Wax Banks

Obamaguts.

Some guy:

I appreciate the slim possibility of this happening, but would the activist left now please shut the fuck up about what a coward President Obama is. He may have just kissed off a few swing states--and in the kick-off to a presidential reelection campaign, it doesn't get any gutsier than that.

Some Sullivan:

impossible to believe that marriage and inclusion in their own families was possible for them, so crushed were they by the weight of social and religious pressure. I think of all those in the plague years shut out of hospital rooms, thrown out of apartments, written out of wills, treated like human garbage because they loved another human being. I think of Frank Kameny. I think of the gay parents who now feel their president is behind their sacrifices and their love for their children.

He's probably spelled 'library' with one L again, poor bastard.

The quite good joke that leads off the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – in which Arthur Dent’s house is destroyed to make way for a bypass, but he’s not around to see it because he’s fleeing Earth, which is being destroyed to make way for a (hyperspace) bypass – deepens by degrees throughout the first four volumes of the series, until it attains a kind of comic grandeur. A quick overview:

• In the first volume, we start with the aforementioned good (but simple) joke on mindless bureaucracy. The planet is blown up, and the earthlings’ protests come too late – the plans have been on display at Alpha Centauri for decades. But it gets better: Earth wasn’t even a planet, it was a computer designed to find the Ultimate Question, destroyed at the moment of readout. Life on Earth was just part of a computer program.
• In the second volume (Restaurant) we find out that (1) Arthur has the Question in his brain, (2) it’s not even the right question, and (3) the reason for this cockup is that the simple peaceful cave-mammals populating prehistoric Earth were killed off by a bunch of idiot telephone sanitizers and management executives judged too stupid for their own planet. Earth was, it turns out, a backwater’s backwater. And by the way, the Vogons were actually hired by Zaphod’s analyst – who didn’t want the Ultimate Question interfering with his business. Even that cosmic conspiracy is absolutely petty in motivation. (And the whole thing might take place in Zarniwoop’s literal ‘pocket’ universe anyhow. Adams was fearless about tossing out his premises…)
• Then we get to Life &c. – in which we revisit Earth but just twenty pages or so at the beginning and another five or ten at the end, where we encounter one bloody clusterfuck after another, mostly revolving around the Ashes, which (I’m told) are something to do with cricket, which is what Englishmen play when they find baseball too fast-moving and stress-inducing. Earth – basically a floating calculator populated by stumbling morons, our hero included – is a bit player in the great drama of Krikkit. Arthur and Ford hang around long enough to be annoyed, and Arthur asks to be dropped off elsewhere.
• But in So Long and Thanks, he comes back – and meets Fenchurch, the crazy woman who figured out the answer to the Earth’s many problems on the first page of the first volume. They have a bit of sex on the wing of a plane and end up leaving Earth anyway. The series’s recurring nostalgia object isn’t, in the end, worth the trouble. There are other matters to attend to anyhow – the laughing truth-teller and God’s last message to His creation among them.
• I can’t remember Mostly Harmless but I’m sure it’s nice. There’s food in it, and some jokes about TV.

One extraordinary thing about this series of increasingly Weird treatments of Earth and its fate – too big to be a comic ‘runner’ but so lightly handled that it’s easy to miss its centrality to the (ahem) trilogy’s (ahem) philosophy – is that Douglas Adams kept finding new ways to tell grand jokes about the true nature of the human race and its beautiful, broken planet. The bit about the mice would’ve been a fine topper to the initial gag, but the Golgafrincham sequence manages to strip away its sentimentality while achieving real emotional resonance – we killed what was true and good about the Earth long before the Vogons justifiably did us in.

The contemptuous ease with which various beings (mice, Vogons, Halfrunt, the galactic judiciary, Disaster Area’s stage crew) kill off or otherwise terrorize various other beings (usually Arthur and his companions, but also the entire population of Earth, the telepathy-stricken inhabitants of Belcerebon, Prostetnic Jeltz’s crew, the billiards-ball planet in Ford’s story, et al.) is the blackest joke in the whole series. Of course in Adams’s ass-over-other-bits Darwinian cosmos, this is the nature of life, universe, everything. Which makes his ‘true’-nature-of-Earth revelations all the more bleak: they follow an emotional line straight toward dissipation and despair, and Arthur can only respond with an exhausted shrug.

Here’s one of Adams’s bleakest interpolated narratives, in full:

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is an indispensable companion to all those who are keen to make sense of life in an infinitely complex and confusing Universe, for though it cannot hope to be useful or informative on all matters, it does at least make the reassuring claim, that where it is inaccurate it is at least definitively inaccurate. In cases of major discrepancy it’s always reality that’s got it wrong.

This was the gist of the notice. It said “The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.”

This has led to some interesting consequences. For instance, when the Editors of the Guide were sued by the families of those who had died as a result of taking the entry on the planet Tralal literally (it said “Ravenous Bugblatter Beasts often make a very good meal for visiting tourists” instead of “Ravenous Bugblatter Beasts often make a very good meal of visiting tourists”), they claimed that the first version of the sentence was the more aesthetically pleasing, summoned a qualified poet to testify under oath that beauty was truth, truth beauty and hoped thereby to prove that the guilty party in this case was Life itself for failing to be either beautiful or true. The judges concurred, and in a moving speech held that Life itself was in contempt of court, and duly confiscated it from all those there present before going off to enjoy a pleasant evening’s ultragolf.

The entire Hitchhiker’s Guide universe runs just like that. The destruction of Earth in chapter 1 of the first book fits this pitch-black comic mood perfectly, but it’s also a comfortingly benign event at the time, because it seems so utterly out of measure with readers’ expectations. After all, England runs more or less the same way, is the obvious satiric point, but it’s all more civilized in a way, isn’t it? There’s contempt and then there’s contempt, right?

Well. By the end of the series, in an ironic ‘triumph’ of worldbuilding, Adams has lifted up Earth – or rather the various mutually-contradictory Earths – to the status of full participation in the carnival of malice and cruelty and offhand, even accidental, genocide which is his (nonetheless quite funny) titular Galaxy.

The only consistently nice, earnest, curious creature in the whole series is a mattress, which flollops around in a swamp.

Schumer tries to say the right thing but can't, because he is a dick.

Chuck Schumer, ladies and germs:

“Democrats are focused like a laser on jobs, the economy, and the middle class,” Schumer said. “Republicans, realizing that that’s not their strong suit, are going off on these other things, women’s issues and women’s health and contraception. The women’s vote, latest polls show we’re up by 15 percent, because they want us to focus on the economy and the middle class, and we are doing it.”

You see the point he's trying to make, right? That the GOP are harping on culture-war issues (i.e. opening up lines of misogynist attack) out of desperation. Not exactly a controversial point, and useful to note.

But Schumer can't help being, as mentioned in the title of this post, a dick: 'these other things, women’s issues and women’s health and contraception.'

So-called 'women's issues' are human issues. 'Women's health' is public health. Cheap, widely-available contraception is an extremely vital part of any halfway-sane approach to public health. These aren't secondary matters, and the frustrating thing is that if male Dems like Schumer could get away with not even noticing the existence of women, we can be absolutely sure that they would. Schumer isn't castigating the GOP for declaring war on American women, he's complaining that they're harping on stuff that's not Big Important Veiny Throbbing American Politics Stuff. For focusing on the wrong stuff.

It's naked political calculation.

In other words: he's enough of a politician to know that Republicans are doing something wrong. But he's not enough of a man to say what it really is.

Fuck him.

One key difference between God and King Lear...

...is that outside of the imaginative world of King Lear -- outside of the contract with Shakespeare and his performers which guides our experience of the play and the events it depicts -- no one actually thinks King Lear is a factual account of being in the world. It feels that way for a while, but as spectators at a drama we maintain a dual awareness that the events are both real-to-us and factually-incorrect, strictly speaking; the status of Jewish/Christian Scripture is such that readers/listeners accord it radically different ontological status.

That said, the Biblical God is a lot like a 'literary character,' and it's good to appreciate the ways believers relate to him both literarily and historically, all at once, complexly, with their full humanity intact. It's OK to think wrong things. It's good to feel deeply, even about nonsense.

But still: 'this kind of thing happens, it feels this way' is one good thing. 'This happened exactly this way so join our church' is straight bullshit.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, radio series (LP reissue), by Douglas Adams et al.: a quick review and a general point.

I first read the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books in elementary school, on my friend Scott’s recommendation. I think he’d heard about the books from his older brother Sean; over the few years of our friendship I got a lot of my cultural learnin’ from Scott/Sean. (Good stuff too: Depeche Mode, Zork, Talisman, the Avalon Hill Civilization, Paul Simon’s Graceland, early Chili Peppers…)

Over the years I reread the first three volumes of the increasingly inaccurately named Guide trilogy many, many times. (I read So Long and Thanks for All the Fish only twice, and Mostly Harmless just once, though I imagine I’d think more of its daddy-anxiety material now.) I also listened many, many, many, manymanymany times to a cassette of the Restaurant radio series – or rather, its LP rerelease, which abbreviates the radio show’s second storyline into an hourlong, headlong Magrathea > Milliway’s > sunship > B-Ark story of unusual-for-Adams structural cleanliness and utterly-typical-for-Adams comic density. The LP rerelease is actually a brand-new performance by the cast, from a revised version of the original radio scripts.

The performance is better by far than the original, with much stronger production, and I heartily recommend it to any DNA fan. For aforementioned personal reasons I’ll always consider it the definitive Restaurant recording, though like any right-thinking person I dearly love Zaphod’s trip to the Frogstar and Marvin’s duel to the death with the battle tank at Guide HQ, and have read those sections of the Restaurant novel more times than I can count.

God I love these stories. God Gosh I miss Douglas Adams.

* * *

Anyhow I just want to make a quick point about the Hitchhiker’s Guide stories: the remarkable business of Adams’s fictional universe – its crowded urban vibe, the way Adams piles up incidental details through Guide entries and interpolated vignettes, always with a dead eye for his ongoing satirical project – invariably gives way, at peak narrative moments, to a powerful sparseness which not only serves his original narrative form (linked comic sketches for a handful of actors) but reflects Adams’s deeper concerns, which would find clearest expression in Last Chance to See.

Think of the moments of unexpected (but always totally earned) emotional seriousness and weight in the Guide trilogy: the songs of Krikkit, Ford’s look at the bartender near Arthur’s house, Marvin’s death, the factory floor on Magrathea, Ford and Arthur and the Scrabble pieces, Arthur and Fenchurch on the airplane’s wing, Arthur and Thor, Marvin’s hilariously sad monologue in the Milliway’s carpark (‘After that I went into a bit of a decline…’ is perfect), Zaphod on the Frogstar(!), and – of course – Zaphod, Trillian, and Zarniwoop visiting the man with the cat.

Almost without exception, they’re moments of stillness and isolation amidst a great deal of very effective background bustle. At these peak moments, the characters are afforded a sense of their own smallness, which less crushing than freeing – these are moments of taking responsibility. (The Total Perspective Vortex is a literalization of this two-sided revelation, though with Zaphod around you have to play for laffs, of course.) Indeed, one of the lovelier narrative arcs in the trilogy is Arthur’s slow journey from unhappy connectedness to melancholy contentment – learning to accept the immensity of the universe and his own essential aloneness in it. (By the end he’s done with all the other characters, isn’t he? Except Random, I suppose.)

The end of the Restaurant radio show has Ford and Arthur accepting, with characteristic good humour, the futility of trying to help prehistoric Earth’s cavemen: they’ve lost the evolutionary race, and humanity will evolve thereafter from the useless bloody loonies on the Golgafrincham B Ark, the telephone sanitizers and management executives and hairdressers and documentary filmmakers and insurance salesmen. The moderns. In one of the radio show’s deft little running gags, Ford relates a wild story (billiards this time); Arthur asks where he heard it, and Ford says it’s from the Guide. Arthur is totally underwhelmed. ‘Oh, that thing,’ I think he says. Nothing special. Just a travel book, after all, and the real human race is slowly, sadly wiped out all around them.

And Louis Armstrong sings ‘What a Wonderful World.’

Gets me every time. A moment of perfect love for all living things, turned sideways a bit, with a ‘comic’ story of planetary genocide nested within another ‘comic’ story of planetary genocide (and ecocide, per the colonists’ mad tree-burning deflationary fiscal policy), sung with a sigh rather than a belly laugh. Ultimately the Guide isn’t about hijinks in a crowded galaxy that’s a merciless riff on the awfulness of modern ‘civilized’ life – or not just that, anyway. Not really. Deep down it’s about escaping, not even into space, but into the feeling that space affords. The matter is distance, and smallness.

Our yellow sun is close enough, important enough, to beat down on us, to beam, to burn. A ball of angry light with no mystery to it. Other stars must be content to hide during the day and be (barely) visible only at night – and to us they seem like tiny pinpoints, formless. Kind of pathetic, really.

But they twinkle.

What a wonderful world.

Miss you Adams.

Seeing without seeing.

Fixating: not fixing one's attention, but rather fixing the object of our attention, making it a center for our perception and conception, unmoving. Dead. We can no longer relate to it dynamically. To fixate on a person is to turn him or her into an abstract category or cluster of qualities: make another into an Other.

'Take a step back' is one of the most important pieces of advice one human can give to another; it's nearly impossible to follow when it matters most. If you're not fixating on a person as a feature of your private narrative, you're responding to a being-in-full. You're living for real, in other words. Wouldn't that be nice?

an argument approached.

[notes from a project abandoned but not forever.]

the self misperceives itself (as eternal, coherent, unique, centre of the world, etc.). this central misapprehension and distortion is ‘allegorized’ or mirrored in every arena of our experience:

• essentiality/essentialism (‘dogs are essentially different from cats’ is only a thumbnail for ‘dogs and cats can’t interbreed due to interactions at a level (macromolecular) we couldn’t even perceive until the 19th century’)
• narcissism of small differences (nationalism, racism, etc.)
• behavioural intertia/addiction (bad habits are a damaging abstraction of experience; we fall into patterns without even perceiving them, and relinquish the ability to monitor our own behaviour)
• myopia continuing even after we know of it (stubborn resistance even to knowledge we already possess!)
• causal scale (look for problems’ causes at the problems’ site and scale – related to essentialism, e.g. ‘racial/culural differences must be due to race, which maps to skin colour, so look for skin colour first’)

it’s vital to understand the distortion that is the coherent ‘self’ in order to perceive the true relations of things without demanding comfort (e.g. in egocentric religious myths). life without lies will NOT reduce to life without fiction – when we understand what fiction does (allow for emotional/cognitive action at a distance, consciousness-alternation in other words, via a complex symbolic compression/encoding scheme) we will be prepared to experience it lovingly in its time and place, while not wrongly demanding fiction’s distorting/abstracting comfort in places like, say, the nightly news, or a tense conversation with family, or the concept of ‘true love.’

this mode of ‘scale-free thinking’ leads to an understanding of the purposes of the Self’s fictionalization, and sheds light on one of the most crucial ideas ever conceived by humans: sustainability. this term is more potent than is generally understood.

consider (in a goofy semi-related thread maybe): is the myth of santa claus sustainable? no. (eventually all kids figure it out, or are told.) does it hurt when we let go of it? yes. is the hurt a long-term problem? we don’t know. (no one’s ever studied the psychology of the santa claus myth, that i know of.) the fiction of santa claus scaffolds a complex belief system about the magical nature of life – but is that metaphor (‘magic’) necessary to perceive the beauty and, yes, ‘magic’ of the mere natural world? of mathematical equations and scientific concepts? of fiction in general? i’m not sure, but i doubt it.

in any case the point of the santa claus example is that LOTS of cultural myths are like that: as soon as the kid cares one way or another about finding out the truth, the kid’ll find out, and great pain and anxiety will result. (your parents lied to you for years, after all, about something as basic as ‘where good feelings and presents at christmas come from.’) but it really does take years – kids WANT to believe in santa claus. the myth is comforting: among other things, santa will never run out of presents. but mommy and daddy might…

ironically, the unsustainable myth of santa claus is in part a myth about sustainability itself: about the possibility of an experience, a force, a story, existing outside of time. santa claus invests the year-end holiday season with glorious anticipation. it amplifies feelings. but what if those feelings could be arrived at another way? what if the snow and cold were enough? the lights, sledding, decorating trees? what if the rituals of year’s end could function autonomously?

without lies underpinning them, i mean.

the Self demands the lies and retreats into ritual.

The Hierophant.

Naturally you'd have to obscure the banal Euro-Catholic origins of the tarot with a few well-chosen name-changes and substitutions, chief among them the exoticization of the Pope, who's now the Hierophant. high priest of something-or-other (which is crucially nothing-in-particular). The Pope represents institutional power and knowledge, sure, but the success of the papacy over the last 2,000 years reminds us that the 'boss==God' formulation is a crucial strategy for ensuring employee loyalty. The Pope commands an army of followers hundreds of millions strong, with an officer corps trained to believe in (or at least act under the provision of) papal infallibility. As a step on the path from Fool-as-credulous-idiot to Fool-as-Buddha, then, the Pope (and to a lesser extent Waite's Hierophant) represents the Problem of Obedience, of Dogma.

He holds the key to the greatest repository of exoteric learning on earth but the cost of entry is a pledge that no wise Fool would consent to make.

* * *

'Exoteric,' I say, as opposed to the esoteric wisdom held by (or which holds) the High Priestess, the Witch-Woman. In a sense the Pope is the public face of a secret Church; as the Church's purpose is to bring churchgoers to wisdom, and wisdom comes only through devotion and a kind of scholarship of the soul (to be in one's every act a student of Truth, that sort of thing), the Hierophant is less a symbol of secret wisdom attained than the earthly administrator of the machines by which the group can act toward wisdom.

The inner Church, its secret corps, is necessarily built on solitude, personal reflection, release-from-structure. The Pope is structure. The High Priestess is the secret, the Hierophant its keeper. Which, if you're rejecting the simple man-above-woman ordering of these first few trumps, might be an ornamentation or allegory of the simple truth that we (observers of the human/universal condition) can readily grasp the shape of 'esoteric knowledge' with pre-human faculties 'beneath' high-level mentation or consciousness, but inquiring into the order of all things as socially-embedded humans means pulling apart complex relations which obfuscate as much as they reveal.

In other words, Churches raise awareness of the fact or possibility of Wisdom, but they make its attainment more difficult. Some churches more than others, you feel me?

'Pulling apart complex relations' shouldn't necessarily put you in mind of things like deconstructionism or critical interrogation either - those are just specific (FALLEN) instances of a general practice of seeing-anew; insofar as our academies reduce them to algorithms for generating, say, interchangeable conference papers and dissertations rather than private experiences of the well-beyond-the-goddamn-dissertative, they're actually the opposite of wisdom. Which maybe just means 'Don't go to grad school if you want to be happy,' though of course plenty of people go to grad school precisely because they don't actually know (or won't accept) what makes them happy, so maybe you don't need me to say this stuff!

