On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters

[Below I have copied out for you a famous essay by Yevgeniy Zamyatin. I will see you at the other end.]

Name me the final number, the highest, the greatest.

But that’s absurd! If the number of numbers is infinite, how can there be a final number?

Then how can you speak of a final revolution? There is no final one. Revolutions are infinite.

(From We)

Ask point blank: What is revolution?

Some people will answer, paraphrasing Louis XIV: We are the revolution. Others will answer by the calendar, naming the month and the day. Still others will give you an ABC answer. But if we are to go on from the ABC to syllables, the answer will be this:

Two dead, dark stars collide with an inaudible, deafening crash and light a new star: this is revolution. A molecule breaks away from its orbit and, bursting into a neighbouring atomic universe, gives birth to a new element: this is revolution. Lobachevsky cracks the walls of the millennia-old Euclidean world with a single book, opening a path to innumerable non-Euclidean spaces: this is revolution.

Revolution is everywhere, in everything. It is infinite. There is no final revolution, no final number. The social revolution is only one of an infinite number of numbers: the law of revolution is not a social law, but an immeasurably greater one. It is a cosmic, universal law- like the laws of the conservation of energy and of the dissipation of energy (entropy). Some day, an exact formula for the law of revolution will be established. And in this formula, nations, classes, stars- and books- will be expressed as numerical quantities.

The law of revolution is red, fiery, deadly: but this death means the birth of new life, a new star. And the law of entropy is cold, icy blue, like the icy interplanetary infinities. The flame turns from red to an even, warm pink, no longer deadly, but comfortable. The sun ages into a planet, convenient for highways, stores, beds, prostitutes, prisons: this is the law. And if the planet is to be kindled into youth again, it must be set on fire, it must be thrown off the smooth highway of evolution: this is the law.

The flame will cool tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. (In the Book of Genesis days are equal to years, ages). But someone must see this already today, and speak heretically today about tomorrow. Heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought.

Where the flaming, seething sphere (in science, religion, social life, art) cools, the fiery magma becomes coated with dogma- a rigid, ossified, motionless crust. Dogmatisation in science, religion, social life, or art is the entropy of thought. What has become dogma no longer burns: it only gives off warmth- it is tepid, it is cool. Instead of the Sermon on the Mount, under the scorching sun, to upraised arms and sobbing people, there is drowsy prayer in a magnificent abbey. Instead of Galileo’s ‘But still, it turns!’ there are dispassionate computations in a well-heated room in an observatory. On the Galileos, the engineers build their own structures, slowly, bit by bit, like corals. This is the path of revolution- until a new heresy explodes the crush of dogma and all the edifices of the most enduring stone which have been raised upon it.

Explosions are not very comfortable. And therefore the exploders, the heretics, are justly exterminated by fire, by axes, by words. To every today, to every evolution, to the laborious, slow, useful, most useful, creative, coral-building work, heretics are a threat. Stupidly, recklessly, they burst into today from tomorrow; they are romantics. Babeuf was justly beheaded in 1797; he leaped into 1797 across 150 years. It is just to chop off the head of a heretical literature which challenges dogma; this literature is harmful.

But harmful literature is more useful than useful literature, for it is antientropic, it is a means of combating calcification, sclerosis, crust, moss, quiescence. It is utopian, absurd- like Babeuf in 1797. But it is right 150 years later.

We know Darwin. We know what followed Darwin- mutations, Weissmanism, neo-Lamarckism. But all of these are attics, balconies: the building itself is Darwin. And in this building there are not only tadpoles and fungi, but also man. Fangs are sharpened only when there is someone to gnaw on. Domestic hens have wings only for flapping. The same is true for hens and for ideas: ideas nourished on chopped meat cutlets lose their teeth, like civilised, cutlet-eating man. Heretics are necessary to health; if there are no heretics, they should be invented.

A literature that is alive does not live by yesterday’s clock, nor by today’s, but by tomorrow’s. It is a sailor sent aloft: from the masthead he can see foundering ships, icebergs, and maelstroms still invisible from the deck. He can be dragged down from the mast and put to tending the boilers or working the capstan, but that will not change anything: the mast will remain, and the next man on the masthead will see what the first has seen.

In a storm, you must have a man aloft. We are in the midst of a storm today, and SOS signals come from every side. Only yesterday a writer could calmly stroll along the deck, clicking his Kodak (genre); but who will want to look at landscapes and genre scenes when the world is listing at a forty-five-degree angle, the green maws are gaping, the hull is creaking? Today we can look and think only as men do in the face of death: we are about to die- and what did it all mean? How have we lived? If we could start over again, from the beginning, what would we live by? And for what? What we need in literature today are vast philosophic horizons- horizons seen from mastheads, from airplanes; we need the most ultimate, the most fearsome, the most fearless ‘Why?’ and ‘What next?’.

This is what children ask. But then children are the boldest philosophers. They enter life naked, not covered by the smallest fig leaf of dogma, absolutes, creeds. This is why every question they ask is so absurdly naïve and so frighteningly complex. The new men entering life today are as naked and fearless as children; and they, too, like children, like Schopenhauer, like Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, ask “Why?’ and ‘What next?’ Philosophers of genius, children, and the people are equally wise- because they ask equally foolish questions. Foolish to a civilised man who has a well-furnished European apartment, with an excellent toilet, and a well-furnished dogma.

Organic chemistry has already obliterated the line between living and dead matter. It is an error to divide people into the living and the dead: there are people who are dead-alive, and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alive also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no mistakes; only machines make no mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in questions, in torment.

The same is true of what we write: it walks and it talks, but it can be dead-alive or alive-alive. What is truly alive stops before nothing and ceaselessly seeks answers to absurd, ‘childish’ questions. Let the answers be wrong, let the philosophy be mistaken- errors are more valuable than truths: truth is of the machine, error is alive; truth reassures, error disturbs. And if answers be impossible of attainment, all the better! Dealing with answered questions is the privilege of brain’s constructed like a cow’s stomach, which, as we know, is built to digest cud.

If there were anything fixed in nature, if there were truths, all of this would, of course, be wrong. But fortunately, all truths are erroneous. This is the very essence of the dialectical process: today’s truths become errors tomorrow; there is no final number.

This truth (the only one) is for the strong alone. Weak-nerved minds insist on a finite universe, a last number; they need, in Nietzsche’s words, ‘the crutches of certainty’. The weak-nerved lack the strength to include themselves in the dialectic syllogism. True, this is difficult. But it is the very thing that Einstein succeeded in doing: he managed to remember that he, Einstein, observing motion with a watch in hand, was also moving; he succeeded at looking at the motion of the earth from outside.

This is precisely how a great literature, which knows no final numbers, looks at the movements of the earth.

The formal character of a living literature is the same as its inner character: it denies verities, it denies what everybody knows and what I have known until this moment. It departs from the canonical tracks, from the broad highway.

The broad highway of Russian literature, worn to a high gloss by the giant wheels of Tolstoy, Gorky, and Chekhov, is Realism, daily life; hence, we must turn away from daily life. The tracks canonised and sanctified by Blok, Sologub, and Bely are the tracks of Symbolism, which renounced daily life; hence, we must turn toward daily life.

Absurd? Yes. The intersection of parallel lines is also absurd. But it is absurd only in the canonic, plane geometry of Euclid. In non-Euclidean geometry it is an axiom. All you need is to cease to be plane, to rise above the plane. To literature today the plane surface of daily life is what the earth is to an airplane- a mere runway from which to take off, in order to rise aloft, from daily life to the realities of being, to philosophy, to the fantastic. Let yesterday’s cart creak along the well-paved highways. The living have strength enough to cut away their yesterday.

Whether you put a police inspector or a commissar into the cart, it remains a cart. And literature will remain the literature of yesterday even if you drive ‘revolutionary life’ along the well-travelled highway- and even if you drive it in a dashing troika with bells. What we need today are automobiles, airplanes, flickering, flight, dots, dashes, seconds.

The old, slow, creaking descriptions are a thing of the past: today the rule is brevity- but every word must be supercharged, high-voltage. We must compress into a single second what was held before in a sixty-second minute. And hence, syntax becomes elliptic, volatile; the complex pyramids of periods are dismantled stone by stone into independent sentences. When you are moving fast, the canonised, the customary eludes the eye: hence, the unusual, often startling, symbolism and vocabulary. The image is sharp, synthetic, with a single salient feature- the one feature you will glimpse from a speeding car. The custom-hallowed lexicon has been invaded by provincialisms, neologisms, science, mathematics, technology.

If this becomes the rule, the writer’s talent consists in making the rule the exception. There are far more writers who turn the exception into the rule.

Science and art both project the world along certain coordinates. Differences in form are due only to differences in the coordinates. All realistic forms are projections along the fixed, plane coordinates of Euclid’s world. These coordinates do not exist in nature. Nor does the finite, fixed world: this world is a convention, an abstraction, an unreality. And therefore Realism- be it ‘socialist’ or ‘bourgeois’- is unreal. Far closer to reality is projection along speeding, curved surfaces- as in the new mathematics and the new art. Realism that is not primitive, not realia but realiora, consists in displacement, distortion, curvature, nonobjectivity. Only the camera lens is objective.

