Category Archives: Mythology

Includes philosophy, science, religion, physics, metaphysics, and all kinds of speculative wankery.


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).

Reading Thomas Covenant

The first 100 pages of the Thomas Covenant series were the very last thing in the fantasy genre I read almost 10 years ago. I enjoyed what I read, even if not particularly so, then I couldn’t find anymore the book for various reasons and I abandoned entirely the genre only to return to it in the last years. These days I had no particular interest in going back and read it (while Donaldson’s GAP series is part of my ever expanding reading queue) but it became a resolution when I read that Donaldson finished writing the first draft of “The Last Dark”, the fourth and last book in the third series.

I’ve started reading Thomas Covenant from the very beginning because I’m interested in what he’s doing right at the end. I’m ready to go through the first million of words in order to get there. If this third series never came out I’d have probably never had again the interest to go back and read what I missed, but knowing that he returned once again to it, more than twenty years later, makes me curious about what places he may go and what he’ll bring along of all these years. This series of 3 + 3 + 4 books was never planned as so. When he wrote the first trilogy it was “done”, nothing else required or planned. Then he found ideas and wrote a second trilogy, which probably exists also as a dialogue with the first, but it was again a thing on its own, closed. Now he returns. I have trust in him when he says that every time he returns the stakes and ambition rise, and I want to read this because I’m interested on where it all leads.

I’m almost halfway though the first book and should be able to write down more comments soon after I’m done with Midnight Tides. Curiously enough the controversial parts of “Lord Foul’s Bane” are the strongest. My interest is held entirely by what I usually see criticized, while the more traditional and fantastic part of the journey through the land feels dull and slow.

The rape scene is probably the most discussed and criticized part of the book and yet I had no problems with it. It’s a strong scene that is perfectly excused by the context, I don’t see anything in it that feels forced or indulgent. I’d rather say that it’s one of the sporadic points that make the book worthwhile. It’s not about being edgy and subverting some canons by shocking the reader, I don’t see a “writer’s intent” in it, as if in showing a purpose, a declaration of tones and themes so the reader knows what he’s going to find in the book. The scene is not there to set a bleak mood or warn the reader. It is there because there’s no way around. It’s the consequence of what is going on.

This leads to the other aspect about it: Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever. From a side it’s kind of curious how the “unbelief” of the character seems carried over (or “in”) the context. Fantasy is not serious literature, you can’t believe it. So here’s a book about a guy who finds himself in a fantasy world and… does not believe it. Literally. The other side of this argument is that the “Unbeliever” is the leading theme, embedded with it is also the rape scene and why it fits with the rest. Thomas is convinced of going through a vivid and elaborate dream. He knows he was hit by a car and now he’s hallucinating and fighting to survive. In this dream he goes through a reawakening of spirit and senses, but it is painful because he is aware it’s all fake. The more beautiful the world, the most cruel it is, because it all shows him a beauty he knows he’ll lose as soon he wakes up from this terrible hallucination. Hence the rape. He rapes Lena because Lena, to his eyes, taunts him. She speaks and moves with cruelty (but this is partially concealed to the reader). Being part of HIS dream he has all the rights to react to all this with rage. One thing I noticed while reading is that Thomas goes through a lot of states internally but communicates little of it on the outside. More than “characterization” this is the result of awareness. He does not believe in the “world”, so talking to it is kind of stupid. Does it make sense talking to your own dreams? Aren’t the dream-shapes there just to mock and play with you? This is also mirrored by the reactions of some people to him. They believe he knows, but is faking his lack of knowledge of the world because he’s testing them.

So Thomas Covenant is character locked in. The introspection is the point since he doesn’t believe in the external world. The “rape” is an accusation toward the outside. It holds on many levels. It’s even a crime if you rape someone in a dream? It is a crime if the rape was not deliberate? Donaldson, the writer, plays with all this. And this is what interests me deeply, the bold links between internal/external, between writer and character, the fantasy and the Fantasy.

Obviously I can’t avoid now to interpret all this my own way. Probably most readers were in for the Fantasy, for The Land and its weird creatures. I’m in entirely to interpret it symbolically, and that’s where the book carries some value for me. Yesterday I read a part that felt like a reference to The Matrix. Thomas Covenant and The Matrix? What should they have in common?