Crowley goes on at characteristic length and obfuscatory strangeness about this card, more or less embodying the unbelievably annoying secreter-than-thou side of esoteric inquiry, in which quantity rather than luminance is the key measure of the worth of information:

The card is referred to Taurus; therefore the Throne of the Hierophant is surrounded by elephants, which are of the nature of Taurus; and he is actually seated upon a bull. Around him are the four beasts or Kerubs, one in each corner of the card; for these are the guardians of every shrine. But the main reference is to the particular arcanum which is the principal business, the essential, of all magical work; the uniting of the microcosm with the macrocosm. Accordingly, the oriel is diaphanous; before the Manifestor of the Mystery is a hexagram representing the macrocosm. In its centre is a pentagram, representing a dancing male child. This symbolizes the law of the new Aeon of the Child Horns, which has supplanted that Aeon of the "Dying God" which governed the world for two thousand years. Before him is the woman girt with a sword; she represents the Scarlet Woman in the hierarchy of the new Aeon. This symbolism is further carried out in the oriel where, behind the phallic headdress, the rose of five petals is in blossom.

None of this strikes me as terribly meaningful or interesting, which is to say (parochially) that I don't get the sense that this description of 'magical' inquiry is correct; there's no flash of illumination or immediate connection, which even the most eso- of esoterica should provide. Waite and Crowley both use their glosses of the Hierophant (in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot and The Book of Thoth, respectively) as chances to put in a little dig at the Catholic Church and Christianity more broadly, but only Crowley (who seems to have had a better time, in general, than Waite) provides an alternate frame of reference - the 'Aeon of the Child Horns,' which is a load of cod-Viconian/Hegelian bollocks but at least kind of a cute image.

Better to start simple, leaving aside Waite's pedantry and Crowley's grandstanding, with this: the Thoth deck gives us the image of Churchly authority (over thought and deed) complicated or even overturned by a new way of being. Dissolution of barriers to knowledge. Authority overcome. Waite-Smith has stone columns and a raised hand in blessing, but no true blessing is his to confer. He's just a manager. (You can tell he doesn't have any real power: the only folks lined up to receive his favours are...his employees.)

False knowledge. Seeing the Self - i.e. one's private universal meaning - in borrowed terms.

'When you speak the master's words, you think the master's thoughts.'

* * *

The 'Fey Tarot' Hierophant ('The Wisest') speaks to me: a little gnome seated on an hourglass, working his way down a scroll full of whatever-it-is (a tiny shopping list?), with a great red dragon in watchful repose at his feet.

The dragon is his friend, his pet. I'm sure he'd say so. They'd both say so, I bet, dragon's eyes twinkling, gnome wearily.

He's going to eat that little gnome motherfucker the moment he gets even the slightest bit hungry or ornery or just bored. Maybe the gnome realizes this. But he goes on studying his shopping list, and for the moment he can call himself Master. (Maybe something D&D-ish, like 'Dragon Lord.')(!!)

But he's lunch, soon enough. Mark my words.

'The trick is not to mind it.'

'The Wisest' of the Fey is a critique of the Hierophant/Pope tradition of the tarot.

I mean a continuation.

I mean a critique. Is there a difference, really? The severest critique is just to speak the truth, but as we're all implicated in the timely thrown-forwardness of each other's of being-in-the-world (thanks Buddha/Heidegger!), part of every statement of The Really Real is that, alas, shit is partly my fault too. The gnome is perfectly happy for the moment. He has a dragon for heaven's sake. It's going to eat him, but until then is any gnome even a zillionth as totally fantastic as The Wisest Gnome?

So either he's a rube who's about to be kibble or he's a Zen-Gnome-master with a dragon watching his back, or both. I don't know which at this moment. There's my attempt at truth-telling for the day, if you like.

* * *

It's important to remember that the Hierophant is trumped directly by The Lovers. That's not an arbitrary decision on the part of the original tarot designers. You might say the Hierophant's job is precisely to be trumped, to reveal the mere temporarily of earthly power. Such an old institution can't ever make something new - and if The Lovers have a single great work before them (which with so many bloody Popes busily, monomaniacally interfere), it is making someone new. (Making you new, if you like to love.)

Love doesn't conquer all. We die, it's 'bad,' dust to dust with or without you. But I'd prefer your hungry mouth to the dragon's. In any case we're more likely to find release - by which I mean Wisdom - there.

When a single product defines an industry/hobby, strange things happen when that product falls off.

Fragmentation of an industry/hobby makes for weird times for customers/users. Specifically it induces a generational divide between users.

Right now, 'tablet computer' (in the public's eye) means 'iPad.' That'll be true for a few more years, because no other tech company can control quality and cost like Apple, and that's not going to change without mind-bogglingly large flows of cash money. In a few years, though, when a single competently-made viable alternative to the iPad exists, users won't just face a 'which do I buy?' choice, they'll face a conceptual shift. Right now (unless you're looking at netbooks, which pretty much no one is) you don't even really need to think about the iPad's features - either you want that basic kind of device or not. In five years you'll need to break down the iPad into its components, affordances, specific features, which produces a wave of weird feeling. It strips the magic from the device. The 'cool' is gone.

Folks hate to lose their store-bought cool.

For 30 years, 'roleplaying game' basically meant Dungeons & Dragons. It didn't matter what that game was good or bad at - either you wanted to sit down and tell stories over dice rolls, or not. Sure, other (better) games existed, but until Vampire came out in the 90's, no one entered the hobby just to play those games, and those numbers were never ever big anyway.

Now there are better, reasonably well-publicized alternatives to D&D. (If you like stories, you should be playing Fiasco or Baron Munchausen or Mouse Guard.) The ongoing identity crisis starts here: for the first time in the hobby's history, gamers/buyers need to think hard about what, exactly, a game like D&D actually does. The answer turns out to be: 'not what we thought.' Its shoddy genre-emulation has given way to a strange involution of playstyle and narrative focus - since the millennium, D&D has been solely about D&D - and the whole idea that RPGs emulate genres has changed the way gamers think about the experience of play.

This matters way, way, way less than the iPad question, but it helps to illustrate the shift that cultural objects/formations take - in D&D's case, from 'that thing teenage boys do with dice' to 'that one heroic-fantasy game.' There's no longer anything ineffable about it in the public's eye.

What's lost is religious content.

Initial reaction to the first 200+ pages of Sex at Dawn.

The data in this book, fascinating and counterhegemonic as it is, could just as easily have been marshaled to support a book arguing, say, this:

'Monogamy is arguably the oldest extant human cultural tradition - nearly as old as agriculture or the stationary village. Its utility to technologically-minded humans is difficult to measure, but the astonishing productivity and exploration of monogamous societies certainly suggests that monogamy has been immensely useful.

'In the last 100 years, however, cultural traditions like monogamy and monotheism have come under intense scrutiny and challenge, and like monotheism, monogamy would seem to be on the wane in the modern world - or at the very least, undergoing a catastrophic transformation in which fundamentalist monogamies and emergent "non-state" alternatives compete for resources, just like their equivalent theisms.

'We dismantle the "biological" arguments for human monogamy, while recognizing its totally self-evident status as sensible cultural/behavioral adaptation, and tentatively suggest modifications to human monogamous practices, including relaxation of the strictures of monogamy itself.'

But of course that book wouldn't sell. Instead they've written a scattershot, snide, airily generalizing, unfunny, self-important book: well-researched, I believe, but filled to the brim with dipshit rhetorical questions and insinuations. It's not an argument for the utility of polyamory - it's a collection of evidence for that argument.

The book's rendering of evolution strikes me as cartoonish. In particular I'm appalled by the authors' disregard for the evolutionary importance of self-organizing optimizations like monogamy, and for their thuddingly 'biological' (and oddly deterministic) treatment of human sexuality. Their dim view of marriage is also a hackneyed Euro-cliché - how bohemian to carry on and on about the stultification and soul-deadness awaiting anyone stupid enough to explore a single long-term sexual relationship!

I need to think more about this (and to finish the book). I see why polyamorists are so excited about the book, though: as if modern polyamory were a return to an ecstatic Eden - excuse me, a savannah - of sexual-intentional purity, more 'natural' than modern monogamy. Blah, blah, blah.

Something tells me A General Theory of Love would be a tremendously useful corrective to this book's overreach, even as Sex at Dawn is a vital corrective to the overreaching lunacy of fashionable ev-psych.

* * *

And I have to set off this comment: the authors imply that clerical child-rape is a result of sexual repression - i.e. if those priests had only been allowed to fuck adult women/men they would never have raped those boys. This view is contemptible, and I desperately hope they're not so vile as to believe it. A child molester isn't picking children as targets for abuse from the societal leftovers after being denied grownup sex. If celibacy the only (or main) problem behind clerical child-rape, why isn't there an epidemic of Catholic priests impregnating their parish secretaries?

The book isn't that bad, on the whole. I hope I've mistaken their intent.

The High Priestess.

The image of the earth-mother-goddess is central to a lot of New Age mythology, hence the attraction of this figure today, but the High Priestess has another, more straightforwardly formal role: she twins or mirrors the Hierophant and the Magician, the former by her role as religious leader (though the Priestess focuses worship and knowledge in a somewhat non-priestly way), the latter by her 'guarding the Mystery' posture. The Waite-Smith Priestess is seated between the pillars Boaz and Jachin, straight out of the Temple of Solomon, but that's not of much interest to secular readers; neither is the now-familiar Egyptian drag, nor the cross, nor the sephiroth beyond, except as Generic Religious Such-and-Such for Good Measure.

In the Marseilles deck she's a straight-up female pope, i.e. Pope Joan - the one who snuck in under false pretenses, penetrating (in a nice image-inversion) the theretofore exclusively male Catholic mystery-cult and inadvertently dropkicking the whole 'papal infallibility' schtick.

Indeed, the 'High Priestess' name seems to be an 18th century solution to the problem of earlier tarot decks depicting a female Pope. Folks do get touchy about their religious iconography, modern occult/New Age types not least among them. That's part of the appeal of the nondenominational 'High Priestess' name: it cancels out the reader's private religious baggage, leaving a Choose-Your-Own-Inner-Adventure activity behind. Which is part of the point, you might say; though you might again say otherwise. If the tarot is an autoanalytic tool, better (I guess) that the card float free of religious-historical specificity; on the other hand, no one complains about the Kabbalah nonsense the way they complain about the Catholic nonsense.

Which is to say, the tarot is embedded in a set of interlinked historical discourses, continuities, and controversies, and knowing about them can only help.

So maybe I should reconsider my dismissiveness and antipathy toward the Egyptohebraichristianity of the whole thing.

I love this version, which features THE POMEGRANATE VULVA OF KNOWLEDGE, complete with hoot owl.

Actually I love everything about this version of the Priestess trump, from the surprise-filled 'Tarot of the New Vision.' The solemnity and nocturnal/oceanic vibe of the Waite-Smith card remain, but the praying women 'backstage' nicely invert any 'power behind the throne' image: they're not skulking, they're in deep ritual devotion. Wild birds, ripe fruit, the moon, the sea, nuns, waves lapping on a lonely beach: the priestess's job is to sit quietly and know, and to offer aid to petitioners. Bit of the Virgin Mary in there. From memory, Catholic boy, take it away:

'Remember, o most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection, implored thy help, or sought thy intercession was left unaided. Inspired with this confidence I fly unto thee, o virgin of virgins, my Mother. To thee I come, before thee I stand, sinful and sorrowful. O mother of the Word incarnate, despise not my petitions, but in thy mercy hear and answer me, AMEN.'

And so a little of the ol' pagan flavour emerges from the ol' Catholic image-structure; we forget that part of what pissed off the Protestants was Marian/saint worship, the may-as-well-call-it polytheism that makes Catholicism such a nice fit in Latin America...

Behind every strong woman there are...more strong women.

* * *

Alright, so she's the Tree of Life and so forth. (Vulva!) Keeper of the Temple. (Vulva!) Smith paints her robes ocean blue, soft folds falling, foaming wavelike. (Vulva!) Pomegranates (vulva!) decorate her soft curtain (vulva!) which conceals the mystery between two pillars. (Vulva!)

There's a theme here but I'm not sure what it is.

* * *

The Priestess kicks off the run of portrait trumps: first (least?) in a line, you might say. Robert Place's tripartite trumps schema seats the Priestess in a group of four ordered earthly powers (papess/queen/king/pope), which are very early stages/obstacles between the Fool and his apotheosis. (Is there a Dante's Divine Tarot, with earthly figures populating hell, symbolic transformations populating Purgatory, and celestial matters marking the way through Paradise?)

In most renderings she's all alone, waiting to dispense wisdom like a supporting character in a video adventure game. The Gaian Tarot deck extrapolates the Priestess's role to 'women's wisdom' in a pretty straightforward way; I'm reminded, or prompted to think regardless of the facts, that the wizened old crone/young priestess combination has a certain cachet that old/young male dyads aren't usually afforded. I have a sense that combination old/young male characters don't usually appear in myths, that it's one or the other, but mythical women are age-switching this way all the time. Is that true? I can't remember, can only feel it, but I wouldn't be surprised to find I feel it wrong...

The Priestess is a worldly figure, a repository of some power. The King and Queen get theirs from royal heredity, wealth, a mercenary army; the Pope is appointed by God (kidding!); but the Sacerdotisa has to sit alone on a beach (or a Delphic cliff-cave) inhaling hallucinogenic fumes and devoting herself to the esoteric, the divine. Threshold of revelation and all that.

(The role of High Priestess in Angels in America is split, ironically-appropriately, between a young married woman and an old crone: Harper and Mother Pitt share Average Joe Pitt, and act to restore some balance in the wake of his departure. Mother Pitt comes back down after her orgasmic ascension, though; I can't remember whether Harper ever returns to earth. Maybe she just gets on a plane? Mustn't they land, in time? But why?)

The Bechdel rule applies to the tarot deck: it's not serious unless two women talk about something other than the Fool's Journey. Well, there you go: Three of Cups in Waite-Smith, check. I like that the New Vision deck restores an interpersonal dynamic to the Priestess. You can imagine the three women taking turns as Priestess, like the guardians of the Temple of Offler the Crocodile God...

* * *

In the last hours of my wife's labour with our son, I'd have sworn that there were 10,000 years of women gathered in the room with us. It was a holy feeling, and such oceanic feeling, not its (imaginary) referent, is what the card depicts: the Priestess isn't hiding anything from the petitioning Fool; rather, he needs to understand that her wisdom resides precisely in her acts of devotion and community. The women who guard the temple are the secret. To be a servant, even when alone. You can't possess a Mystery.

You come into possession, or rather it comes into you, through submission. The first step is not-willing-to-remain; what stronger symbol, for a young male Fool, than a woman whose authority matter-of-factly disrespects the border between the sacred and the profane?

So come back, finally, to the Asia-drag, the Hebraic mumbo-jumbo: they're there precisely to signify ideational wildness, the long-forgotten and -overlooked tributaries that once fed the river that is Approved Faith. The tarot's value is secular, I insist, but the cards emerge from an extremely Catholic 15th century culture, and were refined by Waite et al. at the turn of the 20th century in England. The iconic polyphony of the cards is part of what matters, not because the crescent and star trigger a specific memory or opinion in you, but because they yank your symbol-reading out of any simplistic religious course. Everybody else's god-ideas are as wrong as yours, and as scary; but there she is on the shore, and she sees something. The moon, if nothing else. But then when did you last look, really look, at the moon?

If it were a carburetor or a glass of 7-Up you'd still have to answer the same question. When did you last look hard, and why not since then? Once you authentically give a damn, you're...well, you're still a Fool, but oh the places you'll go...

The Magician.

Above his head the lemniscate; in his hand a candle burning at both ends (wand + flame); on the table before him the ceremonial offices of the magician: cup, pentacle (coin), wand, sword. Flowers bloom all around, red roses and white lilies. His robes alchemical red and white. The first of the major arcana; as avatar of the querent or reader he stands for the pursuit of wisdom - illumination from above dispersed below, per Waite's own reading - but the medieval Marseilles deck, Waite's model, casts the magician as a conman, a fraud: false knowledge as obstacle to the soul-development whose attainment is the goal of the narrative embedded in the major arcana.

Crowley and Waite have a young Magus: the Fool cleaned up and reporting for duty. A cartomantic Mary Sue story. Crowley actually gives us three Magi, ranging in aspect from the foolish acolyte to the wise all-but-god in Eastern drag.[*]

Note that Crowley calls the young Magus by his old name: the Juggler.

The tarot is generally lumped in with 'occult' matter: UFOs, spontaneous combustion, the Illuminated Seers, all that. But while plenty of New Age pantheist narcissists follow Waite, Crowley, and the rest down a rabbit hole of self-referential hokum, a tarot deck differs in nature and purpose from, say, a David Icke book: whatever the aesthetic value of a given deck, the tarot is an actually-existing tool that works best without any magical or fortune-telling baggage. Indeed, it deserves to be taken seriously as a narrative/experiential medium, a channel for solitaire image-play and story/worldbuilding.

But then there's the Magician. Which means there's Magic in there somewhere, and the trouble with magic is that no one can agree on what it is, how it works, or how seriously to take it. Which is a problem, because nearly everyone who's ever lived has believed in magic.

* * *

Assume the Magician can't do anything with that wand but point it at things and look silly. Assume the robes are just a costume, the flowers need watering, the sword is dull, and the cup is empty - or bears the faint tang of noontime wine. (Just enough to loosen me up, is all. Enough to soothe the nerves a bit...) And no, he doesn't have the infinity symbol floating over his bean.

What's left, when you strip any 'supernatural' elements from the scene? The pursuit of hidden knowledge through ritual devotions and the systematic alteration of consciousness. The machinery of self-dissolution and -expansion. (But I repeat myself.)

Y'know, the motto of Aleister Crowley's church was:

THE METHOD OF SCIENCE - THE AIM OF RELIGION

The modern tarot community retains some of the old spiritualist gobbledygook but pretty much none of the obsessive inverse-theological esoteric rigour. Even trustworthy historian/designer Robert Place allows his sober-minded Tarot: History, Symbolism, Interpretation to devolve into lunacy about the Higher Soul interceding through the cards. (Of course Place also cuts Aleister Crowley and his influential and popular Thoth deck from the book entirely, probably out of spite; that should've clued me in to the silliness to come...) Place's book is dead solid on matters like the western European origins of the tarot and its roots in popular media like the medieval trionfi, but his card-by-card exegesis of the Waite-Smith deck can't hope to compare to Waite's mock-intellectual carryings-on, never mind Crowley's own visionary weirdness.

