Author Archives: Abalieno

Kurt Vonnegut

I started to get interested in Kurt Vonnegut a couple of weeks ago, and the more I read about his books the more I felt the desire to start reading. My interest is especially focused on the level of meta-fiction, for example on the character Kilgore Trout that ends up appearing in a number of different novels.

I enjoy these kinds of meta levels, but in those cases where they are not a self-serving gimmick, like a thread that ties together all the works of an author. A message embedded in a certain worldview. I perceive an intriguing level of mythology in this, with a curious idea of time. Kurt Vonnegut has been defined humanist, which makes this level of metafiction and metaphysics quite interesting because it’s obviously not the proclamation of a “belief”. It’s instead the search for meaning where there can be none.

(and there are a number of “conceits” that are in common with the stuff I’m reading and writing about in the last months, such as: determinism, free will and time loops. As well as a number of “framing” devices and various playful “meta” structures that I always loved)

Considering where it was better to start reading, and considering that I was going to focus in particular on Kilgore Trout, I noticed a Library of America edition that collected all four of the novels I was interested in the most: “Cat’s Cradle”, “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater”, “Slaughterhouse-Five” and “Breakfast of Champions”. Of these four only the first is not Kilgore-related, but Cat’s Cradle is still the one Vonnegut himself rated the highest, so it’s a collection with all top tier material. This hardcover is not cheap but now that I have it I can say the quality is exceptional. This is what books should be. It has a smaller format than typical hardcover, very good paper, clothbound etc… Just excellent. So if you intend reading Vonnegut go for it.

At the end of the book there are some short stories, notes and other material, but I noticed in particular an introduction to Slaughterhouse-Five that I’ll quote below and that I think represents well that jaded, truthful and unmerciful look that I expect to find in the stories. A kind of disheartened honesty that finds absolutely nothing in self-celebration.

And there’s also this:

“Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder ‘why, why, why?’
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.”

This is a book about something that happened to me a long time ago (1944)-and the book itself is now something else that happened to me a long time ago (1969).

Time marches on-and the key event in this book, which is the fire-bombing of Dresden, is now a fossilized memory, sinking ever deeper into the tar pit of history. If American school children have heard of it at all, they are surely in doubt as to whether it happened in World War One or Two. Nor do I think they should care much.

I, for one, am not avid to keep the memory of the fire-bombing fresh. I would of course be charmed if people continued to read this book for years to come, but not because I think there are important lessons to be learned from the Dresden catastrophe. I myself was in the midst of it, and learned only that people can become so enraged in war that they will burn great cities to the ground, and slay the inhabitants thereof.

That was nothing new.

I write this in October of 1976, and it so happens that only two nights ago I saw a screening of Marcel Ophul’s new documentary on war crimes, “The Memory of Justice,” which included movies, taken from the air, of the Dresden raid-at night. The city appeared to boil, and I was down there somewhere.

I was supposed to appear onstage afterwards, with some other people who had had intimate experiences with Nazi death camps and so on, and to contribute my notions as to the meaning of it all.

Atrocities celebrate meaninglessness, surely. I was mute. I did not mount the stage. I went home.

The Dresden atrocity, tremendously expensive and meticulously planned, was so meaningless, finally, that only one person on the entire planet got any benefit from it. I am that person. I wrote this book, which earned a lot of money for me and made my reputation, such as it is.

One way or another, I got two or three dollars for every person killed. Some business I’m in.

Hopelessly fallible: two sides

Reading “The Wayward Mind” made me think, among other things, that we always deal with past writers/thinkers/whatever in a really close perspective. We always relate these figures to their own times and what was the cultural trend at that time. Instead we always put ourselves on a privileged, external position. Partly this is true because we do come “after” everything that we know. We’re surfing the wave that moves on and on. Riding on the edge. So as long as we’re alive we’re also ahead. Yet we perceive ourselves as objective and unbiased, free of ties and subordination. This must be so obviously a misconception. We know much more than an ancient Greek philosopher, but our condition isn’t significantly different. And we’re also stuck within our own time.

A possible interpretation is that the modern Quantum theories actually drive our beliefs. The post-modernity is the system we’re trapped in, and that system colors our sense of reality and of possibility.

