Brad, this is to be read and re-read. Unlike those many readable historians who follow a single thread (Codfish: A History, or The Spice-Trade: From Sumer to Last Thursday), your knowledge is encyclopaedic and your vast 'patch' is The Permanent Things. These two facts put you in a small and rare bunch. We are most fortunate. First minor thought, re: 'Rather than condemn these media outright, Catholics should follow the example of the early Church and the Church Fathers: they should sanctify them.' Buddhists of the Northern (Mahayana) Tradition recall their wizard-saint Padmasambhava wandering from modern-day Swat in Pakistan (circa 800 AD) to the great Buddhist university Nalanda (in now Bihar State, India) and into the High Himalayas to do battle with the ancient monster-gods, fearsome beings dancing on skulls, with far too many arms and fangs for polite company. They remain physically unaltered today, but the wizard-cum-boddhisattva converted them one by one, so now they work to slash and crunch and maim and clobber selfishness and ego.

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Win-win-win for Buddhism, traditionalist hill-people and perhaps the dim-witted and thuggish old daemons who keep on bashing happily but for a nobler cause. Second minor thought: almost by magic, fake myths don’t survive long, methinks.

Homer’s pushing 3,000 years and still a sell-out; Firdausi’s Shahnama a thousand; Christianity at 2,000 wins the Oscar for depth and breadth of impact (but it has an influential Author/Producer); Tolkein will last a few centuries I wager. But a century-and-a-half on, Neitzsche is merely sick-making (thanks for reminding me with that choice quote: what a pathetic sod). Were they not so bloodthirsty and evil, all those goose-stepping, neo-pagan, Wotan-worshipping, cod-runic Nazis would be even more laughable than modern Welsh druids and Southern California New Agers. Indeed one wonders who filmed it better, Leni Riefenstahl or Mel Brooks (guess my choice). While Leni was a superb cinematic propagandist, when she tries to peddle Nazi paganism the result is simply pathetic: audiences moved by her political agitprop still probably rolled their eyes at that. An answer here may be that any mediocre artist can fake myth with nationalism, special effects and a big orchestra, but if he hasn’t got the ingredients right the public won’t bite for long.

We know real myth because it resonates inside, whether Americans watch Kurosawa or Kurosawa watched Westerns. So, back again to The Permanent Things. Another excellent article.

When talking about the Imagination and the likes of Batman and Superman I think you miss a crucial aspect. This passage and quotation is excellent; 'for the ancients, imagination and myth were always tied especially to beauty. “Nothing evokes this remembrance more intensely than beauty; this is a specific characteristic of beauty,” Josef Pieper has written.

“Its power to lead toward a reality beyond the here and now, beyond immediate perception, it cannot be compared to anything in this world.”' The Imagination, true Imagination, was meant to grasp aspects of the world above us, the world of Imagination and of Intellect. In essence(and to put it grossly simplistically) it was supposed to be able to grasp the world of Platonic Ideas, or their equivalent; not in some simplistic allegory to add to our deductive reasoning, but as a more profound realisation, or recollection, of these truths. The important point in this context though is that Imagination and Symbolism are then reflections of these realms and they follow their order and hierarchy. They can then be perverted and even subverted.

I think the constant stories of UFOs and a lot of modern Science fiction have this quality. They take genuine desires and symbols, like the desire to transcend the corporeal and subvert them into tales of far off space travel.

They take genuine humans longings for paradise and pervert them into the desire for technocratic abundance. I would question whether most comic books are not engaged in this kind of perverted or subverted mythology and symbolism. I've been contemplating a return to academia in pursuit of an advanced degree in clinical psychology, and this essay inspires me in that pursuit. Your use of Kirk's comment, 'In this inquiry [into the human condition], there must be joined with the historical discipline certain insights of philosophy and psychology.' Helps clarify why I would want to return to school at my 'advanced' age (about to be 49). As do the lines Batman utters: “I know I am fighting a war I can never completely win,” he admits at the end of one story. 'But there are small victories that encourage me to keep trying.

If I can win back one child, there may be hope for others. If it starts with one person, and then a neighborhood, then perhaps redemption can spread through an entire city, and finally back to me.' A far-ranging and thoughtful piece that I’d like to think about a good deal more. My overall thinking is that almost all these figures need to be handled very carefully, and with a good deal of respect for the potential ambiguities they embody. Wagner seems to have promoted a kind of revivified paganism, for example, but he died a Catholic. He wrote a vile screed entitled Judaism and Music and yet retained a Jewish conductor for the premiere of Parsifal, deeply rooted in Christian thought and tradition, if somewhat heterodox in its particulars.

