Is Bakker an impostor?

I was going to write this as a goodreads update, but decided to move it here, since it’s relevant to continue “the head on the pole.”

Chapter 4 is rather troubling. Some of it seems disappointing, or dismaying. If the whole cryptic section on the head on the pole was open to suggestive interpretation, this chapter implies the head on the pole is the No-God. At the very least the purpose of the chapter it to lead the reader there. Is it misdirection? I don’t know and I don’t worry about it, because I’m not reading to outsmart Bakker, or anticipate the story and guess it right. I’m only trying to… understand.

The head on the pole being the No-God “flattens” the number of interesting possibilities. It’s kind of plain and not especially surprising or insightful. It is not meaningful. Kellhus has gone mad, he’s now doing what he himself accused his father would have done: side with the No-God and fight the heavens. It doesn’t add to it or solve anything. It only hammers it back to what it was.

But as I was reading, I realized that I was going through similar emotions as Proyas. The interplay goes on so many different layers that I can’t even properly backtrack them again here.

Kellhus/Bakker and Proyas/me as a reader.

Is Kellhus an impostor?
Is Bakker an impostor?

In the same way Proyas is dismayed, but clings desperately to his own faith, he seizes not the present, but the past. He was there. He has seen those days of the holy war. He knows. In the same way, I, as a reader, know what Bakker is writing about. I know what it is and why it’s meaningful. It’s not in the present, but cemented in the past of what I already read before. In the same days of the holy war, but physically as a book.

And yet Serwe burns in Hell.
And yet, for all I’ve done, the world burns.

What is left here?

Sorrow and scrutiny.

There is no recompense… save knowing.

There is a head on a pole behind you.

I decided to take a look across the internet, trying to dodge spoilers. And I glimpsed two important aspects: the first is that this is seen as a rather unique passage in all the books, and that it doesn’t seem like Bakker clarifies it through what’s left for me to read.

This motivated me to write down here what I’m thinking. Through several rereads, across many days, there are layers to my thoughts and so many ideas going in different directions that I have no hope of retrieving from memory and archiving the whole of it. But at least if I write here what I currently have, at least I won’t lose that. I use this blog more for myself than communicating with the outside.

Let’s start from the end: “The living shall not haunt the dead.”

This is something that troubled me because I don’t have much to offer. It felt incongruous with the rest of the scene. But it comes here first because it comes first in the chapter. This is the first line, and it comes attached to a different part, with the men of the Great Ordeal eating Sranc. That line is appended there, so that it then returns to close the section I’m commenting here. But in the case of Sranc, it doesn’t tell me much… These are dead bodies being eaten, echoing what happens inside the section. The living aren’t haunting the dead, maybe the opposite since the sense of the first scene is some men complaining the practice of eating Sranc is changing them from the inside. “The meat.” “What of it?” “My… my soul… It grows more disordered because of it.”

There is more to the meat, but this we’ll see later. The living, here, aren’t haunting the dead, because the dead are dead and the living still living. This “divide” has been a theme in these last few books, and the line is thinning. But at this point there is no crossing over, and if anything those men are complaining something of those Sranc is lingering back, rather. I’m wary of considering the opposite because there are too many implications attached and what I’ve read up to this point isn’t very coherent with the idea going that way.

There is a head on a pole behind you.

While this is probably quite “troubling” for most fist-time Bakker readers, for me it makes instead an anchor. Or maybe it feels like one and I’m being fooled. But the first time I read this passage, for me it was a fixed point. Because I immediately linked it to this blog post.

It is the same concept that is familiar: the darkness that comes before. The head on a pole is yet another “fashioning” of the same concept. So the way I interpret its meaning is: you believe the movement of your thoughts are your own, but there’s something that comes before, here behind, that precedes your thoughts, shapes them and your actions. The key points are that you don’t control what you think you control, and more importantly, you have no perception of it. Same as the practical example in that blog, the “feature” of the head on the pole is to be perpetually just behind you. You cannot turn to see it. You have no direct perception of it.

All of this is reinforced at various points. This inner scene is surrounded by different pieces of the scene between Kellhus and Proyas. Right below the passage Kellhus is described as IMMOVABLE “in the eyes of his Exalt-General.” But he’s also controlling everything. He’s not so much in front of Proyas, but behind him, controlling and shaping each of his thoughts. “Kellhus had ruled Proyas’s heart, became the author of his every belief.”

“Kellhus could have reached out and behind him, manipulated the dark places of his soul.”

This much is quite clear, about the philosophical underpinnings of this “metaphor,” but not quite enough for me to see clearly through it… The following section is a huge problem:

He is here … with you … not so much inside me as speaking with your voice.

“He is”, should exclude this being the God of Gods, this scene is too authoritative to have slips like that. Who’s there? We don’t know. It’s Shakespearean. Who’s there? I am.

“With you.” Yes, it’s the same thing. He’s one with you. You think there’s one where there’s two. Master and manipulated. Kellhus and Proyas, in the example scene. One can be used to decode the other, even if the link may be less direct than this. This scene is not about Proyas, it’s about Kellhus in the Outside.

How does Kellhus reach the Outside? At this point of the book I have no idea. If it’s some kind of trance or meditation, like the Thousandfold Thought, then his consciousness wanders. Also meaning he’s in two places at once. So it started to open possibilities while I read. This, also, could be an anchor for Kellhus. He could either be the head, with the head on the pole behind him. Or he could be the head on the pole. Or, more likely, SEE through the head on the pole, like his anchor point in the Outside. But what to make of all this? I don’t know. It doesn’t coalesces into something usable, just suggestions.

“Not so much inside me as speaking with your voice.” This for me trips all over everything and why it is so confusing. We established there’s a “he.” We then established there’s a “you,” and he’s here with you. But then there’s a third. “Me.” This me, speaks with YOUR voice, and HE’S HERE.

Up to this point we were always playing with a double. Consciousness and preceding darkness. Master and slave. But it splits in three ways and I don’t know what to make of it, beside the fact that all of these three still coincide with the same point. There’s a he who speaks with your voice inside me. But if this voice is inside me, then how can it be other than MY voice? Again, the darkness that precedes. Who’s speaking here in the first place? Kellhus? It sounds incongruous.

But what if instead this is Kellhus talking to himself? It’s still incongruous for the way Kellhus has been shown before, but “you” could simply be self-reference. Your internal monologue that speaks to you as a double. “You’re really an idiot”, saying your internal voice, referring to yourself. Soooo… He’s here with me. Not so much inside me, but speaking with my voice.

I am being controlled. This is my voice, that I hear, but I’m not the one speaking.

We pondered you, says the most crocodilian of the Sons.

“But I have never been here.”

This “surprise” sounds like Kellhus. The further reply, “You said this very thing” is to me so clear that it’s probably misleading and false (more on this, at the very end). I just can’t see alternatives, and alternatives are what’s probably needed to decode the whole thing…

“And what was your reply?” (Kellhus? asks.)

“The living shall not haunt the dead.

And we’re back to the line that caps it all, but that for me means the LEAST. What we know is that this is spoken by one of the “Sons,” likely some kind of lesser gods in this Outside, or something pretending.

What does it mean? You should not be here. Only dead souls crowd the outside, to be eaten by the gods. This is HELL, after all. You should not be here. You are still alive … and there’s a head on a pole behind you. But do the gods know about the head on the pole? This is more likely Kellhus private knowledge. The head is an anchor point to the outside, to peer through? We don’t know.

Other parts here and there are easier to parse, or should be. Again, not because I’m smart, but because I’ve been onboard for a while, and read Bakker explain stuff through his blog. I often can see parallels between the story and the actual philosophy it comes from. So here we go:

“And he sees that these things are meat, here. Love is meat. Hope is meat. Courage. Outrage. Anguish. All these things are meat – seared over fire, sucked clean of grease.”

I immediately recognized this coming from a section of the blog, that I cannot find now. It was too many years ago. I don’t even remember if it was someone else in the comments. But it refers to a video. The concept is still at the foundation of eliminativism a science of human consciousness. There is no magic, it’s all basic science. Therefore the nature of emotions is still inscribed within the “meat.” Using the abstraction that we are just meat. Our brain is meat. Emotions have to be encoded within that same meat, if we accept there isn’t something “more.” The hard problem of consciousness. There are also different versions and I’m not sure the one that we used at the time, but the concept is the same. Even a cursory search through the blog offers some explicit quotes:

They need to understand that thoughts are made of meat. Cognition and communication are biological processes, open to empirical investigation and high dimensional explanations.

But how literally things are encoded here?

You can eat the brain of a wise man, without getting the wiser. Digestion would rather destroy that information, if we want to be literal. Already this is problematic, because this scene is in the Outside. If these are souls, how can they be meat? Maybe the parallel Bakker made isn’t direct at all and I’ve been mislead by prior knowledge, rather than helped?

