Category Archives: Mythology

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


Trystero (3)

Robert Scurvham had founded, during the reign of Charles I, a sect of most pure Puritans. Their central hangup had to do with predestination. There were two kinds. Nothing for a Scurvhamite ever happened by accident, Creation was a vast, intricate machine. But one part of it, the Scurvhamite part, ran off the will of God, its prime mover. The rest ran off some opposite Principle, something blind, soulless; a brute automatism that led to eternal death. The idea was to woo converts into the Godly and purposeful sodality of the Scurvhamite. But somehow those few saved Scurvhamites found themselves looking out into the gaudy clockwork of the doomed with a certain sick and fascinated horror, and this was to prove fatal. One by one the glamorous prospect of annihilation coaxed them over, until there was no one left in the sect, not even Robert Scurvham, who, like a ship’s master, had been last to go.

time is arbitrary. You pick your zero point anywhere you want, that way you can shuffle each person’s time line sideways till they all coincide.

You take it because it’s good. Because you hear and see things, even smell them, taste like you never could. Because the world is so abundant. No end to it, baby. You’re an antenna, sending your pattern out across a million lives a night, and they are your lives too.

feeling like a fluttering curtain in a very high window, moving up to then out, over the abyss.

This is America, you live in it, you let it happen.

WE AWAIT SILENT TRISTERO’S EMPIRE

Trystero (2)

“only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold; which must always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly, leaving an overexposed blank when the ordinary world came back.”

The Dream of the Red Chamber (2) – Postmodernism

A couple of things left from the other post. I’m surprised to find here traces of “self-awareness” and use of playful circular devices that are so typical of Postmodernism.

I’ll continue to quote parts of the introduction:

But for all the little hair-cracks that the scholar’s magnifying glass reveals, The Story of the Stone is an amazing achievement and the psychological insight and sophisticated humour with which it is written can often delude a reader into judging it as if it were a modern novel. In fact neither the idea that fiction can be created out of the author’s own experience, nor the idea that it can be concerned as much with inner experience – with motives, attitudes and feelings – as with outward events, both of which are a commonplace with us, had been so much as dreamed of in Xueqin’s day.

As regards the various ‘devices’ which Xueqin employs for converting remembered fact into artistic fiction, one he makes persistent use throughout the novel is the antinomy of zhen and jia, meaning respectively ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’, but both regarded by Xueqin as being different parts of a single underlying Reality:

Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true
Real becomes not-real when the unreal’s real

is the inscription written up over the gateway to the Land of Illusion which we pass through at the beginning of the novel.

‘Jia’, the surname of the family in the novel, is also a pun on this other jia which means ‘fictitious’. The Jias of the novel are connected in various ways with a mysterious family in Nanking called the Zhens – another word-play – who are a sort of mirror-reflection of the Jia family.

It is easy to imagine that many of the Stone‘s ‘devices’ had their genesis at this stage: the presentation of fiction and reality or reality and illusion or the waking world and the dreaming world as opposite sides of a sort of single super-reality, for example – like the two worlds one on each side of the mirror.

All of it sounding weirdly close to the topic of my blog in the past weeks. No matter what stuff I pick up, I end up again and again in the same places.

What surprises me here is how deliberate it is all, and not really a strained interpretation of today. What Xueqin was doing was about redressing his family and people he knew as fiction, this is a common practice. But he was doing this by incorporating in the novel the awareness for its own device, and so all this playful interplay of fiction with reality, that probably comes back as one of the key to interpret the “secret” of this novel.

Such devices play a functional part in the structure of the novel; but many of the symbols, word-plays and secret patterns with which the novel abounds seem to be used out of sheer ebullience, as though the author was playing some sort of game with himself and did not much care whether he was observed or not.

And finally another striking feature of this novel is that it seems to have its core on the women. Something that is discussed right at the beginning of the book, in Postmodern style as the book describes its own possible frameworks, merits and limits. A sort of self-dialogue:

it contains no examples of moral grandeur among its characters – no statesmanship, no social message of any kind. All I can find in it, in fact, are a number of females, conspicuous, if at all, only for their passion or folly or for some trifling talent or insignificant virtue. Even if I were to copy all this out, I cannot see that it would make a very remarkable book.

‘What makes these romances even more detestable is the stilted, bombastic language – inanities dressed in pompous rhetoric, remote alike from nature and common sense and teeming with the grossest absurdities.
‘Surely my “number of females”, whom I spent half a lifetime studying with my own eyes and ears, are preferable to this kind of stuff? I do not claim that they are better people than the ones who appear in books written before my lifetime; I am only saying that the contemplation of their actions and motives may prove a more effective antidote to boredom and melancholy.
‘All that my story narrates, the meetings and partings, the joys and sorrows, the ups and downs of fortune, are recorded exactly as they happened. I have not dared to add the tiniest bit of touching-up, for fear of losing the true picture.’

