Monthly Archives: February 2014

Mythology of a True Detective

This is going to be a little rambly. I only wanted to pick up a quote from episode 5 of True Detective because it repeats a pattern. One that I’ve been using in many of my posts on “mythology”.

This is a world where nothing is solved.
Someone once told me, “Time is a flat circle.”
Everything we’ve ever done or will do
we’re gonna do over and over and over again…
…and that little boy and that little girl,
they’re gonna be in that room again…
and again…
and again…
forever.

You ever heard of something called
the M-brane theory, detectives?
It’s like in this universe,
we process time linearly forward…
but outside of our spacetime,
from what would be a fourth-dimensional perspective,
time wouldn’t exist,
and from that vantage, could we attain it..
we’d see…
our spacetime would look flattened,
like a single sculpture with matter
in a superposition of every place it ever occupied,
our sentience just cycling through our lives
like carts on a track.
See, everything outside our dimension…
that’s eternity,
eternity looking down on us.
Now, to us,
it’s a sphere,
but to them…
it’s a circle.

In eternity, where there is no time,
nothing can grow.
Nothing can become.
Nothing changes.
So death created time
to grow the things that it would kill…
and you are reborn
but into the same life
that you’ve always been born into.
I mean, how many times have we
had this conversation, detectives?
Well, who knows?
When you can’t remember your lives,
you can’t change your lives,
and that is the terrible and the secret fate of all life.
You’re trapped…
by that nightmare you keep waking up into.

The theme of circularity is less clear, but the rest is again about determinism and the loophole. The second block speaks of the fourth-dimensional perspective, but the important aspect is the shift from one perspective to the other. One, ours, is a perspective from within the sandbox, the other, belonging to a theoretical observer we can as well call “God”, is the perspective from outside the sandbox. Where “the sandbox” means the known universe.

What’s important about this sandbox is that all its laws are contained and the sandbox is sealed. The premise of determinism is that there isn’t any intervention to the inside of this sandbox from the outside. This is also the premise of “science”, or the belief that the laws that rule the world are not mutable (if not when subject to bigger rules).

From that perspective, from the outside, everything is cause and effect. If we toss a coin we might interpret the outcome as “random”, but we also know that the face the coin falls on depends on a great number of factors and laws. Ideally, if we could know every factor we could also then predict the trajectory of the coin, how many times it spun in the air, and so predict the face it would fall on. But since this complexity is already far beyond our reach, we still consider it a practical use of randomness: we just don’t have that kind of control when we toss the coin.

But we can imagine a different perspective if one looks from the outside. In this case it would be like a sequence of numbers, of the kind where you have to guess a few missing ones by looking and figuring out the relationship between the numbers that are there. This is a common game. But with the perspective from the outside the game is different: you know already the rule that generates the sequence of numbers, you are given one number at a random point of the sequence, and your job is instead to deduce all the numbers that come before, and all the numbers that come after. That’s determinism.

Within this context, looking from the outside, the life of someone within this box looks like “trapped”. Why trapped?

“if you can’t remember your lives, you can’t change your lives”

If a choice depends, is influenced, by processes that “come before”, then that choice is always the same if the factors leading to it do not change either. But if you have memories, then these different factors will produce different results. Within a single life, linearly, you can see how experiences influence different choices down the line. That’s a perspective from within the box.

The “loophole” is again theoretically personified as “God”. Or: you need a way to escape the sealed sandbox, a kind of loophole that lets you go “take a glimpse” from the outside, and then returning back in, keeping that knowledge, so that you can use it to “change” what happens within the sandbox.

That’s once again the idea playing in those quotes. If “God” granted us, whenever the timeline reboots and we are reborn, “memories” of our past lives, then it would be as if we would obtain the “breaching of the vessel” that grants us the loophole. Knowledge that passes through God, holding our previous memories, is knowledge that is taken from the sandbox, preserved outside it, and then injected in the box to alter its content: this is intervention from the outside, and so the sandbox isn’t sealed anymore (unless there’s another external observer, whose observed system would be a deterministic “sandbox + observed god”).

Why does this matter?

If it’s all a game of infinite perspective shifts, then we are all alike God, playing with sub-creations (see Tolkien on his mythology).

How many times those detectives had their conversation, indeed? I’ve played it at least twice. And it was repeated as many times that show was seen. Every time it’s the exact same conversation. Because those characters are trapped in a movie, and the movie plays always the same. Those characters can show feelings and everything, but they don’t have memories of the repeating acts. You can see “choice” happen, when you move from one episode to the next, those characters react depending on their past experiences, but if you rewatch the show they aren’t going to retain those memories, and so they can only repeat themselves in the exact same way.