This:

Foamfollower stood in the stern, facing upstream, with the high tiller under his left arm and his right held up to the river breezes; and he was chanting something, some plainsong ,in a language Covenant could not understand- a song with a wave-breaking, salty timbre like the taste of the sea. For a moment after Covenant’s question, he kept up his rolling chant. But soon its language changed, and Covenant heard him sing:

Stone and Sea are deep in life,
two unalterable symbols of the world:
permanence at rest, and permanence in motion;
participants in the Power that remains.

a song with a wave-breaking, salty timbre like the taste of the sea. Think about it, how can a song have a “salty” timbre? This made me think of a world (The Land) made of language (so words, numbers). This Foamfollower is a giant whose boat moves upriver. It’s a “spell”, something breaking the natural rules. And it comes from language he uses. I don’t know how far Donaldson consciously pushes this, but it’s there.

I just can’t avoid reading this book in a sort of Kabbalist way. The whole journey is “symbolic”. I don’t know how Donaldson resolves it, but at the moment I buy into the “hallucination”, so Thomas is moving through an internal landscape. This doesn’t even need to be a “suspect” of a writing intent, because it just can’t be avoided. Donaldson HAS TO write an internal landscape, because The Land does not exist. So whether you see it as a contradiction or proper form, it is brought in the book as it is in reality. You can’t escape it, and it is what makes the book strong.

Within this context it is particularly interesting to see how Donaldson deals with the “cosmology”. “The Celebration of Spring” is a chapter he said he dreamed and he wrote exactly as it came to him. It’s about a circular dance of some flame figures that kinda fits with a Kabbalist interpretation. In another scene the giant talks about a legend on the cosmology. Most of it is formulaic and not really addressing the interesting points (there’s always a Creator that creates, but somehow some kind of flaw slips through and acquires its own deliberateness, threatening the rest), but it is good for the mirror it creates.

Essentially the giant compares the creation of the world with the legendary history of his own race. Both stranded from home. Locked away from their proper place and unable to return. Taken from within, it is interesting because you wonder whether they built their creation myth on the basis of their own history (so projecting “outside” what happened to them for real, shaping gods in their forms) or if it’s the opposite, that they wrote their own legendary history shaped around a myth that they received (if you believe in-world holiness). Ambivalent. And it all again fits with certain Kabbalistic forms, since this idea of being separated and then cut from “home” is essentially the Kabbalistic structure of men stranded in the physical world. The barrier between the physical and the concealed spirituality.

All of it then brought in the book at another level, since Thomas Covenant is also stranded and cut away from home, being trapped in this fantasy world. This game of mirrors, where the same structure repeats at different levels, is one of the truly inspired parts of the book. Sometimes it slides back into fantasy conventions (for example I think the dialogue between Thomas and Lord Foul when the two of them meet at the very beginning is dreadful) but overall I’m enjoying what I’m reading and find now things that I’d likely have missed ten years ago.

Homunculus – Hideo Yamamoto

I don’t read many mangas these days but I make exceptions for those masterpieces that set themselves apart. There are certain signature works in every medium and genre, Homunculus isn’t very much “signature” because it doesn’t seem to represent any canon, but it sets itself apart as one of those rare, significant works. It is a true masterpiece, of the kind you can count on your hands. I’m writing about it also because it’s finally complete. It’s 15 volumes, the last one came out in Japan in April 2011 and translated in English two days ago. Yes, it’s not officially licensed, but it also means that there’s the possibility to read it online, all 15 volumes for free, thanks to the work of fans who did the translation. It’s not the same experience of actually having the volumes in your hands (I read most of the volumes as they were published in Italy), but believe me that this is something you can’t miss.