A new form is not intelligible to everyone; many find it difficult. Perhaps. The ordinary, the banal is, of course, simpler, more pleasant, more comfortable. Euclid’s world is very simple, and Einstein’s world is very difficult- but it is no longer possible to return to Euclid. No revolution, no heresy is comfortable or easy. For it is a leap, it is a break in the smooth evolutionary curve, and a break is a wound, a pain. But the wound is necessary: most of mankind suffers from hereditary sleeping sickness, and victims of this sickness (entropy) must not be allowed to sleep, or it will be their final sleep, death.

The same disease often afflicts artists and writers: they sink into satiated slumber in forms once invented and twice perfected. And the lack the strength to wound themselves, to cease loving what they once loved, to leave their old, familiar apartments filled with the scent of laurel leaves and walk away into the open field, to start anew.

Of course, to wound oneself is difficult, even dangerous. But for those who are alive, living today as yesterday and yesterday as today is still more difficult.

(1923)

[Hello again. There is one thing I do not agree with in this essay of Zamyatin’s, and that thing may be an error of the translation, or my misreading, or an exaggeration made in recoiling from the opposite error which does not truly reflect Zamyatin’s thought. Of course, if someone comes to you and says, I have the truth here, it is in my pocket, here is the theory that explains it all, that answers all your questions, that cannot be improved upon- you ought to flee from such a person. But that does not mean that there is not such a thing as objective truth. Nor does the mutability of nature imply that we cannot approach that objective truth asymptotically, each theory an improvement on the one that went before, even if we will never get there. It does not mean that Einstein’s theory was not an objective improvement on Galileo’s. Zamyatin trained as an engineer, so I am sure he would agree with me. If there was no such thing as objective truth- as opposed to ‘truths’ known by men- then he could not say ‘the mast will remain, and the next man on the masthead will see what the first has seen’. The ship we sail in is floating on a real sea, there are real icebergs, real maelstroms, real storms on the horizon- that is why the man on the masthead is important. The taste of the water remains salt, whatever you care to call it, and its conductivity lies within certain narrow parameters, and somewhere in it crimson gugfish are swimming.]

[May 16th 2012. I'm glad to see via Blogger's statistics widget that of all my pages this is the one that has had the most views in recent times. I'm happy to think I'm helping to keep this essay alive in the minds of the world. :D ]

Y is for You

I've said before that I find monologue boring. I have to listen to myself in my own head enough as it is, going over the same tired ideas again and again, reinforcing my own errors through repetition. It would be a total waste of time for me to write the same stuff down just so I could sit back and admire it- oblivious to the flaws everyone else can see. Over and over I will overlook the obvious, until it is pointed out by someone else. Decade after decade I will go on believing some core principle of mine is ‘self-evident’ until someone else tells me it isn’t.

If nobody had ever commented on this blog, I would probably have given up after a few months. So, it is yours as much as mine. And in any list of important figures whose influence has gone towards creating the Clamly memeplex, you certainly deserve a mention. Thank you, lexifab, marco, winstoninabox, jenny, and everyone else who has stopped by and said anything, ever. I still don’t really understand how any of you think. But I sure do like having you around.

You have made me expand on things I would never have thought of expanding on if left to my own devices, which has been good for me; you have forced me to clarify and clarify and clarify my thoughts about the things I feel most strongly about, until they are practically coherent; you have led me to read all sorts of things I wouldn’t have thought of reading, which have also been good for me; you have introduced me to Mr Stross when I have abandoned all faith in science fiction; you have persuaded me that the ‘Many Universes’ model of quantum mechanics may not be entirely stupid; and you have taught me at least one invaluable lesson.

(Probably more than one. But I can't remember the others at the moment.)

I had another little mission statement I prepared earlier hanging around- ah, here it is:

I believe there is such a thing as truth.

Therefore, I wish to be corrected when I am in error.

An assertion of a contrary opinion does not correct me.

I hunger and thirst for reasoning which will correct me.

If I say I do not understand you, I do not understand you.

If what to you is self-evident is not self-evident to me, I need to imagine a worldview in which such a thing could be self-evident. Please help me to do this.

Thanks for all your good work in correcting me thus far. Grats! :)

X is for Xenophon

No, seriously.

No, not the Senator.

And not directly, but at third or fourth hand.

But I am not just scraping around desperately for authors starting with ‘X’. I really do have an autobiographical story about my interaction with the Anabasis, though it can hardly be called one of *the* most significant books in my life.
When I was about eight, I read a paraphrased and condensed English version of Xenophon’s account of the retreat of the 10,000. I remember its illustrations were those black and white prints interspersed amid the text that used to be really common. Among them there was one of an ostrich running across the Syrian Desert, I am pretty sure, and one of a column of soldiers walking along a road with steep cliffs on either side. The lowering, overcast-sky quality of the illustrations helped colour my whole perception of antiquity. And translated over to my perception of Middle Earth, I think. The pictures that automatically leap to my mind when I think of those long lost places always have overcast skies. I think- again, I am not sure- that this was the first non-Biblical work I had read dealing with the Greco-Roman world. So it reinforced a mental image that I had for a long time, until I read much much more, of Greece as a distant place that you approach from the East, rather than as a place where you are.

The next year I wrote a story at school, which I think must have been influenced strongly by the bit in Xenophon’s book where they are freezing to death in the Armenian mountains, because it was about a Greek army marching through an icy landscape and being generally miserable. Of course, in my story, there were also vampires.
The teacher (aide?) I showed it to didn’t believe I had written it and wanted to know where I had copied it from. I can’t remember whether I talked them around or not, but the accusation was evidently traumatic enough that I remember it with irritation even now.

This is all very trivial and autobiographical, I know. You may console yourself with the thought that we are nearly at the end of the alphabet, so soon I will stop talking about myself.

I had a read of a non-juvenile English translation before I wrote this, and it is interesting how very topical some of the themes are.

The dangers of unconditional negotiations with perfidious Persians:

Tissaphernes replied as follows: ‘I am really delighted, Clearchus, to hear your sensible speech. With the sentiments which you have, it seems to me that, if you were to contemplate doing me an injury, you would be simultaneously plotting against your own interests. But, now, you must listen in your turn so that you may be convinced that you, too, would be wrong in entertaining any lack of confidence either in the King or in me.
If we really wanted to destroy you, do you think we are short in numbers of cavalry or infantry or in the right sort of equipment with which to damage you, while incurring no risk of retaliation? Or do you think it is likely that we could not find favourable ground to attack you? Remember all the flat country which you go through with great difficulty even when the inhabitants are friendly to you. Consider all the mountains which you have to cross which we could occupy first and make impassable for you. Think of all the rivers where we could cut you into detachments and engage with as many at a time as we liked. And there are some of these rivers which you could not get across at all unless we brought you across. Even supposing we had the worst of it along all these lines, you can be sure, anyway, that fire is more powerful than crops, and if we burnt the crops we could bring famine into the battle against you; and, with all the courage in the world, you could not fight against that. With all of these methods of making war on you at our disposal, how can you imagine that out of all of them we should choose the one method which involves wickedness in the sight of the gods and shame in the eyes of men? It is simply and solely among people who are without means and desperate and without any other way out (and even then they must be villains) that you will find men willing to secure their ends by perjury to the gods and faithlessness towards men. It is not so with us, Clearchus. We are not such blockheads and simpletons.
You may ask why, since we have the power to destroy you, we have not proceeded to do so. Let me tell you that what is responsible for this is my own desire that I should earn the confidence of the Greeks and that I should, by doing good to them, return to the coast with the support of that mercenary army on which Cyrus, in his journey inland, relied only because he gave them their pay. As to the ways in which your help is useful to me, you have mentioned some of them yourself.’
…
After this conversation Tissaphernes behaved with great affection towards Clearchus, urged him to stay with him for the time being and had him as his guest at supper.
…
When they arrived at the entrance to of Tissaphernes’ tent, the generals were invited inside. They were Proxenus the Boeotian, Menon the Thessalian, Agias the Arcadian, Clearchus the Spartan and Socrates the Achaen. The captains waited at the entrance. Not long afterwards, at one and the same signal, those who were inside were seized and those who were outside were massacred. After that contingents of native cavalry rode over the plain and killed all the Greeks they could find, slaves and free-men alike. The Greeks saw with surprise these cavalry maneouvres from their camp and were in doubt about what they were doing until Nicarchus the Arcadian escaped and came there with a wound in his stomach and holding his intestines in his hands.

Some of the immemorial inherent problems of democracies, in this exchange between a Spartan and an Athenian:

‘It would be a much better plan, then, for us to steal a bit of the undefended mountain from them when they are not looking . . . I gather that you Spartans, Chirisophus,- I mean the real officer class- study how to steal from your earliest boyhood, and think that so far from being a disgrace it is an actual distinction to steal anything that is not forbidden by law. And, so that you may become expert thieves and try to get away with what you steal, it is laid down by law that you get a beating if you are caught stealing. Here is an excellent opportunity for you to give us an exhibition of the way in which you were brought up and to preserve us from blows, by seeing to it that we are not caught stealing our bit of mountain.’
‘Well,’ said Chirisophus, ‘what I have gathered about you Athenians is that you are remarkably good at stealing public funds, even though it is a very risky business for whoever does so; and your best men are the greatest experts at it, that is if it is your best men who are considered the right people to be in the government. So here is a chance for you too to give an exhibition of the way in which you were brought up.’