(interesting how the genre of games called “roguelike” offers a good example of loophole and sandbox-violation. The sandbox is the game, the player is the god. The character in the game/sandbox can die permanently, but then his “knowledge”/memories passes to the player, who’s going to learn from those characters’ deaths, and play better)

So if god created the world, and sees it as a deterministic system where we don’t have any freedom, the same happens to us and to our sub-creations. We are small gods with small powers, just repeating the same moves in a smaller scale. I guess.

True Detective

Oh, True Detective, HBO. Singular masterpiece on TV now.

Some pretentiousness and fluff aside, this is serious good writing, excellent use of music, excellent direction, and even more excellent acting, which is rare if taken alone, even more if you expect them to happen all at once. It comes as close as possible to an hour of perfect Television. I’m impressed (I’ve only seen the first three episodes, I’ve heard the fourth is better).

It’s also a fair bit like a TV adaptation of Bakker’s “Disciple of the Dog”. Matthew McConaughey is more than perfect for the role as Detective “Rust”, the most delicious kind of cynicism. Tasting exactly like Rust, who suffers from synesthesia. Bakker’s themes are all there and not /too/ flattened for the broader public either.

This show, contrary to the standard of TV productions, is also run entirely by a single writer and a single director. Eight episodes and the first season is over, but following seasons, if they happen, open up completely new chapters and characters. So this story will come to a close in these eight episodes. It promises and delivers.

To add more genius, the opening shows human interiority as physical landscapes. Human beings as environments. And The King in Yellow was mentioned.

But this post is simply supposed to collect quotes right from the script (or the three episodes I’ve seen).

– People out here, it’s like they don’t even know the outside world exists. Might as well be living on the fucking Moon.

– There’s all kinds of ghettos in the world.

– It’s all one ghetto, man, giant gutter in outer space.

Look. I consider myself a realist, all right, but in philosophical terms, I’m what’s called a pessimist.

– Um, okay. What’s that mean?

– Means I’m bad at parties.

– Heh. Let me tell you. You ain’t great outside of parties either.

– I think human consciousness was a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, this accretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody when, in fact, everybody’s nobody.

– I wouldn’t go around spouting that shit, I was you. People around here don’t think that way.

– I think the honorable thing for species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters, opting out of a raw deal.

– So what’s the point of getting out bed in the morning?

– I tell myself I bear witness, but the real answer is that it’s obviously my programming, and I lack the constitution for suicide.

—
Ah, that’s not this. This has scope. Now, she articulated a person with vision. Vision is meaning. Meaning is historical.

—
Yeah, back then, the visions. Yeah, most of the time, I was convinced that I’d lost it. But there were other times… I thought I was mainlining the secret truth of the universe.

—
– Some folks enjoy community, the common good.

– Yeah? Well, if the common good has got to make up fairy tales, then it’s not good for anybody.

If the only thing keeping a person decent is the expectation of divine reward, then, brother, that person is a piece of shit, and I’d like to get as many of them out in the open as possible.

What’s it say about life, hmm, you got to get together, tell yourself stories that violate every law of the universe just to get through the goddamn day?

Oh, yeah. Been that way since one monkey looked at the sun and told the other monkey, “He said for you to give me your fucking share.”

Transference of fear and self-loathing to an authoritarian vessel. It’s catharsis. He absorbs their dread with his narrative. Because of this, he’s effective in proportion to the amount of certainty he can project.

Certain linguistic anthropologists think that religion is a language virus that rewrites pathways in the brain, dulls critical thinking.

See, we all got what I call a life trap, this gene-deep certainty that things will be different, that you’ll move to another city and meet the people that’ll be the friends for the rest of your life, that you’ll fall in love and be fulfilled. Fucking fulfillment, heh, and closure, whatever the fuck those two– Fucking empty jars to hold this shitstorm, and nothing is ever fulfilled until the very end, and closure– No. No, no. Nothing is ever over.

The ontological fallacy of expecting a light at the end of the tunnel, well, that’s what the preacher sells, same as a shrink. See, the preacher, he encourages your capacity for illusion. Then he tells you it’s a fucking virtue. Always a buck to be had doing that, and it’s such a desperate sense of entitlement, isn’t it? “Surely, this is all for me. Me. Me, me, me. I, I. I’m so fucking important. I’m so fucking important, then, right?” Fuck you.

People. I’ve seen the finale of thousands of lives, man– young, old. Each one is so sure of their realness, that their sensory experience constituted a unique individual with purpose, meaning… so certain that they were more than a biological puppet. Well, the truth wills out, and everybody sees once the strings are cut, all fall down.