Of course the more historical detail you offer, the more comparative perspective, the clearer it becomes that the tarot is just a deck of cards with four symbolically-freighted suits and an allegorical parade of trumps, not a conduit to Aetherial XYZ or what have you.

Maddeningly, the tarot community exists quite happily on the fringes of narcissistic/palliative (vs generative, exploratory) unreason. But insofar as occult such-and-so provides any entrance to wisdom, it's through the smart occultists' ironic self-reflection. Waite's Magician is deadly serious but young; Crowley's might not know what he's getting into but he's totally immersed in it already, smiling because of what's to come. The Deviant Moon deck smartly gives us an old-fashioned jester - 'the juggler' indeed - with Crowley's several-armed cod-Hindu look, still uniting the four spheres of magical inquiry but clad in makeup and a jester's cap. (And there's an audience behind him, isn't there? Or are those shadows all his?) Only the Waite-Smith treatment is wholly earnest, and even then Patricia Colman Smith's drawn figure has a bit of a smile to him. Hard not to think it's coming at someone's expense. None of the New Age's syrupy earnestness here.

What occult scholars had/have going for them is an appreciation for the immensity of the past; the Revealed World is wider than their own skulls, which is more than can be said for the Aquarian comfort game (or its paranoid mirror image, the conspiracy that's invariably out to get YOU, of all people). If magic is gonna stay halfway magical, it's got to do more than make you feel good - or bad.

That's one lesson to be taken from the various tarot Magi: whether as developmental stage (Crowley), self-congratulatory arrest (Waite-Smith), or bitter joke (Deviant Moon), the Magician's purpose is to establish a feeling of Strangeness, of possibility, which can only be realized through concentration - immersion. You're going to have to change track: that's the warning. No point telling the Fool, who can fly, after all. But the Magus, the first figure in the allegory of the trumps (Crowley's Atu, the major arcana), demands a shift in perspective which can only come through intense, unself-conscious attention. No fear of looking stupid in those alchemist's robes. No shame is delighting in the jester's trickery. No modesty about appearing nude up in (metaphorical) outer space. Are you Mercury or not, for heaven's sake?

Or without the mythological freight: would you like to see an old trick anew? They've been pretending to cast spells for millennia now, after all, but everyone knows that magic never works; so why in the world would they bother? If so-called magic doesn't accomplish anything, then what's it for?

The Magus says: some folks do this for a living, did you ever wonder how? Or why?

Which is the point of the entire exercise. Wondering how and why. Just wondering. The tarot can't fill you with information - there is none - but any genuinely 'divinatory' act affords us the opportunity to ask the universe something in a Weird posture. There's nothing to take seriously, but if you try to take it (not yourself but your self's willfully bizarre opposite) seriously, you win: you transform, if nothing else, into a questioner. The method of science, the aim of religion.

On the other hand, it's only a deck of cards. This is pure, arrant nonsense. We're dead serious about silly things here. What do you suppose that will accomplish? Well: why do you ask?

[*] Clarification: The three Magi actually include two preliminary drafts rejected by Crowley, included in posthumous issues of the Thoth deck.

The Fool.

He'll do for a start.

A young man walks beside a cliff. Fancifully dressed, holding a white rose in one hand and a satchel and walking stick in the other. Feather in his cap. He's high up in the mountains; the sky is yellow, like his boots, and the sun is white. A small white dog nips playfully at his heels.

The Fool: the zeroth card. Beneath numbering, if you like, or maybe beyond it. Or the zero is (let's leap) half a whole story - two Fools side by side would turn zero into infinity, right? But then we'd have to come back to the Fool at the end of our work, and wouldn't it defeat our purpose to end up back at the zero?

Well. Depends on our purpose, I imagine.

The fool who follows him

If he knew the danger he was in, he wouldn't step so close to that cliff; on the other hand, not knowing, his dangerous path affords him an extraordinary view, which more prudent folks might never experience. You'd think the dog would tell him what's going on, but unless my perspective is all screwed up (who's isn't?), the dog is even closer to falling than the Fool...

...and we should note, here, that while the Waite-Smith deck contains plenty of dancing or running figures (even the hobbled beggar on the five of pentacles), the Fool seems to be taking fairly measured steps. He's not cavorting, in Smith's rendering, he's just out for a nice relaxing walk. Y'know: on top of the world.

My poor fool is hanged

The same fella ends up in some trouble, if you ask me, when we get to major arcana XII. That's what comes of rushing in, Fool. But as usual the cards resist simple moralizing: the Hanged Man doesn't look too upset about his plight. Same unkempt hair, similar goofy outfit. He's lost his dog friend, unfortunately - maybe Fido jumped off the edge, forgot to fall, and ended up on a different mountainside altogether? - but the Hanged Man has gained, among other things, a halo. Trade outer peace for inner? Why not.

Part of the suggestive power of the Waite-Smith cards is their eerie silence: you half expect a mournful flute melody to be the only sound accompanying many of the images, and even kinetic images like the Tower (major arcana XVI) have a terrible moving-stillness to them, as if frozen in stone. Robert Place (hereafter RMP) notes the Golden Dawn's use of the white rose to symbolize 'silence and rebirth'; I don't think Lear's fool picked a rose before climbing into his garbage can to disappear (only for Samuel Beckett to put him to work again, 350 years later), but I well remember his prophetic farewell, and the unexplained and disconcerting silence that followed his divination.

I wonder what Smith's Fool is hearing, up on the mountain. Hey fella: if anyone hands you a couple of stone tablets, save yourself some trouble, and dance the other way. Holiness is lightness, as you well know (or will find out, either pre- or post-Hanging), but messenger for authority is a mug's game.

Still and all, I wonder. A strong breeze might blow him right off the cliff, him and his little dog too; or else give him a funny idea. The Fool's job is to speak truth, after all, and it has to come from somewhere. I wish there were a second card, the zero's twin, final Fool, walking on a storm-blasted Heath behind a bent and broken old man; the latterly fool would have the same spring but lessened, the same stick but laden, the same rose but wilted; and his smile would have faded. In its place: knowledge of the dark. (Knowing better, first of all, than to turn away the sun.) Not to be too literal-minded, here of all places(!), but that darkling wanderer would make thuddingly clear what the 'narrative' arcana depict: a Fool's training in Foolishness.

Another zero isn't zero: each circle's every turn takes time, which is the name of all stories.

A vision.

Tell me a story.

In this century, and moment, of mania,
Tell me a story.

Make it a story of great distances, and starlight.

The name of the story will be Time,
But you must not pronounce its name.

Tell me a story of deep delight.

--Robert Penn Warren, 'Audubon: A Vision'

Here's to the crazy ones.

The Macintosh was sort of like this wonderful romance in your life that you once had — and that produced about 10 million children. In a way it will never be over in your life. You'll still smell that romance every morning when you get up. And when you open the window, the cool air will hit your face, and you'll smell that romance in the air. And you'll see your children around, and you feel good about it. And nothing will ever make you feel bad about it.

But now, your life has moved on. You get up every morning, and you might remember that romance, but then the whole day is in front of you to do something wonderful with.

--Steve Jobs, 1994

Laugh 'til you're grey in the face.

"To choose order over disorder, or disorder over order, is to accept a trip composed of both the creative and the destructive. But to choose the creative over the destructive is an all-creative trip composed of both order and disorder." --Malaclypse the Younger

i should be floating

Do you get up up up?
Clouds stop and move above me
Too bad they can't help me
What is the right way?

Do I float up up up?
When I stop and look around me
Grey's where that colour should be
What is the right way?

Old glasses clinking and a
New order's blinking
and I -
I should be floating but I'm weighted by thinking

--Animal Collective, 'What Would I Want? Sky'

yesterday freewrite warmup.

[The initial subject here is Finnegans Wake. For 'allways,' read both 'always' and 'in all ways/directions.']

rifling through the wake as through a burnt-out memory attic or grandmother's vault or safe or the home of a deposed king; or walking slowly hallway by allways through a museum corridors opening up to exhibitionisms aplenty. it gets into your wording like riddley but you knew that. it makes old ideas calamitatiously anew. noob i mean newborn. it makes ideas borne-again i mean to say you have to hold them. what but what. what but you open up a book and it is a consciousness machine. you are a consciousness machining it is a nother mechanism attaches to you inside outwise. human brains and literary minds interoperate. genre is part of the API of literary mind-melting i mean melding i mean to say magic exists and its language is Once Upon a Trembling.

hard to pull back from that oceanic language unnerving. to bricks and periods and colons. pull back the view the camera widens the words walking about lose focus dissolve into the sea again. up close you see the bacterial music of it. exactings at the paleoatomic scale old notions new forms. the formlessness that total surrender permits. what words are for is giving structure to time that might otherwise pass inchoate in the interstices i mean through the bodies i mean among the desires of human separated beings. strange estrangement. i mean i mean you are writing your way into a state of alltogetherness ideally. but what if you cant.

we all know magic exists because it scares us. i mean to say the fear is real and what else can there be. ??? question but what else must be in order for this life to be this life, to match our expectings? fearfully we make fire. fearful make words for fire, watch burn, we wish for words for the working of fire into the cells of living things; wish for a straightforwardness of cause to accommodate our infinitude of question. i mean we'd like to think we wouldn't ask questions have no answers.

fear of magic is fair, is fireful speech. our trembling invests the words with potent power. precisely the confliction of what can not possibly against the collapsing layered border surface of what we clearly perceive clearly. that interspace, that innerworld. thereby we come to believe in what we make. magic is there because there is magic because we made that place for that thing. i was saying last night able to isn't the premise for doing. doing is the journey to being able to able being. i mean to say the acting that is the body the world is not the consequence of the being that is readiness. we are ready when we act in becoming. you can't readily move you movingly be. you are made not was. you are making. magic is maybe the realizing of the act that hides behind being. it is to see be as do. but if that seeing is magic, if the saying is its operation Magical Words i mean to say if the spellcasting is to see the die has been cast, if it is Acceptance --

i think magic is true living, an end to self-deception. but then the self is the deception. but to see yourself as merely seeing, to feel the presence i mean the presents i mean the presentness i mean that-the-present-is-all-that-allways-is; to do as totality, in authentic presentness -- there you miraculously are. there you truly are. true things are miraculous. nothing is miraculous. see but both ways are; both are ways of being; allways find every expression.

no but every language is constraint. yes but every language is pattern which is expansion. pattern multiplies what it orders; pattern is collision. you think you are repeating as if an old idea. no but you are yes, you yes are, yes you are singing the oldest song. magical is taking up old songs as responsibilities laid by. merely to allways be everything. please it is only chance. there is no shame in a universe in which all things are all things and nothing can be held against anything because everything being is allways acting. the one thing that can fill up the universe and deny nothing is Song.

Lovecraft's 'cosmicism': another quick take.

For Lovecraft's 'cosmicism' to attain full flower, he'd have had to give up his (meta)fictional conceit of Ancient Races Lying Dormant - it's a philosophical copout. If your supposed philosophical point is that humanity is insignificant, it's enough to pit man against Nature, or Thermodynamics, or Chance...but that wasn't Lovecraft's point; or at least that wasn't where his heart resided. His emotional connection to his 'cosmicist' philosophy must be located in his obsessive return to his mythology of malign forces from Beyond. In other words, while 'The Call of Cthulhu' is a brilliant work of fiction in its own right, I'd say 'The Dunwich Horror' is closer to the center of Lovecraft's imaginarium, because its stakes are more accessibly human. Its horror might be invisible, but it can at least be directly felt.

Critics' dogged insistence on HPL's writing as 'cosmic horror' obscures the fact that it's horrific only to the extent that it happens to human beings - which is of course the opposite of 'cosmicism' if you take it halfway seriously, wuntcha say?

Adam Roberts, Yellow Blue Tibia (2009): Third response; really the third part of a long response that's actually taken me weeks to formulate. No, not 'formulate.' I mean 'expel.' This is how it ends, folks: THE BIG FINISH.

First bit. Second bit.

Now then:

Permit me to quote myself for a moment:

The interesting thing about ghosts is that (1) they're not real but (2) we've built immensely powerful belief/practice structures around them and (3) those structures become autonomous from the original claimed belief and no longer require dogmatic belief in the existence of ghosts. The experience of 'seeing a ghost' is absolutely real, but that doesn't mean it's an encounter with The Spirits of the Dead or any such thing. And yet, and yet...

UFOs - excuse me, 'alien spacecraft visiting earth' - are almost certainly not real. Can we all agree to that? There's no compelling evidence that visitors from another planet/dimension/realityline have ever visited earth. Same goes for fairies, deities, sentient dinosaur-accountants, books that change their contents every time we look at them, 900-year-old Jews, or really memorable and heartbreaking puddings.

Yet we some believe. The question 'Are aliens real?' isn't particularly interesting; we can't answer it now, we're really not likely to ever answer it at all, the answer's probably NO anyhow, and either way it really shouldn't affect our day-to-day lives one iota. (What if there are Martians gadding about on the next planet over? Unless they have nefarious plans for us, aren't we likely to just keep on fiddling with our iPads and ignoring our children? Isn't that in fact the most sensible thing to do from our perspective, if not necessarily our kids'? Westerners can't be bothered to learn about alternative ways of life from the fucking Buddhists, what makes you think we'd pay any attention to Martian wise men?) (Or is the point only to co-opt Martian musical traditions for young white pop stars?)

Better to concentrate on the effects of insistence upon incorrect claims, or 'belief in "false" things.' Doubly interesting given the increasingly shrill ongoing debate about the place of atheism in a slowly-coalescing global culture that's probably gonna have to grow up and get pretty seriously pluralist soon, despite the maybe-impossibility of pluralism in a belief-sphere as complex as 'are "gods" real?' which, c'mon, no, that's totally ridiculous; though now you mention it mine aren't half as ridiculous as yours...

* * *

There's an early scene in Yellow Blue Tibia where Skvorecky, compulsive ironist, finds himself lecturing to a room full of UFOlogists who interpret his repeated insistence on aliens' nonexistence as sly avoidance of the appearance of dissension; i.e. they take him for a staunch, brave believer. The scene is funny and almost physically uncomfortable:

'There are no such things' I enunciated clearly, 'as UFOs.'

A murmur went from table to table, but not of dissension, or outrage, but rather of dawning comprehension. Somebody clapped.

'No,' I said, becoming annoyed. 'You are deliberately misunderstanding me. Do not transpose my negatives for positives. I am not speaking ironically, or in code; I am stating a simple truth.'

'The truth is simple,' somebody boomed, from the back of the cellar. 'It is the attempt to cover up the truth that is complicated! That cover-up forces complications upon us!'

'That's not it,' I said.

'Well said, Comrade Skvorecky,' said somebody else. 'No! -- we must hold fast to the dialectical! We must negate the official version!'

Things get more ridiculous from there: a 'squeaky penetrating voice' carries on about rectum-probing (ahem) and so forth. It's a good short scene, nicely capturing the queasy feeling of hopelessly incompatible belief-systems colliding, with a frisson of isn't-Soviet-life-weird for the Western reader. Totalitarianism is daft: check (funnily).

But YBT isn't actually about late-stage Communism; rather, it deploys familiar 'satire on totalitarian society' elements in service of a story that's less 'about' than around its thematic Stuff. Maybe that's a little of Kincaid's point, or Rich's: ARRRRRR's busy intertextuality isn't meant to support a unitary narrative, it's supposed to produce 'a kind of conceptual disorientation of the familiar' (Skvorecky's description of SF), which the bookish among us (professors of English lit, say, or SF critics) will find both comfortingly familiar and uncomfortably stuffed - plus some third thing, which let's call 'Lyotard's pomo sublime,' just for kicks. Making a home in Dislocation.

(That last isn't a bad description of 'falling in love,' I think. Which is one of the stories in YBT, of course, though I never quite felt it.)

YBT presents several forms of self-contradictory or 'magical' thinking, which are ultimately metaphorized in the 'realityline' explain-o-dump in the last chapter. Maybe I'm being too hard on that section; the finale is, after all, a depiction of one variety of Rapture, so it kinda has to come at the end, or rather the end has to come after the explain-o-dump. Skvorecky sees the nature of all things, which is Possibility, and is made keenly aware of the existence of the Great Big Supernatural; so he's crazy from then on, you might say, because his thinking-frame can't be mapped onto everyone else's. His private time is out of joint, though from his perspective ours is; cursed spite, everyone thinks his novel is a memoir. The I'm crazy/everyone else is crazy shift is nicely handled; the final page, 'Radiation in that sense' and so forth, is actually sweet.

But the Dora-Skvorecky 'love story' isn't a depiction of a growing romance so much as a metaphorical rendition of love as, simultaneously, endless possibility and inescapable destiny: wild swingy orbits that collapse in time onto one another. Crash. In a book where hyperliteralism is comedy and irony is trustworthy and synopsis is sinister, where everyone seems to be repeating half-remembered lines from one of a dozen different other novels from which they've been beamed (radiation in that sense?), I found it hard to take the love story seriously. 'True love' is, on top of everything else, a dangerous myth: like UFOs, lots of people claim it's real and will always be real and is the realest real YES but then they just one day grow out of it, or fuck their boss or something. Plus while love-amidst-totalitarianism is mere reality for the poor saps living under a Lunatic Regime, it's become for us coddled westerners a handy metaphor for the heroism of romance, which I've got my doubts about.

Dora the spherical cultist deforms spacetime in order to provide an a narrative image shaped just like our image of true love; that's at least one too many abstraction layers for me, sorry.

* * *

Yet Skvorecky is a human being: the best thing about Yellow Blue Tibia. Wonderful.

* * *

I guess what I'm saying here, or trying to say, is that YBT spends much of its runtime in a state of maddening epistemological betweenness, artfully depicted (as when Coyne is/isn't killed by a UFO, or the incompetent cop manages to dialecticalize his own self(!) by synthesizing Good and Bad cops into just a Scared Guy); but working against the novel's generative uncertainty is the attraction (inevitability?) of definition, such that the last few pages give us concrete answers to The Alien Question, plus a bowtied love story, so that even as Skvorecky says 'I did see a UFO...at the same time -- I didn't,' the fictional suspension that's carried through the novel finally gives in, and we did, after all, read a book in which The Alien Question is answered in the inventive-affirmative. A new kind of Yes to an old sort of question.

All of which makes for a satisfyingly unsatisfying novel, whether you've gone in looking for a linear narrative about Soviet SF writers or have somehow convinced yourself, as I somehow did, that forty thousand realitylines could be left open at story's end, unwoven, uncollapsed. ARRRR's depiction of rapturous all-seeing ('My feelings were of wonder'?!?!) doesn't quite spin me up to wobbling whirling velocities of psychedelic spin; not for nothing did the first part of this 'review' refer to his 'bone-dry conceptualism.'