It’s curious that in the context of the purely agnostic (“we lack tools to understand what is really going on”) there are two opposite possibilities that seem quite popular these days. In one you could put Scott Bakker and a certain nihilism: the more we know, the more we realize we’re nothing. We decide nothing. Consciousness is not the center of the world, but the true fabric of the lie we cling to. We’re just trapped in a number of consolatory, vulnerable narratives that get constantly crushed under the heel of reality. The more you know the more you fail, because success is that vulnerable, erratic lie you tell yourself. It can only work as long you’re gullible, and quick on the self-deceit.

Then there’s the opposite belief. That we are world-creating devices. Having the powers of the Creator and shaping realities in ways that can be literal. In Constructivism the definition of “Observer” is: “who creates an universe”. Make some Google searches about “reality creator” and similar permutations and you come out with all sort of crazies, right with the first link you have there. That’s quite an absurd website, even if it can’t compare with Val Valerian’s Matrix. If you enjoy “mythologies” in general like I do, there’s plenty to have even if you don’t dig into Fantasy. People build the most complex and fantastical mythologies in THIS world.

This was also a curious perspective I came to on my own last summer, following some thoughts on the Malazan series. One thought I was toying with is about the “location” of god. God is usually an external agent because this property of being “outside” is required to explain reality. If the world is created, then the creator has to be out of the specific realm of the world. So being external means being authoritative. Pretty much all ideas of gods are about entities that sit outside, looking in. My idea was: what if the gods instead hide inside? Not inside the creation, but inside the dark corners of the soul. This specific perspective is exactly what most of “The Wayward Mind” is based on, so this personal speculation of mine wasn’t entirely shallow and hubris.

But returning to the idea of the “reality creator”, what got my attention was the idea of responsibility. There’s some of this even in Von Foerster’s Constructivism. The “participatory universe”. If there’s no god and reality is “constructed”, then it means that humanity has its destiny in its own hands. There are no moral impositions if not those that men impart on themselves. It’s really up to you, you’re completely free. Morality becomes even MORE important than if there’s a god who’s going to judge you, because everything is at stake, and power at its maximum (it’s like the apex of Stan Lee’s most famous line). The model is even quite neat because it surfaces right from quantum theory (for the dummies) and explains why we’re not so omnipotent. The reality creator hypothesis relies on two big constraints. The first is that the process is not conscious, the obvious one, so what truly comes to happen is influenced by what you truly expect and believe, not directly what you “want”. The other constraint is about the “participatory” aspect. Everyone of us influences reality, so reality is more like an entity that manifests out of a collective mind (a Jungian “collective unconscious”). Some kind of large scale ritual that takes place and “evokes” what we consider our reality. So it’s obvious that our personal omnipotence gets only one “vote” on what is going to happen, like some kind of democratic model of reality.

As I said this fits nicely with the simplified idea of quantum theory we have. We dig down in the fabric of matter and continue to find smaller particles. Then at some point we figure out we can’t even determine their position, so small that it all becomes an abstract, almost metaphysical game of probabilities. The intuitive leap is about the human mind being able to influence these probabilities, being connected with the True Source, the energy that is in everything, the quantum foam, the aether. Which, since I’m now coming from “Bakker’s school”, is THE PROOF of being bullshit. It feels nice thinking up abstract, metaphysical theories that seem to explain so well a number of things, yet this simplistic, intuitive ease is exactly what undermines their validity. These theories “work” merely because they feel gratifying, not because they offer some actual insight. We believe in them because of how they feel, not for what they are. Wherever we see chaos, we imagine a pattern, and then we persuade ourselves that the pattern is “really” there. It’s similar to the “reality creator” principle, but it’s about our own bullshit.

Take these two broad ideas and you see how everything else kind of falls in the middle. They represent the two extremes. From a side human beings and consciousness as marginal entities whose whole existence is a big delusion, and from the other side human beings so central in reality that everything depends on them, they create it. Obviously, most people will tend to believe in what they like better, not in what it is more likely. Which reminds me a legitimate position to have (if the goal is targeting a tactical position to take).