Considering the gruesome picture I decided to use one would expect some kind of brutal manga about violence or serial killers. While Yamamoto, the writer and artist, is the guy behind the more famous “Ichi the Killer”, that you may know for the movie adaptation by Takashi Miike, Homunculus is an entirely different thing. There’s not much violence, or action. It’s instead a deep psychological and metaphysical journey into consciousness. In that scene you see Nakoshi, the protagonist, trying to drill a hole into the girl’s skull. It’s gruesome, but he does not intend to kill her. It’s part of the metaphysical conceit the manga is based on, by drilling that hole you stimulate the brain to a different kind of activity, augmenting perception. In the specific case the hole allows the protagonist, by covering his right eye, to see the “truth”. To see demons, or “homunculus”, which are essentially symbolic constructs of the people he sees around himself.

They aren’t the demons “outside”, from the outer world, those typical in horror movies. They aren’t supernatural or magical. They are the demons inside, those who live truly within each of us, every day, and that we can’t exorcize since those demons are “us”. As real as everything you can touch and feel. Deep psychology and symbols, the stuff we live off. And it’s here that this manga reaches its apex. From the first to the last page, beside the single case of the premise of the trepanation, there’s nothing fantastic or that falls outside science. You’ll see all kinds of weird, freaky stuff, it flirts with the occult, but it will all be slowly explained in logical terms. Everything will be explained.

It is a masterpiece because of how it keeps the tension for 15 volumes straight, unrelenting. It’s an unbelievable crescendo that reaches the top right at the end. Truly ambitious works usually have problems finding a worthwhile ending that matches expectations and wraps up all mysteries and plots. This is an example of “flawless victory”. It does everything perfectly, with an ending I feel powerful. Recently I was discussing the difference between “ambiguous” and “ambivalent”. It’s a meaningful difference because I consider one satisfying and the other frustrating and infuriating. Ambiguous endings are infuriating, because you don’t get the answers you seek, the ending is open-ended, you’re left wondering what the authors wanted to say, you can’t come to grips with it. It’s not over and you can’t let it go, but you can’t do much with it either, because you feel like you can’t solve it, or that it was all a fraud, with no solution (hello LOST). Instead ambivalent endings are fine. They are still open-ended because you don’t get to know “exactly” a specific solution or truth, but at the same time you are given more than one specific solution. Each explaining plausibly what happened. You get your answers, mysteries are solved and explained, but there’s more than one single solution. You’re given more than one combination, but they all potentially open the lock. You don’t get to see the one that does it, but you know one of them will. The path is clear, the message delivered.

During the course of this manga, page after page, the protagonist will face the homunculus of other people that he needs to “solve”. Each is its own mystery, bound to the whole life of a real person. You’ll see stories surfacing and every single mystery about them slowly being explained. At the same time every chunk of these stories will go to build up the bigger picture, it will build up to the mystery of the homunculus. What these homunculi are, where they come from. The mystery will be revealed and the whole manga is built so that everything leads up to it. It’s a masterpiece because how every story exists on its own and yet builds up to that ultimate mystery. And it’s a masterpiece because how every single image, frame after frame, goes to acquire a symbolic meaning. Yamamoto is a genius, you’ll see the deep, meticulous research after every symbol, taking often hundreds of pages for the “descent into truth”.

“Truth” is what lurks deep down, in that pit that is the symbolic unconscious. You’ll get to see some of those truths, see their freaky shapes. All the while, remember, without any “magic”. This is the real thing.

It can be quite disturbing. But the truth rarely isn’t.

Midnight Tides and Lovecraftian Gods

I’ve reached a point in the book where some big sea god makes its grand entrance. I was quite in awe and decided to write a bit about it, about how I perceived the whole scene and wanted it to be more than how it appears in the book. It has quite an evocative power but I feel that Erikson understated way too much such a grandiose event. It’s one awesome idea Erikson had, but that is dismissed in the multitude of other things. Other writers could have made this a dramatic pivot of a novel, but here it is somewhat resolved in three pages or so. 3-4 pages enough to introduce the threat posed by this unknown sea god, research its mystery, see it rise on the surface wrecking chaos, conclude the first battle and solve a first mystery. Too fast!

Embedded in those three pages there isn’t just that, but a treasure of fundamental ideas that go deep down. Even if so understated they still make a fulcrum of things. So I’m going to describe what I saw, in there, knowing it’s not going to be perfectly accurate, but not my own fancy either.