Then there is the bewildering melange of ethnic groups riven with internecine strife in the Caucasus, just like there is today.

And I think there are clear analogies between the ‘poll-driven’ leadership of our times and Xenophon’s reliance on consulting sheep entrails to make decisions.

W is for Wyndham

It is fitting, I guess, as the ‘Holiday from History’ (August 21^st, 1991 – August 8^th, 2008) draws to an end, to say a few words about the work of John Wyndham, which more than most other bodies of work breathes the sense of Apocalypse that overshadowed my youth.

I had a pretty good idea of what I was going to write about Wyndham back around B or C, but I am afraid it has pretty much evaporated. My mind is like one of those thingies, you know, that is full of holes, and I don’t seem to remember much unless I write it down. And as I never wrote down what I was going to write back then, I haven’t remembered it. So I will have to start again.

‘She was quite abruptly aware that the world was almost noiseless.

There was an alarming feeling of unreality. She held her breath to listen for some reassuring sound. Supposing it had all stopped, now? – As it might do one day.

Perhaps, even at this moment, there were in some parts of the world great columns of smoke writhing upwards in Medusan coils, swelling out at the top into cerebral convolutions that pulsed with a kind of sub-life, marking the beginning of the silence that meant the end of everything.

For years now, when she was off her guard, those pillars of smoke had been likely to start up in her mind. She hated and feared them.’ (Wild Flower, 1956)

In another way, it is inappropriate for me to construct this around Wyndham, since I didn’t start reading him until I left the Old Country and no longer lived in fear. It was The Martian Chronicles that best embodied the feeling of Apocalypse when I was young. There was something I never understood. Why did all those people leave Mars and go back to Earth? Isn’t away the direction you ought to run, when everything goes pear-shaped? There was such a deep, deep, vein of melancholy in those two doomed civilisations, Mars and Earth, following each other into the void in the twinkling of an eye.

The short stories of John Wyndham are not always about the end of the world as we know it, but the novels almost always seem to be, in one way or another. I guess it is hard to keep writing for so long without doing something drastic. In The Outward Urge, which I am fond of for no particularly good reason, the nuclear war happens offstage and isn’t really so bad given the action takes place over centuries and in Brazil and Australian when its on Earth. In The Kraken Wakes and The Trouble with Lichen, civilisation isn’t quite destroyed, but it is clearly going to be replaced by something very different.

I remember that Stanislaw Lem was quite dismissive of ‘End of the World’ fiction. Ah, here he is:

‘In the course of its evolution science fiction has renounced the positive omnipotence, and for a long time it has occupied the opposite pole- that of maximum despair. Gradually it has made this pole its playground. Because the end of the world, the atomic Last Judgment, the epidemic provoked by technology, the freezing, drying up, crystallisation, burning, sinking, the automation of the world, and so on no longer have any meaning in science fiction today. They lost their meaning because they underwent the typical inflation that changes eschatological horror into the pleasant creeps. Every self-respecting fan owns a science-fiction library of the agonies of mankind that equals the book collection of a chess amateur, since the end of the world should be as formally elegant as a well-thought-out gambit. … There are specialists who have slaughtered mankind in thirty different ways, but still search diligently and calmly for further methods of murder. Structurally this (end-of-the-world) science fiction has put itself on the same level as the crime novel, and culturally it acts out a nihilism that liquidates horror, according to the law of diminishing returns.⁴’

To me what is written and what is unwritten have always loomed equally large in these sort of novels, and I spend a lot of time thinking about the countless tragic stories that are not the adventures of the hero. My own imagination always interpolates the eschatological terror back into the most pedestrian of the sort of books Lem is talking about.

I have been reading ‘My Apprenticeship’, by Beatrice Webb, off and on for the past month or two. I had only ever heard of the Webbs as people mentioned unfavourably in books by or about Chesterton or Wells- sort of Machiavellian powerbrokers of the Socialist movement, the sort of people who might go out to dinner at Iguana Joes. It has been a pleasant surprise to find Beatrice so engaging, so rational, so- Clammish:

‘What body of scientific men, or even of ordinary shrewd business men, spoken to on the subject that interested them most, whether intellectually or materially, would tolerate that extraordinary mixture of personalities, dogmatic assertions as to fact and principle, metaphysical theories, grand and vague moral sentiments, appeals to personal devotion on the hand, and self-interest on the other, this extraordinary medley of sentiment, passion, and expediency which makes up the argument of the politician?’ (Beatrice Potter Webb, diary, July 1884)

But I wanted to quote something that she wrote when she was much younger, about ten:

‘A novel now and then is a wise recreation to be offered to a growing mind, it cultivates the imagination, but taken as the continual nourishment, it destroys many a young mind … The whole of their thought (for a child of nine or ten spends little or no thought on her lessons) is wasted on making up love scenes, or building castles in the air, where she is always the charming heroine without a fault.’

When I was of that age, a good many of my castles in the air involved the destruction of everything I knew, a desperate struggle to survive, and my death at the age of 21 from radiation-induced cancer after playing a role in the salvage of something from the wreck of civilisation. I thought, a lot, about the exact sort of story that the first chapters of The Day of the Triffids is, with myself as the protagonist. Most times I travelled into town- for we lived on the edge of town- I would think about how far we were likely to be from Ground Zero, and what our chances of survival might be. My calculations were based on false premises; for I later found out the city I lived in was surrounded at a goodly distance by a ring of Titan II missile silos, which no doubt had at least one missile each allotted to them, so wherever I went I would have been comprehensively obliterated by overlapping blast zones in the event of a nuclear exchange.

I still think, uneasily, sometimes. Should I lay in a better store of organic seeds? Do I really have any practical skills that my neighbours in the village might find useful, were civilisation to collapse? Are we far enough away from the highway to avoid the starving hordes from the cities?

Oh well.

It appears to me that the holiday is over. We had for a little while the luxury in the West of casting down tyrants, but now we are well on our way back to being tied-up by Realpolitik and the Balance of Terror from effecting anything good in the world.

We shall see.

4: The quote from ‘Science Fiction: A Hopeless Case - With Exceptions’ was long enough, so you will have to hunt down a copy of ‘Microworlds’ yourself to read the footnote. But it will be worth it, if you have any weakness for curmudgeonly footnotes at all.

V is for van Vogt

Or more accurately, V is for Voyage of the Space Beagle.

I have never managed to get through much of anything else written by A. E. van Vogt, but Voyage of the Space Beagle is one of those books that changed my life.

It was one of the first science fiction books I read- along with Decision at Doona by Anne McAffrey- and so every standard sci-fi trope hit me as something new and fresh.

My copy seems to have crumbled away- at least, I can’t find it anywhere, and it was looking pretty shabby last time I saw it. It had a picture of the coeurl on the cover. What this means is that I won't be checking any of my facts in what follows. Or putting any quotes in.

One appealing thing about Voyage of the Space Beagle is that the direction of the narrative is quintessentially Clamly - outwards, outwards, ever outward, on, on, on, into the unexplored intergalactic vastness, onwards and outwards! I can think of few more fitting ends to a story than to an endless journey through empty space in order to lead a planet-killing black cloud to its doom in the void.

I mentioned before how Hugh Lofting’s Dr Dolittle provided one fine role-model for my professional life. Voyage of the Space Beagle provided two more: the smart-arse nexialist who makes it his business to know more than everybody else does in their particular specialty, and the empire-building chemist who takes over said nexialist’s lab space. I see my subsequent career* as an attempt to harmonise these two competing visions of the scientist.

I immediately went off and started writing a story with a similar spaceship on a similar expedition. As you do, I crewed it with all the people I knew. This was partly so I could kill off all the people I didn’t like in gruesome ways on alien planets. As you do.

I didn’t make myself the nexialist- I made my know-it-all friend Steven Mathiesen the nexialist. I gave myself a role that I made up, which I think I called ‘environmental engineer’. Or ‘ecosystem engineer’. Something like that. As these stories work out, I think we got halfway through our first planet before I moved on to another project.

Sometime around then I was hanging around school after school because my Mum, who was a volunteer teacher person, had to do some after school thing. I think I was boooooooored. I can’t remember. But I do remember my english teacher pointing to one of these seedpods and saying: ‘That looks like an alien creature. Why don’t you write about that?’

So I did. They are about twice as high a person (I think) and live in endless sand deserts, where they filter tiny things out of the sand to eat- sort of funneling them towards their maws with those long arms of theirs. They were intelligent. I think only one of them had ever been brought back to Earth, and it did not survive long because of our high gravity.

The only other thing I remember writing about them was a list of the emotions they could experience. Something like Type 2 Joy, Type 1a Despair, and an emotion with no common English name, characterised by parameters X = 2.3 and Y = 7.0 on the Pfitzer-Gloschburg scale. Something like that.