The best part of Yellow Blue Tibia, for me, was the feeling that it might not have to end at all, that forty thousand threads might just run out, fragile and frayed like poetry (or love?), and be seen in retrospect flapping in the (meta)fictional breeze. That idea of multiplicity. The best part lasted almost to the very end. Not bad.

I quite liked the book. It's a strange, oddly-shaped, idiosyncratically-paced thing. Have I even talked yet about the interregnum in what might be heaven? Stalin is there and confesses that he's not a human being. It's like opening a fortune cookie and finding a 100-line lyric poem in the middle. Maybe the best part of the book, though that contradicts the previous paragraph. The best part of the book (third try) is its Strangeness, which is achieved through setting, character, plot, and above all (this being, I'm told, a novel by ARRRRRRRR) High Concept, of which some people claim he is 'the king.' Hell of a thing to be king of! It's also a funny book. Best part of the whole thing, except for the other best parts.

* * *

THE END.

............OR IS IT

Two sentences and more on Mitch Horowitz's Occult America, which I finished reading today.

1) It'd be a lot more important - though a much harder sell - if it were a history of ideas rather than a gallery of Compelling Personalities (Joseph Smith, Manly Hall, Blavatsky, Cayce, Pelley, et al.).

2) The last hundred pages are far, far, far less compelling than the rest, as Horowitz subtly (and not-so-subtly) shapes the narrative to separate what seem to be his own occult beliefs from less pleasant/respectable currents in the genealogy of American mystical thought.

* * *

Horowitz's book is a decent introduction to a particular strain of American Irrationalism, which isn't a bad name for our unofficial national religion: we 300 million are proudly and deeply credulous, shockingly historically ignorant, and hooked on a centuries-old mythology of American self-determination (darkened by the identity-instability of a migrant nation cut off from all its geo-historical sources). Horowitz is an engaging guide to the links between mid-19th century American mythohistorical prophetic writing (e.g. Smith's Mormonism), Spiritualist psychiana, the civic-minded narcissism of New Thought, and 20th century self-help culture from Norman Vincent Peale to the 'self-actualization' subgospels of the 'New Age.' And for occult trivia from Lincoln to the Beatles, it's a fine, easy, breezy read - even when Horowitz gives in to the urge to show off his research cred, as in the uncomfortably defensive and shallow 'occult+fascism' chapter.

But the book falls short as a critical work, mainly for reason #1 above: it's a widely-read enthusiast's anecdotal tour rather than an analytical work, long on 101-level introductions and disappointingly short on serious historical context. Its brief epilogue (on New Age thought) leaves a sour taste as a result. Here's the last page:

For all of its inroads into mainstream life, New Age became a term (and sometimes an epithet) that for many serious people connoted nothing more than a softheaded jumble of spiritual-therapeutic remedies or bromides. But the New Age did, in fact, have a core set of beliefs and a definable point of view. Most people, thought schools, or movements identifeed as New Age from the 1970s through the earlytwenty-first century shared these traits:

1. Belief in the therapeutic value of spiritual or religious ideas.
2. Belief in a mind-body connection in health.
3. Belief that human consciousness is evolving to higher stages.
4. Belief that thoughts, in some greater or lesser measure, determine reality.
5. Belief that spiritual understanding is available without allegiance to a specific religion or doctrine.

Most twenty-first-century Americans, whatever their background, would probably agree with a majority of those statements. To a very great degree, occult movements and personalities had introduced those ideas, in some of their most popular variants, into American life. Whether the occult changed America, or the other way around, certainly this much is clear: The encounter between America and occultism resulted in a vast reworking of arcane practices and beliefs from the Old World and the creation of a new spiritual culture. This new culture extolled religious egalitarianism and responded, perhaps more than any other movement in history, to the inner needs and search of the individual. At work and at church, on television and in bookstores, there was no avoiding it: Occult America had prevailed.

This slipshod question-begging gobbledygook retroactively imbues the whole book with an unpleasantly self-justificatory quality: in lieu of a historical argument about American integration of 'New Age' beliefs, Horowitz provides a brief laundry list of supposedly widespread beliefs - phrased so vaguely as to be meaningless - and uses this list to claim that even more vaguely defined 'occult' beliefs had 'prevailed' in the U.S.

Prevailed over what? Horowitz never does explain. The book's final movement is full of that kind of stuff: Horowitz's treatment of Carlos Castaneda involves (1) sensibly dismissing his factual claims as fabrication and (2) gushing over his books' value as 'allegories on [a] path' of 'religious or wisdom tradition. The resonances,' Horowitz breathily reports, 'could be remarkable.' At moments like this, the man's credulousness shows through, distorting his reportage, and it's hard to forget that the dude believes not only in ecumenical generosity but in the existence of leprechauns.

The whole book isn't this bad, thank god. Horowitz goes off the rails when discussing mid-20th century occult believers like Vice President Henry Wallace and 'mystic healer' Edgar Cayce, as part of his quiet book-length effort to demonstrate not just correlation but a straightforward causal relationship between occult beliefs and American progressivism/ecumenism (guess which is the cause). But the early material on Spiritualism and its discontents, and especially the link between early-20C self-help texts and loopy 'New Thought' pseudoscience/pseudophilosophy, is pure gold. The line from Peale's 'lemons into lemonade' cheeriness to our 'lemons into locally-grown organic lemonade' self-help culture is certainly important. And I bookmarked a whole mess of material about autodidacts, self-made huckster/loon/wisdom-adepts, and sui generis critico-poetic writers like Manly P. Hall (whose Secret Teachings of All Ages, which I picked up from the Cambridge Library on Horowitz's recommendation, really is every bit as comprehensively brilliant as it's made out to be). It's important to remember that every great creator, from Jesus to James Joyce, has had a bit of a larcenous touch - and Americans are unique only in the flavour of our celebrations of such generative poetic theft. We like being lied to - never moreso than by preachers.

[I wish Horowitz had spent time on the feedback loop between his favoured metaphysical claptrap and mainline American Protestantism - Billy Graham belongs in this book, without question. Imagine if our schoolchildren learned that kind of spiritual-historical context!]

But as enthusiastic as I was/am about Horowitz's well-presented early material, I can't recommend Occult America's back half (from the Henry Wallace chapter onward) as much more than an extensively annotated bibliography. In fact the book's list of sources is a wonderful thing, and it'd be a worthwhile project for someone to organize his list of primary references into a proper bibliography. Or - hey, it's the 21st century, right? - an amazon.com wishlist.

In short, it's a decent book, or 60% of one. But for a first course in American mythoi/metaphysics, you might be better off rewatching O Brother, Where Art Thou? and paying close attention to the lyrics...

It rarely stops.

I should warn you: these are not easy to watch.

Watch them.

The trouble with having a recreational interest in 'occult' or 'magical' thinking...

...is that the folks committed enough to produce the great body of Occult Literature today do not, for the most part, know when to stop, but they so often lack self-awareness about why they keep going. Reading Mitch Horowitz's Occult America - a breezy pop introduction to a particular strain of irrational/mystical thought in the American popular tradition - is a maddening experience for this very reason, among others.

Horowitz's book is a mishmash, and that's fine; it's an introductory text, after all. And to the extent that he has a thesis, it's a pleasantly obvious one ('occult belief is a vital part of the American identity'). But in talking about his work he's happy to go from 'Joseph Smith's apocalyptic/prophetic writing is part of an important American homebrew-religious tradition' to 'I think leprechauns are real and ouija boards connect us to another universe.' His catholic approach to the occult is good'n'proper, but his credulity is lamentable, and it bleeds into the book. (He's wrong about the sooper seekrit Masonic origins of the Great Seal, for one thing, and that's how he leads off the book!)

The book is free of the rapturous Weirdness of Charles Fort [indeed Fort's not even in the index!], because Horowitz doesn't (can't?) play the complex ironic-epistemological tonalities that were Fort's whole schtick. He's like a Disneyland tour guide slowly letting on, in unguarded asides, that he thinks Mickey is a real mouse.

[UPDATED the following w/r/t ARRR's strong point:]

The interesting thing about ghosts is that (1) they're not real but (2) we've built immensely powerful belief/practice structures around them and (3) those belief structures become autonomous from the original claimed belief and no longer require dogmatic belief in the existence of ghosts. The experience of 'seeing a ghost' is absolutely real, but that doesn't mean it's an encounter with The Spirits of the Dead or any such thing. And yet, and yet...

'And yet, and yet' is the essence of properly ironic Weirdness, and Horowitz's entertaining book is totally free of it. Siiiiigh.

pleroma, hermetica, gnosis, et cetera.

In lieu of a review of M. John Harrison's The Course of the Heart, which I finished in my now-traditional sitting spot in the parking lot of the Burger King off Route 28 near Union Square today (the air too cold for windows-down, the sun too bright for buttons-buttoned):

* * *

pleroma and so forth.

gnostic divinity. the unification of man and woman into some greater being, more complete, more capable. this seems clear to me; obvious. though i suppose the man/woman schema is a naive sexual predication: how could the ancient gnostics have known about the limbic system? it's so clear now that humans can't live separately from one another, though some are more able to regulate their thoughts/emotions than others. but computationally speaking ALONE you'd need (for real happiness) the capacities revealed by connection, by interface. 'interference' in the holographic sense: a pattern, exposed to light, reveals a literal (though i suppose we have to say 'virtual') new dimension. we reconstitute this additional dimension by looking into the play of light in the pattern. human beings pattern for one another and become each other's hidden dimension. i suppose i mean you reveal something that is the rejected or essential or just another part of me, and i for you, but then this thing exists yours-within-me, vice versa, and this dimension exists in the space between us, at our interface: we let light in to scatter in fragments (waves breaking upon seaworn stones, sounds variegating as they carom, baffled) and that is our capacity for illumination. not the world, see, except insofar as the world is the plane we define. our interweaving lines constitute a new space at angles we could never have perceived on our own.

parallax IS inventiveness of course, of a simple kind. love, i think, is holography: reality's new spline-curved z-axis irrupts from us. there are no straight lines in nature, except for the terminal fall of one object toward another. (but don't we simply fail to perceive perturbations at a distance? isn't it more right to say we curve toward the earth at last, rather than 'falling?')

i think the old teachers had it right: there is a new world you can make, it is a form of magic to give birth to this world, it exists in the erotic or confessional or confrontational or simply (not so simply) honest interstices between us, and its name is Love Truly Given. stars boil away in the cold but i think maybe the birth of an ascendant shared mind between two minds (do i mean 'making love?') is the wildest and most dangerous release of energy that possibly exist, because it can contain all others. i mean imagine. nothing can contain, only share. the world-between, the Innerworld, can only be given, not possessed. that's the difference between joy (which is love) and death.

* * *

hermetica and all that.

not puzzle-stories but a kind of cognitive recipe book. the esoteric tradition is about possessing (and exerting) a will-to-knowledge, which i suppose is easily enough perverted into a will-to-power. well nothing draws the bruised social misfits and maladapts quite like the promise of doing magic spells.

* * *

gnosis and other such.

self-knowledge as the highest goal of a human being. well you have to work with what you're given. we seem to have the strongest selves so it makes sense to build a faith around self-analysis. you might call zen 'peripheral gnosis': knowing your self without acknowledging its primacy or essentiality (which acknowledgement actually constitutes those things - zen is very much a philosophy of peaceful combat with the self).

we live in a world of objects but experience a universe of perceptions/interpretations. it makes no sense to begrudge that fact. but then self-knowledge will always be incomplete unless it's part of a greater body of knowledge of all things (perceptions, interpretations) and through all things. if you aren't complete unto yourself then your self-knowledge can't be complete either; by extending your self through the imaginative parallelization and exponentiation that is...well, i suppose it's love...by this extension you extend too your capacity for reflection, the fidelity of your self-image, which is the self! the self-image is the self-object, and it is available to us both in private reflection and through the imaginative gift of our loved ones.

when you love all things - seeing that you are inseparable from all things - then all things are revealed as aspects of your greater self, and you have that much more to work with, self-image-wise. you can be high on yourself but can never really love yourself until you live the fact that you'll live some and then die (and live no more).

the more freely you love, the more loved ones you have. that's not terribly complicated but we tend to choose otherwise.

Repost: Issue #0.

[Originally posted 5 Dec 2006. It's not exactly subtle but it wasn't until I wrote the thing that I noticed the depth of the parallelism between the guys I'm writing about and the guys I'm pretending to write about.]

Bunch of skinny Jewish guys - real nebbish types - out on the fringes, they're immigrants, they're feeling left out. Mayer and Goldwyn their names are not; we're talking about just tradesmen here. Just this bunch of friends and they're looking around and thinking, Well shit. Politically speaking times are not ideal, which for the Tribe has historically been something of an understatement. Has there ever been a good time to be Jewish? Everyone else has had a goddamn shot at ruling the world. We get books called How the Irish Saved Civilization, which has got to be the Special Olympics of civilization-saving at a certain level.

Anyhow, so these schmucks, they're looking out at the world and thinking, Y'know it's hard out there for a pimp Jew, know'm sayin'? You know what we need? We could use a good myth right about now. This is how bookish types see the world. Men of action, they see trouble on the horizon, Euro types with weapons and yellow stars and bold Teutonic noses or what-have-you, and they say, 'Ma, hand me my .45, I'm going hunting.' Only they drop the final 'g' in 'hunting' because that shit is tough. Nerds, not so much. Have you seen The Matrix? Lord of the Rings? Pootie Tang? These guys are thinking, Let's inspire our people. Hard times a-coming or whatever Bob Dylan says. We're looking at a longer, darker long dark night of the soul here, and the soul wasn't exactly sunbathing before. The old stories ain't cutting it. It's a new era, financially not so swell, hell maybe we can make our names this way. They get cracking.

And what do they cook up? The superhero. These guys pool their talents - a little text, a little art, some long story arcs, a few one-off adventures - and they're building this story around a character they can really believe in. Because they relate to him. Alien origins ('cosmopolitan' used to be an anti-Semitic slur, they say), secret identity since he can't let everyone know his true nature, he's this figure of mercy but basically he's got superpowers, right? And for once he's not using them to, like, obliterate everyone. He's saying let's keep law and order, right, and preserve this way of life (because it's so fucking great so far) but let's also inject a little love. We've got a working girl for a love interest, OK. The young disciple who wants to be Just Like the Hero. And Ma and Pa will be these real humble nothings, nobodies, because when you come from good stock it doesn't matter what you have, right? Only what you believe. Just typing it out I feel like an asshole, it's so silly. So this guy shows up in town ready to help everyone out and he's Sleeper-era Woody Allen, yeah? And then he starts performing miracles, really tossing them off, but he never forgets his mama. And you can check in later for more adventures. The best part is, these guys are taking these old archetypes that have existed for ages, they're going back into Scripture even, and basically writing a powered-up version of themselves into this pantheon of heroes.

It's the single greatest and least subtle Mary Sue fanfiction in the history of literature. All it needs is Captain Picard falling in love with the lead. (Of course Picard didn't exist then either.)

Of course they can call the individual stories whatever they want; they know ultimately they're gonna be more important when they're collected, that someday they'll have their own fanboys poring over every minute detail of the text, looking for concordances, trying to convince themselves that this 'foreshadowing' on page 15 wasn't just some kind of lucky accident at the printer's. So the short story arcs get individual names, so the collectors can talk about 'em and drum up enthusiasm. And the series? They need something catchy, a real trademark. I mean eventually you have to think in terms of sales. They go to the well and bring back, of all things, a scholarly term. Like something out of philosophy. Slap it on the cover in a bold font and you're good to go.

The tragedy is, these clever kids gave birth to a myth that emboldened generations of young kids through rough times. And they didn't see a goddamn cent of those residuals. Creators' rights? They hardly even existed at that point.

Poor, poor Matthew Mark Luke and John. That New Testament series wouldn't fly today of course - not enough straight-up tits-and-violence for DC or Marvel, too many loose plot threads - and honestly I don't think HR can even cut you a check if you don't have a last name. Their corporate overlords just take all the credit and leave the writers in the dist. You'd almost forget it all started out as just a goofy bit of nebbishes-winning-a-holy-war Old Testament fanfic, like NaNoWriMo for the children of Israel.

(Hey they didn't treat the Superman guys so well either, now that I think about it.)

w e a v e

the light through the Weave is all things. the name of the Weave is all things. the false form of all things is written in the Weave. the true movement of all things pulses through the Weave. we remember into the Weave. we forget within the Weave. we transform under our own auspices by our own energies according to private fluid illogics, and the Weave binds us all things to each of all other things, and we are one another. we are becoming each other.

Brown for the win, again! This guy keeps surprising me.

Scott Brown:

"I support family planning and health services for women," Brown said in a statement. "Given our severe budget problems, I don't believe any area of the budget is completely immune from cuts. However, the proposal to eliminate all funding for family planning goes too far. As we continue with our budget negotiations, I hope we can find a compromise that is reasonable and appropriate."

The Planned Parenthood cuts are political hackery of the lowest sort; nothing new from the completely spineless Boehner. Good to see our new Senator pointing out the obvious. Next step, Scottykins?

Christ, I don't recognize myself anymore!

I just read a column by someone who has dubbed herself the 'Teafaerie,' over at Erowid, and GOD HELP ME right now I think it's kind of fantastic. It's about sex and psychedelics, and it is a fine piece of writing, and ends with a kick, so there you have it. Go on.

While you read, I'll sit here thinking about what in the world could have happened to me, that I am who (what?) I evidently am. Then I'll see what I can do about this awesome capacity for judgment and negativity that I've come to identify with my Self. Fun, huh.

Simple exercise.

Here's a simple exercise you can try at home.

Look at your Twitter feed, or your friends' Facebook updates, or a local newspaper, or indeed any shortish list of people.

For each one in turn, try and imagine what he or she wants to accomplish today; or what he or she was feeling when writing that Twitter/Facebook update; or what he or she sees out the window upon waking or going to work/school. Easy, right? Just try to imagine his or her feelings. Try to feel them for a moment.

OK? Now try the same thing with, say, the national news. Or the blog or newspaper column of someone you vehemently disagree with or dislike. Or an ex-lover, or -spouse, or -boss.

No sweat, right? I'm sure you had no problem with any of those things. Lemme guess: even when arguing with someone over blog comments or email or Twitter, you still do exactly that, the very thing.

There is no such thing as a 'supporting character.'

Parpety.

Every morning they were counting every thing to see if any thing ben took off in the nite. How many goats how many cows how many measurs weat and barly. Cudnt stop ther counting which wer clevverness and making mor the same. They said, `Them as counts counts moren them as dont count.'