When I was a kid Lovecraft was my myth. I couldn’t get E. A. Poe because he was too psychological, but Lovecraft delivered fully what I wanted. He grasped the psychological side, but at the same time also going all the way with awe-inspiring imagery. Fantastic, otherworldly landscapes, truly alien creatures. He didn’t underplay the fantastic element. Today looking at Lovecraftian mythology it all seems quite thin. Lovecraft is about atmosphere, what it suggests. Under that surface there’s chaos and uncertainty that feed on the idea of “cosmic horror”. It’s a powerful feeling, part of the unconscious and dream world, but it is abstract and undifferentiated.

The implicit rule is that when you reveal a mystery, describe how it operates, how it works internally and externally, you defuse all its power. So if Lovecraft probed and replaced the void of the “cosmic horror” with something precise, then all the magic and evocative power would be lost. The magic is about not seeing completely, the horror of the unknown, something right out the corner of the eye. And so we get a tradition of Horror where we don’t quite see, something only suggested, vaguely hinted at, the monster is a shadow, an outline.

Erikson instead, striving for other goals, goes deep into the mystery, and instead of diminishing its power he manages to not “explaining it away”, but make it stronger and even more evocative and full of implications than ever! The danger down this path is evident if you for example watched LOST, the more the mystery was revealed the more it got broken, made no sense, felt more and more contrived and annoying. In less words: the answers to mysteries weren’t satisfying. They weren’t reaching as high as the expectations. Here instead we have an occasion to see how it can become satisfying.

In the book a character starts to analyze the situation and the possible origin of this sea god that is looming and threatening his army. He comes out with three possibilities (two in the book, that’s one of the reasons why I say Erikson underplayed this too much). The first is that in this region, possibly thousands of years before, there was another population. It is explained that the land was made of limestone and, due to underground rivers and currents, the ground was eroded and shaped, and some deep, circular natural pits were formed. This population used one of these huge pits as a sacred place to their own deity. They threw into this pit bones, living sacrifices and other precious materials, till it filled up. So the sea god they are facing in current times is what this ancient population worshiped thousands of years before. The second hypothesis is that there was no original god that fed on that pit, but that another spirit or god was lured by the sacrifices, it disguised itself as their god, it became and replaced their god (and this is a pattern that returns in these books, gods that deceive and manipulate, preying onto the delusion of common people), and so its power grew and grew.

The third hypothesis is that there was… nothing. This is the most fascinating one because it took me a while to come to terms with it in these books. (opening necessary parenthesis here) One usually assumes that a god either exists or not. We either believe or we don’t. In a Fantasy novel, where gods are “tangible” and real, you assume there are no problems of faith. Gods exist, and that’s all. Yet, Erikson’s mythology is “protean”. Meaning that it is “fluid”. It’s a bit counter intuitive but let’s say that there could be some people that have their own pantheon. These gods exist and are real. Yet it’s entirely possible that on another continent there’s a different population with a completely different belief system and pantheon. They believe in different things and so their gods are different, but STILL very real. Belief, in our real world, is also protean, because it is created and is transformed. What a Christian believes is not what a Native American believes. In the Malazan world the “conceit” is that the mechanics are the same as our real world, but the gods come into being. Are made. So, going back to this third hypothesis, this means that a god may have come out of some, let’s say, “emotive or symbolic power”. The accumulation of lives sacrificed to some conceptual deity, the value of the symbols (the precious materials also thrown in the pit), all coalesced over time into something. “A creature came into being, and was taught the nature of hunger, of desire. Made into an addict of blood and grief and terror.”

Now take all these three possibilities and you’ll see that all three have significant implications. In the context the characters are preparing to fight this god in battle, so they need to learn as much as they can about it. What it is, what it can do. In the first case (a native, ancient god) the mystery becomes about what kind of god the ancient population worshiped. What its nature may be. In the second case (a spirit or a god that was attracted by sacrifices) the mystery deepens, because the ancient god is a mask and anything could have taken that position, hidden within, with its own motives and goals. What kind of creature was it? Was it maybe some other god or ancient creature? Where does it come from? What’s its true origin? Then the third case (a god was “fashioned”, from nothing), how do you fight something that is not there?