Surprisingly, I found out that these discussions seem quite frequent and popular. For example I found them more than once while visiting that internet cesspit that is 4chan. A true cesspit in the original sense that gave the title to my old blog. A place filled with garbage, sometimes even disgusting, but also with piles of interesting stuff if you’re good at fishing. Some arguments I found were insane and rather messed up, for example the ideas of Tulpa and thoughtform. Especially the way they are pushed to the extreme: if you don’t like your life, what is wrong in deliberate hallucinations? I can actually see this working, but it’s not exactly something I associate with a pleasant experience.

Among one of these discussions I found a number of interesting links that I’ll repost as I found them. I’d link to 4chan, but it’s pointless because of its volatile nature. So here these links for posterity. Dig into them and you can find interesting (and crazy) stuff:

* http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHALAbstract.html
* http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9704009
* http://arxiv.org/abs/0704.0646
* http://swc2.hccs.edu/kindle/theoryofnothing.pdf
* http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0011122
* http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0510188
* http://arxiv.org/abs/0912.5434
* http://www.i-sis.org.uk/organis.php

From time to time, reading this stuff, you notice some baffling echoes. Take this for example:

The current textbook universe started in a big bang and consists of billions of galaxy clusters each containing billions of stars, probably many with a planetary system. But this is just the visible universe. According to inflation models, which are needed to explain the homogeneity of our universe, the “total” universe is vastly larger than the visible part.

The context of this is cosmology, but it echoes directly with a pattern we see in the human brain: what we see and presume to know is only a tiny part. So again the Russian Doll structure. These echoes are just too powerful to be random, but maybe too easy to be solved intuitively. What are they truly saying?

My intuitive theory is the Mise en abyme, what we see outside is a reflection. The cosmology we see is a model of consciousness. “Shaped like itself”. As large as the whole universe (and beyond), as small as the smallest particle (and beyond), spiraling into infinite. From infinite to infinite, endlessly repeating.

“As above, so below.”

What to make of all of this I have absolutely no idea. I know it’s fascinating, and in “The Wayward Mind” there’s also something that describes why it is so fun, and why it has so much in common with “epic fantasy”, and why I like it so much:

“Our imagination loves to be filled with an object or to grasp at anything that is too big for its capacity. We are flung into a pleasing astonishment at such unbounded views, and feel a delightful stillness in the soul at the apprehension of them.”

In picturing vistas which dwarfed human beings, both in age and scale, artists such as Turner reminded their viewers of the power and grandeur of the natural world of which they themselves were a microcosm. Landscapes that are ‘huge, obscure and terrible’, said Edmund Burke, ‘arouse feelings that invigorate and elevate the mind’.

Inhuman Revolution

From what I’m reading in “The Wayward Mind” one of the essential Kabbalistic tenets is, at least, as old as Pythagoras. The essential worldview is all there. But what caught my attention at an intuitive level was the following passage:

Well before Plato’s famous metaphor of the shadows on the cave wall, it was Pythagoras who turned the world, and especially the person, upside down and inside out. That which was visible and tangible was to be disdained, and that which was merely an idea was to be taken as the only true worthwhile reality.

Behind murky, complicated, changeable appearance lurked, if one could only understand it well enough, The divine, pristine, eternal forms that were the only things on which one could truly rely […]

The intuition is about how all these attempts to explain the human soul essentially circle the truth, and the truth can justify and explain all of them. I’m coming to this right from Scott Bakker’s own cynical perspective, so based entirely on the evidence of science and neuroscience.

From the center to the periphery. If consciousness is truly just a marginal event with no concrete hold on “choice” and intent, then, intuitively, this new model revolutionizes what we think about ourselves. Bakker broadly divides the progress of science in three big movements/revolutions: the discovery of the earth orbiting around the sun, the evolutionary theory, and finally the third movement about to happen, the discovery of the peripheral role of consciousness in the brain processes. All three built on top of intuitive assumptions (earth at the center of the universe, man at the center of creation, consciousness at the center of the soul) only to be consequently and forcefully dislodged by science. All three met with a whole lot of resistance, even if at least the first has been completely “surrendered” in modern times.

Yet, the “human” being, as we consider it, IS a thing of consciousness. This is why this isn’t one of the themes one can talk about. This is THE frame. It represents the whole encapsulation of experience. As human beings we live and exist within “culture”. As some philosophers would say, our world is entirely made of language. If it is culture then it is made of language, and if it’s made of language it can be codified. We think, therefore we’re language, because there is no thought without language. We live of symbols and stories. Through which we make sense of life, and self-describe.