So let’s stick to what’s written… Which doesn’t help. Because he’s offered that meat, whoever “he” is. The head on the pole cannot be moved (we’ve seen why), but here it appears to be used as a motive for what comes after. “He seizes the lake.” This seems quite an intentional stance, rather than a passive observer. Which is weird. The Sons, who are speaking and doing here, are also seized within the whole. “He rips them around the pole.” No idea what to make of this specifically. It may be as well bound to conceptual things Bakker uses for his ideas of time and place, but I never delved deep into that, and it’s complex stuff that would require time. “He transforms here into here,” and everything on that scene… But doesn’t seem to do anything with it. That phrase ends. He seems to wrap the whole place, but then what?

“You refuse to drip fear like honey – because you have no fear.”

Here the causal chain seems linked to the head on the pole. He has no fear of damnation… Because there is a head on the pole behind him. But let’s stick to the mention of fear, and go back.

Fear is just meat. It is encoded in the meat same as every other emotion or feeling. Fear is just meat… Because there is a head on a pole? More or less. Again, how literally things are encoded? Kellhus cannot be eaten. Because he’s not there. The living should not, can not, haunt the dead. He’s tricking them believing him being there, but he’s not.

But the moment you see things for what they are, the moment you shift the perspective back to the head on the pole, then you exit that personal consciousness. You understand the movement of a person’s soul. You know what is being moved, you know how. Kellhus knows how. He is inhuman in that way, the same as (well, not really) Non-men described later as “False-men”: “This is what made them False, inhuman … The way they made beasts of Men.” The same as Kellhus makes children of all Men. Toys. The bestial being used as “lesser than,” same as the Emwama in that scene.

As Dunyain, Kellhus has mastered fear. Not as simple control of one own’s emotions, but because fear is “explained away.” Once you have an understanding of reality, fear goes away, same as fear becomes just more “meat.” Once you have a fundamental description of reality, once you’re one with the world, you become fearless. Not so much as an act of will, but as an act of… physics. Fear is determined by what comes before. The nature of fear is for being incomplete and abrupt. To have no bridge between before and after. The moment you switch back to the perspective of the head on the pole, fear becomes at best a tool, not an emotion. By eating that meat you also eat fear, but in the sense that fear becomes illusory, same as consciousness is illusory. The appearance of something else.

Again, how literally things are encoded? Kellhus is not there (so he has nothing to fear, the Sons can’t get him), but he’s also fearless as a state of mind. But so is Theliopa:

“The bottomless indifference of her gaze was the only thing that terrified.”

“She gazed at him with piscine relentlessness, her pale blue eyes dead, void of passion. And for the first time he felt it … the menace of her inhuman intellect.”

“She looked like a thing graven, the goddess of some lesser race.”

I like how Bakker writes, because describing those “piscine eyes” he never flatters. The horror always lies in the truth of the mundane. And Bakker is a genius because Kelmomas sees her cunning, IN HER SKIRT (it’s not a pun, it’s like that).

But these considerations are beside the point. Is Theliopa also fearless? Is she… without a soul? That’s what I meant with “how things are encoded.” Because when it come to metaphysics we don’t know all that much, and it may be that achieving a certain impersonal otherness, the way of the Dunyain, may also translate with them being literal meat, without a soul. But there’s nothing indicating anything like this, up to this point, so this is another diversion trying to interpret this passage, leading nowhere.

We pondered you.

“But I’ve never been here.”

What if he had? This was my first idea. On the whole scene and the identity of the head on the pole.

“This was what his father’s Thousandfold Thought had made.”

“A pattern conquering patterns, reproducing on the scales of both insects and heavens; heartbeats and ages. All bound upon him.”

My guess was that the head on the pole is Moengus. But it may as well be a wrong guess. I’m still biased by the fact I don’t feel the end of the third book complete. I still rage at what I can’t come to terms there. And Bakker STILL teases me, right in this chapter. Moengus couldn’t explain why Kellhus had haloed hands. Here, Kellhus still has no idea why, either.

“He raised a hand into the dim air, gazed upon the nimbus of gold shining about them.”

“Such a remarkable thing.”

“So hard to explain.”

This is Kellhus. “Most failed to even notice his evasion.” I read this almost as if this is Bakker, also evading poignant questions, leaving just “odour of profundity.” Make believe. “They assumed they were being misdirected for some divine reason, in accordance to some greater design.”

This here is a dressing down, pretending to have greater answers where there’s none.

But it’s also a missing point. What’s the matter of the haloed hands? Miracle. Moengus was fooled, or maybe pretended to be, in order to enact. Kellhus doesn’t know. He’s being moved by a head on a pole behind him. By his father’s Thousandfold Thought.

He goes to the outside, but he only moved through the path his father already traveled before. Kellhus has never been there, but Moengus had.

“He was as much a creature of the Thought as it was a creature of him. For it whispered as it danced, threading the stacked labyrinths of contingency, filing through the gates of his daylight apprehension, becoming him.”

This is what I currently have. Which is a collection of SOME of the thoughts I had, just the more recent. I either write them down or lose them. As it happens, these moments stay clearer than what they become later on. So better hold on them while they are here…

(for example, I left out considerations about the first quote in the chapter about the game of Abenjukala, map and territory. It still is an example of occlusion. This was actually something I planned to start from, writing this whole thing, and now I can only stare dully at the page, wondering what I meant to write and then forgot… Sigh.)

Deconstructing Atlas Shrugged –
Chapter 5 – patriarchal kingdom

This is a follow up to the first part, a part that was already hijacked from that short story by Greg Egan…

At the time of writing this I’m already back on track reading Bakker, and I don’t intend to stop. Continuing Atlas Shrugged is compelling, but I can’t delay Bakker once again. After that, I plan to do some kind of read along for Erikson’s Forge of Darkness, knowing the author should be back writing the final part of that trilogy (I was about to link the first part here, only to realize I only wrote the beginning unedited and unfinished three years ago…). But who knows. I also have 1Q84 to finish at some point.

I’m 110 pages into Atlas Shrugged. I had read parts of it, years ago, but I usually stalled around 60 pages. This is the first time going a bit further, and it’s a really interesting and stimulating read. I really enjoy it, makes me think. It creates a quite ambiguous and strange mix because of how much “philosophical” distance I have. Meaning that I also want to engage with the text, rather than reading it more passively.

This will focus on the first part of chapter 5, despite I had relevant things to say about the preceding three chapters as well.

Let’s start from the elephant in the room. This initial section of the book is mostly preoccupied of looking back at the past of the characters. Chapter 5 in particular is about the story of Dagny Taggart and her influential childhood friend, Francisco D’Anconias. Francisco comes from a noble, rich family, but he’s an overachiever and an extremely successful person even as a kid, and not directly due to his family. even during his vacations he goes to work, hard, hiding what he’s doing from his father. He’s purely driven by his own ambition, and already at very early age he sees his family more of an obstacle to overcome, than a support. The author makes it very clear that whatever this kid achieves is due solely to his own drive and determination rather than… circumstances. And this is all seen through the eyes of Dagny Taggart, who’s made of the same substance, the same drive in life, and so sees Francisco as both an inspiration and a challenge. As if it’s a game where they try to surpass each other, a symbolic duel that even becomes material at some point.

The problem, the elephant in the room, is the strong, sexist undercurrent… Ayn Rand was a woman, and in the book makes sure to write the example of a strong, successful woman, Dagny Taggart herself. Yet, there’s some kind of idealistic deference to male power, that itself risks to become “objectivist,” something that just is. And that’s again the problem that I commented during the first part: whenever you backtrack the causal chain, you usually end in a place that “just is.” It’s not objective, as part of reality, it’s just convenient fiction, that, as fiction, needs only to be stated to be true. No motivations needed.

Through these pages there’s no sexual tension between Dagny and Francisco, the only tension is purely intellectual. Yet, I turn the pages and there’s something slowly building up. To the point it edges on the creepy.

But when a thin sheet of paper fluttered down to the floor and she bent to pick it up, she was suddenly as intently conscious of that particular moment, of herself and her own movement. She noticed her gray linen skirt, the rolled sleeve of her gray blouse and her naked arm reaching down for the paper. She felt her heart stop causelessly in the kind of gasp one feels in moments of anticipation. She picked up the paper and turned back to her desk.

I mean, times are different, but you really have to try hard to see this passage as some sexual provocation… Yet this is still the effect while reading. What is going on here? What’s that “anticipation” for?

Dagny is working late through the night. Francisco comes in…

“What are you doing up at this hour?” she asked.
“I didn’t feel like sleeping.”
“How did you get here? I didn’t hear your car.”
“I walked.”

And what does he? He sits there, silently, watching her working like the creep he is.

He did not seem to want to talk. He asked a few questions about her job, then kept silent.

He sat in a corner, one leg thrown over the arm of his chair, waiting.

Hours pass, he watches her working, until morning:

She glanced at Francisco: he was looking at her, with the same smile.