My English teacher was horrified. ‘You can’t do that,’ I remember her saying.

‘What?’

‘Here- this is all scientific, about what they eat and such, and then here you’re talking about emotions. You can’t talk about emotions scientifically like that.’

‘Why?’

I can’t remember exactly how the conversation went, but I’m sure we ended up staring at each other in mutual incomprehension.

*: Collins Essential English Dictionary: verb. to rush in an uncontrolled way.

The picture of the Devil's Claw seedpod is lifted from evil-nature.blogspot.com/2007_08_01_archive.html. I don't know anything about that website except it had this picture sitting there for me to nick, so can't recommend you go there.

U is for Unfinished Business

I would like to offer the following spoiler for The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana.

The narrator loses consciousness on page 298.

At the close of the novel, on page 449, he is still unconscious.

I humbly tips me lid to this impressive display of authorial chutzpah.

T really ought to be for Twain

But Twain I have mostly covered already, except for the terrifying dialogue in ‘What is Man?’ which I plan to somehow work in today. And I have, by a shabby trick, already covered Tolkien as well. So where shall I go from here?

Were the Angel of the Lord to appear and say to me: ‘Dr Clam, the wrath of the Lord waxes great against the works of American fantasy authors of the second half of the 20th century, and before a night has passed and a day it is His will that they be destroyed utterly, and expunged from the memory of Mankind, as though they had never been,’ then, perhaps I might say, at first: ‘Bully for You, Lord.’ But then I think I would reconsider, and I would say: ‘Please, might the Marianne books be spared?’ And were the Angel of the Lord, being rational and analytical in manner - as angels are - to ask me to justify my presumption in making such a request, what would I say?

I would then be struck dumb, for I cannot justify my presumption. I cannot justify such a request. I can emote, that is all. I have been sitting here for a few minutes already with ill-formed thoughts cascading through my head trying to figure out what I would say. Perhaps after a few minutes I might be able to say: ‘I am not in love with Marianne, O Angel of the Lord, but I would love to be Marianne. If I could be any character in the works of these fantasy authors of which you speak, Angel of the Lord, how could I chose to be anyone but Marianne, who is so plucky, and so bookish, and so wanting in cant and artifice, and so much the archetype- for I would have had plenty of time to think of big words like ‘archetype’ to throw in- of the Handmaiden of the Lord? Marianne is the type of every hopeful battler on the side of the Culture of Life in a World Gone Mad^TM, don’t you see, Angel of the Lord? Somehow she is different from all those other fantasy heroines. I can get inside her head. I don’t imagine scenes in books like I used to when I was young, Angel of the Lord, now that I am grown, but I can see so clearly the faces hungry for justice pressed outside the windows of the library, and Buttercup’s room lined with little drawers.’

I am writing this without the Net, so I will be putting in the links to books I can’t remember the titles of later. I am also writing this without a recent memory of the books I am writing about, because I haven’t been able to bring myself to read them for a long time. You see, I discovered that their author was a Gauleiter in the Planned Parenthood organisation, with responsibility for part of their network of murder camps in Colorado or New Mexico or someplace like that. It’s a funny place, this world of ours.

For I don’t reckon there’s a militantly anti-choice author who could have written a more ghastly pro-life image than Tepper has in that book about the flying white creatures with the teeth who rape human women and dismember their children in utero. These creatures are welcomed into human societies by patriarchal oppressors, of course, who make a stupid bargain of their own immortality- in the form of flying white toothy creatures- in return for the lives of their own children. As in our own world the patriarchal oppressors of the Culture of Death wage systematic war against women in the Renegade Mainland Provinces. That book is a forceful and effective pro-life book, despite the fact that the author is still, as far as I know, proud of her anti-life work.

Then there is Beauty. The psychopath misogynist from the overpopulated future world who rapes the narrator, and the hedonist nitwit faerie-folk, there are the two halves of the Culture of Death in a nutshell. No militantly anti-choice author could have done it better. Beauty is one of those books that made me miserable. It was all so bleak and hopeless and awful. The spirit of Marianne is still there in the narrator, seen through a glass darkly, but crushed almost to nothingness by the end. I should quickly mention some of those other books. Brave New World, when I first read it, for the ironclad arguments against everything I believe in that send the Savage over the edge at the end. That dialogue in What is Man? which demolishes morality and free-will. Walking on Glass, by Iain Banks, before I figured out that it actually had a happy ending. Then something called- I think- Lamia, which I borrowed from a girl named Jackie (Morrisey?) in my year 10 home economics class. Gosh, that was a horrible book for making one’s soul feel slimy and acrid.

I never got to the end of ‘Gibbon’s Decline and Fall’. Though at the moment I am reading Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall’, which first got me thinking about Sheri S. Tepper again. I remember thinking that all of the five choices offered by the Goddess to the women of Earth would lead to the extinction of mankind in a very few thousand years.

T is for Tepper because the book is not the author. Your work does not have the meaning (only) that you wish it to have. The work goes on and on, writing itself anew in the mind of each reader, long after the moving finger is still.

S is also for Linebarger

Re-reading the Book of Skulls makes me nostalgic for the landscapes of the Old Country.

There are very few of the tremendous vertical cacti here, the saguaros, though I
see a few, fifty or sixty feet tall, some way back from the path. What we have
instead, thousands of them, is a weird thing about six feet high, with a gnarled
grey wooden trunk and a lot of long dangling clusters of spines and green bumpy
things. The chainfruit cholla, Ned calls it, and warns us to keep far away from
it. The spines are sharp. So we avoid it; but there’s another cholla here, the
teddybear cholla, that’s not so easy to avoid. The teddybear is a bummer. Little
stubby plants a foot or two high, covered with thousands of fuzzy straw-coloured
spines: you look the wrong way, and the spines jump up and bite you. I swear
they do. My boots are covered with prickles. The teddybear breaks easily and
chunks come loose and roll away; they lie scattered everywhere, a lot of them
right in the path. Ned says that each chunk will take root eventually and become
a new plant. We have to watch our steps all the time for fear of coming down on
one. You can’t just kick a teddybear chunk aside if it sin your way, either. I
tried that and the cactus stuck to my boot, and I reached down to pull it off,
only to get it stuck to my fingertips next. A hundred needles jabbing me at
once. Like fire. I yelled. Most uncool screams. Ned had to pry it away, using
two twigs as handles. My fingers still burn. Dark, tiny points are buried in the
flesh. I wonder if they’ll get infected. There’s plenty of other cactus here,
too- barrel cactus, prickly pear, six or seven more that not even Ned can put
names to. And leafy trees with thorns, mesquite, acacia. All the plants here are
hostile. Don’t touch me, they say.

This landscape has all the inimical gooshiness of Belzagor, with the added benefit- or liability- of being real. I miss cactus. All the trees here look the same to me.

There should be more meat to this series of transitions, but here goes:

* The characters in Book of Skulls want to live forever, and do desperate things in the attempt. The people in the book who are immortal- if they really are- are strange and mystical and not like other men because they have vastly more life experience.

* The characters in Glasshouse, by Charles Stross, really do live forever. But when everybody is special, nobody is, and they all seem to be the kind of shallow Gen-X perennial adolescents that you can’t heave a rock in Newtown without hitting. When they get too close to gaining some sort of value from their life experience, they have memory enemas.

* One of the nifty things about Glasshouse was how the narrator is a veteran of a military organization called the ‘Linebarger Cats’. I assumed this was probably a tribute to Paul Linebarger, friend of Chiang Kai-Shek, expert in psychological warfare, and author of science fiction under the name Cordwainer Smith. Latter on, the ‘Cordwainer something-or-others’- I can’t remember what exactly, and I’ve taken the book back to the library, mea culpa- is given as another name used by the Linebarger Cats, making the identification obvious.

The science fiction of Cordwainer Smith is rife with cats, but I like to think the ‘Linebarger Cats’ of Glasshouse are echoes of the cats in The Crime and Glory of Commander Suzdal:

He coded these cats. He coded them with messages just as monstrous as the messages which had made the men-women of Arachosia into monsters. This is what he coded:
Do not breed true.
Invent new chemistry.
You will serve man.
Become civilized.
Learn speech.
You will serve man.
When man calls you will serve man.
Go back, and come forth.
Serve man.
These instructions were no mere verbal instructions. They were imprints on the actual molecular structure of the animals. They were changes in the genetic and biological coding which went with these cats. And then Suzdal committed his offence against the laws of mankind. He had a chronopathic device on board the ship. A time distorter, usually to be used for a moment or a second or two to bring the ship away from utter destruction. …
Suzdal remained calm. He coded the genetic cats. He loaded them into life-bombs. He adjusted the controls of his chronopathic machine illegally, so that instead of reaching one second for a ship of eighty thousand tons, they reached two million years for a load of less than four kilos. He flung the cats into the nameless moon of
Arachosia.
And he flung them back in time. …
The cats came. Their ships glittered in the naked sky above Arachosia. Their little combat craft attacked. The cats who had not existed a moment before, but who had then had two million years in which to follow a destiny printed into their brains, printed down their spinal cords, etched into the chemistry of their bodies and personalities. The cats had turned into people of a kind, with speech, intelligence, hope, and a mission. Their mission was to reach Suzdal, to rescue him, to obey him, and to damage Arachosia.The cat ships screamed their battle warnings.
“This is the day of the year of the promised age. And now come cats!”