Now, it’s this whole level to go into a crisis. It’s the whole of consciousness, and so, of perception. Everything we know that is not consciousness, say the physical feelings and the inanimate world, is still something we know through consciousness. We exist in a realm and look outside its window, but we know of what’s outside of the window because of what arrives to us. So we perceive ourselves as “separate”. That’s why identity and consciousness cease to be almost entirely in a dream. Consciousness is asleep, we surrender the pretence of control, and hope everything will be alright when we wake up again. That the world will be still out there.

So there is this big gap between “us”, the perception of what’s an human being, and what’s truly the human being, the body and all its functions. We’re merely trapped “in there”. If we turn off the light of consciousness then EVERYTHING ceases to be. For you. I mean for you as a conscious being. As that specific, omnipresent feeling you have of being yourself. It is your whole world to be at stake.

I’m talking of perception. I’m now thinking and writing, and, to me, this “feels” happening into consciousness. Whatever sits out, is for me dark. Invisible. If something passes through and “appears”, a good or a bad feeling, then it is surfacing on consciousness. In fact we believe we can go through surgery and bypass the pain, as long our consciousness is “shut down”. A momentary lapse. We can cease to be, we can stop existing, because we are only a small part of ourselves: a consciousness.

Now consider again the quote above. If consciousness is peripheral then it’s true that all we hold dearly is essentially vain and empty. And it is true that the mystery of what’s out there (out of consciousness, so including the parts of us excluded from it), call it “divine, pristine, eternal forms” for the lack of better terms, is what’s actually “real”.

Our journey as a species seems a journey of knowledge, and surrender. More than two thousands years spent to figure out ourselves, as narcissistic constructs. Eventually we’re finding out. Maybe someone can even see a sense of harmony into this, if not something consolatory. We had a beginning and we will have our end. This place, right here, right now, in the whole universe, belongs to me. I’m worth no more and no less. Seems like the message at the end is similar to the one in LOST. “Let go”.

We’re locked in some sort of passive observation. It seems like in the end we’ll have to break the loop we’re caught in. It’s the entire encapsulation that is either there or it is lost. If we’re truly agnostic then we have no claims on the world, and we only have our illusory perception. We can be SURE of being illusions. Transient dreams. Wakeful states of passive observation. And we can be CERTAIN that something out there is “real”, whatever it is. Whatever it is excludes us, is antithetic. So, in order to go there, we’ll have to surrender consciousness itself.

The more you stay radical and scientific, the more you surrender to metaphysics. Science is way too radical to be walled into a story, or by consciousness. The story we make of science is merely one stop, on the way to knowledge. A place where to catch breath, to then move again. All stories, philosophy, all the books written, the scientific progress, the metaphysics and esoteric beliefs, all pivot around a gravity center. The gravity center is the human being and the human soul. We wrote stories so that we could fill the gaps in all we couldn’t know. Within consciousness and language we created a world we could live in, that could bear us.

But consciousness is artificial, it is faked. It’s a trick that served whatever purpose. Our whole history, of events, of thoughts, is just the music that followed us. It’s a glorious story that had a beginning, and will have an end.

Two styles of writing

I often try to pinpoint and understand certain things. One of these is about narrowing down the reasons why George RR Martin is immensely popular, and why his prose and style of writing feel so strong and vivid. I compare writers all the time, but not to decide who’s “better” and coming on top. I compare things because it lets me carve out stuff I’d otherwise miss. Because stacking things together lets me better appreciate in what and how they differ. So I constantly try to do this “gauging” of writing styles, but I lack the proper tools and knowledge to analyze a text, and so have to resort to my own vague, unspecified “feelings”.

In the last few months I’ve deliberately juggled writers to juxtapose the most different styles. Jumping between Abercrombie, Glen Cook, Martin, Erikson, Donaldson, Gene Wolfe. And especially reading twenty pages of Erikson and then immediately moving to read twenty pages from Martin’s “A Clash of Kings” (that I’m reading also because I want to clear the book before the TV show starts), and the opposite, from Martin to Erikson. As I said, since I can’t analyze, I need this so I can understand how it “feels”. Because I believe there’s something quite relevant that I’m missing and so that is hard to describe.

