Looping Wor(l)d

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.

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.

“I am the Shield Anvil, and I am not yet done.”

These pieces have been, by far, the hardest and most emotionally difficult ones to do. They require absorbing huge amounts of pain, holding it, staring at it, making sense of it, channeling it. My therapist notes similarities in our work… but only one of us has training. 8/

— Ed Yong is not here (@edyong209) April 15, 2022

(backup)

I’ve followed the original mini, this was the last part.

A follow through is deserved. So what happened to the grand, ambitious X-Men run by Jonathan Hickman?

It ended in a trainwreck.

It’s Hickman himself to explain, earlier this year:

When I pitched the X-Men story I wanted to do, I pitched a very big, very broad, three-act, three-event narrative, the first of which was House of X.
[…] as a three-year plan

I was also pretty clear with all the writers that came into the office what the initial, three-act plan was so no one would be surprised when it was time for the line to pivot.

during the pandemic, when the time came for me to start pointing things toward writing the second-act event, I asked everyone if they were ready for me to do that, and to a man, everyone wanted to stay in the first act.

the reality was that I knew I would be leaving the line early.

So after Inferno, I’ll be leaving to go work on my ‘Next Big Marvel Thing™’

I pruned the rhetorical noise.

The truth of it is that the ambitious project went nowhere. The original 12-issue mini presented a grand plan, followed by its first expansive arc titled Dawn of X, followed this year by Reign of X, and moving now into Destiny of X, I think now lead by Kieron Gillen. (if you, despite everything, still want to read this, I suggest the release order)

The project already went off the rails during the first year, so it’s not surprising that it ended with a trainwreck. Dawn of X didn’t even seem a sequel to the original story, it was all over the place and lacked the cohesion you would expect, and that was promised… Since House of X was just a setup for things to come. That didn’t come.

Rather than this expansive story in three acts we only got a clumsy 20%. We’ll never know the truth about why Hickman left it so incomplete. If we trust his words then it’s probably a mix of him wanting to support other writers while at the same time feeling like the story wasn’t anymore under his control. So he shrugged and left. He’s being paid anyway, and will continue to receive undeserved critical acclaim.

But it was also rather predictable. Marvel’s comics in general are in a really bad shape that more or less resembles to the collapse of the late 90s. There are many reasons for this and I’m not going to examine them here.

I’m disappointed because regardless of the quality of the stories from this point onward, and despite my original lack of trust on Hickman, I still wanted to see where it was going, and I still wanted him to have full control of it to the end. As I wrote before, I appreciate the ambition, and whether or not I like the story, I still want it to be fully realized as the author intended. Only when it’s done and wrapped up I can comment it for its merits and failures.

But this just went nowhere, and not only it is bad because we’ll never know how it was meant to be, despite following and trusting it for so many pages, but it also diminishes what is already there, because the whole thing collapses.

Please do not make grand plans if you don’t have what it takes to complete them. In the case of Hickman: please do not write grand things if you don’t give a shit. Are you trying to imitate J. J. Abrams?

I’ve picked up the terrible habit of reading a few chapters of a book, then move to another, and so on and on. Even when I come back to the same book I read it again from the beginning. The circle is so wide I could continue forever.

The only one I was able to complete is The Skylark of Space. Probably the worst book I’ve ever read.

The last I started, instead, was Bleak House by Charles Dickens, I read this in 2009, but only got to page 450 or so, then I couldn’t resume because there was a gap and I forgot everything. So now I’m reading it from the beginning, and I already know I probably won’t even get to the same point where I left…

The introduction to the book by Terry Eagleton is noteworthy.