As consequence of all this, Vanitas, starting off in the Void (which is Truth) came to the contemplation of Form (which is Illusion); and from Form engendered Passion; and by communicating Passion, entered again into Form; and from Form awoke to the Void (which is Truth).

Having made an utter failure of my life, I found myself one day, in the midst of my poverty and wretchedness, thinking about the female companions of my youth. As I went over them one by one, examining and comparing them in my mind’s eye, it suddenly came over me that those slips of girls – which is all they were then – were in every way, both morally and intellectually, superior to the ‘grave and mustachioed signior’ I am now supposed to have become. The realization brought with it an overpowering sense of shame and remorse, and for a while I was plunged in the deepest despair. There and then I resolved to make a record of all the recollections of those days I could muster – those golden days when I dressed in silk and ate delicately, when we still nestled in the protecting shadow of the Ancestors and Heaven still smiled on us.

I might lack learning and literary aptitude, but what was to prevent me from turning it into a story and writing it in the vernacular? In this way the memorial to my beloved girls could at one and the same time serve as a source of harmless entertainment and as a warning to those who were in the same predicament as myself but who were still in need of awakening.

The Dream of the Red Chamber

I received today the first volume (of five, for a total of 2500 pages, give or take) of “The Story of the Stone”, better known as “The Dream of the Red Chamber”. One of the four great Chinese classical novels and the one most known and famous among those four. All these four being “epics” in their own right, especially in size (but not just) since they all exceed the thousand pages.

This Penguin Classics edition has a good 40 pages introduction and it is the reason why I’m writing this. It presents an interesting case of “unreliable narrator” embedded in the book. Actually THREE unreliable narrators that existed for real and only known for their suggestive nicknames: Red Inkstone, Almond and Odd Tablet. With a fourth called Gao E who actually delivered the final edited work and got called liar by the majority of the critics. Obviously the original manuscript was lost, only 80 chapters on the total 120 were finished, and it’s not even sure if those 80 chapters were also rewritten and adjusted, or if the remaining 40 chapters were done from scratch, or followed an outline of the original author, or were instead written by the original author but before said guy went to rewrite and polish the first 80 (“All the evidence suggests that he finished the novel long before he died and was merely revising and correcting during his final years.”).

Essentially it’s a mess, made worse by the fact that there are allusions of it being an elaborate riddle to solve, or even a satirical commentary, but all so buried and successively adulterated that it’s now impossible to get the “true story” out of it. This all explicitly teased right in the text:

Pages full of idle words
Penned with hot and bitter tears:
All men call the author fool;
None his secret message hears.

In fact in China they are all over this like a national sport, writing every years piles of books whose only purpose is to reinterpret, redefine and speculate, over this one book, its history, its hidden meaning, its allusions, its author(s) and so on.

The other fun fact is about timeline problems and similar mistakes:

But the problem of inconsistency which troubled Gao E and continues to trouble translators is by no means all due to the anonymous author of the last forty chapters. Cao Xueqin himself must be held responsible for quite a few of the novel’s minor inconsistencies. This is partly due to the elaborate devices he used for distinguishing the facts of his family history – switching generations, substituting Peking for Nanking, and so forth – which make him peculiarly susceptible to slips about ages, dates, places, and the passage of time.

I guess this is the kind of necessary evil when an author embarks for something truly “epic” and recklessly ambitious, without the guarantee to see it through (in fact, considering the incompleteness, this is more a case of Jordan-Sanderson).

Let’s forgive Erikson for his similar slips, and remember that someone like George RR Martin, who expressly admitted of obsessing over these sort of things, is more likely to succumb than succeed in the process.

HARD thinking, for the glory

Surfing the Bakker’s wave. Consciousness and whatnot. I just found an interesting link in a comment to an article linked on a forum thread about a Bakker’s story (and this is an example of typical internet loop that is actually quite SHORT).

Here: LessWrong.com

I’m jumping around between the interesting articles, starting from here specifically.

Especially there’s an interesting perspective on Reductionism that kinds of overthrows the term and is maybe dialed closer to truth:

it requires constant vigilance to maintain your perception of yourself as an entity within physics.

The way a belief feels from inside, is that you seem to be looking straight at reality. When it actually seems that you’re looking at a belief, as such, you are really experiencing a belief about belief.

So when your mind simultaneously believes explicit descriptions of many different levels, and believes explicit rules for transiting between levels, as part of an efficient combined model, it feels like you are seeing a system that is made of different level descriptions and their rules for interaction.

But this is just the brain trying to be efficiently compress an object that it cannot remotely begin to model on a fundamental level. The airplane is too large. Even a hydrogen atom would be too large. Quark-to-quark interactions are insanely intractable. You can’t handle the truth.

Reductionism is not a positive belief, but rather, a disbelief that the higher levels of simplified multilevel models are out there in the territory.