Waiting, like a snake fixed on its prey.

When it’s time to get home she moves toward her car, but Francisco blocks her and asks her to walk through the woods. It’s implied she’s exhausted for having worked through the night, but she doesn’t like to sleep and doesn’t feel that exhaustion:

Each night, she drove the five miles from the country house to Rockdale. She came back at dawn, slept a few hours and got up with the rest of the household. She felt no desire to sleep. Undressing for bed in the first rays of the sun, she felt a tense, joyous, causeless impatience to face the day that was starting.

So they walk through the woods.

She noticed suddenly that they had not said a word for a long time.

They came to a clearing.

And.

They stopped and looked at each other. She knew, only when he did it, that she had known he would. He seized her, she felt her lips in his mouth, felt her arms grasping him in violent answer, and knew for the first time how much she had wanted him to do it.

Okay, we’re in romance territory here, more or less, but:

She felt a moment’s rebellion and a hint of fear. He held her, pressing the length of his body against hers with a tense, purposeful insistence, his hand moving over her breasts as if he were learning a proprietor’s intimacy with her body, a shocking intimacy that needed no consent from her, no permission. She tried to pull herself away, but she only leaned back against his arms long enough to see his face and his smile, the smile that told her she had given him permission long ago. She thought that she must escape; instead, it was she who pulled his head down to find his mouth again.

In the end this is a consensual act, the writer explicitly makes it so. But the writing is quite problematic regardless. The problem is in that sexist undercurrent. In the legitimization of that power and influence that Francisco has over Dagny. No matter how “objective” you try to make it, it’s still creepy.

She knew that fear was useless, that he would do what he wished, that the decision was his, that he left nothing possible to her except the thing she wanted most — to submit.

Write that on the cover, will you?

Her strongest, willful character, the one that embodies her philosophy and morals, in the end finds her purpose: to submit to a man.

“Francisco,” she asked him once, in sudden astonishment, “I’m your mistress, am I not?” He laughed. “That’s what you are.” She felt the pride a woman is supposed to experience at being granted the title of wife.

It’s quite an eloquent example of how a patriarchal culture runs deep to the point of being assimilated. This is indistinguishable from identity. There is no “wrong” here because any alternative has been erased. There is no other state of being, there is no other choice. You have to read the whole chapter to understand the full impact of this, because Dagny is no standard woman. She is almost masculine, she hasn’t blended with other women and girls her age. She has no interest in men and the one time she tries she ends up bored and disappointed. She deliberately refuses success and approval.

She was fifteen when it occurred to her for the first time that women did not run railroads and that people might object. To hell with that, she thought — and never worried about it again.

She is driven, by herself, AGAINST the norm. Her track is her own track, and yet she CHUGS DOWN that sexism as the sweetest wine.

To Mrs. Taggart, the greatest surprise was the moment when she saw Dagny standing under the lights, looking at the ballroom. This was not a child, not a girl, but a woman of such confident, dangerous power that Mrs. Taggart stared at her with shocked admiration. In an age of casual, cynical, indifferent routine, among people who held themselves as if they were not flesh, but meat — Dagny’s bearing seemed almost indecent, because this was the way a woman would have faced a ballroom centuries ago, when the act of displaying one’s half-naked body for the admiration of men was an act of daring, when it had meaning, and but one meaning, acknowledged by all as a high adventure. And this — thought Mrs. Taggart, smiling — was the girl she had believed to be devoid of sexual capacity. She felt an immense relief, and a touch of amusement at the thought that a discovery of this kind should make her feel relieved.

This passage, and whole chapter, is incredible not for the banality, but for the exceptionalism of it.

“Why should you care about the others?”

“Because I like to understand things, and there’s something about people that I can’t understand.”

“What?”

“Well, I’ve always been unpopular in school and it didn’t bother me, but now I’ve discovered the reason. It’s an impossible kind of reason. They dislike me, not because I do things badly, but because I do them well. They dislike me because I’ve always had the best grades in the class. I don’t even have to study. I always get A’s. Do you suppose I should try to get D’s for a change and become the most popular girl in school?”

Francisco stopped, looked at her and slapped her face.

How obnoxious you must be to act like that? Sure, he’s written to be righteous and have a point. But to SLAP your friend on the basis of a hint of weakness? How fucking OBNOXIOUS and totalitarian. Can’t tolerate any error. We must be PERFECT through and through. Exhibit even a minimum of humanity, of doubt, of weakness, and get SLAPPED HARD by this paragon of absolute virtue that is Francisco D’Anconias, aged fifteen.

Jim, who’s the literal evil in the book, almost sounds reasonable when pitched against the sheer absurdity of the situation:

“All those airs you put on, pretending that you’re an iron woman with a mind of her own! You’re a spineless dishrag, that’s all you are. It’s disgusting, the way you let that conceited punk order you about. He can twist you around his little finger. You haven’t any pride at all. The way you run when he whistles and wait on him! Why don’t you shine his shoes?”

“Because he hasn’t told me to,” she answered.

Once again, the moment you question Francisco “circumstances”, they always come back… to magic.

No matter what discipline was required of him by his father’s exacting plan for his education, no matter what subject he was ordered to study, Francisco mastered it with effortless amusement. His father adored him, but concealed it carefully.

A master at everything. A man born with an affinity to success. How? Why? These questions simply disintegrate in the face of the “what.”

He had started working at the foundry as furnace boy, when he was sixteen — and now, at twenty, he owned it.

Fiction.

His financial talent was called phenomenal; no one had ever beaten him in any transaction — he added to his incredible fortune with every deal he touched and every step he made, when he took the trouble to make it.

Francisco found it natural that the Taggart children should be chosen as his companions: they were the crown heirs of Taggart Transcontinental, as he was of d’Anconia Copper. “We are the only aristocracy left in the world—the aristocracy of money,” he said to Dagny once, when he was fourteen. “It’s the only real aristocracy, if people understood what it means, which they don’t.”

Natural Born Killers Geniuses.

Since this is all of a political nature already, let’s get POLITICAL, shall we?

The purpose of this post is quite simple, but the irony for me is how banal the counter argument is: in what science the same starting conditions produce different outcomes?

This is very much in topic here. You wonder why I read Bakker now? Ayn Rand is all about backtracking the causal chain until you find the magic of make believe. Bakker is all about backtracking the causal chain until you find truth. The darkness that comes before, that everyone tries to hide or ignore.

If the starting conditions are the same, what is that makes men successful? What darkness was enacted in between?

THE GENIUS! THE CREATIVITY! THE WILL!

(the bullshit we tell ourselves to feel great)

“I like cigarettes, Miss Taggart. I like to think of fire held in a man’s hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come from such hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind — and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression.”

The art.

And naught was known or unknown, and there was no hunger.
All was One in silence, and it was as Death.
Then the Word was spoken, and One became Many.
Doing was struck from the hip of Being.
And the Solitary God said, “Let there be Deceit.
Let there be Desire.”

Kellhus sipped his bowl of anpoi, watching the man.

“So this is how you conceive me?”

“This is how all Zaudunyani conceive you! You are out Prophet!”

Behave like one.

There is a head on a pole behind you.

And he sees that these things are meat, here. Love is meat. Hope is meat. Courage. Outrage. Anguish. All these things are meat – seared over fire, sucked clean of grease.

There is a head on a pole.

Taste, one of the Sons says to him. Drink.

Greg Egan – Axiomatic:
1. The Infinite Assassin

I’m currently in a turbulent reading phase, while I keep delaying Bakker’s last stretch. I started a number of different books, resumed Janny Wurts only to go back and re-read the first 100 pages of book one, slowed down on Michelle West but still going, started again with Gene Wolfe, this list could keep going for a while. Then I went into sci-fi phase, meaning I started looking into stuff, especially what’s considered interesting in the “hard” category. Eventually narrowed it down to:
– Greg Egan, Permutation City
– Peter Watts, Firefall (Blindsight + Echopraxia)
– Alastair Reynolds, Revelation Space

Read some 20-30 pages of each to get an overall feel. Greg Egan convinced me enough that I decided to backpedal to Quarantine and Axiomatic. This last one is a short story collection, so here we are.

But as I said it’s a turbulent phase, and that means my way of coping with recent events has been to once again starting to read Atlas Shrugged. And I really like it. It’s still a fascinating read, the writing has a strong sense of purpose and it matches well the whole philosophical theme. On that front she succeeded, and it makes for a compelling read.

My attention is obviously on the subtle (?) points where the whole thing falls apart, when it comes to meaning and truth. I think she does a good job shaping a believable antithesis. The starting point of view is Eddie Willers, and what defines him is being a neutral point. He observes and perceives some disturbing changes. Something is in motion, but it’s on the outside. He himself represents a sort of stability: he does “whatever is right”, and “he thought it self-evident that one had to do what was right; he had never learned how people could want to do otherwise.” […] “Simple that things should be right, and incomprehensible that they weren’t.”