I don’t know if it was entirely wise of Stross to remind me of Smith. I still have to read a lot more of Stross’ stuff, but his worlds seem to be geeky Greg Egan-like places inhabited by people who are mentally just like us, worlds drained of mystery and the terror of the dark places between the stars by uber-technology.* The people in Smith’s universe are not quite people like us. They’re people, but you can imagine them being people from a different time. And the Instrumentality tried to make the universe into a place drained of mystery and terror, but gave it away.

I haven’t managed to get to Kingdoms of the Wall yet, it seems.
Nor have I dragged in, as planned, Star Maker, Roadside Picnic, or Orbitsville.

S is just one of those letters.


* Or not.

S is for Silverberg

Marco is keen for me to write about a non-controversial science fiction author. I am happy to oblige. If you have taken the ‘Are you Dr Clam?’ survey on the right, you will have come across the question ‘Which of these Robert Silverberg novels have you frequently re-read?’
So I may as well write about those books, and why I have often re-read them (if I can possibly figure it out). This should be non-controversial, if perhaps fundamentally uninteresting.

Downward to the Earth (1969) gets its title from Ecclesiastes 3:21, but I have always associated it with my mis-remembering of Psalm 118:25- ‘Adhaesit pavimento anima mea’ of the Vulgate- as ‘my soul cleaves downward to the Earth’. Silverberg drags me downward to the earth. I find nothing seductive in the godless worlds of Asimov, or Egan, or Heinlein. They are not places I want to live. The actions of the characters are not actions I want to emulate. For the worlds of Foster- long ago- and still, sometimes, in the worlds of Herbert, I feel a stir of longing, but they are safe worlds, and the characters who live in them do not imperil my soul. Robert Silverberg’s godless worlds somehow seethe with all the things I find attractive in godless reality.

Who wouldn’t be Gunderson? Wandering across a planet that he helped wrest from the alien wilderness as the alien wilderness inexorably takes it back. Both phases are terribly attractive to me: the carving of a raw new place, and the decay of an old place. The bits in between, where it is clean and orderly and functional, are booooring. I love the way Belzagor pullulates. It is a riot of living things, things that accurately reflect the intoxicating reality of real living things in the way so many of them are inimical to man. Here there are not just space monsters, but gooshy parasites with all the gooshiness of real earthly parasites. Most sci-fi writers shy away from the raw gooshiness of living things as we know them. Not Silverberg. The Face of the Waters (1991) does this even more. Actually, hmm, it does it so much it is kind of unreadable.
And what are Gunderson’s wanderings about? Sex, drugs, and the pursuit of mysterious knowledge. Things that drag the soul downward. Lots of writers can write about these things without making them seem attractive. But not Silverberg. Ah, forget about Gunderson! Who wouldn’t be Kurtz, leading the Nildoror astray with a perversion of their most sacred rite? Actually, I know he is totally reprehensible and stupid. Nobody with any sense or any shred of decency would behave like him. But there is a creepy attractiveness to him, part of the whole adhaesit pavimento anima mea thing…

There are other things to like in Downward to the Earth. There is the sense that the whole rest of the universe really exists, even though you never hear very much about the rest of Earth’s colonial empire. In Across a Billion Years – which is otherwise fairly forgettable- there is an Israeli character on board the ship, and in the little potted biography he is given at the beginning it says something like he did his degree in Alexandria, and post-docced in Baghdad, but he’d never been out of Israel before. Why is that great? Because it is never mentioned again, and is not important to the plot in any way whatsoever. It is just a superfluous geopolitical detail that makes you feel the rest of the world is really there and the story isn’t taking place in front of a cardboard backdrop.

I don’t find the characters in The Book of Skulls (1972) attractive. There is just a bit of the Generation-X envy- I don’t know how widespread this is, really- of the Baby Boomer generation and their wild sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll adventures. We are the sensible ones. I am happy we are the sensible ones. I like being sensible. But this inglorious and stupid longing to have been part of the great age of stupidity is real.

I actually bought my copy of The Book of Skulls in a great barn of a secondhand bookstore in Tucson with my friend Tim Harrison, who I have been unable to find with Google. We used to make photocopied comic books together, long ago. He worked for the Clinton campaign in 1996 and- last I heard from him- he was tracking to the fanatical left edge of idea space as quickly as I was moving into Clamspace. But that’s not important right now. At the time I hadn’t read that many Robert Silverberg books and I wasn’t that fond of them, but it said on the back cover that the immortal monks lived in the desert outside of Tucson. So I bought it. Inside, I found that the immortal monks actually lived in the desert outside of Phoenix, our arch-nemesis. Oh well. It was not as egregious an example of misleading coverness as the cover of Journey to the Centre of the Earth that I used to own.

Yes, that is a ‘raft’ ascending Mt Etna on the cover. Yes, the characters are wearing space suits. Yes, there are four of them. The cover illustrator obviously flipped it open and read half a page at the end, the slacker.

I think there is a bit of geek wish-fulfillment in The Book of Skulls in that the two weedy intellectual ones survive to the end, and the two jocks die. I don’t think it would turn out like that. Especially as Oliver’s will to live at all costs is made so much of in the bits where we are inside his head. Would he really kill himself over something as trivial, in comparison to thousands of years of existence, as his sexuality? Not from how he’s written. But I guess, in the parts of the book that haven’t been written, I guess he reached the same conclusion that any immortal character in a Greg Egan book would, that the one thing worse than annihilation is turning into something antithetical to what you are now. You can endure a temptation for seventy years. You can repress the darkness. But forever? There is no hope while your soul cleaves downward to the earth.

Lord Valentine’s Castle (1980) appeals partly because Majipoor, like Belzagor, pullulates. All those cities and peoples. The continually reiterated vastness of it. Is it just that Silverberg keeps going on about the vastness of it that it seems vast? Is the vastness just in the unwritten story inside my head, and not in the created Majipoor? I don’t know. A lot of the *particulars* of the trilogy are unsatisfactory. But as a tiny bit, seen through a glass darkly, of a world that is 99.999% hidden, it is superb. My favourite of the trilogy is actually the Majipoor Chronicles. A single tale spanning continents will unavoidably shrink a world. But a collection of stories each set in a tiny fragment of a world, that’s the way to make it vast…

The way things are continually named but not described, as if we are familiar with them already? That is splendid world-building. But the world is too creepily lawful, like the one we live in.* I think it would be frustrating to live there. Maybe that is another temptation dragging me toward the earth, the temptation to chaotically create lawful worlds for other people to live in…
I just came across something about how Majipoor was originally conceived of as an overwhelmingly urban world, which explains something that always bugged me, the imbalance between the urban areas and the rural areas responsible for feeding them. There never seemed to be enough of the latter to me. I justified the ‘alternating ribbons of city and farmland’ in western Zimroel to myself by saying that they were actually blobs of urban area on the highway like beads on a string, with lots of farmland to the north and south.
I get the impression I am trailing off into inane geographical pedantry. So I will just… trail off… and finish up with Kingdoms of the Wall (1992) at another date.

Actually, before I go, there is one huge piece missing in the pullulating tropical luxuriance of all these worlds of Silverberg's, and that is fecundity. If I were writing them, they would be seething with children as well. Characters would be getting knocked up all the time.

* Though not as creepily lawful as the Land of Oz. I have been re-reading these books to Miss E and am finding the place scarily totalitarian:

‘Ozma is as nearly perfect as a fairy may be, and she is noted for her wisdom as well as for her other qualities. Her happy subjects adore their girl Ruler and each one considers her a comrade and protector.’
(The Scarecrow of Oz)

‘Isn’t one punished enough in knowing one has done wrong? Don’t you wish, Ojo, with all your heart, that you had not been disobedient and broken a Law of Oz? ‘
‘I – I hate to be different from other people,’ he admitted.
‘Yes; one likes to be respected as highly as his neighbours are,’ said the woman. ‘When you are tried and found guilty, you will be obliged to make amends, in some way. I don’t know just what Ozma will do to you, because this is the first time one of us has broken a Law; but you may be sure she will be just and merciful. Here in the Emerald City people are too happy and contented ever to do wrong; but perhaps you come from some faraway corner of our land, and having no love for Ozma carelessly broke one of her Laws.’
(The Patchwork Girl of Oz)

‘This wonderful Magic Picture was one of the royal Ozma’s greatest treasures. .. If one who stood before it wished to see what any person- anywhere in the world- was doing, it was only necessary to make the wish and the scene in the Magic Picture would shift the scene where that person was and show exactly what he or she was engaged in doing.’
‘Of all the magical things that surrounded Glinda in her castle there was none more marvelous than her Great Book of Records. On the pages of this record book were constantly being inscribed- day by day and hour by hour- all the important events that happened anywhere in the known world , and they were inscribed in the book at precisely the moment the events happened. … For that reason nothing could be concealed from Glinda the Good, who only had to look at the pages of the Great Book of Records to know everything that had taken place.’
(The Lost Princess of Oz)

Asymmetric access to information corrupts. Asymmetric access to *lots* of information corrupts *a lot*.