I actually think there are profound truths buried in the heart of the Ring cycle that Wagner himself may not fully have understood or put there intentionally. That’s the way it is with most artistic products. Perhaps it’s the grace of God at work. Be that as it may — nobody (not even Nietzche, whom I don’t like much either) is a mere one-dimensional blot. Your main point concerning the intrinsic dynamism of myth here is not at all impeded by those ambiguities and complexities.

I have always been of the belief that story — not the mere mechanics of a given telling of a tale, but the intrinsic inner core of character, cause, effect, and memory — is one of the core mysteries of the universe. In a sense our lives are about the stories they constitute.

For me one of the central validations of the gospel is that it is not a mere recitation of principles, however sophisticated and precise, but the unfolding of the narrative of Christ’s sojourn on earth. That in turn has a larger context. At the Easter Vigil in our church we unfold the great salvation history, threading its way from the fall of Adam through Noah and Abraham and Moses down to us. To spin only slightly out from Tolkien’s words, we’re all part of that story, too. It can never be replaced by a mere propositional reduction, in part because we could not find a place for ourselves in such a thing, and also because a rational set of propositions requires consistency, while story can encompass contradiction and tension.

Imperfect beings that we are, we live in that tension: we have conflicting motives and modes of behavior, things we’re proud of and things we’re ashamed of, and probably some things we’ve never fully encompassed ourselves, to figure out what they were. Thanks for some very interesting reading material. I hope to see more.

Damage to the ExxonMobil refinery in Torrance from an explosion is seen from 190th Street. Photo by John Schreiber.

The which was damaged by an explosion last year, was restarted early Tuesday morning. As a safety precaution, ExxonMobil shut down a pollution control device for six hours during the re-start process. That shutdown will result in up to 600 pounds of excess particulate emissions, but South Coast Air Quality Management District officials do not expect it to expose residents to unhealthy levels. “We can confirm the Torrance Refinery completed the six-hour period per the terms of the South Coast Air Quality Management District Hearing Board Order for Abatement,” ExxonMobil spokeswoman Gesuina Paras said in a statement issued shortly after 7 a.m. “We evaluate each phase of the restart sequence and continue to work with the South Coast Air Quality Management District on the stringent conditions outlined in the Order for Abatement,” Paras said. An AQMD hearing board approved the re-start plan, and regulators said they would be keeping a close watch on the operation. “We are taking a number of steps to protect nearby residents when the refinery starts up and resumes operations,” said Wayne Nastri, acting executive officer of the AQMD.

“One of those measures includes deploying an air monitoring network to measure fine particulate levels in the air around the refinery during the startup process.” ExxonMobil executives said the restrictions imposed by the AQMD on the operation would “minimize impact to the community and the environment as we resume full operations.” “Our restart procedures have been thoroughly evaluated by the South Coast AQMD and are consistent with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Refinery Sector Rule and other relevant regulations,” according to the company. “Full operations at the Torrance refinery will help to maintain a dependable, local inventory of California-grade gasoline, a specialized blend that meets the state’s stringent clean-air regulations.” The refinery has been largely out of operation since Feb.

18, 2015, when an explosion caused extensive damage to the facility, injured four people and led to spikes in Southern California gas prices. Under the re-start agreement approved by the AQMD hearing board, ExxonMobil must pay about $5 million in penalties for air pollution violations that resulted from the February 2015 blast. Agency documents indicate the refinery “is not currently in violation of district rules” or its operating permit, but the restart “is expected to result in a violation of district rules and the facility’s existing Title V permit conditions.” The refinery was sold to New Jersey-based oil refining company PBF Energy in September. The $527.5 million deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2016. The 750-acre refinery has a capacity of 155,000 barrels per day.

With the purchase, PBF will increase its total capacity to about 900,000 barrels per day, according to the company. Federal authorities blamed a breakdown in safety procedures for causing the 2015 explosion. According to the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, the trouble began six days before the blast when a problem developed with a piece of equipment known as an expander, forcing the plant’s “fluid catalytic cracking” unit to be shut down. That shutdown led to steam being forced into a reactor, and some was leaking from an open flange that was preventing plant employees from carrying out repair work, the board found. When a supervisor reduced the flow of steam, it caused hydrocarbons to flow into the plant’s electrostatic precipitator, where the hydrocarbons were ignited, causing the explosion. According to the board, plant employees deviated from standard procedures while trying to repair the catalytic cracking unit.

Investigators noted that a similar situation led to a 2012 fire at the Chevron refinery in Richmond. State regulators issued 19 citations against ExxonMobil and proposed penalties totaling $566,600 in response to the explosion.

Cal/OSHA officials said a 2007 safety review found problems with flammable vapor in the plant’s electrostatic precipitator, but no corrective actions were taken. Digital Decor Digital Trio Viewer Manually on this page. Regulators noted that the plant’s fluid catalytic cracker had not been working properly for as long as nine years prior to the blast. —City News Service.