Counting counting they wer all the time. They had iron then and big fire they had towns of parpety. They had machines et numbers up. They fed them numbers and they fractiont out the Power of things. They had the Nos. of the rain bow and the Power of the air all workit out with counting which is how they got boats in the air and picters on the wind. Counting clevverness is what it wer.

When they had all them things and marvelsome they cudnt sleap realy they dint have no res. They wer stressing ther self and straining all the time with counting. They said, `What good is nite its only dark time it aint no good for nothing only them as want to sly and sneak and take our parpety a way.' They los out of memberment who nite wer. They jus wantit day time all the time and they wer going to do it with the Master Chaynjis.

--Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker

Boring.

When someone says 'That's not interesting' he is always making the almost-parallel admission, 'I can't believe you're interested in that.' Which is to say, 'I don't understand you.' To insist that something is boring is precisely to refuse to empathize with those who think otherwise. Have you already 'solved' the problem that your neighbour now struggles with? Very well for you. But your possession of that answer changes nothing about the struggle itself - his or yours. The process of answering is meant to produce, not an answer, but an answerer: a learner. Curiosity and adaptability, rather than knowledge, are the 'eventual goals' of education, which in any case is ongoing, lifelong, and (except for the bit about everybody dying at some point) anti-teleological.

This might be a path to wising up, I don't know: whether a story is good or bad, interesting or boring, its subject matter 'fit' or 'inappropriate,' depends solely on your own willingness to give in to its (il)logic.

Literary value is density and intensity of implication. There are still shitty books and movies, under this definition, and thank god, because I'd hate to have to stop writing negative reviews, and I bet you'd hate to have to stop reading them wouldn't you now haw haw haw.

Exhaustion.

At the point of exhaustion - having spent the day just on the respectable side of teary hysteria, after a near-sleepless night - I ask if Agi can start the baby's bedtime rituals without me. 'Of course,' she says. 'I can use the crib (to keep him in temporarily).' She starts up the stairs. This reminds me of something. I call up after her, 'We played in the crib today.' She makes a noise of pleasant surprise.

At the end of a day's despair and confusion, the mere thought that I might have done something right is a new wound, and I do cry, a little. As usual, the possibility that I'm not the terrible person I imagine myself to be is too much to bear: too big, too new.

Fatherhood has called for the abandonment of nearly every idea I've ever had about myself 'as a person.' Letting go of my precious self-conception is the hardest thing I've ever done; merely keeping a defenseless infant alive seems trivial by comparison, not least because it is literally the most natural thing in the world.

Old again new again: Divination.

[Originally posted 12 October 2009.]

I brought two tarot decks with me to the coffee shop thinking I'd use them for 'inspiration.' The 'Deviant Moon' deck has gorgeous evocative steampunk art; the other is my beaten old standard Waite-Smith deck, which is something like the template language of tarot - and more importantly, the default visual identity of 'the' tarot in the popular imagination. Strange how that happens: visual analogue to 'Kleenex' synonymizing with 'facial tissue,' though perhaps a more potent prompt to symbolic connection. People think of fortune-telling charlatanry when they think of the tarot, which is reasonable. But I think I'm looking for something else.

Well...or I tell myself so in any case. 'Inspiration.' The idea is to jangle loose some idea or association. Basically to buy idea-connection on the cheap. I have these cards with me because I wish to feel connected. Like reading lists of 'tips' in a hunting magazine, thinking you're learning how to be a hunter.

You have to respect the action of the thing. To buy in. Perverse, isn't it, that 'buying in' has become synonymous with 'having faith.' Well, I bought the cards. You surround yourself with the apparatus of belief. It's so satisfying to approach sacred places without rigor. Can you think your way into sacred experience? Yes, I suppose so. But you have to treat contemplation itself as sacred, or your space, postures, your food intake, the books you carry...you have to believe in some kind of magic. Which is to say, again, that you have to respect the action of each machine.

Else end up in its teeth, right?

Now, tarot cards don't tell you the future. Nothing does. But then divination is just a form of perspectival shift: Help me reencounter this strange moment. Divination pursues not certainty but possibility. Like the Sacrament of Reconciliation, it can bring about a change of stance, but the only change or manipulation that occurs in the activity is emotional, perspectival. You might say: aspirational. You sit in the confessional ready to engage with a new possible self and are 'transformed' (solely) to the extent that you're prepared to realize that possibility through action. Works in a mechanistic universe or any other. The contour of the experience - hush, prostration, air close in, fear, the imaginary presence of the Overseer - has been refined over the thousands of years. Institutional art. It's meant to produce an effect; it works.

Some people like naked pictures of the elderly. Some kneel before the dead. Some eat mushrooms or drink chemicals and see colours; others make bright music in dark rooms thinking it will save them from something they won't name. Some fuck for sport. Nothing will stave off death but irresponsibility. (The Fool dances heedless at cliff's edge, and alone among the Arcana he bears no number.) The purpose of the thing isn't the thing itself.

'Just...pardon the expression, but I love...no, I love the attraction. Or I love my own reaction.' (Jamie Laurie)

Can you show me the future? Yes. You will react to some arbitrary prognosis, thereby revealing some hidden desire.

Well. That's the one 'correct' prediction available to the diviner. But it's also false - in the sense that it can't produce the sublime moment of dislocation that art (even the art of 'fortune-telling') affords. Self-consciousness violates the integrity of the experience. There is no ironic divination, no uncanny self. We are our own baseline; the more we insist upon the primacy of our own experiences, the easier it is to 'get a grip' on things - and drag the moments yet-to-come down to our level.

But you know as well as I do that I didn't plan to work with the cards.

Opening up to new experiences is hard work for some people. The more I withdraw into myself, the more elegant my systems of justification (i.e. 'philosophy') become, the more detailed my analyses of 'divine' or sublime experience...and the further I get from experiential understanding of the divine. Which is to say you can say correct things or true things about God but not both, and one of those forms dies with us, is dead already. Truth is vitality.

I did come here to the café, yes, rather than staying in the apartment alone. But my new headphones are 'sound-isolating.' You can imagine what that means, but maybe you can't imagine what it feels like. It's absolutely lovely. Everything becomes backdrop (to me). All these folks animated separately from this fast-moving images in my head. They lose detail. I'm just as alone here as anywhere else I might disconnect myself through music. I lose the swirling movement of the air here. I forget what the heat of a body is.

And the cards? One box is out on the table, upturned so I can't see the art on the box. One is stashed safely in the bag. I'm free from the suggestions they might make. I don't wish to be seen (as). The last thing I want is for the future to behave irresponsibly.

The Fool. From the other deck - the unnumbered Major Arcane, or rather the zeroth card. The thing to which we return. Entropy rises as intention is washed out. Not order but tension. A maximally entropic universe is wholly known, as is a perfect crystal (entropy zero) - paradoxically, we can as easily describe an utterly dissociated universe as we can a rigid unitary identity. The fool only seems to surrender; he is his own ruleset. How can you walk across the canal? By not sinking. Why does your skin glow? I've never tried to hide it. Shouldn't you be sleeping? I can never know. As entropy rises we lose less and less information to abstraction.

The universe has opinions. It loves symmetry and chaos. It loves order and dispersion, dissociation, eruption.

The Fool and the Magician want very different things: perfect experience (meaning total) and perfect action (meaning pure). Total control is a fool's dream, of course. We have opinions too. And remember that it's the magician who wears the jester's cap; the fool may as well have stepped out of bed. Or floated upward from its warmth, becoming dream. Perhaps.

This is what I wanted to avoid: unencumbrance. How strange.

Old man in a smart cravat, 3/4-length raincoat. Halting steps and careful hand motions. Keep your hands from disappearing. (The moment you become unself-conscious you disappear. The Magician knows that that's death; the Fool sees that it's life. Old age makes fools of us, thank God.) He disappears up the stairs, comes back. Books sticking from a well-worn leather satchel on his right hip. He leans left against its weight, rubs his hands together. I think of the room as cold or warm but I know it's a mistake. I bring energy or leave it behind, or share it, or feel it. You find the strength to surrender or don't. I can't imagine how cold he must find each room to be, what it's like to see skin fade to translucence and transparency because of fucking time...he knows 'hot' and 'cold' are measures of his tolerance, has earned the right to give in. I'm obligated to feign warmth. So many years to go.

The inside of Judgment's trumpet is very definitely not a living thing. Cold metal. Noisemaker. See? Look at you. You've run out of noises to make on the cards' behalf. A credulous person might give in now to...not 'to the cards,' fool. To the possibility of something new.

The cards are pocketed and away. What was I looking for? Doesn't matter. On my errand I found:

The Fool. From the other deck - the unnumbered Major Arcane, or rather the zeroth card. The thing to which we return. Entropy rises...

A credulous person might give in...

OK.

Incredulity is something you choose. 'I couldn't believe it!' Well, that was true before it happened. The moment of decision comes to pass no matter how you've prepared. 'Incredulous' is not 'how you feel' when something happens you can't believe. It's the posture you adopt, crab-walking toward a junction or possibility, shoulders hunched. How comforting it feels: limbs drawn in against imagined cold ('cold' is a feeling, not a measurement), every atom's position known and controlled. 'In control' is a feeling, not a place. An inch more space between the feet of the Fool and the face of the cliff won't buy safety. That's what the Fool knows. Safety is a feeling, not a possession. You can't buy into it anyhow.

True things can't be bought.

Dwelling on the surface of the cards while disrespecting the action of association - imaginative creation - is laziness. Alternate form of the same statement: typing isn't writing. Or: only lovers know the hidden name of love. Or: religious belief is the myth that makes faithful action possible; faith is authentic action.

Or if you're into the whole 'brevity' thing: Deal.

That doesn't seem like a good ending but if I don't give these things away they will bury me.

If I had a chance to interview Keanu Reeves...

I would say,

'Keanu, I loved The Matrix like everyone else when it came out, but in my mind those three films haven't all aged equally well. If you're able to come back to them in an unbiased or unself-critical way, do you still get the same charge out of them that you did back in the day? A lot of folks talk about the "ideas" in the films, especially the first - do those hold up as well as they seemed to when you read that first script? What were those films really about, to you?'

Then I'd drop on him exactly how they've aged differently, in my eyes, and he'd go all wide-eyed and then say 'I've never told anyone this, but I feel the same way!' End of interview. Happy Keanu.

* * *

So how have the Matrix films aged differently, Monsieur Banks? I'm so glad you asked, Disembodied Voice.

The original...

...is nowhere near as complex as it was originally made out to be. It's essentially a cyberpunk Star Wars with Luke the Gnostic hacker feeling his midichlorian oats and entering a literal 'larger world' with the help of Morpheus the Afro-Buddhist Jedi tutor (w/prequel-style millennial zealotry) and Trinity the post-HIV geek-fetish Leia. The Baudrillard is halfway there - Morpheus and company do have a real world to escape to, which despite its abjections is more ruggedly 'authentic' (not to mention sexually/racially harmonious) than the Matrix - and the culture-jamming netrunner madness of the final act is still no more sensible than the whole 'You can jump really far but can't "fly," and you can dodge bullets but still need guns to fight' conceit.

The Wachowskis' cinematic universe was a lot less complicated before the sequels, but that's precisely what people remember so fondly: the black-and-white ur-story, without all the weird futility-of-messiahs stuff in Reloaded and Revolutions. The ontologico-anarchist good guys were good because they were cool and vice versa (shades of those Brit-punk comics like Transmetropolitan, The Invisibles, Doom Patrol, V for Vendetta(!), Sandman...); the bad guys were correct about the vileness of the human race but it didn't matter because they wore suits and killed civilians and so were Very Bad; the unit of cinematic currency was the Cool Image; the stakes were readily-understandable Free the Captives stuff; the idea of a Machine World was distant and cold and (thank our gods) easy to take as just an allegory for, y'know, non-conscientious consumerism or Internet addiction or something.

In other words, the first Matrix movie let us off easy. Like the first half of Fight Club, it made an interesting point amid flashy visuals, and didn't seem to press the issue too much.

But the Matrix sequels do to the original film's hero narrative what the Project Mayhem section of Fight Club does to that movie's streamlined, hilarious Fight Club story: they reveal it as hollow.

Reloaded

Everyone thinks I'm an idiot for liking Reloaded best of the three Matrix films. The marks against it are obvious: the 'Burly Brawl' is pointless in plot-mechanical terms; the Keymaster bit is as silly as the first flick's lobby shootout; the subterranean rave (which my friend Farhad calls the Endor Jam) seems ludicrous when played against the Neo/Trinity sex scene, which ends up seeming weirdly racist(?!); the ending makes no sense even after the third film; the dialogue is even more portentous and overwrought than in the original, particularly during the Architect and Merovingian(?!?!) scenes, and - oh yes - Monica Belluci's character makes no sense at all (except purely symbolically, about which more later). It's too long, too stuffed, it ends with a clear strong choice for the hero (save the girl or save the world?) that half the audience couldn't understand because of the insane sequence that preceded it, and it doesn't stand alone at all.

It is, in short, very much a middle chapter, and the Wachowskis allowed it to sag out of a desire to get everything that's ever interested them onscreen.

But.

Even if you're not talking about Meaning (which we're gonna), you've gotta give Reloaded credit for having:

* the trilogy's cleverest fight scene (the tabletop duel);

* its most jaw-dropping action sequence (the freeway chase/fight);

* its most interesting, varied kung fu (the villa fight);

* its most unsettling, morally complex revelations and allegorical material (the Architect scene);

* its most gleeful comic-book material (the Burly Brawl);

* the rapturously weird/sexy Endor Jam;

* its sharpest criticism of the viewing audience (the bowels-of-Zion talk about man/machine codependency);

* and of course the half-realized Zion, neither utopia nor dystopia, which squanders more story potential than most screenwriters will ever come up with.

What's most impressive about Reloaded is the Wachowskis' willingness to move the satisfying self-contained hero narrative of the first film forward, well beyond the triumphant (literal) Superman moment at the end of The Matrix, into a murkier realm. The key revelation of the Architect scene - indeed the entire trilogy - is that The One is no messiah at all, but a bug in an early version of the Matrix which the machines have repurposed to keep the human remnant hopeful and docile. The job of The One is to reset the social order to something more controllable.

In other words, the central problem of the Matrix trilogy isn't that the machines have enslaved the humans, it's that the whole Hero Will Save Us narrative is a load of bollocks. Neo can't 'save' the humans, he can only take part in the codependent (more diplomatically, interdependent) machine/human cycle.

The first Matrix sequel really did offer 'The Matrix but much bigger' - yet critics and audiences bitched and moaned about it, seemingly unable to make heads or tales of its story. More recently you saw something similar with Avatar and Dollhouse - admittedly problematic texts whose main goal was precisely to problematize familiar genre narratives. I think the hard part for audiences wasn't 'plot holes' (nobody gives a damn), nor muddled acting, nor silly dialogue; you find those everywhere. The hard thing for a summer-action-flick audience in this country is to walk into the theatre expecting violence/sex/thrills/reassurance and instead receive an ontological facepunch.

Revolutions

I won't defend The Matrix Revolutions in basic story-craft terms. The interminable 'defense of the dock' sequence, pointless fighting-on-the-ceiling shenanigans during the otherwise bizarrely enjoyable Club Hel sequence, and hand-wavey Bane-is-Smith-made-flesh material make thrill-ride pleasure impossible. At least Reloaded moves quickly down its spiral of eroticocinephilosophical lunacy; Revolutions is the only Matrix film that's incorrectly structured and edited. So I can understand anyone who had a bad time watching Revolutions, OK?

But it's a glorious mess - the most ambitious of the three films, the most unabashedly beautiful, the wooliest in metaphysical terms, the most unsettling, the one that crawls right up its own semiotic ass and sets off a Weirdness Bomb just because it can. It's the Southland Tales of the trilogy, the chapter that reveals the pair of sequels as a wildly ambitious maybe-failure, miles and miles beyond that tidy little gem of a first chapter. Together they're a flawed five-hour masterpiece.

Consider:

* The climactic fight - the all-time fistfighting-superhero-sequence champion in any medium - puts Neo in the position of trying to save the Matrix and preserve machine hegemony.

* Morpheus is wrong about the One and the Prophecy, and ends up just flying around with his ex-girlfriend and apparently sabotaging the defense of Zion.

* Near the film's end, Neo and Trinity fly up above the clouds in order to escape the squids; the resulting crash kills Trinity; it is the closest the movies come to religious rapture; that blissful escape lasts less than five seconds.

* Smith evolves (literally) from self-aware policeman (Man in Black) to suicidal demigod, and tries to destroy the Matrix because he doesn't know what else power could possibly be for.

* The 'happy ending' is a sunset made by a computer program, all unnatural purples, set to a weirdly morbid 'triumphant' orchestral cadence.

* The Oracle and the Architect end up hanging out, telling jokes, talking about the inevitable failure of Neo's bid for peace. This is the trilogy's last scene.

* Neo 'wins' by dying, not by winning the fight, and he's given a hero's burial...by a bunch of creepy flying robots.

* The defense of Zion is shown to be necessary, necessarily futile, and merely a repetition of a cycle the machines have planned for - yet the machines feel compelled to carry on with the charade of war.

* The movie opens with Neo in Limbo, chatting with three computer programs about the meaninglessness of the word 'love' and - get this - receiving a kind of panhuman (pantheistic?) enlightenment from applets named Sati, Rama-Kandra, and Kamala. (I've linked to that essay before. It's tremendous.) This scene is dead serious and absolutely necessary to the film; near as I can tell, pretty much no one cares about it at all, save for the Wachowkis (and the linked essayist).

* When Neo leaves Limbo he's no longer 'human'; this is a necessary step for him to become the 'hero' required of that moment (every moment, really) in human/machine history.

* One last tiny thing: the third film also includes the gnarliest couplet in the trilogy. ORACLE: 'You're a bastard, Smith.' SMITH: 'You oughta know, Mom.' man, when I first heard that call and response I just about jumped out of my seat.

* * *

Like Avatar (or American Psycho, and to a lesser extent Fight Club), the Matrix series sets out to work with familiar action-thriller cliché, but eventually drifts into a new kind of story, far less comforting and familiar than what was advertised in the theatre lobby. Avatar is the most deeply, unsettlingly transhumanist film yet made; American Psycho exempts its serial killer from blame so as to damn the happy worker bees he consorts with (i.e. us); Fight Club viciously criticizes the male-empowerment/adbusters sloganeering it starts out praising, then gives over to delirious, irrational (and so authentic) self-dissolution and -transformation. The Matrix and its sequels look like comic book hero narratives with Japanophile/cyberpunk shadings, but their 'Gnostic Tao of Baudrillard, leather-clad' bricolage gives way to total immersion and subversion. The Wachowskis weren't messing around - the story of The One was never just in fun.