Each stilled body so certain that they were more than the sum of their urges, all the useless spinning, tired mind, collision of desire and ignorance.

This– This is what I’m talking about. This is what I mean when I’m talking about time and death and futility. There are broader ideas at work, mainly what is owed between us as a society for our mutual illusions. 14 straight hours of staring at DBs, these are the things you think of. You ever done that? Hmm? You look in their eyes, even in a picture. Doesn’t matter if they’re dead or alive. You can still read them, and you know what you see? They welcomed it, mm-hmm, not at first, but right there in the last instant. It an unmistakable relief, see, because they were afraid and now they saw for the very first time how easy it was to just let go, and they saw– In that last nanosecond, they saw what they were, that you, yourself, this whole big drama, it was never anything but a jerry-rig of presumption and dumb will and you could just let go finally now that you didn’t have to hold on so tight… to realize that all your life– you know, all your love, all your hate, all your memory, all your pain– it was all the same thing. It was all the same dream, a dream that you had inside a locked room, a dream about being a person…

Final Fantasy XIII mythology

Final Fantasy 13 is still widely considered the worst in the whole series, and rightly so to an extent. It’s pretty clunky and bad as a “game”, but I still do believe that its setting and mythology are rather interesting and the better developed compared to all the other games in the series.

The story in the first FF13 is rather convoluted and it is true that for the most part it makes no sense, but there are aspects of it that are either misunderstood or under appreciated. Recently I’m having fun replaying the first System Shock and it’s another of those games with a brilliant structure and flow. You are alone on this space station, waking up after months of coma. The station is desert and overrun by hostile mutants and robots. All the “plot” and sense of direction is delivered through audio logs that you find around. Each audio log has a date, and you can explore a level in a non-linear way. So it’s like collecting random pages of a book, slowly putting them together. These disconnected pieces eventually form a more comprehensible puzzle as these logs are organized and listed by date, so you can rebuild the chronology of what happened and figure out what you are supposed to do next. FF13 has a somewhat similar structure in the sense that the events that lead up to the events at the beginning of the game are slowly rediscovered through the first part of the game. When the game starts the characters don’t know each other, but all of them are quickly brought together. Instead through the flashbacks we see the story from each character’s perspective, but each adding to a bigger picture and leading up to the big convergence that starts the game. While this is less functional than System Shock, it still allows the game to start big, in medias res, and then start to map out the context and everything else. It sets the characters and then attempts to build a sense of place.

This character-level perspective, where for the most part the characters proceed without any real clue of what they are supposed to do, is sustained through the whole game, including the end. What’s interesting for me is that this plot forms like an “inner circle” that is contained within bigger plots, Grand Scheme of Things, that involve the gods of FF13 mythology. Character-level drama is subordinate to the hidden god’s game in the background. One of the plot points that gets criticized the most is how these gods pick and brand human beings to accomplish some tasks. These tasks are obligatory, in the sense that often they have time limits, and if an human doesn’t fulfill his mission then he gets turned into a soulless monster. Yet the “silly” point is that these agents of a god aren’t given a clear mission. They are left basically clueless trying to figure out in the first place *what* they are supposed to do. Secondarily, this is linked to other themes of freedom: whether or not they could free themselves from the will of the god, act of their own free will, or just being puppets. While all this ambiguity is usually seen as just plot that makes no sense, it’s instead ambiguity that preserves real-life themes. The questions that the characters ask themselves in the game are the questions you wonder about outside the game. Ambiguity and uncertainty are what dominate a life. You are left alone giving an answer to your questions, and even if you find one, it’s never conclusive or completely satisfying. The gods in the game structure and condition the life of the characters as a real world does with its imposition. But the gods themselves do not give answer.

At the end of the game the characters face the gods in battle. It’s a deliberate attack on the imposed structure. A rebellion against control, and against the ambiguity that was imposed on them (even if they end up fulfilling exactly the god’s agenda). They somewhat “self-depend”, find strength within themselves and all the typical idealist babble you expect from a game. Find the truth within yourself, dream, hope and whatnot. It all becomes really hard to follow but if you push away all this typical nonsense and get the actual quotes, things become interesting again.

A heaven.
Yet it must fall ere we be saved.
Too frail a shell, and humans should not thrive.
Too stout a shell, and they would not die.
Slaughter and salvation.