See, the mystery GROWS. It becomes filled with interesting implications, and consequences because in the context there’s a war ahead and this god is being used in it. Among all this, Erikson deepens the “import”. This is where I love what he does. It’s a fantasy story, but it has no power, no weight, if it doesn’t try to reach deep and say something that isn’t merely a clever “invention”. Take this quote:

Shorelines were places of worship the world over. The earliest records surviving from the First Empire made note of that again and again among peoples encountered during the explorations. The verge between sea and land marked the manifestation of the symbolic transition between the known and the unknown. Between life and death, spirit and mind, between an unlimited host of elements and forces contrary yet locked together. Lives were given to the seas, treasures were flung into their depths. And, upon the waters themselves, ships and their crews were dragged into the deep time and again.

Here Erikson, in a few lines, evokes a whole breadth of literature. Man and sea. All contained within that idea, then developed and shaped, “fashioned” in a myriad of stories. Thousands of books, movies, poetry, music. Ancient and modern. A theme that runs through this book, Midnight Tides, confirming that what I see in the title (the undercurrent, the subconscious, what’s hidden and unseen below the sea level) was not an illusion, but something that Erikson grasped fully (see also this and the quote about erosion).

The mythological work done in these three pages (btw, I already surpassed the wordcount of the whole scene I’m writing about, which also includes the battle itself, just saying) is not complete. The analysis continues speculating on the fact that this god should be dead.

The spirit was doomed, and should have eventually died. Had not the seas risen to swallow the land, had not its world’s walls suddenly vanished, releasing it to all that lay beyond.

The ancient population that filled the pit with gifts and sacrifices vanished at some point. Maybe they migrated somewhere else, or managed to destroy themselves (it wouldn’t be the first time in this setting). In both cases the god would be still bound to the pit, and, with the population feeding it gone, it would weaken and eventually die. Yet this was not a weakened creature, quite the contrary. What happened? That the whole land, including this pit, was in origin dry. At some point the level of the ocean rose (and this is likely as consequence of another cataclysmic event part of the mythology, opening new questions, possibly answers) and the land was submerged. Symbolically (see the quote above) and concretely, this means that the god was unbound, passed through the threshold between land and sea, known and unknown. It got unleashed onto possibilities. And unbound from the tie with its worshipers, it also got a sort of freedom. Out in the ocean ships sailed, more wars, more deaths, more to feed on. But outside of its pit survival wasn’t easy.

For all that, the spirit had known… competition. And, Nekal Bara suspected, had fared poorly. Weakened, suffering, it had returned to its hole, there beneath the deluge. Returned to die.

There was no way of knowing how the Tiste Edur warlocks had found it, or came to understand its nature and the potential within it. But they had bound it, fed it blood until its strength returned, and it had grown, and with that growth, a burgeoning hunger.

And so it rises again and is used as a tool in a war. Again and again in this series the past returns, sometime as it was, sometime disguised, manipulating and manipulated. Erikson already dealt with this sort of Lovecraftian mythology in Memories of Ice (I’m referring to the Matron buried under the plain), where he made real a line by Lovecraft I only remember in Italian, that retranslated sounds like this: It is not dead what forever can wait.

Erikson goes deep into the myth by not treating it merely as a self-serving invention. It feeds on its core, which is the anthropomorphic vision of the world and its coming to terms with reality. As the cover blurb by Glen Cook goes, I also stand slack-jawed in awe of what Erikson is doing. Yet I’ll leave a tiny, little disappointment because I sometimes feel that he doesn’t run all the way with his ideas. As if he didn’t completely believe in their strength. So much and more was contained in those three pages, that ultimately is understated as a small scene buried within a chapter. I haven’t gone further so I don’t know what this creature truly is, but I feel that too much potential was dismissed in a short run-through of hypothesis and even shorter confrontation. Which by the way was confusedly described (has the wizard somewhat shot himself into the creature? how could he see and describe what happens to his partner if one was on top of a lighthouse and the other far at the end of the docks?). I always have a problem of scale with Erikson’s descriptions, sometime he can evoke some huge setpieces filled with sense of wonder, but sometime one doesn’t “feel” this and it seems instead cramped, or not as vast as it could. Visually, it should be given some more “punch”, and it’s again something that doesn’t satisfies me fully. Give me some great imagery when you have motivations and means to do it (and what I wrote here is the foundation to make it happen, having earned it). Erikson’s creatures are sometime lost in the trivial, big dog, big wolf, green eyes. Give me something awe inspiring, huge, that also looks cool. You don’t have a budget on special effects. Ramp up the scale, make something truly grand.