The negative reaction to Revolutions had something to do with its overt (pan)religious symbolism - the cross of light, the sun, Hades, Rama-Kandra, all of it. As we walked out of the theatre, one of the people I first saw it with called it (if memory serves) 'another Jesus myth.' It does look that way, doesn't it. But you needn't quibble with the specific sectarian affiliation (Jesus is the usual scapegoat for criticism of the 'Oh look, another messiah' variety) to see that the Matrix trilogy as a whole is very much about 'normal' humans becoming superbeings. 'The One' is just a role that someone has to play, and to enter that role requires radical self-awareness (and then self-dissolution); it's a mindgame, not a genetic inheritance.

(Folks who complain about the 'hereditary kingship' stuff in Star Wars forget that for all Luke's gifts, he still has to undergo training from Level Zero in order to become a warrior-monk, and even then he's barely able to defeat a crippled old man in a plastic diving bell in a swordfight. His birthright still has to be earned, to some extent, even if it's still (y'know) a birthright. In any case The Matrix goes a lot further to dispel any such notion.)

Not for nothing is 'The (Final?) One' a computer hacker. That was part of the appeal in the first Matrix film - his hipster nerdiness - but by the third installment audiences had completely forgotten about Thomas Anderson ('Doubting Son of Man') the coder. That's a shame. Reloaded is all about a geek-turned-golden-boy accepting his new responsibilities, then finding out the game is rigged; in Revolutions he realizes he can never begin to meet those responsibilities on his own, that his best friends are counting on him to go quietly on their behalf...and as a final indignity, in order to do so he has to foreswear every idea he has about the universe, except that it deserves (for some value of that word) to keep going. It sure isn't an 'empowerment' story in the banal, familiar self-help sense.

* * *

The ending of Avatar is a good deal Weirder and more ambitious than it's been given credit for. Avatar might not have deserved the Best Picture Oscar - particularly given its pedantic, hamfisted screenplay, which totally loses its nerve at a crucial point - but its story is a lot deeper than its familiar plot. As I wrote in an essay elsewhere:

The prominence of the transformed Jake Sully in [the climactic combat scenes] is a necessary dramatic fiction - protagonism, hero-fixation, is a shared feature of every human culture's stories - and it leaves the impression that the climax is about Jake doing great things (on behalf of 'natives,' as it happens). It's the film's most disappointing feature. Yet in the end, 'Jake' (willingly) disappears, is revealed as a fiction, a provisional identity. The best and noblest thing Jake can do, in Cameron's world, is be part of an extended biological family that extends beyond visual resemblance or (blah) ideological affinity. He is very definitely not a 'steward' of his new environment - a thumb in the environmentalists' eyes, there - he's simply a participant in it, with no illusions about 'self-sufficiency' or human destiny.

[...]

Remember that the Na'vi don't win the film's epic final battle; they're nearly wiped out in a foolish headlong cavalry charge. Then the birds and rhinos arrive, taking orders from dandelions. The moon itself defeats the humans. The Na'vi aren't even 'top predators'; they're just part of the system. They don't 'like' it that way; they simply accept it, as we accept air and hunger and time. In Cameron's rendering they are correct in this acceptance...

In other words: the glowing dandelions are characters in the film, the Na'vi are only one small part of the Pandoran ecosystem, and Cameron really does want us to take the notion of continuity-of-consciousness seriously. These aren't just pantheist notions, they're transhuman ones, anti-anthropocentric in the unfamiliar extreme.

Naturally our 'brave' film critics - who'd rather analyze than create, for the most part, even if they can convince readers they're creators - felt the need to complain about the 'familiar' plot of Avatar, reducing its strangeness to 'dippy Eastern/environmentalist platitudes' and the like. It is indeed a platitudinous film, but its story isn't.

Here's a little thought experiment:

Imagine a version of Avatar set, not among the Na'vi, but among the dandelions.

Same story. Same morality. Same 'theology.'

Somewhat lessened commercial appeal, though, wouldn't you say?

* * *

I mention Avatar to illuminate my broad argument from a different angle: truly Weird filmmaking makes mainstream audiences uncomfortable, but we're willing to accept some degree of radically anti-essentialist material in our movies so long as we don't have to think about it at all. The spectacular visuals of Avatar and the Matrix sequels are reason enough to go see (and enjoy) those films, but viewers are uncomfortable with intimations of life's absolute meaninglessness (or more diplomatically, its dramatic inadequacy). That's why we get the love stories and endless macho breast-beating in those movies - or the kid in Spielberg's War of the Worlds, or such a high dose of boys-makin'-trouble hijinks in Fight Club, or so many killings and product descriptions in American Psycho. The messages of these films are too unsettling to be administered directly; they require extra genre-comfort and spectacular padding.

The same goes for Spielberg's extraordinary A.I. Artificial Intelligence, which ends audaciously with a tribe of telepathic anthropomorphic TV sets making an imaginary Mommy for the robo-child protagonist to hop into bed with as compensation for him waking up in an arctic hellscape devoid of hope or life. Audiences weren't exactly over the moon about that film, but the kid sure was cute, wasn't he! And my, isn't that Jude Law in a zoot suit?!

The Matrix films depict a world in which: our messiahs are the puppets of machine-masters who really just want to reach an 'acceptable' balance of human slavery and illusory freedom; the You Are Awesome prophecy of the first movie turns out to be hokum; love not only gets you killed, it's not even strictly 'love'; the only authentic humanity left on earth is dark-skinned minorities having underground techno-orgies to celebrate/dismiss their impending deaths at the hands of the whiter-than-white Architect (sidebar: has any action film ever celebrated African-American actors and energies like the Matrix movies?); the robots and computer programs end up having lives just as complex and beautiful as the humans they've enslaved; happy endings (remember the sunlight) are unattainable because they're (1) not really happy and (2) not really endings.

This world is explicitly an allegory - or rather a computerized simulation! - of our own.

And in the end, the good guys give up their essentialist anthropocentrism to either live alongside the machines and computer programs or (in Neo's case) become one.

Oh, I guess we didn't notice on account of all the exploding and karate kicking and the techno soundtrack. Well. So you can hardly say it's our fault, right?! Right!

* * *

None of this would matter if films like The Matrix and Avatar weren't making points about 'human' existence that are correct and important, i.e. worth thinking and fighting about. It's not like they're the only films that do, of course - Jesus! - but when millions and millions of people are hearing and watching stories and most of them are either innocently missing or explicitly rejecting the scary points they raise, we should be concerned. Textually speaking, this is the low-hanging fruit: these movies are out there, everyone's seen them, they're easily read. They're a lot of fun.

Ideawise: what could possibly be more important? We're talking about what 'human' means and suggesting that nearly all our answers are not only wrong but dangerously insane in consistent, even programmatic ways.

* * *

I've got no Big Finish here, sorry. Maybe there's a Big Continue to come?

Depression.

Depressed folks often insist that they 'don't matter,' and lose the will to act. In my experience (both personal and among depressive friends), depression manifests not as melodramatic woe but as quiet self-abnegation: you're 'too sad to do anything.' But of course this is just shadow- or inverse narcissism. If your feelings aren't actually important, why must you change your world all around just because you're sad? When you're depressed you misperceive your importance even more dramatically than usual. You are never, ever, ever the 'center of the world.' In the cosmic sense you don't matter one whit. That's (imaginative) freedom if you choose to claim it. Maybe you can't stave off depression without pills, I dunno, but there's a reason doctors prescribe exercise and healthy food and balanced, joyful work/play for folks prone to depression. It's the (an) opposite, not of happiness, but of accepting that your life is only your life.

The depressive's self-denying moping is grounded in a (preconscious!) belief or sense that his self is both damaged and very important. It is neither of those things. You're an animal and no one's watching you. You are safe.

David Lynch speaks true.

I always say, you take George Lucas or Spielberg: They're doing, in my mind, what they truly love. But what they truly love, zillions of people love, so they're multimillionaires. I'm doing what I truly love, but the audience is way smaller. And Don Van Vliet was doing what he truly loved and the audience is hardly there at all.

But it's OK, because if you do anything that you don't love for money or fame, you die. You can't live doing that. It's hollow. It's a joke. So be thankful you're able to do what you love.

--David Lynch, LA Weekly interview

Two things about Ta-Nehisi Coates.

[Started this a little more than a year ago. Added two sentences today and here it is. I've nothing to add today.]

1) He is a spectacular writer and an admirably honest man.

1.5) Even better: he's gonna be even better someday.

2) This -

My Moms once busted my lip after I tried to literally look down on her. I was 13 and had recently grown taller than her, and thus thought I could intimidate her. Heh. I was left singing that old Ice Cube riff, "With a right-left, right-left your toothless\And then you say godddamn they ruthless." My Moms came up in the projects and used to walk miles to school, and miles to church. She spent her summers in the country down on the Eastern Shore. She was raised by Negroes who did not play, and she took the lesson.

This is hard for a lot of people to hear, but in my family, in my neighborhood, and in my community this is what part of what parenting meant. If you weren't feeling the edge of the sword on your ass, then you were responding to the possibility of it. One thing I learned, while touring for my book, was that a lot of people consider this to be child abuse. It really was news to me and ultimately unthinkable. Almost everyone I'd ever known had come up the same way. My book editor would joke, while reading, the manuscript about his grandmother coming up from the South and making him go search for a switch. In Harlem.

Which isn't to say I, or people who came up like me, are without a critique. I smacked my son's hand until he was four. And then spanked him until he was seven. Most of this was about him sucking his teeth at his mother, or some such. We're done with that now, and at least in my presence, he doesn't exhibit that kind of disrespect. When he's staying with my people in Baltimore he doesn't earn any immunity, and he's subject to the same threat of the sword as his cousins. I get the argument against corporal punishment. But there's something elemental in me, that recoils at modern parenting. I was on the train the other day and watched a kid repeatedly say to his father, "Daddy, you're a jerk." Wow. I confess that my immediate thought was, "that kid need his ass whipped."

- is fucked. Not the fact of hitting kids, which is complicated, but the affectionate internalization of this circular logic of violence. Or, no: not violence but bad, stupid pedagogy. Hitting kids is the bluntest teaching method imaginable, and for that reason it's useful in some situations ('Don't touch that very dangerous thing!') and absolutely wrong in some situations ('Don't try to make me feel small in order to get what you want; it will not work'). Spanking and hand-slapping are largely symbolic violent acts - I remember most spanking as a warning rather than a punishment - and I understand why they're useful. Shorthand! (Literally.) But motherfuckers do not put the switch to a child because they're interested in communication - and so they hurt the child's chances of growing into an adult who is interested in (and skilled at) communication. Sometimes it turns out OK (cf. Ta-Nehisi Coates?).

Mostly it doesn't.

What Coates calls 'elemental' is 'habitual.' That's something worth pursuing later, maybe?

readyou.txt

That would be the perfect thing. To obliterate what I suppose is my 'nature' and become some endlessness. Not a thing but the idea of all-possibility. Not just 'egolessness' in the sense of 'lemme share my cupcakes/my work/my ideas/my sexual vulnerability/my blog posts with you,' please, please, but egolessness in the sense of 'there is no me to share, no you to share with, only transference, only this endlessly repeating obliteration and reexperience.' Tip top I guess. Always to be nothing more than transformation. Maybe that comes out as a novel. Or in verse. Or painting. Or I dance on a strip of grass and step onto concrete and decide I'm two bands of four people, one each, and they're talking to one another quietly at first then more enthusiastically and they would say there isn't any 'topic of discussion' but listening we (outside-we-imagined, everyone) tend to think they're (we're) singing songs, reciting magical incantations, solving math 'problems,' I mean really what's so problematic about not knowing everything yet? or just trying to figure out which of the eight gets to walk home, will it rain, what is our home tonight, to whom can we give the love that is listening-presence tonight? Tomorrow? Must we sleep alone? Must that dreamtime be divided between beds, properties, dominions of something like care-apportionment? No. Sleep where you like, you become everyone. Drink this or go without eating that or eat it, dance, there is music you can't hear, you become everyone. The 'one' in 'everyone' is the myth. Everyeveryhow is what it is. Fall asleep with her head on your arm or his breath on your shoulder, or remember to return that book you borrowed and maybe get coffee afterward, or drink all the coffee and sleep Thursday night, you become everyonlywhere. You are a medium of transmission.

Spring.

Now i lay(with everywhere around)
me(the great dim deep sound
of rain;and of always and of nowhere)and
what a gently welcoming darkestness--

now i lay me down(in a most steep
more than music)feeling that sunlight is
(life and day are)only loaned:whereas
night is given(night and death and the rain

are given;and given is how beautifully snow)

now i lay me down to dream of(nothing
i or any somebody or you
can begin to begin to imagine)

something which nobody may keep.
now i lay me down to dream of Spring

--e.e. cummings

Why am I not more excited about this WOW GOSH ZOOM bacterium?

I worry that I've swung from a moral/biological definition of 'life' to a thermodynamically-preoccupied disdain for the idea that life is special in some way, as opposed to just very something-or-other (efficient, complex, etc.). After all, there's a macroorganism that incorporates human beings, steel colossi, entire complex biomes into its memetic material (a 'city'); that sounds just as interesting - and a hell of a lot more complicated, in chemical terms! - than a bacterium that can incorporate arsenic (which all other life sensibly avoids) into its DNA.

I recognize the importance of the find for science as a field (or interlinked set of fields) of inquiry, and I love the knowledge, the feeling, that the frontiers of human knowledge are expanding. But at some point in the last three or four years I stopped believing strongly in the inevitability of scientific/rational expectation - we're deeply invested, as a species and as individuals, in our present belief systems, our precious taxonomies. But life-that's-into-arsenic is no different, in most senses, from life-that-can't-abide-arsenic. None of this matters to a stone; not a moment of today will change the Kuiper Belt's mind about anything; none of the worlds within my cell membranes so much as rustled when the NASA press conference started. Y'know? Not even during the Q&A period!

If you're interested in the news, by all means read about it, love it, give in to what happiness you are afforded (yes, yes, yes!) - but by all means take a moment, or an hour, or a decade, to wonder why one organism that does unlikely-but-highly-believable XYZ has an effect on you that quintillions of equally-unlikely-but-by-now-utterly-boring organisms no longer can. And spare a moment, while you're at it, for the offensive parochiality of considering sugar-phosphate backbones 'normal' in the first place. What's special about life is that it's the thing we call special.

Well.

Or maybe I'm just in a mood?

Leave Hitchens alone, "for Christ's sake."

The suggestion that Christopher Hitchens, now dying of cancer, should 'convert' to religious superstition on his deathbed is cowardly and contemptible - even when presented as a glib little thought experiment:

The contemplation of death must be horrifying for those who pin all on the frail reed of the ego. The dimming of the light, the loss of control, the feeling of helplessly and hopelessly slipping away into an abyss of nonbeing. And all of this without the trust of the child who ceases his struggling to be borne by Another. "Unless you become as little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven." But this of course is what the Luciferian intellect cannot do. It cannot relax, it must hold on and stay in control. It must struggle helplessly as the ego implodes in upon itself. The ego, having gone supernova, collapses into a black hole. What we fear when we fear death is not so much the destruction of the body, but the dissolution of the ego. That is the true horror and evil of death. And without religion you are going to have to take it straight.

[...]

Well, suppose 'the truth' is that we are nothing but complex physical systems slated for annihilation. Why would knowing this 'truth' be a value? Even if one is facing reality by believing that death is the utter end of the self, what is the good of facing reality in a situation in which one is but a material system?

(My emphasis.)

This is masturbatory nonsense. The ego doesn't dissolve at death; rather, among other inner-optical illusions it simply stops being generated by the brain. More importantly (and myopically), the human ego constantly undergoes processes of dissolution and reconstitution, and only the ignorant fear ego-dissolution or -suppression. Everyone who's paying attention understands that deep happiness - fulfillment - more or less consists of ego-dissolution. (Ever been 'lost in a book,' or so 'wrapped up' in some pleasurable activity that you 'forget yourself?') If Hitchens has accepted the materiality of his mind, which after all is something his brain does, then we needn't be suspicious of his insistence on the banality and boredom of death. If you're not lying to yourself about Entrance into Heaven and whatnot, if you've acknowledged the permeability and mutability of your self-consciousness and committed yourself to joyful action rather than literal Self-gratification, then of course death would seem like just another...thing.

But this is all separate from the etiquette matter. Yes, Hitchens has made waves with his articulate, angry atheism, and it's reasonable to talk to him about it. But the media/'critical' surprise that's greeted his ongoing refusal to embrace egotistical superstition is an embarrassment. He has no access to special wisdom except by having lived, been committed, worked hard, offered and received and laboured on behalf of love. Dying is just something you do once, maybe twice if you're lucky; it's almost always an accident; afterward your mind-functionality isn't around to worry about how it went or what's left; and being scared of death is an understandable and perfectly natural human shortcoming, like being afraid of the dark. Such fears are not admirable. How hard is that to understand?

Those who delude themselves so as not to be scared anymore are free to point out that their 'solution' works, if not robustly, but they should at least have the sense not to be proud - certainly not to call such delusion 'philosophy.'

How to tell a story.

'There are times when I spend the whole night thinking about things like, "God, my feet hurt," or "I gotta pay the rent," or "Why can't I get my guitar in tune; it doesn't sound quite right" - I never get past the trivial little bullshit, so I never see the audience, I never see anybody in the band, I'm just locked up in a little private hell - heh, really, man. But sometimes on those nights people will come up to me and say, "God, that was the most incredible music you guys have ever played; it sounded -" And I just go, "What?" I listen to a tape and it sounds amazing and I say, "I don't remember that; I didn't play that," and it's those moments that I realize that my conscious will, the me I know of as the day-to-day me, is just really not very involved in this whole thing in a way that can interfere with it substantially or cause it. It's something that occurs in a mediumistic way, something involuntary. I trust it because I know it's not me. If it was me, I wouldn't trust it because I couldn't dig it; I know myself too well.'

--Jerry Garcia, 1979

Age isn't wisdom. Now OK, but having said that...

"I'm not exactly a pantheist, but I wouldn't stop one on the street and start an argument."

--Robert Hunter

A few moments for several varieties of DNA, including the English one, and my personal bugbear, the fictionality of scale.

Things are interesting if you're interested in them. Think of DNA: we fixate on the fact that by some biological miracle the cells of the human body 'constitute a human being,' the information in DNA passing down through generations like a secret cipher, yet DNA replication is pure accident. The nontelic character of biological processes is probably the central fact in all the life sciences, but in high school we're taught about DNA as a means to an extremely narrowly-defined end at a specific scale, i.e. 'DNA carries genetic info.'

But that's like saying that the purpose of human interaction is to spread bacteria. These are 'side effects,' which is to say effects at a scale we needn't pay attention to - and our focus on them is misguided and harmful in the long run.