The weak theme here is the dualism good/evil. It’s a conflict within the god and it’s not well realized, but the interesting part is before. A “heaven” is the place that the gods have built for human beings. A place for them to live, protected from the hostility of the world outside. This is a “real” theme, in the sense that human beings are in conflict with their environment, and have to conquer and reshape it in order to survive. In this case the gods protect human beings. If this “shell” is too weak then humans die, because they are too exposed to the world outside (in FF this is unsubtly made real by having the world overrun by huge monsters). But if its too strong, then they wouldn’t develop, become stronger. In the ideal evolution of life the hostile world is necessary for life to develop. The struggle and pain are necessary for growth and improvement, to impose the will to move forward, to act. Nature is always cruel, because it simply follows its own cynical rules. In this case the god simply voices the dualism that is implicit in nature, when nature is observed by the human, and so “judged”. The ambiguity in life is simply projected onto a vessel, a god, then given voice through the god’s speech.

After that, the god speaks some more of the relationship between humans and gods (hint: fal’Cie = gods, l’Cie = humans used by a god as agents):

Have you ever paused to consider our reason for making l’Cie of men? We fal’Cie are crafted for a single purpose and granted finite power to that end. With men it is not so. Men dream, aspire, and through indomitable force of will achieve the impossible. Your power is beyond measure. We take l’Cie that we might wield such strength.
Men dream, aspire, and through indomitable force achieve the impossible. Your power is beyond measure.
We take l’Cie that we might wield such strength.
Through you we obtained freedom from our bondage.

So the gods are single-purpose, created to achieve something and nothing else. What’s the theme here? Determinism. The gods don’t have free choice. They are bound to their single mission, they are built as tools, shaped exactly for one purpose, given no more and no less power than what’s required to achieve it. So this is put as if the gods envy the power and freedom of men. And what’s interesting, even if not “canon” with this mythology, is considering all this in the guise of Bakker’s “WHAT DO YOU SEE?”. The gods, in mythology, and in mythology as something created by men, are vessels that give us answers and revelations. But we are the voice of those gods. These gods are mere mirrors. They need our eyes to see, they need our voice to speak. The silliness of a god speaking aloud is the pretense of finding a voice. The god doesn’t know what he’s going to say before the voice is heard, because the god is a receptacle.

Even in that quote we get again more of the idealistic babble. Men through indomitable force achieve the impossible, power beyond measure. But within Final Fantasy mythology, this has a lot more actual substance. Men, contrary to gods, have a “soul”. It’s because they have a soul that they can tap that source of “power beyond measure”. A source that can’t be predicted, that can’t be manipulated by a god. Something that lets men escape, be free. Being able to self-determine. Only men have power beyond measure because only men have a soul, isn’t this what most of us actually believe?

I have written in the past about this simple but powerful scheme to explain the “structure of the world”, and the place human beings have in the Big Picture. I’ve said that the Kabbalistic god is “compatible” with science. Why? Because science assumes the system of the world is completely closed, without any metaphysical interference. It means that rules are discovered, but not invented. And those rules can’t change, unless subject to a bigger system that also needs to be explained. The Kabbalistic god is compatible with this, because after the world is set in motion, that god can’t interfere. So, looking from the “inside” of this world, the god is unreachable, out there. That god doesn’t “matter”. A world without metaphysics, so without any sort of magical or spiritual interference, is the world of science. All this is important because it’s ordered in the scheme of inside/outside. The scientific, deterministic world of science has only one “inside”. This because an interference from the outside breaches the system. It means that spurious elements are infiltrated, added in the system, and so dynamically changing the system itself. It’s meta-physical interference (derailing: I should make a case of changing “Postmodernism” to the more telling “Meta-modernism”).

Now if we consider human beings as having “free will”, and so real choice, we assume that the brain is its own system that is ADDED to the system of the world. Reality becomes: system + human being. Every human being, so, can influence the system, bring CHANGE to it. But this is our first-person perspective. We know instead that from the perspective of the system itself, we aren’t “added”, but we are simply, always have been, and always will be, just more environment of that system. It means that rules of cause and effect don’t stop when they move through us, get manipulated, and then come out differently, but instead they flow, through the world as through of us. We are still cause and effect, our brain is cause and effect, our thoughts are cause and effect. Formulating a more intuitive, “lite” version of Blind Brain Theory, I could say that, like theory of Chaos, we are only able to backtrack so much cause and effect. After a certain threshold we just can’t grasp the exponential growth of dependencies that rule the world. This means that past this threshold all becomes and indistinguishable blob. And since we can only backtrack a very small minority, and only a few steps back, of our own thoughts, it means that we are not “aware” of the true origins of cause and effect. And without an origin, we claim it as ours. “We” decide, we feel, we are. Because we are that threshold past which the world is too complex to use and realize.