R is for Rushdie

We arrived in Calcutta on the train from Bhubaneshwar one morning in the summer of 1995, for a one night stopover on the way to somewhere else. We were expecting a seething mass of humanity, but instead the streets were eerily silent. We found a taxi to take us to a hotel, and it was the closest I have ever felt to The Day of the Triffids. The middle of Calcutta after all looks pretty much like 1950s London would look if it had been left at the mercy of the elements for a few years. The streets were eerily silent, the driver told us, because it was an election day and people were staying at home to avoid bomb throwers. It wasn’t a national election, or even a state election, just a city council election.


After we got settled in the hotel I went out into the streets and meandered about. As the day wore on they grew more and more alive. It was one of the best meandering abouts in my life. I met a nice man who had lost his job in a factory injection-molding polyethylene and was living on the streets trying to save up for a train ticket to Bangalore to find work. I wandered around the museum for a while, which was a marvelous 19th century wonderland with endless cases of beetles and whole temples taken apart and rebuilt inside. In comparison to Delhi, which had seemed brash and American and stupid, Calcutta seemed restrained and English and intelligent. Street vendors in Delhi had tried to sell me all kinds of mindless tourist trash. A street vendor in Calcutta tried to sell me A Brief History of Time. I already had one; but then he moved on to Midnight’s Children, and I bought one. I am very fond of my copy of Midnight’s Children.

I have already quoted the bit of The Satanic Verses that I carried around in my wallet for years. Twice. So I won’t again, I guess.

This first question of Gibreel’s is really just a fine piece of Clamly emoting which can’t be said to have changed me, just sunk in and reinforced what was already there.


The second question, in case I have only mentioned it on comments on other blogs is more or less: How do you treat other ideas when you do change the world? I am sure it is expressed in a better way in the book, but I am too lazy to look up the proper words. This second question of Gibreel’s has hung around in my head as a sort of goad to conservatism, making me wary of novel ideologies. If I want to know how Catholic states answered this question, or how the Caliphate did, or Communists, or the Conservative Party, or a Jewish state, I can google it. If I want to know how the Inspiring New Movement with Noble Rhetoric will answer this question, I have to carefully read between the lines and try to figure out what they might get up to should they manage to answer the first question. Better just to keep my distance from the Baha’i’s, or from the Greens, no matter how superficially attractive they might seem from time to time.

Another thing I have carried around in my head for ages, colouring my worldview in a minor way, is Rushdie’s characterization of Adelaide as the sort of place where Steven King novels happen. Every couple of years something weird and ghastly happens to set me nodding in agreement with this insight again.

Besides that- well, the sudden elevation of Rushdie to super-celebrity fugitive status happened when I was an easily influenced undergraduate. It was exciting, in an age of proverbial undergraduate apathy, for there to be a book around which reading was in some way a political act. I’m still not sure whether Rushdie blundered in without meaning to cause offence, or whether he set out to cause offence. At any rate, revisiting what he said is a stark reminder of how much easier it is to give offence nowadays. The title ‘The Satanic Verses’ was translated into several languages using a word that means specifically ‘verses of the Qur’an’, hence ‘The Satanic Qur’an’, which in striking at the very source of authority in Islam is practically the worst thing you can say. Inside, this is reinforced by the explicit suggestion that the holiest thing in the world, the uncreated Qur’an, was composed fraudulently. Publishing all that was an act of unparalled audacity. (All chaotic people ought to feel some admiration for the audacity, even if you think it was wholly reprehensible, in the same way we admired the audacity of the 9/11 plotters.) It now seems obvious that millions of people would want to kill you for writing such things. Nowadays, of course, all you have to give the wrong name to a teddy bear.
Androoo will have forgotten this anecdote, I am sure. Once upon that time he said he thought fundamentalist Islam was the most dangerous religion for the world, and I disagreed with him, saying the Evangelical Christians were far more likely to cause trouble and regurgitating some trivial anecdote about Marilyn Quayle. Have we swapped places? That I am not sure about.


I found out by reading the paper the next day that it had been a peaceful election. That is, nobody had been killed. There had been bomb throwing incidents at polling booths X, Y, Z, etc., but all in all it had been a fine example of a peaceful democratic process. Interestingly- the paper said, putting no more spin on it than that- the wards the incumbent party won (it was returned) it mostly won by quite narrow margins, while the wards the opposition won they romped in. Curious coincidence, eh?

Q is for al-Qur'an

'I'm afraid there's no niche in the world for people that won't be either Pagan or Christian.' - Ransom, aka The Director, in That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis

The first time I read that line, the words that rose unbidden in my mind were these: 'There is no god but God, and Muhammad is his Prophet.' True, Belloc et al. have attempted to appropriate Islam as the greatest of the Christian heresies, but I think if we are going to play that game there is a much better case for considering Christianity as the greatest of the Jewish heresies. Muhammad never lived as a Christian or operated inside a Christian society the same way that Jesus lived as a Jew and operated within a Jewish society.

Over in Marco's blog we have been talking about not reading books, and the Qur'an is an example of a book in my life that I have never read. I never got past alif baa taa, you see, and the Qur'an is by definition in Arabic. I have read Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall's English paraphrase, The Meaning of the Glorious Qur'an and the 19th century Koran by Sale.* I had the first with me when I visited the future Nato many years ago, as our meteoric paths through idea space briefly passed- at a great distance, but probably closer than we had been before or since. The other thing I was reading was a very nice graphic novel life of Christ by a Peruvian Catholic of the Liberation Theology sort, while I think Nato was reading something evangelical that talked about how the wealth and power of the United States were signs of God's favour. I think. I may be misremembering/misrepresenting it dreadfully. I also took TMOTGQ with me one summer when I was labouring for a couple of geophysicists at a tiny camp at the back of beyond. Neither of them wanted to be geophysicists. One was an example of what I now recognise as the Sydney Anglo-Celtic yuppie archetype, who wanted to get into IT, and spent his evenings poring over computer techie stuff. I expect he eventually made a gazillion dollars. The other was a vegetarian interested in Eastern Philosophy who spent six months of each year backpacking around India, and he spent his evenings reading books of Eastern Philosophy. He was curious about my TMOTGQ and borrowed it for an evening. He found it quite traumatic. It was the most intolerant religious book he had ever read, he said. I think. I remember he was traumatised, at any rate. I also remember late one night, when there was an assignment I had to hand in the next morning that I hadn't started yet, and I was reading TMOTGQ. I asked myself the question: 'What would be a better use of my time if I were to die tommorrow? Staying up all night doing my assignment or staying up all night reading TMOTGQ?' That is the sort of foolish question first year university students ask themselves.

If you ever find yourself surrounded by Christians of that sort which considers the Bible to be the inerrant Word of God, and their constant company and constant repetition of their arguments are slowly wearing you away, drip drip drip, so that you begin to consider that maybe there is something to what they are saying, you must do what I did. You must stay up all night reading Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall's The Meaning of the Glorious Qur'an. Two things may happen, if you read with attention.

You may realise that the book you thought was an infallible book cannot possibly be an infallible book, but that the book you hold might be the shadow cast from eternity of an infallible book. Maybe it is what you are seeking. It is written like an infallible book, written by someone who teaches with authority, not like the scribes or the Pharisees. Here is the core of the message of the Old Testament, repeated without the barbarities and the improbabilities and the legalistic dross. Here is the same message, the call to the same God, but written with clarity, with confidence, with universality. That is one thing that might happen.

The other thing is that you may decide that infallible books are not for you.

Long have I been attracted by this confident voice out of the desert. It began, I think, with reading history. Islam seemed to me to have been since its inception the only proven competitor with Christianity in idea space. In my first histories of the future, the union of Christianity with Islam was a common theme. I fasted for Ramadan in 1990.

Do not worry: I am too Catholic in my marrow to revert. Should the great ideological conflict of the 21st century turn out to be the same as the great ideological conflict of the 12th, as the president of a Catholic student association suggested to me at Devil Bunny City University in August 2001, I know which side I will be on. But...

Until then, I am a teensy bit conflicted.

I'm with the robust defenders of Christendom. But if the struggle is between the robust defenders of Dar-al-Islam and the decadent and gormless post-Christian West, I'm not going to put myself out to help the infidels.

I have said most of all this before, probably better, in scattered places here and in comments on Nato's blog. This post in the 'Reformation' thread, f'rinstance.


*: If you don't have time to read these yourself, you could always read the Cardinal's book report.

P is for Poe

I think that if you were some sort of psychological archaeologist, and you could dig down through all the consciously scientific strata of my mind, and all the consciously religious strata, and all the weird deposits laid down by the vagaries of history and biology, you would find- a very little distance above the primeval bedrock of "There seems to be an I that is thinking"- these words, engraved in letters as deep as a spear as long:

I
Hear the sledges with the bells-
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells-
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

II
Hear the mellow wedding bells,
Golden bells!
What a world of happiness their harmony foretells!
Through the balmy air of night
How they ring out their delight!
From the molten-golden notes,
And an in tune,
What a liquid ditty floats
To the turtle-dove that listens, while she gloats
On the moon!
Oh, from out the sounding cells,
What a gush of euphony voluminously wells!
How it swells!
How it dwells
On the Future! how it tells
Of the rapture that impels
To the swinging and the ringing
Of the bells, bells, bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells,bells,
Bells, bells, bells-
To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells!