This not only appears as true, but it also is kind of supported by an argument that usually is used against it. Science never predicts anything, it can only understand a phenomenon after it happened. As if scientific discovery can only proceed in a direction but can’t really theoretically define anything. It always falls short. Science essentially works like an Oracle pretending to know the future but only able to make prophecies after they already happened. Normally, we would point at it and say it’s a fraud. Is Science a fraud?

Science is the story we tell ourselves to make sense of certain things, but as a framework, it is built by man, and ultimately false. Yet not completely arbitrary. Science is not invented. And this was part of my recent debate with Bakker.

But what makes me think is a kind of positive thinking on top of all of this:

If you choose, and plan, and act, and bring some future into being, in accordance with your desire, then all this requires a lawful sort of reality; you cannot do it amid utter chaos. There must be order over at least over those parts of reality that are being controlled by you. You are within physics, and so you/physics have determined the future. If it were not determined by physics, it could not be determined by you.

The future is determined by physics. What kind of physics? The kind of physics that includes the actions of human beings.

But isn’t kind of curious that the whole site is essentially dedicated to deal with the limits of “thought”, that they believe will be surpassed by thinking HARDER. Isn’t the loop the prison of our mind?

It gives me the image of a cat chasing its tail and realizing it’s all a matter of SPEED.

We should make Iskaral Pust as our rolemodel:
“Shadowthrone… uh… my worthy Lord of Shadow… is thinking. Yes! Thinking furiously! Such is the vastness of his genius that he can outwit even himself!”

Trystero

A relevant quote from “The Crying of Lot 49” (that is, depending on what chapter you hit, great or infuriating):

“You don’t understand,” getting mad. “You guys, you’re like Puritans are about the Bible. So hung up with words, words. You know where that play exists, not in that file cabinet, not in any paperback you’re looking for, but-” a hand emerged from the veil of shower-steam to indicate his suspended head-“in here. That’s what I’m for. To give the spirit flesh. The words, who cares? They’re rote noises to hold line bashes with, to get past the bone barriers around an actor’s memory, right? But the reality is in this head. Mine. I’m the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, sometimes other orifices also…”

Literature and reality: The Language that Comes Before

I stumbled at random on a Youtube link that ended up full of interesting suggestions. There are a number of class sessions at Yale on American literature that are public.

I started from the one about “Everything is Illuminated” by Jonathan Safran Foer. I haven’t read the book but I knew it was kind of controversial, so I thought it could be interesting to hear about it. Listening through the lesson was indeed very interesting since the teacher makes many links about other writers and styles, especially explaining some notions of post-modernism. I noticed for example how Franzen essentially copied David Foster Wallace’s intent (trying to put together the formal play of the post-modern novel and wrestle it so it can submit to the service of the human sentiment), or the internalization within the novel of a double for the reader, in order to cue or even trick and mislead (Nabokov), the alternate endings of Roth, or putting himself within the novel, or writing about writing (a form of “thinking about thinking”) and certain other “inversions”. And also this ideal of literature as “both sentiment and formal play”. Then when she talks about the themes of the novel she seems to describe Kabbalistic ideals (“desire”, “light”, “connectedness”), which suggests me that when a writer sets to an ambitious journey the themes end up being quite the familiar ones. Each writer adding his own perspective and particular slant, but the core has an idea of stability and constancy, as constant is the pretense of Kabbalah to describe humanity.

Then I moved to listen about “The Crying of Lot 49” (that I’m reading) and this is even more interesting because she goes through a number of literary movements and their position in regard to the perception of reality (within the context of language), and it seems that more than talking about that novel she’s now actually talking directly to me.

It seems that all writers, past and current, end up engaging with this (she expressly calls “the history of literature’s forms and ambitions”). It also seems that more than adding new angles they merely describe different faces of the same thing, in a surprisingly coherent way. I’m wondering here if Scott Bakker really got it and encapsulated the struggle of centuries. I kind of smirk when she (teacher in the video) goes with “the relationship imagined between those visions of language and what is happening outside of fiction, in what we might call the real world”.

For example she says that beginning with O’Connor “embodying a new critical craft of fiction imagining that that craft is reflective of a transcendental order in the world”. Then the Beat Generation and how they did instead reject formalism, or the language mediating with reality. Then passing to the idea (of Nabokov, she says) of the literary work (of art) so autonomous from the world that it could become something like a form of life (and the conceit of author’s immortality, which I guess today is replaced by the “death of the author”). Then to Salinger, believing that the formality of language could lead to communicate the truth of human soul (as in opposite to the Beat Generation, and that I interpret as a kind of solipsistic bliss). Then to Barth who did not believe in the possibility of reaching an unmediated reality, and in this moving closer to Bakker’s perspective and language as a “cage”. She says: “Barth’s idea of language as preceding human understanding”. As a form through which we understand reality, and so not merely mediating, but shaping and “walling” our understanding. Or (and she kinds of quotes this):

The Language That Comes Before

Which also lead me to a pattern of thought about “truth as disabling”, since we always see at the opposite, truth as enabling. What if truth breaks the toy, and what if many writers, in discovering that, recoiled?