Back to the canon of FF13 mythology, the soul in a human being works in the guise of a tunnel, that connects a man to a metaphysical realm of “Chaos”. The source of that power unique to men, is Chaos. The unpredictability. Chaos in this mythology is synonym of free will. It is what escapes manipulation and determinism. Why is it so? Because this tunnel/soul breaches the closed system of the world, it punches holes through it. It connects the world to a metaphysical dimension that holds Chaos. By breaching the system the determinism is defied, because elements from outside the system are brought in, infiltrated through the soul tunnel, and so the metaphysical realm of Chaos interferes with the real world, brings change, achieves the impossible (or: breaks the deterministic equilibrium and predictability, and so, in this case, violates the order as set by the gods, who instead are deterministic, as explained above).

Final Fantasy XIII’s mythology is praiseworthy because it can actually supports, and openly so, this kind of structure. It’s fairly brilliant. The fact that in the game the characters are “terrorists” whose ultimate mission is to subvert the status quo is rather fitting with the idea of “agents of Chaos” that infiltrate the world, which is what actually happens on the mythological layer. That theme becomes plot.

The Dancer From the Dance – John M. Harrison

As she danced she reduced the distinction between heath and sky. The horizon, never convinced of itself, melted. Vera was left crossing and recrossing a space steadily less definable.

This isn’t a review attempt, it is instead an admission of total surrender. I read this post on Harrison’s blog and that’s the perfect thing to catch my curiosity. I’m always for the epic: “this is my last stand, right on the edge of literature”. The idea that this story wouldn’t let go, and haunt its writer is a romantic ideal that has influence on me. So I decided to go read it. In the complete Viriconium paperback I already own this story is only eighteen pages, so it would be quick and I’d get right to the point.

I’ve read already a bit of Viriconium, the first book. I probably made past its middle point, or some sixty page of The Pastel City. I know it isn’t very much representative of what the Viriconium or Harrison’s writing actually is, but I enjoyed and grasped enough the dreamlike quality of setting, story and characters. It certainly has an unique flavor and charm, and it stands apart from everything else. At some point I’ll go back and read all the rest. This story instead, deep into “Viriconium Nights”, the fourth volume made by a collection of short stories, is what I could as well name “unreadable drivel”.

It’s not that I don’t try, but I have to admit failure when it happens. This short story seems to me as if someone took a novel, cut lines and paragraphs all through it, then reassembled them at random, and took every sentence to twist and turn it upside down. But this is not quite. The dreamlike substance that makes Viriconium is present here. This story, and its fictional world, is unstable, as unstable is the fabric of dreams. The instability itself is not perceived, because the fabric of a world defines perception itself. So the sense of wrongness (or weirdness) is perceived by the readers, but the characters go their way without awareness (or sight). Characters, and places, that seem culled from different stories, different worlds. Viriconium, the city, is the improbable intersection where these all meet. An amalgam of different cities, different places. But again it’s even more, because it’s as if the only trace left by all this is only a sort of radiation, a vague imprint. A ghost trace that is reshaped every seconds and receives afterimages from the outside. It’s like an archaeology dig site, a city that was here with its inhabitants, so long ago. Only crumbled walls, pot shards and dust are left. But instead of having the remains of one city, we have countless of them, and from different times.

So this is the structure: different places, different times, coexisting as a backdrop for a story. How would it be living in such a place? The few characters mirror that. As if characters that do not belong together, coming from the most disparate stories. It’s like an earlier movie by Werner Herzog with the actors acting under hypnosis. Characters suddenly standing up and shouting nonsense, then running off in a random direction. The prose, that I know is much praised, has no sense of flow and is actually a deliberate attempt at being clunky, broken, breaking any sense of pacing. Crooked sentences that do not belong to the paragraph they are in. The story is like an assembled puzzle where most pieces aren’t even there, only fragments forced to fit together. It flows and fades in and out, as if only very vaguely leaving behind a trail of coherence. A very weak, and always fading, link with reality.

These regions are full of old cities which differ from Vriko only in the completeness of their deterioration. The traveller in them may be baked to death, or, discovered with his eyelids frozen together, leave behind only a journal which ends in the middle of a sentence.

I guess as an art form it is quite good. It has that link of reality, it has the deliberate creation, it has consistence between style, structure and theme. I kept reading with the fading hope that it would eventually make sense. It obviously didn’t (or maybe it did, an imaginative watchman watching, seeing a story with Viriconium its theater). I can imagine the writer writing this all the while thinking about that. But I couldn’t follow, and in the end this is way more esoteric than Gene Wolfe. I have an intellectual appreciation for the aesthetic, and a respect for the writer and what he attempted. But reading this story was for me quite frustrating and ultimately annoying.