It’s important for me because it’s the opposite of “flattening” writers to a singular measure of quality. The comparisons I do are instead meant to “bring out” the differences so that I can better appreciate them.

What I found out is that moving from Erikson to Martin there is not so much to notice. It makes a kind of uneventful transition. I notice differences, obviously, but it’s not something that draws the attention. But if instead I do the opposite, reading Erikson after I’ve read Martin, the feeling is strong and I can only describe as: dismaying. It’s truly dismaying because this transition modifies the way I read Erikson. Suddenly I perceive something missing in Erikson’s prose that otherwise I wouldn’t notice. A strong feel. A gaping hole. After reading Martin, Erikson’s writing appears as barren and lacking. This is what I observed, but what I believe is important is the fact that all of this comes out only in one direction, but not in the other. From Martin to Erikson.

When trying to describe these feelings I thought that a good example retaining the quality of the comparison is about food. Martin’s way of writing is like a very rich meal. A banquet not unlike those described in the books. Bountiful and seducing. Going to read Erikson (notice that I’ll dramatize a lot to draw out these differences) is like being offered a plate of bones. You crunch noisily bones with your teeth and is not exactly as pleasant and gratifying (fulfilling) as sinking those teeth in juicy meat, grease dripping down your chin. It goes without saying that going from that kind of banquet to a plate of bones is definitely dismaying.

Looking into this I was wondering that the idea is also alike the writers themselves (at least what I see in pictures, since I’ve never met either). Martin himself has this charming, generous and bountiful, benevolent figure. While Erikson is wiry, a more nervous, withdrawn, angled figure. I’d say that if you put them side by side you’d notice Erikson definitely “missing” something (see where I’m going). It seems to me more than a mere coincidence that the way they are reflects so well in their respective writing styles.

It’s an interesting observation because it consequently leads to something else. I believe that Martin writes in a style that is strongly “outward”. It’s what I notice the most in everything, from descriptions to characterization. Martin is colorful and explicit. He’s not “unsubtle”, since the characters have admirable depth, but it’s still a style of characterization that I define as outward. Reaching out, to expression and the reader. Spoken sincerely, but manifest and specific.

Where I’m going with this? I noticed that most of ASOIAF style of plot and intrigue, including character focus, is essentially the same of the gameplay of Crusader Kings 2. These big families seeking to secure powers, betrayal, fratricide, arranged marriages and so on. Thematic greed, selfishness, survival in a cage with wolves. Yet, don’t you notice? There’s a HUGE missing element in this particular recipe: religion. Crusader Kings 2 (as well the historical reality it is inspired to) is all about religion. It makes a significant axis that is curiously missing from ASOIAF. In Martin’s series there’s religion, but it makes a very superficial, immaterial layer holding no weight. Martin doesn’t seem really interested in it.

I’m writing all this because I believe it brings out a certain thing. Read this blog post by Scott Bakker, I think it explains well why my reactions above were one-directional only (from reading Martin to Erikson). Both writers have a style of writing that on its own feels “sufficient”. Maybe Erikson’s style isn’t so warm and welcoming, but whether you like it or not you don’t feel like there’s something that is lacking. It’s sufficient, perfectly walled as meant to be. So is Martin. But if you pose one against the other then differences surface and become visible and significant. You may think that this was a consequent rationalization, but my thought actually went down this path in reverse. I suddenly noticed that the kind of characterization that Erikson was doing was also completely missing from Martin. It’s just not there. You can take out paragraphs of text and, even adjusted or rewritten, they just wouldn’t belong to Martin’s book. They are alien. It’s stuff completely missing.

So the whole deal is figuring out that Martin writes “outwardly”. Because Erikson is blatantly the opposite. He writes inwardly. They go in opposite directions. Realizing this made me discover a number of different aspects. Erikson’s plate of bones is the result of meticulous carving, as a writing research. It’s the result of that inward, personal path. Peeling of layers, like skin, then fat and muscle. I can make an effective comparison with the movie industry. Compare Hollywood, or western in general type of narration, that is “outward”, explicit and loud, very carefully driven to an effect, compare it with the “indie” or eastern style of narration. That is quite often feebler, more intimate, quiet and understated. Easy to blot. Martin’s style has the power of drawing you in regardless of your disposition. Eventually you’re won even if you weren’t fully willing. It’s like a movie that drags you in using competently all its devices. This is what “swallows” the big public, being (the public) so fickle and capricious, heterogeneous, and so hard to capture (and hold down) as a whole. Erikson is the opposite. Either you are “devout” to listen carefully, or it pushes further away if you try to stick to it even if it doesn’t immediately grab you. It’s almost hostile, uncompromising, unforgiving. It’s quite selective, which isn’t exactly a good thing for a book.