The antithesis in this chapter is James Taggart. His physical description already establishes a not-so-neutral stance for the writer, but let’s ignore the unsubtle parts. What the writer wants to establish here is a scenario where there’s some problem (a railroad not functioning) and there’s a very obvious path to solve it. James Taggart is elusive, that’s the whole point. He circumvents the solution and makes excuses. “They never seemed to be talking about the same subject.” This is a critical line, because it’s used by Ayn Rand as a fault, and yet it can also turn the whole thing around…

But here comes Dagny Taggart, who represents “the hard, exhilarating pleasure of action.” An obvious counterpoint to James, who’s always indecisive, always stalling, always unfocused. But James makes some good points:
“We ought to help the smaller fellows to develop. Otherwise, we’re just encouraging a monopoly.”
“I don’t see why we should want to help one man instead of a whole nation.” Countered with: “I’m not interested in helping anybody. I want to make money.”
On the matter of using a new alloy that has never been tested: “The consensus of the best metallurgical authorities seems to be highly skeptical.” Countered with: “I studied engineering in college. When I see things, I see them.”

For all the calls for “objectivism” it seems that the whole evidence is founded on lapses. Every time we backtrack the causal chain we find that objectivism in this book is rooted in subjectivity. We have two counterpoints in this chapter, one is Rearden, the maker of this new metal, and another is Ellis Wyatt. Both of them are enshrouded in mystery: “Ellis Wyatt’s father had managed to squeeze an obscure living to the end of his days, out of the dying oil wells.” The oil wells are dying, but: “now it was as if somebody had given a shot of adrenalin to the earth of the mountain.” “He had discovered some way to revive exhausted oil wells and he had proceeded to revive them.”

“Some way.”

I don’t remember if later on these positions are given some substance. I think there’s more detail about the Rearden Steel, so I’ll see when I get to that part. But for now all the “movers” are of a magical nature. And that’s where the philosophy falls apart. Same as it happens with a magical trick: information is withdrawn. The magician catches your attention and focuses where he wants it, while hiding a meaningful move, so that you end up with the experience of an impossible contradiction. But there never was a contradiction, you just missed some data. A piece of the picture was hidden away.

So we’re back, “they never seemed to be talking about the same subject.” Because James Taggart understood (in this re-enaction of thesis and antithesis) that things don’t exist in isolation. The world is connected. When Dagny states that “I want to make money”, despite the blunt, brave intent, is the fact that such an answer begs the question. It never stops there. Money isn’t a thing on itself. The fact that she’s in a position where she can make money, isn’t a thing on itself. There’s always “another subject”, not because of evasiveness, but because of depth. The whole moral and practical stance here is superficial, and it works only because it’s fiction. It’s a book. Therefore what is lapsed is completely absent.

We’ll see where it goes, but for now it aligns fairly well with my belief that capitalism is “fiction.” It’s a moral justification that exists entirely on omissions. On focusing the attention on some aspects while deleting others. It’s a fictional construction because it’s a selective perception and description of the world. It’s an artificial, self-serving reconstruction, that will eventually crash itself against reality. As someone said: “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

The book still has a long way to go. This first chapter simply repeats the same trick of mistaking action for knowledge. But since this is a book, and the writer has complete control on the knowledge within, then action can be made to appear equivalent to knowledge. No questions asked.

But this post is supposed to be about Greg Egan short story :)

In some way, the premise of the other book I started to read, “Permutation City”, is close to the short story here. In both we’re dealing directly with a kind of multiverse. The difference is that in Permutation City it’s built of simulated copies, whereas here it’s an actual multiverse of possibilities that is made concrete by the existence of a drug, “S”:

One thing never changes: when some mutant junkie on S starts shuffling reality, it’s always me they send into the whirlpool to put things right.

Whereas Permutation City is immediately focused on the moral implications and conscious perception, here it’s all brushed away to try chasing the rabbit down the hole, and see what’s on the other side.

18 pages in total, the story is very straightforward even if the context very vague. “The Company” is some kind of institution trying to keep some order, and the occasional appearance of these “whirlpools” caused by dreamers who take that “S” drug, and causing reality to fragment and spiraling out. The assassin has the task to put this chaos to an end, by going right into the eye of the storm. All the movement of the story is about statistics: maximizing chances of success after colliding with a fragmented reality.

The problem for me is that, similar to Ayn Rand, if you will, if you backtrack the causal chain you get to the same magical point:

The human body somehow defends its integrity, and shifts as a whole far more often than it should. The physical basis for this anomaly has yet to be pinned down – but then, the physical basis for the human brain creating the delusion of a unique history, a sense of time, and a sense of identity, from the multifurcating branches and fans of superspace, has also proved to be elusive.”

With one point given away to magic, the other wasn’t successful for me either. It turns around a mathematical concept I’m not familiar with, “a set of measure zero.” It is explained through examples a couple of times within the story, but I haven’t pinpointed an actual meaning to it. This is the problem of math, understanding what IT MEANS is very hard. It seems to be a subtlety about an exceedingly rare event, that when considered within the context of infinitely possibilities becomes true, but only in “a set of measure zero.” Which means nothing to me. I only catalogue it as a discrepancy between abstraction and reality. A set of measure zero in the context of statistical approximation, rather than accuracy.

(My problem is that one side the assassin manipulates events through procedure, on the other side the dreamer counters with infinite computation. But as the ending reveals, there are no winners. I don’t understand the “weighting” of chances within the context of infinity… In theory neither should have tried that hard, because the context would have already explored all alternatives. The self, meant as intentional stance, would have been brushed away. There is no choice when all choices are being enacted at the same time.)

But what did it all mean? I’m not sure I understood. From the very beginning I wasn’t totally on board with the strategy of maximizing success. Because, intuitively, in a world of infinite possibilities, not a single one “matters.” There’s a disconnection between the self and the context, something that is explored really well in the first few pages of Permutation City. Here it all seems to degenerate into a sort of fatalism. We get to observe one of the infinite assassins, within one of the possible worlds. I’m not sure what’s revelatory about the last two pages in the story.

It seems the crisis between the dreamer and The Company is always absolute, in the sense that there’s always a balance. Which is how the story started:

At first, those alter egos who’ve developed the skill are distributed too sparsely to have any effect at all. Later, it seems there’s a kind of paralysis through symmetry; all potential flows are equally possible, including each one’s exact opposite. Everything just cancels out.

Here with a trailer.

I guess it’s a journey, and this is one starting point.

The White-Luck Warrior –
R. Scott Bakker

Wind falls through the lazy treetops, shushing the bestiary that is the world.

“TELL ME … HAS THE WORLD ENDED?”

Done, late, with the fifth book. Only the last one is left, 800 pages long, split in two halves. I only have some scattered thoughts here, nothing truly coherent.

Closing the book, picking up the next. Reading the summary at the beginning is always an important step. It helps consolidating the experience, double up. From reading these summaries I immediately get the staggering scale of it all. Only Tolkien before Bakker was able to give the fictional construction such a scale and depth, and the sense of vertigo when you look down deep. A journey in the sense of an ascension. But whereas Tolkien was just doing his thing, turned inward, Bakker is conscious about it. Not just a well executed backdrop painted in vivid detail, what Bakker does is transfiguring it. Nail it to the canvas. Like Kellhus, Bakker grasped Moenghus-Tolkien’s Thousandfold Thought, and then went beyond. Bakker dared flying close to the sun, and did not get burnt.

After reading half of the summary I flipped casually through the first few pages, since I was done reading for that day, but something caught my attention as I saw a scene between Proyas and Kellhus. They are discussing metaphysics! And so I found myself reading this section, some twenty pages into the book without even reading from the beginning. A tolerable spoiler, I figured. I didn’t want to go too far so I only read a couple of pages. Proyas is being consumed by Kellhus and the interesting part is what he wants from him. But they were discussing the nature of the god. Kellhus depicts an idea of the god that isn’t again far from Kabbalah. A distinction whose nature is opposition. Something other than a man. In Kabbalah it is all about the ambiguity: men are opposite to god because god’s nature is giving, and men’s nature is receiving. And that’s also the nature of pain. But in closing that system the destination is being whole, apparently opposite to Kellhus’ idea here, that is more an alien, otherworldly concept of an uncaring god.

That’s the nail Bakker hammered into Tolkien’s dead skull. This interplay of god and no-god, men and non-men. Non-men being the elves, or even, going deeper, Istari-Ishroi. Gandalf is transfigured into Cleric, Nil’Giccas. But Nil’Giccas is also one of the nonmen, angel-like creatures.

“What did you see?” Nin’sariccas asked with what seemed genuine curiosity. “What did you find?”

“God… broken into a million warring splinters.”

A grim nod. “We worship the spaces between the Gods.”

“Which is why you are damned.”

