems in the cells, or macro-systems in the organs, or circuitous systems like the digestive, blood and nervous ones, integrating as they go, and directing as they integrate, not only ready to live, but actually living.

Imagine then, not as in some jigsaw puzzle, where merely placing the pieces next to each other is the beginning of a resemblance to something already present – a sort of deadly digital approach that is mere picture, but seeing the thing in life. The jigsaw does not live, but is pictorial symbol; but in life, you have all these systems not only spread out in correct and minute juxtaposition, but that these are equipped with all the commands, both for the continuation and the procreative next generation of it all.

But how do you make it live ?

First of course, resumed the swallow, used to high flying with some address, you need none of it to decay or to become decomposed. The cells would need a case, and so would the blood and the nerve cells and so on; and then they would need a set of membranes such as skin and more delicate internal kinds to cover up and secrete this and that so that it would be in a setting of a continuum, not in a provision for decay.

That would be hard, the magpie reflected, but assume it done. It is much more successful to assume things in this field than to do them. Many scientists act on that basis in such matters, but far fewer of them get past the assumption. Nothing is DONE! Life remains, and they remain, and they live; but life, in them, it is not at their command.

That is precisely, said the swallow, why man never creates life, though he will probably cheat a bit and take both information from the information in the DNA and bits and pieces and pretend he has created it when he is merely an able copycat.

But he hasn't even done that yet, has he ? asked the magpie.

Not even that, mused the swallow.

And he has this life, which we were trying to see, come into being, not as a procreation - for that happens continually, being part of the system and its provisions - but as a creation; but he does not do more than activate its resources, like starting a car, already made and rendered operative. He uses the cells to store the knowledge in code form, and his will to desire to do it, and his spirit to comprehend what on earth he thinks he is doing and why, and intellect which is an application of his mind, which is a function of his spirit, which is an imaginative, conceptual, cognising personality of review, capable of world examination, self examination, world extermination, of God praise and Gospel auditing. But normatively, he does not realise his own poverty, because of his enrichment.

That is what you do not call humility, isn’t it ? asked the swallow.

Correct said the magpie, jabbing contentedly at a grub. But even if you place, as in a car, all the parts in close relationship to the car that moves, yet it is not the car.

The swallow flitted and did a sort of around the throne obeisance in daring darts at ground level, and expounded, thus.

In the case of a car, they have to have correct modes of assembly, to fasten them, keep them fast and enable them to overcome shocks and events without incoherence. That is difficult; but given conceptual information and imagination, it can be done, allowing for all the varying kinds of connective materials needed, and circuits required, including computing facilitation, so that you have symbol, depending on significance, depending on conceptualization, depending on understanding, depending on purpose, depending on perspective, depending on aim, ambition and spiritual apprehension - for a spirit needs to know both itself and its maker. That is a human matter, requiring more than biological understanding. It requires activating momentum for ideas to turn them into a moving event.

When however, continued the magpie, who now was sharing in the dissertation as if it were his own, the two minds being functionally wedded at this stage in their joint enterprise, we are talking of life, we are not dealing with the things we can and do envisage, conceive, correlate with the powers of other things created and connect usefully according to the facilities of our talents. Now we move ...

Move precisely, rejoined the swallow returning from a swift trip into nearby space in order to evacuate it of insect-type clutter with profound success, into the realm not understood, where computing, information science, where medical science, physiological know-how, skeletal perception, neurological conception all move as one without any effect at all.

Why is that then ? asked the magpie.

It is because life is a profound thing, a rebuke to mere artifice, a clip over the ears to the pomp of man. It is WHAT HE HAS! He now has to know what he has, and he does not know how to make it, for it involves continually more than he thought, so that what had seemed simple machinery is now neurological masterpiece, information miniaturisation mixed with mysterious vitalisation which joins the functions of matter, bio-science, physiology, computing technology beyond our understanding and yields, in the presence of our spirits in an intimately coherent correlation, the thing called man. He is as much beyond mere setting out of bits, as is the voice of the opera singer beyond the mere movement of waves of sound in captured form on a disc. He is the LIVING one, and the equipment is the enabling processive unit, at his command, but only partly, for it may DIE! and it is vulnerable to misuse, but not very.

We know how it can die ?

Of course, Some of the systems become inoperative by rupture, loss of parts, refusal to continue being at the end of the telomere chain for more duplication of cells,  or by mental disease with the brain deformed, or any of a hundred and endless-seeming proliferations of types of disjunction of what had conjunction, dissolution of what had construction or deferment in what requires to be constantly operative … and so there is failure at last. Thus the entirety, one system over all with a meaning of life spirit utilising it, like a pilot in an aeroplane of which he may most certainly not know all that might be said even by engineers, resolves itself now downwards becoming more and more, parts put together, and life being gone, there it is. It is a death artifice. It does not live.

That is what you were describing at the first, rejoined the swallow.

Death and non-creation have much in common, said the magpie. In each case, ALL is not ENTIRELY in ASSEMBLED, continuously COMMANDED, in organisational conspectus and co-operative mode.

How then do you PUT it there, if you start where death finished, asked the swallow ?

Why, by having ALL of it in a working form that protects its unity, enables its integrality, provides channels for its information to become direction, materials for the directions to become physical facts, and interfaces to allow mind and spirit to utilise the matter, itself duly made into bio-scientific sorts of entities, scheduled into a correlation of systems which are integrable into an operable totality, over which spirit rules.

Man might then make means of life ?