Why does DNA replicate? Molecules wanna bind'n'bond. Electrons wanna transfer. In more general terms, (chemical) gradients tend to resolve and balance continuously unless channeled or otherwise interfered with. The machinery doesn't serve the machinist, it just carries on.

From another angle: the fact that information persists under some transformation doesn't have anything to do with information as such - i.e. the 'replicator' function isn't purposeful. Information-preserving transformations and procedures exist independent of any conception of 'information' - which after all is an interpretation of the arrangement of certain elements. RNA 'replication' isn't the act of preserving info content during duplication - it's a process, happily puttering along for much more basic reasons, which happens to preserve what we think of as information. 'Preserving information' is absolutely not the goal of any of the many processes that constitute nucleic acid replication. The miracle of the genetic code (its mere existence!) isn't a miracle at all, it's happenstance.

I belabor that point in order to set up this one, no doubt familiar to readers of this weblog. Ever heard this verse proverb?

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
All for the want of a nail.

Its purpose is usually to get us to pay attention to small things - but its power comes from the oddity of a tiny event producing a huge effect. We like it when bold gestures yield big results - ask every Nice Guy who ever got angry at a Pretty Girl for not falling instantly in love with him over the mixtape he slaaaaaaved over. Similarly, it's uncomfortable to see our little doings reflected on a big stage. ('C'mon, she didn't mean anything to me. It was one kiss. I didn't tell her I love her or anything. You're my wife. You know I love you. And how'd you find out about it, anyway...?') Each revealed secret represents an unexpected/unwanted frameshift just as psychically demanding as grokking that buying decisions in the U.S. can affect military policy in China - or acclimating yourself to the width of the world when all you've known is the womb.

Discontinuities of scale are hard to take - so we work as hard as we can to avoid them. When they happen under controlled circumstances, we do what comes naturally: laugh.

It is of course well known that careless talk costs lives, but the full scale of the problem is not always appreciated.

For instance, at the very moment that Arthur said, 'I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle,' a freak wormhole opened up in the fabric of the space-time continuum and carried his words far far back in time across almost infinite reaches of space to a distant galaxy where strange and warlike beings were poised on the brink of a frightful interstellar battle.

The two opposing leaders were meeting for the last time.

A dreadful silence fell across the conference table as the commander of the Vl'hurgs, resplendent in his black jewelled battle shorts, gazed levelly at the G'Gugvuntt leader squatting opposite him in a cloud of green sweet-smelling steam, and, with a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers poised to unleash electric death at his single word of command, challenged the vile creature to take back what it had said about his mother.

The creature stirred in his sickly broiling vapour, and at that very moment the words, 'I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle' drifted across the conference table.

Unfortunately, in the Vl'hurg tongue this was the most dreadful insult imaginable, and there was nothing for it but to wage terrible war for centuries.

Eventually, of course, after their galaxy had been decimated over a few thousand years, it was realised that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, and so the two opposing battle fleets settled their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our own galaxy - now positively identified as the source of the offending remark.

For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across - which happened to be Earth - where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog.

Those who study the complex interplay of cause and effect in the history of the universe say that this sort of thing is going on all the time, but that we are powerless to prevent it.

'It's just life,' they say.

--Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

For a 5th grade school assignment I once had to tell a story (from memory) in front of the class. I told that one, substituting something one of them had just said for Arthur's 'I seem to having trouble...' None of my classmates had any idea what to make of it; the teacher was visibly confused and disgusted. I loved learning but mostly hated school - not that the one had too much to do with the other.

'Scale' is a filter or attenuation of engagement. The human mind is very effective at restricting its scale of activity, but there are plenty of reasons to believe that this is a premature optimization, and in many domains works against us. Here's one: perhaps you think that because the result of writing is a piece of text, the act of writing must centrally concern the production of written text; or in another domain entirely, perhaps you think 'the cause' of the BP oil spill was a specific mishap or chain or mishaps on the Deepwater Horizon itself, and that the event doesn't reflect in any way on fossil-fuel dependency in general...

'The miracle of life' is a name we give to how hard it is to live with pure dumb fucking luck. Adams again: 'The awe [evolutionary biology] inspired in me made the awe that people talk about in respect of religious experience seem, frankly, silly beside it. I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.'

The first thing to understand is that freedom and independence are not the same thing - are quite nearly opposites, in fact - and after we've meditated under a tree for a few years and gotten that one down we can move on to the other stuff. In the meantime, carry on. (You will anyway, I bet.)

You don't build a world by worldbuilding. (Or: 'The best lie is the shortest.')

Bear with me a moment, and suppose:

I lie. To a boss, say.

Fearing interrogation, I work out a strong web of supporting lies.

But my boss never asks; instead he happily takes my statement at face value. Perhaps it flatters him, or comforts, or justifies. In any case my careful post hoc calculations remain my secret.

As it happens, though, he ends up believing some of these unspoken supporting (false) claims as well, which after all handily strengthen what he 'knows' to be true (my original lie). And in a private moment he prides himself on having worked things out for himself.

Two questions, then. First: Was my private expansion of the original lie necessary? By which I mean, did my calculations change the experience that my boss and I shared? If you like, alter the scenario so that I concoct my supporting lies before making my initial false claim.

Second, Does my victim believe my version of the story, or some other story, coincidentally identical? Does it matter?

* * *

Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding.

Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unneccessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfill their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done.

Above all, worldbuilding is not technically neccessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It isn’t possible, & if it was the results wouldn’t be readable: they would constitute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a hallowed place of dedication & lifelong study. This gives us a clue to the psychological type of the worldbuilder & the worldbuilder’s victim, & makes us very afraid.

--M. John Harrison

* * *

The difference between Harrison's reader and my imaginary boss is smaller than it might seem. Both want to be allowed to believe; even the contents of their future beliefs are shaped by private predispositions. Each entrusts part of his imagination to someone who turns out to be a fabulist. In both cases, the fabulist engages in an act of 'creation' that he misunderstands as other-directed, as generous (and generative), when its actual goal is self-satisfaction. If this misunderstanding didn't occur - if the fabulists were consciously aware that the output of their 'worldbuilding' activity was not better stories but a feeling of satisfied completism or correctness - the worldbuilding act might not even be possible. The impulse to keep spinning these lies, to 'exhaustively survey a place that isn't there,' partners with the delusion that the whole activity is 'for' something else - a fictional audience in a fictional future.

Worldbuilding is the story you tell yourself so you can tell someone else a different story. It's Nomar Garciaparra ritually tightening his gloves after every single pitch at the ballgame, or soldiers painting stupid slogans on the sides of missiles. It's the ludicrous mythology of heaven and hell - perhaps the most consequential act of fantasy worldbuilding in the history of mankind - justifying the state-building activities of priests who need to believe that they serve something other than themselves.

A means to mask intentions.

* * *

I've talked about this before in the specific context of tabletop roleplaying games. Less efficiently.

* * *

The tension, here, is between the popular idea that worldbuilding is a 'necessary part of storytelling' (e.g. that Tolkien's decades of obsessive fantasy-lexicography are important to the literary triumph of Lord of the Rings in the same way as his intuitive connection to Frodo Baggins's wartime loss of innocence) and the complicated, troubling, but ultimately much more clarifying notion that worldbuilding as commonly understood is orthogonal to storytelling. In the linked essay I suggested that good worldbuilding was a storytelling act, akin to deciding what to include in a dramatic script, and offered this text, from S. John Ross's wonderful Uresia: Grave of Heaven, as a sublime worldbuilding example:

Four gods are now known to have survived the Skyfall. There may be others, too, but there has been no sign of them in over a thousand years. The surviving gods are an odd mix of "unimportant" gods - morally ambiguous and largely unapproachable.

The Primal One: The god of animal urges - want, hunger, instinct, and lust. Some mistake her/him/it for "evil," but it's both above and beneath such things. It's the shadowy essence of the Id, and of unthinking motive impulse. It cares only for its native worshippers, the wild animals. Paradoxically, it's the secret ruler of a mortal kingdom.

The Sea Dragon: The serpentine goddess of wind and storm at sea, and the protector of the secrets of the deep. A fickle and destructive god, driven by alien motives and fond of drowning anything weak enough to require air to breathe. Villains who attempt to get on her good side end up just as drowned as anyone else. She commands a tiny secret cult of children.

The Arbiters: Their genders and personalities vary according to which culture you ask, but their area of concern is straightforward. They like any contest, as long as it is fair. They have no preference between violence and peace, or between right and wrong, so long as men are competing and striving for a judgment of victory. These cosmic referees inspire most Uresian kingdoms with an obsession for some kind of sport or contest.

The Wine God: In Helt, he is called Tom Beer, a laughing party-animal. In the Volenwood, she is Nysha, Goddess of the Vine, and the patron of the vintners' art. In Sindra, they call it Golu: The Shadow of Drunkards, a semi-sinister spectre of alcoholism, the dark image that the drunkard can only escape by plunging into darkness. Each representation of a facet of the whole truth, but that the Wine God makes more personal appearances in Helt than anywhere else tells Man something, even if it is only how he prefers to be seen.

That's the sum total of the Uresian cosmology. I love it. But note that it's almost worthless as a reference text, and is no more 'definitive' than a simple list ('surviving gods: animal urges, wind/sea, fair competition/balance, wine'). Its purpose is to illustrate the moral character and texture, not of the mythical land of Uresia, but rather of the stories the players will set there. What makes it 'worldbuilding' is the list, but what makes it wonderful is the story - the extent to which this bit of writing is contiguous with the act of storytelling in the Uresian frame.

Roleplaying gamers tend to be quite fond of complicated worked-out backstories, but these same gamers tend not to make full use of those backstories at the game table. Competent RPG play is primarily improvisatory; referring to backstory in the middle of a session is like interrupting a stage play to quote the dramaturge's note. Similarly, the same fantasy readers who praise J.R.R. Tolkien's 'extraordinary worldbuilding' will happily admit to getting five pages into the hundreds of pages of appendices to Lord of the Rings and giving up. (I'm one of these.) There's good stuff in there, but the novel itself resolves all the dilemmas it raises; the appendices start over somewhere else. They're another text, another kind of text. And while Joyce's various schemata for Ulysses are 'of interest' to Joyce fans, we're allowed to admit that noting the main body part 'associated with' each chapter of that novel - a standard Joycean academic exercise - has precious little to do with the story, the 'vivid and continuous dream' which the novel expends so much energy to maintain.

What I think of as 'good worldbuilding,' then, isn't really 'worldbuilding' in Harrison's sense of futilely exhaustive 'subcreation.' It's just one dimension of the discipline of writing, subservient to the storytelling act, and its stopping point is not a state of 'completeness' or even a particular arbitrary level of detail. The limit of worldbuilding is not the limit of the world.

* * *

If you identify your 'self' with your own high-level mental activity, your private mental reconstitution of the world from limited perception, then the last thing you want is for things to change - which would, after all, change you. Drama is change; gameplay is change. ('Play' isn't necessarily change, but then game and play are not equivalent. Far from it.) Effective dramatization requires ego-suppression. Worldbuilding gratifies the ego, which identifies the 'self' with its imaginative activity and is happy to see the imagined/constructed self augmented by 'subcreation.' (Tolkien is Middle-Earth in a way that Joyce absolutely is not Dublin.) Blah blah deductive logic, and we arrive back at: 'Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding.'

The same goes for roleplaying games - like you give a damn. Media fandom too, of course, particularly among fanfic writers and 'shippers' for whom viewership is understood as a consciously editorial or oppositional act, and who zealously advocate for a particular revisionist take on (say) a TV depiction of a fictional relationship. But the same also goes, if you like, for politics: conspiracism and ideology are worldbuilding, self-gratification through the creation of ever more exhaustive imagined order. I wonder whether the same kind of argument is readily made in other domains. Huh...

At the risk of seeming unpleasantly earnest or just dippy, I'd ask you, in parting, to consider whether something like the worldbuilding impulse - which insists on logical consistency and indeed total predictability in the domain of the imagination - manifests in your own life (as it unquestionably does in mine), and under what circumstances. I'm not sure why I'm asking, frankly, but if you don't mind I'll flatter myself that the question comes out of a storytelling impulse, and wish you earnestly and even dippily well. Isn't nice nice?

When you feel like scaring and depressing yourself all at once...

...you want Wikipedia's 'Level of support for evolution' page. Start with this dispiriting graphic, if you like, then try to imagine a U.S.A. in which people actually received basic education about science, and were not forbidden by abusive church fathers from experiencing the joy of honest recognition of their place in the universe. Just you try it.

Vaihinger.

We're gonna talk, later, about Hans Vaihinger (via Wolfgang Iser). Specifically the ol' fiction/hypothesis/dogma arc of provisional beliefs. We're gonna do this so that when I drop my Masters thesis on you the only thing that hurts is that you're smiling so hard.

Further thoughts on boring atheism and 'existential woo-hoo,' whatever I could possibly mean by that phrase.

Our increasingly apparent and increasingly well-understood predisposition toward religious belief is comparable to, say, our willingness to avoid walking under ladders. Cosmological notions like deities and nations (and 'fate' and 'justice') justify action-at-a-distance in emotional terms, enabling action on behalf of entities beyond the realm of the senses, and - bing bang boom - civilization happens. The difference between a neighborhood and a city is not just infrastructure but an idea, a 'third element' uniting two individuals or communities without direct connection. Deities are symbolic creatures; like literary characters and bogeymen and the idea of 'true love,' they exist in the sense that they generate (predictable!) action among believers. The 'arguments' for the existence of these notions tend to take the same (predictable!) form: 'I know _____ is real because I feel it.' The 'presence of the Almighty' is a name properly assigned to a feeling of awe, or terror, or rapturous confusion - but 'the Almighty' carries formal connotations, which support institutional imperatives, which drive considerably more abstract or 'logical' actions (say, Crusading)...

It's not enough, in other words, merely to believe and to act as if deities exist; we also want to avoid being caught out in the cold, finding our flanks unsupported (imaginatively speaking). When our self-image is threatened, we insist upon the facticity of the provisional fiction - altering our language from 'this is a good way to live' to 'this is the God-ordained way to live' - and personal faith finds institutional (canonical) expression. This requires iconic representation and concomitant information-loss, which is how 300 million come to believe not in America's laws but in 'America,' with all that term's fatal variability of definition.

When we set out to enforce our fantasies with arms, madness follows, because fantasies regress endlessly, making surrender unthinkable. That inexhaustibility is the source of much of their pleasure.

I believe that people will seek accommodation with one another and with their environments, rather than conquest or elimination - but fantastic abstractions resist accommodation. (Consider, among any number of other such abstractions, the idea of 'the Jewish state.') One of the imaginative/emotional functions of deities is to substitute for 'Because I say so'; trouble is, such declarations run happily away from us and make reasoning, or even accommodation, merely impossible. (Consider, among any number of other such insanities, 'suicide bombing.') I suspect that theocracies customarily do evil not because churches should play no part in the work of the State - as if 'the State' weren't a bizarre abstraction all its own - but because 'this is our responsibility' and 'it's in God's hands' are diametrically opposed attitudes toward governance.

'We have free will and we do God's will' is incoherent gobbledygook. If you let that kind of sloppy belief-structure go unchallenged, you're vulnerable to the depredations of both the godly and the selfish. 'Free will' and 'God's will' are abstract categories; something else has to ground you. One key question for religious believers, then is whether grounding in 'material' reality - realm of the senses, minds in contact and concert, mere biology - is damaged by religious belief more than it's aided. That's where David Hart's implication about the civilization-enabling qualities of the 'Christian mystery' comes in. Even if we grant solely for the sake of argument that 'Western civilization' as it's evolved would've been impossible without the Christian 'moral revolution,' we'll still have trouble showing that the good bits of Western life are both more important than, and somehow (imaginatively and institutionally) separable from, the bad bits.

But I like being 'civilized.' (Why wouldn't I?) I like 'Cambridge,' and 'blood is thicker than water,' and 'municipal services,' and 'Manchester United,' and all kinds of unnatural foolishness. I even like 'Jesus,' despite the fact that what I take 'Jesus' to mean is totally disconnected from (near as I can tell) everything to actually do with the guy. Through these constructs I feel kinship to people I've met and those I haven't - and tossing 'em out would mean risking those connections, or so I fear. That fear keeps me superstitious, and (craftily) my fear is justified by the fact that (ta-daaaa!) so far I haven't lost all connection to humanity.

What in the world could entice me to risk my identity on something I can't see or touch, the very notion that (folks tell me) holds up every other notion, gives rise to each thing? What could make me a believer?

Trauma, probably. The sense that everything's up for grabs anyhow. Reaching out for a flotation device. I can't speak for everyone, but I can imagine giving in, 'looking up,' and ending up a believer of a sort. If that's what it takes to (quit drinking/stop cheating/start tithing/focus/find a mate/fix a marriage/survive prison) then why not?

There's something boring about 'use value' as a religious category, but I contend that the sheer boringness of atheism is one of its greatest virtues, because it frees up your not-actually-bottomless reserve of existential woo-hoo for whatever comes next instead of holding it back for The Final Scene. This is not, after all, a goddamn drama.

One more moment for the Christian mystery.

I assume, by the way, that the heart of the Christian mystery as Hart conceives of it is that Jesus was at once perfectly humble (self-abnegating) and Chosen. His divinity manifested in service, specifically of the poor. The Resurrection, then, is among other things a kind of Public Service Announcement about a life lived without thought of earthly reward. We should note that this lovely, elemental image nicely mirrors those traditions of meditative-materialist practice which teach that the only way to sink (rise?) into happiness is not to want it.

Part of the point of the previous (linked) post is that once you remove the 'divinity' of Jesus and the weird cosmological principle called God from the Crucifixion - which means letting go of the Resurrection too - you're left with an iconic image rich with moral possibility. The 'lightning bolt' of which Hart speaks is the myth- and institution- and state-building that followed Jesus's death, not just the image of the good man crucified...which was after all a pretty common thing in those days.

These days too.

I readily acknowledge and am obviously taken in by the power of the Christian story. But it's not the only story - and it comes to us now, across millennia, freighted with political and cultural baggage that makes its moral lessons harder, not easier, to apprehend and experience. Separating the lesson, the great Event, from its accumulated science-fictional content is a first step to sharing fully in the moral possibility it offered and offers. And maybe that won't sell quite as well - see above re: superheroes and 'flash' - but then we're getting into 'Windows is better than MacOS because everyone runs Windows,' an argument I'm even less interested in having than this one.

One piece of evidence for atheism, if you like, is that atheism is utterly boring.