Another nod, this one strangely brittle. “As False Men.”

The Aspect-Emperor nodded in stoic regret. “As False Men.”

Men and false men, gods and false gods. But what “false” even means in this context. And what even is truth?

“Is it true you have walked the Outside and returned?”

“Yes.”

“And what did you find?”

The idea of a god being fragmented into countless pieces is from the third book, where Kellhus tried to unify everything into one. The true god. This concept is reinforced by the voice of the dragon at the end of the book:

“IS NOT TRUTH INFINITE?”

But it’s Nil-giccas reaction that is quite funny, considering the dramatic scene, and throws it all back to Bilbo, out of a fairy tale:

“He plays you,” the Nonman said, his face white and serene. “There is no separating him from his hoard. He is too wicked, and he has slumbered here too long…”

The Nonman is serene because he now remembers, this scene comes from The Hobbit. It comes from the past, and now he knows how it will play out. There’s nothing to fear here, the future is known.

“The God is Infinite,” Kellhus said, pausing before the crucial substitution. “Is It not?”

If men are fragments, wedges of reality, then the truth is infinite in practical terms, just as the dragon says.

A hissing pause. “GRASPING,” the dead beast said, shadowy and mountainous. “MEN ARE FOREVER GRASPING.”

“I search for a map,” the old Wizard said.

Achamian comes to bargain, to obtain his trinket from the dragon’s hoard.

“A bargain then!” he cried in sudden inspiration. “I would strike a bargain with you!”

“WHAT COULD YOU HAVE THAT I MIGHT DESIRE, MORTAL?”

“Truth… Truth is all I have.”

Is not truth infinite? Not quite in general terms… The pertinent trait of truth is being complete. One piece of truth, in itself, is true but incomplete. As long it doesn’t overlap in misrepresentation, as long it is adjacent. As long it’s not contradiction. A piece of the world, a piece of reality. A piece of truth is all Achamian has. But men are forever grasping. Achamian wants more pieces, he wants the whole truth. Or the truth made (w)hole.

“Think, Proyas. Men will so they can become one with the Future. Men want so they can become one with the World. Men love so they can become one with the Other…” A fractional pause. “Men are forever famished, Proyas, famished for what they are not…“

And isn’t the Thousandfold Thought an act of a man, forever grasping to make the future, Muad’dib. Hasn’t Kellhus stepped into the Outside to become whole with the god, and return? Kellhus’ journey, ever drifting closer to truth, growing even more inhuman.

But despite all the goading, I still don’t know where this all leads. I don’t even know the proper position of the inner pieces. When reading the scene between Kellhus and the Nonmen, quoted here above, I thought it was ironic that worshiping “the space between the gods” seems equivalent to worshiping a no-god. The actual distinction between what is and isn’t a god. Spaces of not-god. I’m still completely lost in the easy parts. Men are made of populations that migrated from the east, that thrived as the Nonmen dwindled for their own causes. What is false and true about this? Why would the Nonmen self describe as false men? Nonmen were distinct from men merely because they were native of the region. Would Native Americans define themselves as “false men”? Why?

I would understand it as a negation, worshiping the spaces between the gods would be like worshiping freedom from the gods, like the last epigraph says:

We only have as much freedom as we have slack in our chains. Only those who dare nothing are truly free.
—SUÖRTAGAL, EPIMEDITATIONS

But again this would put Nonmen very close to the Inchoroi:

a race who had come to seal the World against the Heavens and so save the obscenities they called their souls.

Wouldn’t their goals be one?

It’s curious that the further the series proceeds, the more it drifts closer to Malazan in its deeper meaning. The “fantasy” of fetching the world toward reality. The end of magic. “Deliver us from evil”. Which is again fully going back to Tolkien and the story of a world gone. The few remaining elves that sail westward, as the closure of an age, and leaving a new world. Even if it is quite probable that Bakker won’t be satisfied by a forlorn, nostalgic goodbye.

What about the rest of the book? The first part is very much the continuation of The Judging Eye. The quality of writing stays excellent, the sharpness of vision is unrelenting. That’s evidently what Bakker sets off to do, and delivered. He wanted to blend themes from the first trilogy directly into the characters, and find meaning through both introspection and action. On the other hand the philosophy stays back once again. This story demanded time, Bakker delivered it masterfully. It’s still not my own main focus as a reader. It’s still, for the most part, a distraction. Then chapter 7 & 8, right in the center of the book, produce a major shift. Once again Bakker soars above and seizes similar heights of the first trilogy. It feels like it’s a pivotal moment in the book, that everything is about to change… But it doesn’t happen. The story eases back in its previous shape, and from that point until the end it feels like an aftermath. While this may sound as a disappointment from me, it’s very much deliberate. Bakker wanted to tell this story, in this precise way. Taking its time, without rushing, without distractions.

The Slog of Slogs started, more or less, as an interpretation of a standard fantasy quest. Looking for a magical trinket (or a map). As I wrote back then, this is a macguffin because as readers we already know those answers, and we know there’s no revelation there. Through all this book Bakker delivers characters to that end of the story, and fully embraces the intent of interpreting something that came before.

Cleric and the old Wizard, meanwhile, dare enter the ruined maw of the Coffers, where they find Wutteät, the famed Father of Dragons, coiled about a great heap of Far Antique treasure.

Once again, it’s all a game. Bakker uses this part of the story like a parable. He overlaps the classical Toliken with his own reinterpretation. He sounds what came before like a musical instrument. But that’s also where the difference is, because Bakker writes in a way that doesn’t afford that type of nostalgic citation or inspiration. Everything Bakker touches ends up transfigured and transcended, exactly as it happened with the first trilogy and inspiration from holy crusades. When this type of superimposition happens, it’s because Bakker wants to look beyond. And if you are on board, he delivers and does not falter.

That’s the shape of the story, and I ended up accepting it. Achamian and Mimara finally reached Ishual and found it in ruins. We of course didn’t see anything there from the twenty years gap, so who knows what happened. The rest of the journey hasn’t been especially enlightening. Everyone else died, all those other threads started and ended. They retrieved some magical trinkets from the dragon hoard, draped them over their shoulders. But they are described as simple toys. Again, it was all a game.

On the side of Momemn things were somewhat more dramatic, but I don’t think it worked for me the way it was intended. The plot twist at the end was way too predictable, due to a giant Chekhov gun that Bakker left unfired. It was WAY too conspicuous, making its absence very loud. On one hand, Bakker had to write it deliberately so that this “weapon” was authoritative. You have to make the reader believe its power, why it cannot fail. Make it a real threat that can kill a Dûnyain. But it’s a too simple trick to make it disappear from the page just after it’s been primed, and then distract the reader through the plot, hoping that the intervening chaos is just enough to hide effectively that weapon until the moment of its return. I was just there turning pages and wondering when it would come back on the scene. And since it only comes at the very end, it certainly wasn’t a surprise. But the interesting part is the consequences of that event, and that’s for the following book to tell.

I am somewhat confused, because it seems like Kellhus must have glimpsed some of those events. He seems surprised when we get a short scene from his point of view, the story is built in a way (and then reinforced by Maithanet) that seems to make evident that Kellhus already anticipated the important events. Yet it seems weird that this was the result of his Thousandfold Thought, that this was the shortest path. Somewhat too convoluted and quite unoptimized… Wasn’t there a better way? It’s more or less the same Esmenet wonders.

Reading the summary in the following book cements the idea of how much the events end up being shaped by Kelmomas, but in the book we get his point of view, and he’s completely clueless, far from the mastermind he appears to be. In the end he’s only successful because Maithanet and Inrilatas trip on each other. Kelmomas is a survivor of chance, more than a director. Again, how much of this did Kellhus glimpse? How could he see the chaos of Kelmomas as an useful threat?

The scene in chapter 8 between Maithanet and Inrilatas becomes the center of the whole book. I’ve read it a few times, and can go back and read it more. There’s so much that is implied and slips away. Both Maithanet and Inrilatas speak following their own inner threads, rather then to each other. They move in a coordinated, parallel way, but it’s not quite a dialogue. On the side, Kelmomas is only able to watch in shock.

And again, Bakker teases me.

Inrilatas seized the opportunity. “You think Mother has blunted Father’s pursuit of the Shortest Path time and again, that he walks in arcs to appease her heart, when he should cleave to the ruthless lines of the Thousandfold Thought.”

“Who has told you these things?” his uncle demanded.

Inrilatas ignored the distraction. “You think Father risks the very world for his Empress’s sake — for the absurdity of love!”

“Was it her? Did she tell you about the Thousandfold Thought?”

The two speak in parallel, they follow their own trajectory. Maithanet is concerned by something, that is never quite explained. Why is he so worried by the mention of the Thousandfold Thought? Shouldn’t it all be common knowledge at this point? It’s basically a different label for the plan that everyone believes Kellhus has. Belief in him, belief in the plan.