III
Hear the loud alarum bells-
Brazen bells!
What a tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells!
In the startled ear of night
How they scream out their affright!
Too much horrified to speak,
They can only shriek, shriek,
Out of tune,
In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire,
In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire,
Leaping higher, higher, higher,
With a desperate desire,
And a resolute endeavor,
Now–now to sit or never,
By the side of the pale-faced moon.
Oh, the bells, bells, bells!
What a tale their terror tells
Of Despair!
How they clang, and clash, and roar!
What a horror they outpour
On the bosom of the palpitating air!
Yet the ear it fully knows,
By the twanging,
And the clanging,
How the danger ebbs and flows:
Yet the ear distinctly tells,
In the jangling,
And the wrangling,
How the danger sinks and swells,
By the sinking or the swelling in the anger of the bells-
Of the bells-
Of the bells, bells, bells,bells,
Bells, bells, bells-
In the clamor and the clangor of the bells!

IV
Hear the tolling of the bells-
Iron Bells!
What a world of solemn thought their monody compels!
In the silence of the night,
How we shiver with affright
At the melancholy menace of their tone!
For every sound that floats
From the rust within their throats
Is a groan.
And the people–ah, the people-
They that dwell up in the steeple,
All Alone
And who, tolling, tolling, tolling,
In that muffled monotone,
Feel a glory in so rolling
On the human heart a stone-
They are neither man nor woman-
They are neither brute nor human-
They are Ghouls:
And their king it is who tolls;
And he rolls, rolls, rolls,
Rolls
A paean from the bells!
And his merry bosom swells
With the paean of the bells!
And he dances, and he yells;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the paean of the bells-
Of the bells:
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the throbbing of the bells-
Of the bells, bells, bells-
To the sobbing of the bells;
Keeping time, time, time,
As he knells, knells, knells,
In a happy Runic rhyme,
To the rolling of the bells-
Of the bells, bells, bells:
To the tolling of the bells,
Of the bells, bells, bells, bells-
Bells, bells, bells-
To the moaning and the groaning of the bells.

O is for Orwell

Hobbit women are often named after plants and flowers, says Tolkien in the LOTR Appendices, and it was vague memories of Keep the Aspidistra Flying that led me to name my hobbit rogue Aspidistra, was back in 1991. While young her nose had been cut off by a mage looking for spell components, but eventually she managed to source a golden one. In LOTR Online, you cannot make up characters with no noses, but I have reconstituted an Aspidistra:

Figure 1: Aspidistra under the constellation Menelvagor

‘To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle. One thing that helps towards it is to keep a diary, or, at any rate, to keep some kind of record about one’s opinions about important events. Otherwise, when some particularly absurd belief is exploded by events, one may simply forget that one ever held it.’ – George Orwell

On November 24th, I expect Labor shall win the federal election. The sudden convergence of policy on everything between the two parties is in one way disappointing, but in another way is a refreshing sign that our country is more or less sane. It would be much worse if the two sides were being dragged along by their lunatic fringes, which seems to be the case in certain other English-speaking countries.

The public pronouncements of Rudd have tracked ‘right’ on Iraq to such an extent that I think it will make absolutely no difference to the U.S. alliance which party wins. In the meanwhile, the Prime Minister has tracked ‘left’ on Anthropogenic Global Warming to such an extent that he is no better than Labor. He has also frightened me by promising to enshrine ‘Some Australians are more equal than others’ in the constitution, and I am irritated by the prospect of him handing over to Costello because I know this would mean another time-wasting constitutional debate.
I don’t expect I shall mind Labor winning overmuch, given this convergence. A Labor government will provide a good opportunity for people to remember that mandatory detention of asylum seekers, gutting higher education, and privatising everything that stands still long enough to slap a price tag on it were policies initiated by the last lot of federal Labor governments.

I have read fewer of Orwell’s essays than I ought, but the ones I have read say something clearly and logically, and the something that they say is always sane, and usually something I can agree with. This is unlike any essays that are written in newspapers or magazines nowadays. Even this celebrated fragment has a good deal of truth in it, and an important message for me to remember:

‘Chesterton was a writer of considerable talent who chose to suppress both his sensibilities and his intellectual honesty in the cause of Roman Catholic propaganda. During the last twenty years or so of his life, his entire output was in reality an endless repetition of the same thing, under its laboured cleverness as simple and boring as ‘Great is Diana of the Ephesians.’ Every book that he wrote, every scrap of dialogue, had to demonstrate beyond the possibility of mistake the superiority of the Catholic over the Protestant or the pagan.’

The protagonist in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, whose name escapes me, has an attitude to birth control which one now expects to find only among extreme religious believers. I am pretty sure from things I have read elsewhere that Orwell shared this opinion. In fact, from where I stand now the similarities between Orwell and Chesterton are far more important than the differences.

I was reading 1984 after school on the afternoon when my sister was being born, and my maths teacher walked by, not knowing my sister was being born just then, and said ‘Big Brother!’.

This is included as an example of an anecdote that has no point.

The only longer work of Orwell’s that I have read and re-read is Animal Farm. In the introduction to the edition I have it suggests that the subtitle ‘A Fairy Story’ relates to the arbitrary nature of success in fairy tales. In fairy tales, there is often no logic to choosing a successful course of action. Anyone may succeed in a fairy tale, no matter how unpromising their beginnings, but for everyone who succeeds hundreds fail. Think of all those knights who try and fail to rescue the princess, leaving their bones to litter the landscape, before the hero succeeds for some arbitrary reason.

Chesterton makes a similar point on the arbitrary nature of morality in fairy tales. In fairy tales, there is often no logic to what is stated to be good or bad. Happiness hangs by an irrational thread. Chesterton shoehorns the arbitrary nature of fairy tale morality into an argument that fairy tales are moral after all.

But I am not entirely convinced.

I have a bad habit of not paying enough attention to things. And I rarely forget instances when I have been stupid. (This is why I keep getting ‘Running out of memory’ errors). So I can remember my father showing me something with the quote ‘All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.’ on it and me breezily, stupidly, saying that I had seen it before. Of course my father would not show me something that was not worth looking at. It had been misquoted as ‘All people are equal, but some are more equal than others’. It had been misattributed, to- I think- ‘Animal House’ rather than ‘Animal Farm’-and it had been, worst of all, cited approvingly to illustrate the importance of education, since by education we could be one of those animals who are more equal than the other ones!

I have felt very bad about not paying attention at that moment ever since. I’m sorry, dad. :(

This is included as an example of an anecdote that has a point.

N is for Nobody

Science fiction is dead.

Exhibit 1: Last month I found myself in the ‘Fantasy and Science Fiction’ section of an average-sized bookshop, one of a major chain of such shops that you can find in any shopping centre in the country.

There were some Star Trek books. There were some Star Wars books. I think there may have been some Stargate books. There were a few of those sequels to the Dune Books by Brian Herbert which I have never had the slightest inclination to read. There was ‘I, Robot’. There was, in one gleam of hope, a whole slab of shelf devoted to a new edition of Philip K. Dick’s novels.

Beyond that, it was all Fantasy.

Of course, not all bookstores are like that. But if Science Fiction was a going concern, there wouldn’t be any bookstores like that.

To a first approximation, therefore, it would seem that no science fiction with mass appeal is being written today.

Refutations of this statement, with copious counter-examples, would be welcome. While awaiting them I will have a go at possible explanations:

(1) As a superannuated fuddy-duddy, I am out of touch with the vibrant and populous community of modern science fiction readers. Entirely possible... but if they were really vibrant and populous one would still expect to see more evidence of it in the chain bookstores. I think.

(2) It just got too hard to write science fiction, because the real world got too science-fictiony, and was more or less the same as the Cyberpunk world we used to read.

Exhibit 2: When I read science fiction, even my favourite stuff, it always has a period feel nowadays: In all but a very few cases, it is obviously of the 50s, or the 60s, or the 70s, or the 80s, and could not be anything else. I can immediately imagine a ‘generic’ science fiction story of each of those decades, as dated by its themes and characters as if it were full of artifacts and celebrities of that period.

Exhibit 3: I can think of two authors immediately who wrote science fiction that was interesting and good, in different ways, and then went off to achieve fame and fortune writing formulaic fantasy. I can’t think of anyone who went the other way.

I sat down once and thought about what sort of thing I liked to read best of all, and I remember deciding that it was science fiction stories of the sort written by Larry Niven. I can’t think of any particular way they stand out. It is just that every other particular science fiction author I think of has particular foibles that would grate on me if I had to read only them forever. So, if I was forced to take the short stories of only one author with me to Camp X-Ray to read and re-read for the term of my natural life, it would have to be Larry Niven.