I’m saying this because that’s as far I’ve read and the scene leaves me with that kind of disappointment (after having achieved and deserved all that awe). I don’t know what this creature looks like since it wasn’t shown yet. I don’t know how truly big it is. But from one side it all happened too fast, the prose not giving it enough emphasis and space compared to the rest of the novel. And from another its grandiose visual potential is somewhat lost on a minor PoV, minor battle, minor scene. On a creature that is “big”, but big as a ship or BIG, as a mountain-spanning behemoth of a beast? The writing, for how good it is and how much it packs in the economy of words, runs contrary to what the scene needed, imho.

He disappoints me on the easy parts. Yes Steve, you are too conservative and not enough EPIC.

Crying over Lot 49 (some thoughts)

I guess I can now say that I finished a Pynchon’s novel… Or not quite:

Certainly this is the ambiance that permeates Pynchon’s 1966 novel The Crying of Lot 49, that short strange book lodged between V (1963) and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) in the oeuvre of this often prolix author. I suspect many readers tackle this brief novel—or in Pynchon’s enigmatic description, a work “marketed as a novel”—with the thought that something so compact, a mere 45,000 words, will make for an easy introduction to a sometimes elliptical writer. Ah, the joke is on them. A walk through a house of mirrors may be short when measured in steps, but if you keep on slamming your face into your own reflection, the effect is anything but that of a leisurely stroll.

Oh no, I’m not attempting to review this. I’ll stick to stuff I pretend to be more familiar with. But I wanted to put together some thoughts and quotes to better figure out where I stand.

I may have said here and there that Pynchon makes for an infuriating read. It has most of the “literary” pretentiousness and, so, esoterism of Wolfe. 99% of the cultural references that make the fabric of a Pynchon’s novel are completely lost on me (and something similar happens to me even with, say, Franzen). Even when I look them up and read about them they are lost too. Because Pynchon doesn’t simply reference a fact, but by referencing it he drags in the novel that “feel”. And if you aren’t a millenarian man-brain, that feel is not part of your experience; you can only feel the loss, and suck it up. The infuriating part is trying to bite thin air and never make any progress.

Another problem I had, I had it after turning the last page. This is a book that has David Forster Wallace written all over it: you see everything everywhere. Yes, it’s backwards, but it’s because I read DFW before Pynchon. The most obvious feat is the momentum building and building, the sense of impending doom/revelation, then you turn the page and the book is over before it reached the climax. Oh, so infuriating. Building a mystery without revealing it, for the whole breadth of the novel.

A couple of hours ago I was reading a review of Murakami’s 1Q84, with a fitting quote out of the book itself:

As a story, the work is put together in an exceptionally interesting way and it carries the reader along to the very end, but when it comes to the question of what is an air chrysalis, or who are the Little People, we are left in a pool of mysterious question marks. This may well be the author’s intention, but many readers are likely to this lack of clarification as a sign of ‘authorial laziness.’ (p. 380) This confuses Tengo. He knows that, as a story, Air Chrysalis was fascinating to many people […]. What more did it have to do? (p. 381)

I’m conflicted because this is what for me makes coincide my utter fascination for something not completely “settled” and solved, with my utmost RAGE (or despair) when it is not. Outright hostility to the writer for being deliberately obscure. For hiding meaning, or simply having fun baiting me out in the depth of the forest, and then leave me there without a clue or way out.

Coupled with simple self-doubt, not feeling secure of my own intelligence and ability to understand something. So the necessity of seeing it all spelled out in as many possible ways, pre-chewed and possibly even digested, as to clear all doubt, and then sighing of relief (and feel clever, for getting it).