'Rational' arguments about the existence of deities tend to descend rapidly from reviews of evidence (inconclusive!) to abstract debate-club maneuvering. There is not a shred of evidence or 'proof' that a single 'deity' has ever existed, and scientific descriptions/analyses of the known universe's workings increasingly provide plausible accounts of heretofore intractable 'theological' problems. You know the type: 'the eye is too complex to have emerged by accident,' with its implicit denigration of 'accident' as less satisfying than design. That sort of thing. (True, we don't know the answer to the question 'Why is there something instead of nothing?' But then we don't really have a stake in the answer anyhow. It'd be nice to know, perhaps. But we needn't by bothered by the possibility that the answer is unknowable.)

The question Do deities exist? is 'theological' only in the which-department-is-providing-my-sinecure? sense. The question is scientific - journalistic, if you like - while its side question (What if we can't ever know?) is a matter for one's therapist.

Over the last 100 years we've (finally) come to grips in a systematic way with the limitations, capacities, flexibility, mutable categories, and astonishing variety of human minds; I feel certain that, barring some ecological catastrophe, mainstream human society will one day concern itself with human predispositions toward totalizing systems of thought ('theism' is one such system) rather than the appealing fancies of religious rules systems themselves. (We'll also legalize LSD. Just you watch.) The rise of the boorishly self-satisfied 'New Atheists' coincides with a revolution in scientific understanding of 'religious experience,' and it seems clear to me that the best atheist argument going forward will be a neurological critique of various common fallacies of bias and belief.

The tendency to confuse 'complication' and 'sophistication' (or 'complexity') is a common problem in theological debate; witness the galaxy of hysterical bullshit surrounding 'transcendence' in every such discussion. As a recent example - and moving in the direction of this post's title - consider a recent essay from David B. Hart in the Christian publication First Things:

Because he understood the nature of what had happened when Christianity entered history with the annunciation of the death of God on the cross, and the elevation of a Jewish peasant above all gods, Nietzsche understood also that the passing of Christian faith permits no return to pagan naivete, and he knew that this monstrous inversion of values created within us a conscience that the older order could never have incubated. He understood also that the death of God beyond us is the death of the human as such within us. If we are, after all, nothing but the fortuitous effects of physical causes, then the will is bound to no rational measure but itself, and who can imagine what sort of world will spring up from so unprecedented and so vertiginously uncertain a vision of reality?

The purity of Hart's evasive question-begging is awesome to behold, but the substance of his article ('argument' isn't quite the right word) is without value. Here ya have it:

The most venerable metaphysical claims about God do not simply shift priority from one kind of thing (say, a teacup or the universe) to another thing that just happens to be much bigger and come much earlier (some discrete, very large gentleman who preexists teacups and universes alike). These claims start, rather, from the fairly elementary observation that nothing contingent, composite, finite, temporal, complex, and mutable can account for its own existence, and that even an infinite series of such things can never be the source or ground of its own being, but must depend on some source of actuality beyond itself. Thus, abstracting from the universal conditions of contingency, one very well may (and perhaps must) conclude that all things are sustained in being by an absolute plenitude of actuality, whose very essence is being as such: not a “supreme being,” not another thing within or alongside the universe, but the infinite act of being itself, the one eternal and transcendent source of all existence and knowledge, in which all finite being participates.

Hart's version of God is essentially a metaphysical category rather than a thing/action/state: He's a condition of possibility, the 'absolute plenitude of actuality...the infinite act of of being itself.' This isn't a 'theological' claim so much as a narrative device. God, in Hart's view, is a good-enough answer to the unanswerable bottom-level question (Why are things?) that lets us get on with our lives. God is a premise. That's His goddamn purpose. How nice for Hart - God exists to answer the question of what God is for. He's His own reason, and that's that.

God's the guy who doesn't have to explain Himself to anyfuckingbody.

That Hart doesn't even bother making a logical case here ('one very well may (and perhaps must) conclude...'!!) is hardly unexpected; if you insist upon logic in 'theological' discourse while clinging to a belief system whose central element (God) is defined as 'the illogical condition of possibility of all logic' - what a charming little sub-Gödelian fanwank we've got going here - then you've guaranteed argumentative 'victory' on your own terms, by definition.

A skeptical Occamite might ask whether the real reason God 'exists' is to provide acolytes with an escape route when anyone questions their morality - to comfort the afflicted conqueror and afflict the conquerable.

Hart's essay isn't particularly worthwhile as an argument about the world, because it's not meant to be - he only has to reaffirm his premises to 'convince' his First Things readers anyhow. The usual business: he naturally conflates Christianity and theism because he's a Christian (Eastern Orthodox) theist, trying to slide 'the death of God on the cross' into a discussion about 'materialism' and theism, and ploddingly follows a long line of theists in defining 'existence' in the sense of 'God exists' as distinct from physical embodiment ('God is' is distinct from 'beer is in my fridge'). He knows he can't prove deities exist, so he defines them as things that must exist - a kind of conceptual placeholder for What We Can't Otherwise Define or Describe.' This line of sub-reasoning is stultifying, and Hart recurs to it all the time. From his 'What happened to Terry Schiavo's "soul?"' article in the Wall Street Journal:

I doubt even the dogmatic materialists among us are wholly insensible to the (1) miraculous oddity that (2) in the midst of organic nature there exists a creature (3) so exorbitantly in excess of what material causality could possibly adumbrate, a (4) living mirror where all splendors gather, an animal who is (5) also a creative and interpretive being with a (6) longing for eternity. Whether one is willing to speak of a (7) "rational (8) soul" or not, there is obviously an (9) irreducible mystery here, one that (10) commands our reverence. [my numbers and emphasis --wa.]

This lazy, insipid posturing follows standard apologetic lines: hoary presumed nature/Man (or nature/Soul) dualism (2, 3, 5, 8); casual introduction of 'miracles' as a category of experience both beyond and incomparable to 'normal' experience (1); teenage-romance metaphor (4); use of 'belief' as justification for belief's content (6, implicitly 10); attempt to slide 'rationality' into wholly impressionistic/metaphorical discussion (7); willfully ignorant anti-scientific language (9, 3!).

The rest of the Journal article is the same sort of stuff - a set of reassuring (irritable?) gestures seeking to resemble an argument, or at least a polite scolding. The same elements and overall structure appear in the First Things piece; let's not waste any more time hashing out such things. Suffice it to say that some smart people consider this sort of thing worth writing or reading, and whether or not they're correct, their belief - in the related usefulness of theology and religious belief themselves - is of interest.

* * *

Damon Linker used to be Hart's editor at First Things, and is sympathetic to his recent performance. (Sample massively condescending sentence from an earlier Linker post: '[W]hat America needs now is not faithlessness. It is intelligent faith.') In the course of a recent post at The New Republic, entitled 'A New Kind of Atheism,' Linker gets in some fine digs at Richard Dawkins and the puerile ignoramus P.Z. Myers. All's well! But he gets bogged down, by essay's end, in the following high-toned banality:

Rather than explore the complex and daunting existential challenges involved in attempting to live a life without God, the new atheists rudely insist, usually without argument, that atheism is a glorious, unambiguous benefit to mankind both individually and collectively. There are no disappointments recorded in the pages of their books, no struggles or sense of loss. Are they absent because the authors inhabit an altogether different spiritual world than the catastrophic atheists? Or have they made a strategic choice to downplay the difficulties of godlessness on the perhaps reasonable assumption that in a country hungry for spiritual uplift the only atheism likely to make inroads is one that promises to provide just as much fulfillment as religion? Either way, the studied insouciance of the new atheists can come to seem almost comically superficial and unserious.

Shorter Damon Linker: Atheism is not just 'difficult' but scary, and therefore today's atheists have an obligation to participate in theists' fearful handwringing about 'atheist morality,' even if the dual premises of theist morality (deities and deity-debt) are themselves unjustifiable and/or nonsensical. There's an implicit belief here, too, that civilization is made possible not just by shared myth but by (as Hart puts it) 'the enigma of the Christian event [...] the lightning bolt that broke from the cloudless sky of pagan antiquity, the long revolution that overturned the hierarchies of heaven and earth alike.' Note, again, that in the view of Linker and Hart, the scariest thing about godless existence isn't its pointlessness (the nominal 'existential crisis') but rather how tough it's gonna be on our delicate constitutions (the actual lapsed-Christian existentialist tantrum).

From a certain perspective the ultimate horizon of 'humanity,' of human identity as such, is the need to believe in an ultimate organizing principle - an anthropocentrism that hijacks our overgrown neocortex to concoct self-justifications ranging from the baroque (Hart's 'transcendental' mishmash) to the simplistic (Jesus is God so fuck off). Animals don't need 'worldviews,' not because they can't see the world - neither can we! - but because they lack the capacity to pretend they do. When we talk about the 'childlike bliss' of, say, a drugged-up raver kid, we tend to imply some kind of subhumanity, equating the loss (or 'unproductive' reassignment) of logical faculties with a descent into 'primitive' existence. In our culture nothing is worse than having one's primitivism pointed out. (Hence the attraction of Hart's 'lightning bolt' - we'll never be scared of the dark again! What could be more civilized than that?)

This isn't too bad a definition of 'humanity,' actually: not just association with our rough biological equivalents but a private/shared desire for centrality; it makes sense that the only animal evincing the ability to signify would become preoccupied with the desire for significance. The 'humility' of monotheists is scaffolded by an absolute faith in their own cosmic importance, their protagonism. The narrativizing imagination does its thing, bada-bing bada-boom, and the most important works of literature in all history are centrally concerned with superbeings talking to humans and reassuring them they're (1) not alone, (2) 'in charge' of the earth, and (3) required to stay humble about it all, but not too humble, ya dig?

No one is less humble than the guy insisting he won the lottery of Creation and (alone) can apprehend the Blessing. The metaphysical premise ('God') balances out the literally monumental self-centeredness of a monotheistic imaginative stance.

Finally, to our titular claim.

Hart and Linker (correctly) identify, if only by implication, the comforts that theism offers each individual; Hart is also explicit about the social value of theism, i.e. of shared transcendentalist belief. Buddhists garnish their materialism with an astonishingly silly mystical backstory involving reincarnation and 'karma,' which provides spiritual justification for that bit of reasonable moral advice, 'Watch out.' Jesus's anti-institutional teachings were readily adapted for nation-building purposes once a bit of mystical side-story was introduced (Jesus the mythic creature supplementing and in time supplanting Jesus the enlightened teacher). Mohammed having weird thoughts in a cave would've been a laughingstock; Mohammed passing on angelic speech motored a world-shaking political revolution. Complex belief-structures spread most easily when bound to compelling narrative structures and iconic symbolism.

In short, gods have flash. Zeus threw thunderbolts; the Hebrew God parted the Red Sea; Jesus is coming back with trumpets and a bit of infantry warfare.

Atheism, on the other hand, is boring.

If you understand the 'death of God' not as a change in our universal circumstances but as each individual's abandonment of an incorrect belief, then the 'tragedy' of godlessness is revealed as a self-fulfilling prophecy which can be easily opted out of. What's left is what we begin with: a set of circumstances, some parameters of which are knowable, which must be acted upon without knowledge of our actions' full consequences - and an identity that's porous, mutable, formed from our associations with other beings, and bound to change in the fullness of time into something unforeseeable. Christianity's greatest promise (and most contemptible, cynical fraud) is foreknowledge of How It All Ends, but the purpose of (say) meditative materialist practice is to lift from us the desire for that knowledge, which we misperceive as need. Hart and Linker nicely illustrate this misperception, failing to distinguish between the metaphysics we want and the biosocial optimization we (presumably) need.

The fact that individual organisms have no purpose but what they perceive - i.e. none at all - is only distressing if one feels entitled to such a purpose. If we can find a way to agree that the question of life's 'purpose' is ill-posed, then we can stop discussing human behaviour in terms of fanciful motivations and metaphysics, and focus instead on plain ol' human social- and psycho-dynamics: distress, entitlement, conditioning, agreement, the almost uncontrollable narrativizing and generalizing and imaginative impulses which our shared beliefs and institutions serve to constrain and instrumentalize.

Some folks say that 'life' is just a way for the second law of thermodynamics to go more efficiently about its business; as Mike Russell gleefully puts it, 'The purpose of life is to hydrogenate carbon dioxide.' More and more scientists seem to believe that life's origin - and implicitly its 'purpose,' its 'nature' - will be found not in molecular replicators' capacity for preservation (informational stasis?) but in metabolic pathway's heightened efficiency at transformation. Life doesn't need a reason for being, in other words - it's just one form that metabolic doing can take. Which is to say, perhaps, that while there's obviously such a thing as 'life,' the main reason the category is more interesting than non-life is that we happen to belong to it.

Does the notion that (to the extent that 'purpose' at the thermodynamic level has any meaning) we exist to help our geosystem blow off steam upset you? It's entirely possible that the interplay of natural selection and far-from-equilibrium self-organization can explain the 'miraculous' complexity of the human eye - and it's just a short step from the eye to the tricky abstraction of the 'rational soul.' What's lost in the transition from (say) Christian mythology/cosmology to The Purposelessness-Driven Life, in terms of use-value? Only certainty. If you treat moral questions not as a matter of 'getting things right' in the eyes of some cosmic referee but rather as a kind of optimization problem, it's not hard to start from 'minimize suffering to maximize human sustainability' as an uncontroversial moral imperative and get to a robust moral code. (Surely it requires no more tortuous logic than, say, 'the invasion of Iraq is arguably a "just war" under international law.')

The idea that atheism must be 'tragic' in order to be authentic is nothing more than dead-enders' resentful carping. Atheist morality is not comparative; it doesn't have to supplement theist morality, and where they're forced to coexist, a sustainable belief system must be able to incorporate the fact that not everyone participates in it.

Unsurprisingly, Hart has a coward's contempt for this view:

One does not have to believe any of it, of course — the Christian story, its moral claims, its metaphysical systems, and so forth. But anyone who chooses to lament that event should also be willing, first, to see this image of the God-man, broken at the foot of the cross, for what it is, in the full mystery of its historical contingency, spiritual pathos, and moral novelty: that tender agony of the soul that finds the glory of God in the most abject and defeated of human forms. Only if one has succeeded in doing this can it be of any significance if one still, then, elects to turn away.

What Hart is demanding, here, is that atheist morality participate in the same system of satisfaction, the same comfort game, as the Christian literary/moral experience - more specifically, his own idiosyncratic and highly academic version of that belief system. This is stupid and myopic of course. Hart's 'image of the God-man' is no more 'morally novel' than the martyrdom of any other political-spiritual revolutionary, except insofar as men like Hart have encrusted it with an inconsistent, invented extraterrestrial mythology. Indeed, what makes the death of Jesus of Nazareth 'morally novel' is the stories we've told one another about it, which is precisely the point being made even by the barbaric New Atheists.

(And that's the real crime, here. What's awful about the New Atheism is precisely that it's barbaric, that it makes light of the hermeticism and sophistry which are central to Hart's view of the world. The best-known mouthpieces for the New Atheism are indeed self-satisfied contemptuous assholes, but the whole idea that moral 'novelty' and 'spiritual pathos' must be part of any 'appropriate' moral system is richly deserving of contempt. The real novelty, mythologically speaking, is found in a worldview that accepts that our wholly accidental existence need not be exciting or pathetic or (c'mon) novel to be dear to us, and which endeavours to find value in the joyful cocreation of new shared circumstance. Hart's morality permits him to extort a very specific emotional state from you under penalty of 'unseriousness.' That extortion is justified by a tiny little lie: Jesus was God, whatever that means.)

(A moral code built on lies is flawed, and those who seek profit by lying deserve contempt.)

If Jesus was just a man - even wise! - then there's nothing stopping us seeing the moral grandeur of his crucifixion in, say, Hamlet or Martin Luther King or a mother bear dying while protecting her cubs. And if you can kick your addiction to the notion of 'evil' - which pretty much washes the notion of 'good' out with it, though it does leave 'better' behind, thank heavens - then 'moral grandeur' starts to look an awful lot like courage plus publicity.

* * *

All of this might be moot, though. Hart's essay is simultaneously, or rather interchangeably, about atheism itself and the anti-religious feelings it so often travels with. I seem to have made the same mistake here. Yet atheism is boring partly because in an atheist universe pretty much everything is a tiny little stochastic 'miracle' - everything, that is, from the Great Barrier Reef to the Unitarian Church. Hart seems to strongly believe that the place of churches, and specifically the various Christian sects, must be filled by something but can't be filled by 'atheism'; but before making this interesting view explicit, he keeps rotating it into the silly, trivially incorrect claim that the 'truth' of the Christian mystery is irreplaceable. There's presumably some implied historical argument there - Jesus's martyrdom and (sigh) Resurrection as the organizing metaphor for Western political life and institutions - but Hart can't explicitly render it without falling back into more silliness about Jesus Christ, half-human incarnation of the condition of cosmological possibility.

So we're left with an attack on 'New Atheism' for being insufficiently attentive to the putative value of religious belief as such - a literary criticism when you get right down to it - floating atop a loosely-implied argument about the importance of religious institutions, which itself assumes not only the 'moral' but the cosmological truth of some Christian belief. And so it doesn't matter that the Passion is an important work of literature and moral teaching; it doesn't matter that the best-known so-called 'New Atheists' are for the most part lazy in their anti-religionism; it sure doesn't matter that Hart's trippy God-is-the-unknowable-end-of-every-regress argument (which doesn't originate with him of course) is actually a lovely bit of creative abstraction. Hart waves his hands at a circular argument that can pretend for tactical reasons to be about one or another thing depending on who's engaging with it.

And yet...there's even an argument to be made that you can't believe in money without believing in God (in His role as solution to every imaginative/categorial regress), because God's role is to provide a universal answer to the question 'Why should I trust you?' The character of God obviously exists, variously performed. Deities are as real as Hamlet; if Richard Dawkins spent his time lecturing about arguments for the (non)existence of Hamlet he'd be laughed back into his Fortean hidey-hole, for better or worse. Hamlet does something for us; so does God. (I'm less sure about David Hart.) Hart says atheism - and atheists! - can't provide something that's essential to Christianity, and that's trivially true, but the rest of his essay looks an awful lot like a set of gestures in the direction of Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. And the strong claim at the heart of atheism, in my mind, is that the whole idea of man being 'meant' to know anything at all is just a fun story.

There's nothing 'tragic' about atheism because outside a pretty narrow ontological realm 'tragedy' isn't a meaningful category. Atheism doesn't provide the comforts of Christianity or the Christian story, but a life lived honestly, by some atheist definition, simply doesn't cause the existential discomfort that Hart desperately wishes for us all to feel. That discomfort is essential to his faith and irrelevant to mine, which is to say all this bother about deities is mostly willful ignorance about minds, and as I'm obviously happy to share half-baked first drafts of this sort of thing with you, dear Reader(s), there you have it, and have at it.