Having said that, I have almost never re-read a Larry Niven novel.

And, I can’t think of any way in which Larry Niven has changed my world view. Perhaps changes in world view only arise in response to being sufficiently irritated. So, although ‘N’ was originally going to be for Larry Niven, I have changed my mind.

N is for the next science fiction author to make an impact on the way I look at the world.

Nobody.

M is for Mark, BTW

M was always going to be Mark the Evangelist. I have said before that I like Mark's best of all the Gospels because it has only the merest trace of what I call 'selfish meme' material, the bits that any ideology accrues in the struggle for survival that basically say 'only this meme is true; believe in this meme, or be punished.' Mark's is supposed to be the oldest Gospel written down, so I feel it is a better connection to the historical Jesus. It is also the only Gospel that I have ever gone right through and studied in a proper Bible study thing, long ago with my Mum when I was young and sensible. Thus not only do I know Mark a bit better than the others, it brings back memories of distant deserts and of being small among larger people like a cottage among mountains.

I like it that Mark says 'whoever is not against us is for us', while Matthew says 'whoever is not with me is against me'. (I am pretty sure that Luke says both. Luke would have to be my second favourite.) I like that Mark's Gospel is so unadorned and brisk and to the point. It is probably an accident of my environment that I find that sort of writing seems more trustworthy.

Here is a story about the Baptism of Jesus which Mum asked me to write the other year. I built it around the version from Mark, pulling in pieces from the other Gospels here and there.

Look at the sunset. My eyes are still good- G*d be praised! See how beauty is poured out on us, though we are wicked, because G*d is good.

My eyes are good, but my memory tells me the sunsets were yet more beautiful over the hills of Judaea when I was a child, in Bethany-Across-the-Jordan. Things today are not like things once were. Everything changes, everything is broken apart and scattered to the far corners of the earth. The world shakes on its foundations, as though abandoned by G*d.
Everything is speeding up, falling down, as the end times draw near. All generations are wicked- all have sinned and fall short of the glory of G*d- but as the end times draw closer so does the wickedness of those who go about on the earth grow greater. Have you heard the news from Ascalon? From Ctesiphon? Everywhere there are wars and rumours of wars, tribulations of all kinds, and men who set themselves above G*d, and mock that there is such a thing as truth. The temple is cast down, so not one stone remains on another, just as he said. But there are also those who remember that he said those words, from India to the Pillars of Hercules. They remember that he said it, and give praise to G*d, and they remember that the suffering and the wickedness of this world are but tiny things.

I was there at the beginning. I do not know what I would have done, if I had known who he would turn out to be. Nobody had ever heard the name Jesus of Nazareth. He did not look like anything special, except for his eyes. Mostly I remember his eyes. It was a long time ago, but I will tell you just how it was.
You know where it is written, ‘I will send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way: a voice of one calling in the desert, ‘Prepare the way of the L*rd, make straight paths for him?’’ Those who follow him say those words were written of a man named John who appeared in the desert of Judaea when I was about ten years old. He made his home by the Jordan river. He spoke like a prophet of old, calling on G*d’s people to repent their sins and turn back to Him, and many people came from Jerusalem and all the land of Judaea to hear him speak, and to repent their sins and be baptised with the waters of the Jordan, to show that they were clean in the sight of the L*rd. This John always dressed like a prophet ought to dress, in a robe of camel’s hair, and it was said that he never ate bread or meat, only locusts and wild honey, as a sign to this wicked generation. A brood of vipers, he used to call those who came to hear him speak. But most of them did not seem to mind. Some days there were hundreds of people listening to him; sometimes there were thousands; and on the third or fourth day that they came mother sent me out to them with a basket of figs. Because people need to eat, and not all people pack all the food that they will want, or like the food they have packed when they get where they are going. So every day while this John spoke I would go and sit near where he was preaching and sell figs to those who had come to hear him. I never heard anyone speak the way he did. I never got tired of it, though I got to learn some of his sermons almost by heart. His eyes seemed to shoot sparks of fire when he spoke about the glory of the L*rd, and the Messiah who was to come. He wept bitter tears when he spoke of the sins of Israel, and he closed his eyes in dread when he spoke of the judgment of the L*rd.

‘After me will come one more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. I baptise you with water, but he will baptise you with the breath of the L*rd, and with fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.’

I remember wondering what the Messiah would be like, how much greater he must be than any man I had seen, a prophet and a general and a rabbi all in one, with a sorrow and a fury and a love of G*d even greater than that of John. I saw him in my eye like one of the commanders of the Romans, sitting like a King on the back of a white horse, but a Jew like me, not a Roman, with a deep black beard like our young rabbi of Jericho, and a sword at his belt shining in the sun too bright to look upon, to be used on the enemies of Judah, not on the necks of the Jews like the swords of the Romans. This Jesus of Nazareth did not look like that at all. He did not look like anyone special. Only his eyes, but I did not notice them at first. He must have been about thirty years old. He had come with nothing more than the clothes on his back, and a walking stick. One of the straps on one of his sandals had broken, and he had tied it together with a bit of rope.

‘Will you give me a fig?’ he asked me. ‘I have no money, but I am hungry, and I have walked a long way.’
Well, my mother did not send me to sit all day in the sun to give figs away for nothing, and I told him this as politely as I could. He nodded and smiled at me, and said a word of blessing, and turned away, and as he turned I saw that his eyes were like the eyes of the Messiah I had thought of. Maybe I do not remember rightly, and I only thought that later after everything else had happened, but I don’t think so. There was great mercy and kindness in those eyes, and a terrible hunger and thirst for justice, and something else that I did not understand.
You say you would have given him a fig, if you had been there? You say you would have known him as the Messiah? Do not be so certain.

John spoke that day like he always did, preaching strong words to the learned men of Jerusalem who had come to hear him. ‘How can you say you have repented, if you do not produce the fruit of repentance? The axe is already at the root of the tree, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.’ When he was done all the people came up to
him to be baptised, as they always did when he was finished speaking.

There was an old woman sitting next to me, almost as old as I am now, and the first thing I noticed was that she had stood up all of a sudden. Then my ears caught up with my thoughts, and told me there had been a gasp from the crowd just before, like when a man stumbles in a footrace. So I stood up, too, but I could not see anything.
‘What is it, grandmother?’ I asked the old
woman. ‘It is John,’ she said. ‘A man has come to him to be baptised, and he is bowing down before him, but John has bowed down to him.’

‘What is he saying? What is he saying?’ the old woman asked, for John had spoken while she was talking to me. A man who was standing in front of us turned and said: ‘I need to be baptised by you; why do you come to me?’

‘Who is he?’ I asked, forgetting my place.

‘It is the one he told us about. He is the Messiah,’ said the man. ‘Let me lift you up.’

He put me on his shoulders, and I saw John kneeling in the water at the edge of the river, and another man kneeling before him: it was the man I had spoken to before, who had walked so far and been hungry. John poured the waters of the Jordan over the head of the man Jesus of Nazareth, and then Jesus stood up and walked out of the river. I had imagined the Messiah coming on the back of a white horse, or standing at the gates of the Temple with a stick in his hand to break the tables of the moneylenders; but he stepped out of the river looking like a lamb that has been caught out in the rain, and lies trembling on the wet grass. The end of his robe trailed in the wet sand, and his sandals where he left them were dusty from the road. And at that moment- well, I do not have any imagination. You know that. I never saw visions when I was young, and I never
dream dreams now that I am old- but I saw this; and it is written that John saw the same thing. I saw the sky open up like the flaps of a tent might open up to show the sky. And I saw something like a bird of fire diving down from the break in the heavens, and coming down to rest on the man Jesus. As this happened I heard a voice. It was a small voice, and it sounded very close to me, and I could not tell whether it was the voice of a man or a woman. It said: ‘This is my son, who I love. I am pleased with him.’

I looked around for where the voice was coming from, but I did not see anyone. When I looked back, the sky was whole again, and the bird had gone. Jesus of Nazareth put his sandals on, and walked quickly away through the crowd.

What then? That was the beginning. I never got a chance to get close to him in the crush. He walked away very quickly, blessing the people as he went, but no one followed him. He went away into the wilderness, and when he came back he began to preach to the Jews, and to the Samaritans, and to the Romans, and made more of a stir in the land of Judaea than John ever did. So the Romans and their lapdogs killed him, just like they killed John, and you know that was not the end of it, but only the beginning, and his name is spoken now by Ethiopians and Scythians, and men in the Antipodes who walk on their hands.

I can still remember that voice, as clear as if it had just spoken. ‘This is my son, who I love.’ I wish I had given him a fig when he was hungry. But you cannot take back a thing once it is done, or do a thing that you have left undone. Remember that, child. O G*d that made this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to receive Your saints? How long, O L*rd, how long?

The strangest thing about writing this was rediscovering an ancient metaphor. 'Okay, Jesus has just come out of the water, and I want him to look like the farthest thing possible from a great hero and leader, something really bedraggled and pathetic. Hmmm. I know, how about on a wet morning just after lambing, how pathetic the lambs look sometimes hiding under their mothers as I drive by? Yes, that'll do... Hang on...'