That’s even a main theme of the book, working quite well in the way it is explored through the book: is tyranny necessary?

If men are too stupid, and there’s an existential threat, is maybe tyranny the only possible solution? It’s an actual, tangible question that within the context of the book and its events is completely cleaned of rhetoric. It’s not an excuse to seize power, it’s the same conclusion Sorweel arrives to. From Chapter 7, onward, the function is to show how real is that threat. The neverending flood of Sranc, and the despair it leaves. What’s the answer to this? It’s the same dilemma Achamain has. In the end the truth of it vanishes in the presence of the practical. Yes, Kellhus is a fraud, but who cares? Hasn’t he used his power precisely to save the humanity that is left? Was there a better way? Is truth the price of complete annihilation?

“What if he were simply a man pretending to be more—a prophet, or even as you say, a god—simply to manipulate you and countless others?”

“But why would he do such a thing?” the girl cried, seeming at once thrilled, confused, and appalled.

“To save your life.”

Of course with these types of stories the problem is always in the labyrinth, the Thousandfold Thought: what about the other options? You have to trust Kellhus, and Bakker, saying that there was no other, better way.

That scene between Maithanet and Inrilatas roughly coincided with the moment everyone on the internet started talking about the second Dune movie. I haven’t seen the first, and have zero interest watching either of them. But I did start reading Dune Messiah in parallel, and it become an effective tool to interpret what I was reading here. I really liked Dune Messiah, but it is a book of two sides. The plot itself is a complete failure. Everything ends up being resolved through artificial intervention, it’s simply poorly thought. But Herbert made a great job developing the themes and deeper meanings. He got the metaphysics right, compared to similar attempts that instead failed spectacularly, as I said before, from Alan Moore with Watchmen, to Arrival, Dark, Tenet. They all embrace contradiction blissfully, thinking themselves smart. Herbert instead sidesteps the whole problem. He simply embeds the uncertainty within the prophetic visions of the future, merely because he adds the possibility of hidden actors. There is more than one prophet, therefore no prophecy is ever complete. Therefore uncertainty can’t be squeezed away. But it’s all wonderful because Paul knows from the very first pages there’s a conspiracy against him, and he knows the conspirators are right in front of him. And the conspirators know he knows.

The more I peeled those layers in Dune Messiah, the more I recognized echoes within this book. Hayt is Sorweel. A known weapon that is kept close (even if then sent away, in the context of this book). The path of Paul is very similar to the path of Kellhus. Both end up being quite lonely at the end, and both become inhuman. The moment Paul vanishes in the desert, it seems like the writing takes a somewhat suggestive, rhetorical bent. He goes out to die, but it looks more like he gets transformed, becoming whole with the desert and the planet. The scene wants to be evocative, but is it really just for a show, to make the ending poetic? The moment he grasps his own Thousandfold Thought he actively merges with the future, and then the past. Maintaining a physical form seems almost superfluous at that point. He “grasped” far beyond himself, in a way where time, past and future, have been merged together. In a way that his present happens simultaneously with his past, his perception overlapping and merging. What function has a body left when you are everywhere, anytime, at once? It’s one of the most poetic and yet strictly logical portrays of death I’ve read. Nothing can ever rob you of the moment. A life is always eternal (well, given the current knowledge we have of realty).

Kellhus aspires to the same, and on that level he has no opponents that meddle against his will. At this point I don’t know, maybe the cult of Yatwer has been crafted to conform the same shape conceived by the Bene Tleilax (I absolutely despise them). The White-Luck Warrior being the hidden knife. And it was already been established that the gods are intervening, but they cannot perceive the No-God. So Bakker is adding actors on the scene just like Herbert did. We’ll see where all this leads.

Throughout this uneven commentary I missed quite a few things I wanted to add. A number of characters, both minor and major find their end precisely when their function ceases. It seemed a bit too neat and convenient. Characterization is always a guiding star, shining through all the book. Again, this is what Bakker wanted to do. It is so well executed and meaningful that you find it in the small things, like Sorweel who has to wait being alone to be able to even think his conspiracy. Not because Serwa would read his face, it is assumed that whatever magical power (supposedly) shielded him from Kellhus would work the same for her, but because he cannot have two contradicting halves, one turned inward and one turned outward. And that’s also why he feels betrayed at the very end. He’s still earnest within himself.

The depiction of the idiosyncratic (as an euphemism) royal family is masterful. They don’t occupy much space but they feel so solid and real to me, so distinct and intriguing. I despise Kelmomas with a passion but I’ve truly loved Inrilatas (sadly…). Theliopa comes right behind. She’s not much of a developed character, but deeply endearing to me. And then Kayutas ad Serwa, distancing Moenghus in my own preference merely because Moenghus isn’t quite as distinct or meaningful.

Anyhow, it’s quite telling that whereas the Dûnyain have bred “for intellect”, in reality we breed our leaders for stupidity. The power is their greed, their greed is their end. There’s no further level. One can only wonder what could have happened if there was someone in control, rather than everyone slave to the same machine. We are quite literally victims of an evolutionary dead end without any escape. For all the grimdark, there’s more hope in Bakker’s Eärwa than there ever was on planet Earth (for human beings, that is).

For me reading Bakker has become something more. That grimdark is sustenance, the only way of looking beyond that pointless pain that is the world, the real world. It has nothing to do with escapism, or even entertainment. It’s all about understanding the world and our silly place in it.

A few remaining, quick considerations:

An Ark “toppled”. I can only ask: who comes on the scene by crashing on the stage? Seems quite a clumsy entrance. This still hasn’t been explained. What were the Inchoroi doing? The dragon at the end adds a few things, but I still can’t make anything out of it: “WATCHING MY MAKERS DESCEND AS LOCUSTS UPON WORLD AFTER WORLD, REDUCING EACH TO ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY-FOUR THOUSAND — AND WAILING TO FIND THEMSELVES STILL DAMNED!” 144.000 of what? Worlds? Why 144? “THE LAND OF OUR REDEMPTION!” …Why? Why this land here? “THE PROMISED WORLD!” By who?

The book, as usual, starts with a citation from a real book, Hegel in this case:

The heavens, the sun, the whole of nature is a corpse. Nature is given over to the spiritual, and indeed to spiritual subjectivity; thus the course of nature is everywhere broken in upon by miracles.

—Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy III

“Nature is given”, by who? This appears to reinforce the religious angle in the book: magical intervention is subjectivity. Not the objective description of the world (science). But the subjective moral compass, the judging eye. So, the seed that introduces subjectivity creates the premise of miraculous intervention. Something other than an objective corpse.

I have no idea where this all leads.

A few pages later, still in the summary, there’s a line referring to Kellhus going beyond the Thousandfold Thought: “And go mad.” Next to it I scribbled a note: (miracle?)

The Judging Eye – R. Scott Bakker

“This is a journey without return.”
“She sneered and laughed. “So is every life.”

This is a weird book.
And I absolutely hate writing “reviews.”
I’d love to start reading the following book without saying a thing, but I also feel this commitment to write what I think… so here we are.
(there will be spoilers)

Before I begin here I went to retrieve that old, placeholder cover that was never actually used, and read a couple of reviews that I also must have read at the time they came out, skipping the plot details to avoid spoiler (or pretend to forget). The suspicion I had while reading the book, and maybe that I remembered from back then, was confirmed:

Another error I think I made in The Prince of Nothing as a whole is that I think I focused too much on interior action – I spent too much time knocking around in my characters’ heads. This is one thing that I tried to rectify in The Judging Eye: there’s still plenty of internal action, but I like to think I’ve done a better job balancing it with external action.

Bakker told me that the Prince of Nothing series was always meant to be the “story behind the story.” Hence, he wanted to make sure that The Aspect-Emperor would work for the fans, but also for those who found the literary aspects of the first trilogy (emphasis on particularity and interiority) too much, as well as for newbies.

But here I’m writing what I think, what I was thinking while reading, and I’m not going to make these other aspects intrude now.

This book is essentially a long prologue. I also think it’s really well written, more so than the preceding trilogy. I don’t mean as a quantification, since those preceding three books were exceptional. But the necessities of that story made the pages somewhat uneven, cumbersome for having to carry so much, and Bakker had some quirky writing habits (death came swirling down) that always had a motivation behind them, but also could push a reader either way. This new beginning feels as if Bakker reorganized and decided to write it on his own terms. As if he’s more in control of the story, rather than serving it. More a narrator than a possessed mouthpiece.

And yet the book suffers for it, in a way. The mad desperate rush, or the slow march toward Shimeh, one and the same, had a specific quality. Despite there are aspects of that story that are mirrored here, it almost feels like a fairy tale. Despite the horror, the dread made real, it seems to completely lack an edge. In this regard, the book reads so much more like a well written, but quite traditional fantasy book. And yet it’s very much “Bakker”, every single line. But also so very different.