Thankfully these days we have the internet, so I can at least go and match my own patterns with those out there to see how much of the Big Picture I miserably missed. At least to quench some superficial need of… certainty:

As in his earlier novel, V., Pynchon seems to be making a point about human beings’ need for certainty, and their need to invent conspiracy theories to fill the vacuum in places where there is no certainty.

These days I could put myself as Oedipa in the book without requiring almost any changes. My OWN paranoia. As if the whole world is conspiring and playing games around me. For example, on one hand this book brings heavily back the theme of “Entropy” used in that short story I randomly stumbled on. And Pynchon implicitly reinforces this connection, not just as a theme in common, but even a style.

One of the things I like the most is when a writer writes about his own work, giving his own opinion of it (maybe because of what I wrote above). Pynchon does this in the introduction he wrote for “Slow Learner”, the short story collection that includes “Entropy”. I’d recommend to read this introduction because it’s interesting for many, many reasons, but toward the end it also briefly examines “The Crying of Lot 49”: The next story I wrote was “The Crying of Lot 49”, in which I seem to have forgotten most of what I thought I’d learned up till then.

Since in the introduction Pynchon’s analyzes his own writing flaws, so supposedly those things he learned to improve, while also acknowledging that these flaws are kind of a constant in his work (“Most of what I dislike about my writing is present here in embryo, as well as in more advanced forms.”), then I see that remark about “Lot 49” as implicitly linked to the flaws he pointed out in “Entropy”:

The problem here is like the problem with “Entropy”: beginning with something abstract — a thermodynamic coinage or the data in a guidebook — and only then going on to try to develop plot and characters. This is simply, as we say in the profession, ass backwards. Without some grounding in human reality, you are apt to be left only with another apprentice exercise, which is what this uncomfortably resembles.

Of which I think there’s a trace in this book. Sometimes it feels like Pynchon “overwrites” Oedipa’s character. As if the reality of the fact is then coming truly alive only from the writing. An ordinary event made extraordinary by how it’s written. It’s Pynchon coming in, describing Oedipa and taking control of her stream of consciousness. In fact I wonder if I’m wrong if I say the book is effectively written in third person omniscient narrator EVEN IF it’s closely bound to Oedipa’s PoV. It’s almost never faithful to her awareness.

I identify with Oedipa’s paranoia because I’m doing outside the context of the book what Oedipa does within. Seeing patterns surface and wondering if their shape is a fantasy, or if there’s truly a lingering meaning. A kind of universal connection with a far reach. I’m reading the book and wondering if what I see into it is what the book is showing me. If the conspiracy I see is real or only my own fantasy that completes and compensates the missing parts. And in a Pynchon’s novel, where I feel I’m missing something every line, there’s plenty of compensation and filling that needs to be done.

This is how I interpret it, coming straight from a bias: the book does explain everything thoroughly, actually doing a rather meticulous work picking up and closing all the loops it opened (I wonder what others would say about the numerous “infodumps” toward the end). The climax and final revelation seem to fall off the edge only because everything was revealed a couple of pages back, so the ending is like an Epilogue where events and characters merely drift onward. The end is not shown not because the writer is cynically evil and torturing the reader, but as a hint that what follows is so irrelevant that it doesn’t need to be told. We don’t get to see what happens after not to heighten the mystery, but to heighten the truth. It’s the momentum that makes the reader carry on, eager to turn pages and find out how it ends. The missing part is necessary to redirect the attention to what’s relevant. The revelation isn’t one the reader has to make on his own, but one that needs to be properly located, turning the pages back. It needs to be re-ordered.

A problem I have with the book is that I wildly disagree with what’s written on the back cover:
“The highly original satire about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in a worldwide conspiracy, meets some extremely interesting characters, and attains a not inconsiderable amount of self-knowledge.”

Self-knowledge? If anything she LOST it. She’s completely, utterly destroyed by the end of the book, as I see it. It’s pretty much the way Hal ends up in Infinite Jest. It’s quite hard for me to see it in an optimistic, positive light.