In the end it seems coming down to spirituality, which is why I pointed out how religion is absent from ASOIAF. Spirituality is about going inward, is the kind of personal journey. The interpolation of this model underlines many things. You can see outward and inward characterization, you can see how the world and things are described. In Martin’s story there’s always so much the characters have on their hands, that is immediate and tangible, that they never really stop to think. It’s interesting for example that Martin deals with “mystery” either in a classical way (folk tales and similar), or he gets quite clumsy and awkward. He fumbles whenever his characters aren’t earthly guys (and excels when they are). Whenever he steps out of his outward approach, he is less effective. The meal is rich and so you don’t notice if something’s missing, but this is an illusion created by abundance. If you know where to look, you’d notice certain “lacks”.

It’s again so similar to the recent discussions about consciousness. Moonlight versus bright, dominant sun. Midnight tides versus Kings. How the argument is not symmetric, and how the slanted vision makes you see things wrongly. Intuitively they are in that way, but intuition is often wrong. The same was my “feeling” moving between Martin, Erikson and back. Noticing how Martin conquered spaces, of attention, appreciation. Marching on uncontested. In this, similar to a western school of movies that are all projected out toward the public, to reach and draw the public in. Like the Oscars, or the Hugos, ideally meant as external, overreaching institutions of absolute judgement, closing down on everything. But then there’s this very manifest risk that the loud voice will completely overshadow the feebler ones. A problem of domination, of doing things “better”, more effectively. Flattened to a single path. Of seeing rising popularity to obscure everything else.

You have to listen carefully.

Have a mindfuck: Awake

Briefly on TV shows. The last episode of Fringe (4×14) was fine and made the plot move a bit, but it also shot itself in the foot by explaining Observers as a gimmick. I don’t think that mysteries to be effective have to stay unsolved, so it’s not that Observers were overexplained, but it just ended up a dead end not so unlike some explanations in LOST, that also sucked because they lead to nothing. Satisfying mystery “opens up” possibilities and interpretation, explains other stuff and gives it a new spin.

Now there’s a month break for Fringe, but I read about this new TV series, “Awake” (on NBC), that relies on a similar trick: the main protagonist is stuck between two realities and unable to figure out which one is the “dream”. I watched the first episode and it’s GLORIOUS. It plays wonderfully with its possibilities and it’s highly evocative. Way, way better than Fringe or Alcatraz. The latter feeling also like a very shallow gimmick, looking as a bad, plain procedural that moves the mystery plot in the last minute of every episode. It’s like it hits the formula for irritation.

“Awake” starts playing its cards perfectly. It doesn’t indulge in the drama of its premise as I expected, instead has it coming out of the rest. It puts the melodrama aside, and feels more authentic. It is playful with its possibilities, with the two shrinks in the two realities that try to outsmart each other. The show has a metalinguistic level that just tastes delicious, while not overshooting it into parody. The way this first episode struck a balance is already a statement of competency. I really hope the public sticks to it despite its “complexity”, because it deserves going on.

The stakes are put so it can also quickly become a disaster. Many ways that the show can take a wrong turn or lose that balance that make it feel right and plausible, but at least it got my trust solely with the pilot. Hopefully it continues to deliver.

And it’s fitting with the “groove”. I’m reading right now “The Wayward Mind”, that I ordered as soon as Scott Bakker wrote about it. I see in these pages many, many arguments that I dealt with in the past year, many fancy theories and lines of thoughts. Written so clearly so that one sees the “order” in the scheme instead of feeling lost in the myriad of sidetracks. That and Bakker’s own “The Blind Brain Theory of Consciousness” (he sent me the file he was working on) are eye-openers in ways that can’t be dismissed. Dramatic advancements for me. I almost feel like I’m understanding something. Or at least having a lot more tools to work with the problems, instead of staring at them without a clue.