He has the thing set out before him in billions of cases.

But not provide a spirit ? He IS one in his most important functionality. You can make a piano, but to make a pianist is categorically different.

I cannot even make a piano! lamented the magpie, but as for the man, that is for the One whose Spirit is so far beyond the spirit of man that making one is an assimilable feature of His power and perception. Analytically knowing a spirit is something as far beyond man as the sun above ...

A dead bacterium ? asked the swallow.

Far worse than that! warbled the magpie. The trouble with man is this, said the bird, that although as the word of God declares, he is "fearfully and wonderfully made" (Psalm 139), and God created him, yet he insists on making gods of mere muck, inventions of an imagination which cannot even understand life, bowing down to these naturalistic fallacies as if the piano had made the pianist and the elements had constructed the plan for the piano: and then he wonders why God is not pleased, except that he puts it differently. He says, Things are tough! or Why does God not care!

It is rich, isn't it, said the swallow. Criticising God and ignoring His word, man uses the divinely made powers to reject the power that made him, while blasting the same for not being more intimate and helpful.

It isn't wicked as I see it, said the magpie.

What is it then ? queried the swallow.

It is devilish.

In what way ? asked the stunned swallow. Well, let us make an entirely different system. In this one, you have a magnificent creation obviously the product of a marshaller of vast schema and brilliant methods, which NEVER make themselves, using a command language expressive of the thought which language requires for its articulation, and then ?Then man then engages in a dis-assemblage work, to kill - in his mind, mind you - the living relationship, and then puts it into bits, as if unconnected bits of protoplasm were laid side by side in that ludicrous imitation of life which is mere particles in place, and then imagines ways for it to be so placed, and then for it to be systematised in the first place, and then verifies that it cannot in ANY way be made to happen, for matter is not cogitative, and nothing is not capable - while presenting the picture that it arose in stages from what was not there.

In this way, like a Captain of a Ship called Nothing, he sails on the seas that have no liquid, set on an ocean that has no base, and sails off in a wind which has no air, to present a fiction which has no place in rationality, and so teaches his race in schools and colleges, magazines and appeals, in the hope that he may take over from what is the actual Creator, while banishing Him from classrooms and places of learning, except as a disassembled ogre or mantra.

Is there no word more horrible than devilish for this ? asked the swallow.

The devil is a being as you see in the Bible, a desperado, a brilliant dynamic equipped with personality and is indeed a spirit, whose whole objective is to deceive, dispossess God of man and to make him his kingdom, in despite of God, with results so appalling that wickedness their derives its name and horror its autograph. God allows any test, even that of the devil, and the deceive merely apes creation, destroys its spirit, waylays its prizes and fails its tests, and then holds classes guaranteed to produce failure, and calls  them sure ways to success.

Not nice eh ? asked the swallow.

Certainly not beneficial for man.

Yet he complains as he regresses, is hypocritically shocked at 'nature' which does not have the advantage of having mind, and continues to vex truth to the point that you can see how Christ said to many of His own generation: "You are of your father, the devil, and desires of your father you want to do. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him?" (John 8).

That is the real and only place of nothing, isn’t it, asked the swallow ?

Yes, it is he who sets about bringing glory to nothing, and for this he wants to be paid everything.

Man’s wallet is big …

But not big enough! said maggy, who had a kind of affection for the human race, but had been taught to be sensible, and so regarded it in the main, rather like New York skyscrapers. Once built, they decay; rats often infest their bowels; unless a new creation occurs, they become dangerous encumbrances.

Man, said the swallow, needs a new creation, first in his own heart, and then for the world.

He even wants to DO that himself, though his ability with life is by itself, ZERO, said maggy.

II Corinthians 5:17-21 is the medicine he needs, and he needs to swallow it.

Now of course the maggy was not dumb. He realised that this could be tilt of pride on the part of the swallow, but having been instructed well when young, when he used to roll onto his back and put his legs helplessly into the air when the enraged parent was trying to get something into his finely made feathers, he stopped short of declaring this finding. After all, love hopes all things, and there is such a thing as … a sense of humour.

The trouble is, said swallow, reading his thoughts, that if you joke about life, you can turn comedy into tragedy. Man’s thoughts outside the word of God, and contrary to it, are a comedy; but the result ? It is a tragedy. You see it traced out in the Old Testament in Proverbs 1 and in the New in Romans 1.

They have so much.

They use it so badly.

It is time they had their come-uppance.

That would be a pleasant enough prelude to their falling into ruin, when the very world itself being removed so that its components can no more be worshipped, in essence or directly, they all stand before  the Creator and give account of their redemption or lack of it.

Or rather, said the Maggie, find from the records what they have NOT done with it, being omitted from the book of life.

That is what Revelation 20 reveals! Alas for man.

But hurrah for the new man in Christ, for we the creation eagerly wait for him (Romans 8:19-21), said Maggie.

There are two sorts of those, cried Swallow (they get capitals now because they are growing so in knowledge), the bogus and the true as James declares.

And there is ONLY ONE SORT of those who are true, as Paul demonstrates, asserted Maggy, those who receive the gospel of grace by faith, being saved by grace alone, through faith alone in love alone.

Love is never alone! smiled Swallow.

But in God it operates without confusion, dilution or distortion, for God is love, my dear, warbled Maggy.

Just so, smiled Swallow.

What about a game of first eating ? said Swallow.

Maggy had often enough admired Swallows delightfully artistic antics with insects, but accepted anyway as a loving expression of grace.

The things these birds do!