🪐 GOSPEL & UNIVERSE - on agnosticism - Contents: brief & detailed

💕 THE FRACTAL HEART - a romantic sci-fi fantasy - Contents

🇺🇦 CRISIS 22 - on literature & the Ukraine War - Contents

MISC. ✴︎ Short Fiction ✴︎ Poetry ✴︎ College English

About Me ✴︎ Photos: 80s Asia∙Travel & Art

~ by R.Y. Clark, Vancouver, Canada ~

The hooded figure at the top of this page is Giordano Bruno, a 16th century Italian thinker. In 1600 Bruno was taken, naked and silenced, to Campo de’ Fiori, a beautiful square in the centre of Rome. They put his tongue in a wooden vice so that he couldn’t express his unorthodox views — about Jesus, the Trinity, the eucharist, heliocentrism, salvation, infinite space, reincarnation, the nature of stars, and life on faraway planets. Because he voiced his views publicly, the Roman Inquisition burned him alive at the stake.

If I were to pick two symbolic images for this website, they would be a planet as seen from outer space and the hooded figure of Giordano Bruno. Though long dead, Bruno still towers above us, caressed by the dark blue sky.

The three book-length works on this site might all be connected to Bruno’s heretical notions: 🪐 Gospel & Universe explores many of the same unorthodox points Bruno made about religion and astronomy; 💕The Fractal Heart peoples the alien planets that Bruno imagined 400 years ago; and 🇺🇦 Crisis 22 argues against autocratic powers (Rome’s Inquisition then, Moscow’s Kremlin now) that destroy the freedom and the lives of those who refuse to be coerced.

From Wikipedia: “Giordano Bruno was an Italian philosopher, poet, alchemist, astrologer, cosmological theorist, and esotericist. He is known for his cosmological theories, which conceptually extended to include the then-novel Copernican model. He practiced Hermeticism and gave a mystical stance to exploring the universe. He proposed that the stars were distant suns surrounded by their own planets (exoplanets), and he raised the possibility that these planets might foster life of their own, a cosmological position known as cosmic pluralism. He also insisted that the universe is infinite and could have no center.”

“Bruno was tried for heresy by the Roman Inquisition on charges of denial of several core Catholic doctrines, including eternal damnation, the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the virginity of Mary, and transubstantiation. Bruno's pantheism was not taken lightly by the church, nor was his teaching of metempsychosis regarding the reincarnation of the soul. The Inquisition found him guilty, and he was burned at the stake in Rome's Campo de' Fiori in 1600.”