The idea you could start reading from this book sounds to me simply ABSURD. It makes no sense. There is so much to this story that it would be simply ridiculous to decide to start from a different point. But as I was reading it, I had this feeling of reading an extended prologue. It’s a 400 pages book, the length of the last one in the previous trilogy. The more I moved through it, the more I realized that the prologue wouldn’t end, and the book wouldn’t begin. And as I was reading through the final, extended section, it simply dawned on me a weird idea: this wasn’t written as a prologue to the following volumes… This is a prologue to the first trilogy.

It doesn’t make ANY sense, and yet it does. Without reading the summaries of the story so far, that in this case have been moved to the back of the book, it seems as everything is set up to refer to that story, but without quite spoiling it, without making it known and plain. The first page, a letter to Kellhus, is enough to set the stage, but from a guarded point of view. That story already blended into legend, and built a distance. The original trilogy played on its two different levels, the ancient times of the First Apocalypse, with the brief direct glimpses through Mandate dreams, and then the present times. With Achamian realizing that things were in motion once again, that legends once again become real, become present. Twenty or so years pass, the world is largely transformed, and so are the characters. There is less of an impending doom, even if the impending doom is obviously closer. There is a sense of relative security and stability. This book becomes, at the same time, the future but also the past. Because that past, blending to legend, becomes something to rediscover and reinterpret. And for all these reflections, it seems all building momentum to lead there. There’s emphasis, a sought knowledge expressed from characters that are new, like Mimara and Sorweel, who understand that their circumstances are the result of what came before. Their stories and movements in the book are introductions to the past. They build an offset of wonder, they build an anticipation for things ahead, that are instead behind.

And it’s all… gone.

This is the apparent contradiction: that the book is so well written, to the point of pure spectacle. Of a writer, much like David Foster Wallace, who seems to say “hey mom, I’m driving this bike with no hands!” Effortless spectacle. And yet, the mission, the mad rush forward, the desperate need that fueled the previous trilogy and made it TRUE, is completely gone. Gone in the sense that it is tucked away. Locked out.

The book begins and sets some premises. They are even quite intriguing, like the false memories about Seswatha. But all it does is simply confirm previous hypothesis. To the point it really makes logical sense only in the perspective of leading toward the previous trilogy. Achamian’s whole journey here, toward an explicit excuse: the library of Sauglish. And to do what there? Figure out the place where Kellhus is coming from, Ishual. Because Achamian believes Kellhus is no god, but just a man who is manipulating everyone around him, for his own ends rather than what he claims. He is a false god, and Achamian’s mission is proving it. First and foremost to himself.

But while this is true for that limited point of view, it’s not true for the reader, to a comical level. You simply need to take the very first book, open it to the map at the end. There it is: Ishual. The map that Achamian still hasn’t reached, has always been there. Everything Achamian seeks to understand about Kellhus, we already know in quite good detail. We’ve even seen authoritative flashbacks of his training. But of course, “we”, the readers of what came before. Not the Judging Eye readers, with a wonder for legendary times. With desire for revelation. To know more, to prove more.

We are already there, waiting for Achamian to catch up. For this prologue to end, and the real story to start.

Since The Thousandfold Thought we’ve known that the boundary between the world and the otherworld, the world and hell, is being eroded. It is reaffirmed at the beginning of The Judging Eye. The end of the book simply reinforces it. Shows it. The book is a prologue because it starts and ends the same. We are none the wiser, because the first trilogy has delivered all these answers.

Whereas all the other “mysteries” still waiting for an answer, and that are still seeded here, like what is Kellhus TRUE purpose, what does it mean to seal the world from the outside. Or the very big deal: why Achamian believes Kellhus a fraud, when we’re getting more and more proofs that things are quite weird (the haloes of his hands, in previous books, that Moenghus also couldn’t explain, or Mimara otherworldly powers here, or all about Yatwer… all being intrusions into the world order)? None of these get explained, or even advanced. Because of course there’s no answer in the first trilogy about them. And The Judging Eye is its prologue.

Once again, all I’m writing is about what isn’t there, rather than what it is there. I wrote some comments on goodreads while I was reading through the book. The second chapter with the introduction to Achamian and Mimara is a masterpiece. But the prose and characterization maintain a superb quality that soars above the preceding books. I still have no idea why Mimara is written in present tense, while everyone else is done through a typical past tense. It makes Mimara feel like a timetraveler that got slightly dislodged from the fabric of reality. She’s more immediate, she’s the same as what happens to Achamian when he visits the past through his dreams. He feels there, even if he’s not quite there. As a meta-narrative device it would work well. Sorweel and Mimara are receptacles for new readers. They demand immersion and identification (despite a couple of plot points about Mimara will throw any reader as further away as possible, I guess Bakker can’t abstain from making fun of any form of positive feedback). Yet Sorwell doesn’t share that literary trick that affects Mimara…

I won’t say much about the description of PURE EVIL that is the kid, Kelmomas. These are all the things that Bakker does superbly well, and it feels pointless to comment because they are plainly there, on the page. But The Judging Eye is all about the characters and how they are written. It’s all about a display of mastery.

The twenty year gap is tricky to deliver. It the same thing that not only was tricky for GRRM, but that lead to the complete SHIPWRECK of that series. If anything, this book clearly proves who’s the better writer, if there was still any doubt (and all the more sad, since Bakker hasn’t continued writing). But who cares about pointless comparisons. The point is that most of what is great here is due to everything being so perfectly nailed. All the sons and daughters of Kellhus/Esmenet/Serwe, they are all incredible characters. Different from each other, yet leaping from the page and from the mass of everyone else. Some appear very briefly, and still make so much an impact as to forget everything about the story. They become story themselves. They are so deeply intriuguing, deeply characterized in their quirky behaviors. They have all the otherworldly charm that Kellhus has actually lost, becoming simply inhuman in an unrelatable way. Kelmomas is just a pure representation of pure evil egoism, but in the end he’s just a kid blown large: the disconnect that is plainly stated at the beginning of the prologue: “When a man posseses the innocence of a child, we call him fool. When a child possesses the cunning of a man, we call him an abomination.” But how not be charmed by neurotic Theliopa, or even Kayutas and Moenghus. Or the folly of Inrilatas, what has he seen? He has found revelation without leaving his room.

All of this, the context of the world after a twenty year gap, the superb characterization, the quality of the prose, they all make this book a masterpiece. And yet it is a masterpiece of a prologue… to the first trilogy.

Where has the bone and marrow of the story gone?

The implications that move everything, that drove those preceding books. They are locked away. It’s not even missing in the sense of a lack, it’s simply not there.

The only aspect that I’m doubtful about is the whole cult of Yatwer side-plot. From Psatma Nannaferi, to where it intersects with Sorweel and then the literal Judging Eye of Mimara. It feels like an intrusion in the story that doesn’t quite fit. It hinges on those parts of the metaphysics that still don’t make a lot of sense. They are intrusion from the outside, but for that reason they clash with the “science” of Kellhus. They are obviously deliberate elements of the story, but still fail to win me over. And all this within the minimal page count they occupy here.

I have no idea what The White-Luck Warrior will be. Will it be a sequel to this prologue? A sequel to the original trilogy? Something else entirely? I still have the feeling that Bakker is moving away from the original story, rather than toward it. I suppose some of this is the result of a sort of “rebound” effect. A reaction to the reaction. Bakker isn’t so much writing his story, as he was doing up to this point, but reacting to the moment that story was delivered and made public. But we’re dealing with “art” here, and it means that feedback doesn’t necessarily have a positive effect. Bakker was seeking approval, this book seems to read like a statement that says (and proves): I deserve it.

For all its exceptional execution, it doesn’t grasp what is there behind the curtain. And it doesn’t match what the preceding trilogy is. This book is mostly spectacle.

(How to write a negative review that is just a list of praises, I guess. But that’s how I feel, and how I felt reading this book.)

Further notes:
there are a number of aspects I intended to elaborate on, but I don’t feel like wrestling with what I already wrote to fit everything in. So I’ll only mention that the whole ordeal in those last 100 pages, obvious reference to Minas Tirith, despite all the dread and incredible execution, still felt a somewhat comforting place. We know Mimara can’t die there, we know Achamian can’t die. We know the captain and probably even Cleric are unlikely to die like that. Despite only an handful come out alive, Bakker knows too and makes fun of: “Of those the Bitten had called the Herd, all three survivors were Galeoth – Conger, Wonard, and Hameron – men Achamian had not known until the arduous climb up the Screw.” … A way of saying “redshirts.” Again, despite the so well described and evoked dread, we see only in small scale what we’ve already seen in the large: the nonman king speaks through unconscious Achamian and Pokwas, but it’s nothing compared to world-encompassing sranc choruses, in presence of the No-God. Despite all those scenes felt remote, merely implied dreams, and here they are close and immediate instead. But it’s still nothing new. It all lacks an edge. And no, this has nothing to do with Bakker unwilling to kill more important characters here, it wouldn’t have worked anyway. Nothing really happened. Achamian is looking for a map we readers already have, Mimara got a magical trinket, some redshirts were culled, nonmen are melancholic living or unliving ghosts. Nothing really happened here, it was a prologue.