So this show is like a way to relax while soaking in the same semantic level. The two realities becoming possible dreams constructed by the mind and dense with symbolic purposes. Conscious mind versus unconscious, the limits and tricks of perception. Watch this show, it plays well with its themes, manages to keep its consistency, and doesn’t seem to proceed conservatively to artificially continue as a serial with no end in sight (or so I hope).

Why George RR Martin can’t finish his books

I’m not one of those accusing Martin for not being a reader’s bitch and watching football instead of writing, but I do “blame” him for this:

– I am heading up to Toronto in less than two weeks.
– Back home after that, and back at work, but then at month’s end I am off again, this time to the UK
– In between all this, I have, hmmmmm, lemme see, one two three four FIVE projects that I am currently working on

This on top of him taking almost all of the past year off from writing ASoIaF.

Everyone is free of making his own choices, but this speaks loudly about priorities. You just don’t commit to more “projects” if you feel like your big one already takes all you can give and is at serious risk of not being completed.

Martin just isn’t Steven Erikson, or Dan Abnett or Brandon Sanderson, who have demonstrated they can handle and deliver what they commit to. I’m not there to judge what he does and how he does it, nor I’m complaining that he so candidly tells us. The problem is that he seems out of touch with the reality of what he’s doing.

The problem is fitting in your own plans. If you’re aware that finishing a book can take you years you don’t plan a seven book series, or even let slip between the lines that two books won’t be enough to close it. You need to plan realistically around what you can deal with. Ambition requires commitment. If you plan large then you need to commit large as well.

So the issue is not that Martin indulges with distractions or watches football instead of writing all day long. The issue is that his series has not the priority and commitment that it requires in order to be realistically finished.

Recently on the forums there was a discussion about when someone’s talent peaks in writing. There are plenty of exceptions to make a rule, but it’s not unlikely that the older Martin gets the more problems he’ll have dealing with the intricacies and smallest details of his work. The mind can stay sharp, but it’ll likely have problems dealing with the sheer number of small parts involved. It should be in his own interest to stay focused on his work and handle it the best he can while he can do it, but he seems more interested in finding excuses to divert his attention to other things.

Do one thing, and do it well. Do you even TRUST who you’ll be in ten years? Are you sure he’ll do a better job than what you can do now?

Compare to someone giving her best:

Destiny’s Conflict will get finished on schedule.

If I took that long to get a book down, I think I would perish of boredom…the only conceivable delay would not be caused by guilty pleasures, but if financial need reared its ugly head and I had to find a day job. With gas prices and cost of living sending all expenses rocketing up, sales of the books will have to rise to compensate.

Every working author I know is swimming in the same rat race. :)

Well, not Martin’s case, obviously:

me and my assistants and my accountant must find time to prepare my taxes, so I can write the IRS the biggest check that I have written in my life.

For some writers the possibility to commit and focus on one project is a privilege they wish they could have.

“I am a caster of nets”

I should finish reading Midnight Tides next week. It took a while.

“I am a caster of nets.”

“Yet, should the need arise, your tyrant masters could call you into military service.”

“The Kenryll’ah have ruled a long time, Trull Sengar. And have grown weak with complacency. They cannot see their own impending demise. It is always the way of things, such blindness. No matter how long and perfect the succession of fallen empires and civilizations so clearly writ into the past, the belief remains that one’s own shall live for ever, and is not subject to the indomitable rules of dissolution that bind all of nature.” The small, calm eyes of the demon looked down steadily upon Trull. “I am a caster of nets. Tyrants and emperors rise and fall. Civilizations burgeon then die, but there are always casters of nets. And tillers of the soil, and herders in the pastures. We are where civilization begins, and when it ends, we are there to begin it again.”

A curious speech, Trull reflected. The wisdom of peasants was rarely articulated in such clear fashion. Even so, claims to truth were innumerable. “Unless, Lilac, all the casters and tillers and herders are dead.”

“I spoke not of ourselves, Trull, but of our tasks. Kenyll’rah, Edur, Letherii, the selves are not eternal. Only the tasks.”

“Unless everything is dead.”

“Life will return, eventually. It always does. If the water is foul, it will find new water.”