DFW essentially writes the deal about The Crying of Lot 49: “The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”

Going backwards here are some quotes to support my interpretation of the book and some of the patterns that seemed to be there:

Possibilities for paranoia become abundant. If Tristero has managed to maintain even partial secrecy, if Thurn and Taxis have no clear idea who their adversary is, or how far its influence extends, then many of them must come to believe in something very like the Scurvham-ite’s blind, automatic anti-God. Whatever it is, it has the power to murder their riders, send landslides thundering across their roads, by extension bring into being new local competition and presently even state postal monopolies; disintegrate their Empire. It is their time’s ghost, out to put the Thurn and Taxis ass in a sling.

But over the next century and a half the paranoia recedes, as they come to discover the secular Tristero. Power, omniscience, implacable malice, attributes of what they’d thought to be a historical principle, a Zeitgeist, are carried over to the now human enemy.

This is a description of paranoia. It is caused by what is essentially a lack of certainty, a kind of compensation. What is not understood acquires a mythical shape. A Zeitgeist, like the conspiracy theories coming out of 9/11. Growing uncertainty, growing insecurity, and so the scarcity of elements to explain what happened becomes a mythical structure where fears are projected. Only what is known can be traced, but it is too scarce, and so it comes together as a fantasy.

Now, I believe all this structure is repeated in the book on a much broader level. About entropy, about communication, and ultimately about language, the brain and the perception of consciousness (as with “entropy”, it becomes a cosmic theme). This is why it looks like paranoia to me, because it’s again all part of what I’m reading and writing on the blog these past few months. And while I was expecting this book to deal with conspiracy and other intriguing things, I didn’t expect it to go SO close to the true themes I’m looking into. I see this specifically as the key to unlock the mystery of the book at its most profound and connected level.

“Cherish it!” cried Hilarius, fiercely. “What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by its little tentacle, don’t let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.”

This seems to me a call to Hillman’s psychology. The need to not lose the symbol, stick to it. Hilarious reply comes to Oedipa’s request of “dissipating the mystery”. Of explaining everything as an illusion (“hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy“). Hilarious tells her essentially that this can’t be done. Also an answer to why the book can’t have its mystery revealed. Because it’s the closed loop itself the condition of existence. As if paranoia and self-consciousness coincided. The paradox can’t be explained because it would cause losing it. The revelation IS the paradox, and to understand it you need to keep it whole.

“And part of me must have really wanted to believe—like a child hearing, in perfect safety, a tale of horror—that the unconscious would be like any other room, once the light was let in. That the dark shapes would resolve only into toy horses and Biedermeyer furniture. That therapy could tame it after all, bring it into society with no fear of its someday reverting. I wanted to believe, despite everything my life had been. Can you imagine?”

I see again the interplay between two levels. Here specifically between consciousness and unconscious. One a more abstract level between the real and the imagined. It’s like the whole book is simply showing dualism in various shapes. There’s always a perceived level, and a possible hidden one:

Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.

Always two sides:

The saint whose water can light lamps, the clairvoyant whose lapse in recall is the breath of God, the true paranoid for whom all is organized in spheres joyful or threatening about the central pulse of himself, the dreamer whose puns probe ancient fetid shafts and tunnels of truth all act in the same special relevance to the word, or whatever it is the word is there, buffering, to protect us from. The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost.

It seems to me all coming down to Cartesian dualism. Or, if you prefer, coming out of it in various shapes and forms. Oedipa’s struggle to make sense of patterns she sees is the same struggle of trying to grasp reality, and being always at loss. The need to escape the loop that makes our prison, but also our identity. Could a writer solve or reveal what’s beyond? Could the mystery be explained? Or maybe the truth is right there, in describing what there is without omissions. The revelation isn’t “off the page”, or open ended. The revelation is in the description, and the description is faithful because it’s about doubts and incompleteness. Oedipa’s present state. Her increasing awareness of fragmentation and transiency. Unsolvable partiality. The writer isn’t holding the truth away from the reader because the reader already has it whole. Feeling right in the novel, in Oedipa’s (pretty) shoes.

And so back to the house of mirrors (of the first quote), because Pynchon is describing that sort of universality.

And that’s precisely the right metaphor to convey the act of reading The Crying of Lot 49, a constant circling in on reflections that may be reality, or a simulacrum of reality, or just a dead end where you will bang your head.