Another thing I want to mention is “Sorweel’s shield.” There’s some Yatwerian magic that makes him somewhat immune, despite this matter isn’t quite clearly set, to Kellhus’ sight. But we know Kellhus’ sight isn’t magic, but just his ability to read the movement of muscle and skin. As I mentioned above, it’s science rather than magic. And Sorweel does indeed betray himself in very obvious ways. Yet he’s not seen.

Page 225: “We walk the Shortest Path, the labyrinth of the Thousandfold Thought.” I’m still somewhat annoyed how these two became one thing, when most of the 2nd book was built on its mystery of being two things. I still have no idea what Bakker (or Moenghus) was doing.

Page 314: “Nonmen can’t see paintings.” What?

Page 283: “Our God… the God, is broken into innumerable places.” Kabbalistic turn again, Adam Kadmon. Every time Bakker gives in to this type of metaphysics, he seems to channel Kabbalah.

One of the two reviews I’ve read said this:
“most notably the biggest weakness in the series remains: that whilst it is imaginative, powerfully-written and at times intense, it is also a somewhat remote and cold work, easy to admire, hard to love.”

It doesn’t sound quite right to me, but I started wondering if actually true or not. I can somewhat relate to it. But what’s then the difference between characters and books I do love, rather than admire? The answer, for me, is that it’s more about the perceived meaning of love than an actual distinction, that this series of books also mocked in a number of occasions…

(as I mentioned at the beginning, I hate writing reviews. I’d read a whole lot more if I didn’t force myself writing down my thoughts. The main reason why this book took longer to read than the previous three is because I decided to write about them (since book 1 and 2 were re-reads). That means I start postponing reading the book, so that I could postpone the moment I needed to write about it… And also started reading all sort of other books. I’m that type of stupid that makes his own cage.)

The Long Way Down –
Craig Schaefer

I drove to the address I hoped was Tony Vance’s house. I didn’t pray, as a rule. If there was a God, we weren’t on speaking terms, and I didn’t think either of us cared what the other had to say. Still, pushing the pedal hard enough to make the engine whine, streetlights strobing across the dirty windshield, I was tempted. Then I remembered God’s track record when it comes to helping out little kids.

“If you don’t like how the universe works, take it up with the architects.”

I definitely enjoy some philosophical blasphemy, but I didn’t expect to find it here.

I picked up this book at some point in 2018, and read it fairly quickly, up to 60 pages from the end. Then I stopped. Why? Because I was burned out writing here for this blog. I ended up in this weird situation where to be able to write something meaningful about a book, then it had to be fresh in my memory. I need to struggle for at least a couple of hours, no distractions. If even more than two days pass between me finishing the book and starting to write, then the task becomes much harder. The solution was trying to align me reading the last 50-60 pages with me having enough time and mental clarity to write about it. As it happens with bad habits, finishing to read a book became more an annoyance than fun. So here we are.

In order to say what this is about I need to explain why I decided to pick this up. It’s a plate-cleansing, guilty-pleasure kind of read, I’m quite sure it’s self-published and printed directly by Amazon, and it’s urban fantasy. That makes it at least atypical when it comes to the stuff I normally read. But it wasn’t quite an exception as it may appear. I saw the author mentioned here and there, and the book is first on a series that seems to hold well, when it comes to readers’ feedback. The last (and only?) book I read similar to this one was “Hounded”, and from what I’ve seen the ending of that series wasn’t that well received. Of course looking at averages on Goodreads isn’t proof of anything, but it gave me an idea that is like drug for my type of mind: a starting point, and the possibility that it could only get better from here.

What I’m reading would be the baseline. Because the real deal, and the one reason why I decided to read this book (twice!) is that there’s… more. This book came out in 2014, but it is part of a larger project that is somewhat structured like Marvel comics in the 90s. There are at least two ongoing series sharing an universe, and even a couple of crossover events. Daniel Faust himself is the protagonist of this book, and his own series. This alone is currently at 10 books, and it’s not done. Each book should be a self contained story, but of course it’s all pinned onto a grander scheme. As you can see from that reading order I linked, 20+ books are already out.

This book by itself is not especially ambitious, and describing its structure in detail is important to understand what it actually is. The book is 366 pages long, but it uses such an oversized font that this would give the wrong idea. All ten books in the series are almost precisely the same length: averaging around 86k. At 400 words on each page, which is a standard I use, it translates to a 215 pages book. Divided into 44 chapters. This makes it a very fast read, turning into an addicting formula because the prose is proactive, terse, smooth. The moment you finish a chapter you already observe yourself starting the next before you even considered stopping. It’s, as the way of saying, hard to put down.

It is also very close to a TV series that I enjoyed watching, up to the third season since with the fourth all main characters got brutally maimed (metaphorically): Lucifer. But the reasons why I like that series are quite weird, so this isn’t telling much. It’s still fairly similar both in tones and execution. It’s set in present time Las Vegas, there are magicians, and a varied underworld of demons and whatnot. Rather than picking a specific flavor of the magical, it seems the setting is a kind of “all-in”, but well realized, despite the limited scope of a small book only paints a very vague cosmology.

The protagonist, Daniel Faust, has some nice swagger that doesn’t get annoying. A bit of a typical anti-hero, with some unconventional takes that make it all less boring and trite, but in the end so much of a very good person that it becomes even too sweet. But it’s fine. There are some companions that don’t do a whole lot, but that help giving it more of a choral atmosphere, and when it happens it adds a lot more. It expands the scope of a personal story, and by the end of the book what started as an homicide investigation with very mild supernatural connotations gets promoted to world-ending catastrophe. Some of it is clumsy, but it gets a pass because the reading is kept always fun and going at a brisk pace.

This was essentially my second read, since I couldn’t remember much and so I started again from the first page. It’s quite funny because with mathematical precision after one or two pages into a chapter I recalled what happened in it, but only that little bit and not more. I was basically spoiling myself chapter by chapter, but it didn’t subtract much from the fun of reading. My vague memories amounted to two different halves that seemed to belong to two separate books, and in the end this isn’t far from the truth, since the story shifts toward the middle point. There is a deliberate tonal shift that feels a bit jarring because up to that point the book stayed within a definite “range”. Since it is a fun, casual read, it has humor and only dips a toe into more serious themes. Then there’s this tonal shift that is even more jarring when it shifts BACK into more laid-back, action-powered scenes. I perceive it as a flaw, but it also contributes to a roller-coaster feel, since so much happens within a low page count.

(Oh, and you probably want to skip reading the back cover summary, since it spoils a good 3/4 of the whole.)

So what is it all about? It comes down to these two points. The first is about the connections. The feel of being part of something more. When I was reading Marvel comics in the 90s, I would enjoy some poorly written, very minor stories just because the shared continuity made the whole so much more than the single parts. Characters were part of a family. When you engage with a larger design it’s always interesting to indulge even in the smallest corners of the canvas. It’s the same reason why the Warhammer 40k books side fascinates me. It’s like an almost endless delve, full of discoveries, all contributing to a larger whole, even if often in a clumsy way. By reading it piece by tiny piece, you slowly realize it. Some of this can already be felt in this first book. Names and figures that aren’t just thrown away, but that wait there to eventually get their spotlight. The fact that the protagonist is the focus of the story, but he’s not alone. That it builds up and becomes more coherent, that throws nets to the future and retrieves links from the past. If this book was purely a stand-alone, it would lose a lot of its efficacy and charm.

The second aspect is the style of the story, that comes alive in a fairly vivid, honest way. The author came out as trans not long ago, so years after I picked up the book. But this book from 2014 is already a bit “queer”. And it does it elegantly without even making it a point. It’s curious that the crossing of silly cultural boundaries here involves crossing species, of course. And it follows it all up with well placed humor. After all, I educated myself about the evils of racism from reading the X-Men. Fantasy is earnestly liberating, especially when it engages with the real. It’s not a contradiction, it’s what fantasy is at its root.

While rummaging through some random Goodreads comments I found this:

Ok Carol I so love the Dresden Files, everything else urban fantasy I read doesn’t even come close. Is this as good as Mr. Butcher’s series?

Better, because women are actually, you know, people and gay people are people, and wizard are just people, and everyone’s just people. Except the demons, and even some of them are people.

The original direction of this review was going to be slightly more scathing, but I instead opted to just promote the better series. :D

You know how sometimes you think about a book that you’ve read and love it more? When I think about Harry Dresden, I like him less and less. I’m still riled about the opening chapters of The Skin Game and the ‘not-that-theres-anything-wrong-with-it’ of Cold Days.