Genesis 22

My link to this revision of Genesis 22 went dead, so I thought I would put it here.

Some time later the Evil One disguised himself as a still small voice and went out to test Abraham. He said to him: ‘Abraham’.

‘Here I am,’ Abraham replied. ‘Here I am, O Sovereign Lord’.

And then the Evil One said: ‘Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about. 

And Abraham went out to do this thing. Early the next morning he got up and saddled his donkey . He took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. When he had cut enough wood for the burnt offering, he set out for the place the Evil One had told him about. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place in the distance. He said to his servants: ‘Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you.’

 

Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and placed it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. As the two of them went on together, Isaac spoke up and said to his Father Abraham, ‘Father?’

‘Yes, my son?’ Abraham replied.

‘The fire and the wood are here,’ Isaac said, ‘but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?’ Abraham answered  ‘God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering., my son.’ And the two of them went on together. When they reached the place Abraham had been told about, he built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. he bound his son Isaac - his only son Isaac, whom he loved - and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood.

Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. But the Angel of the Lord called out to him from heaven, ‘Abraham! Abraham!’ And the Evil One made to speak, but was prevented.

‘Here I am,’ Abraham replied.

‘Lay down your knife’ said the Angel of the Lord. ‘Do not do a thing to the boy. How could you believe that the Lord your God would ask such a thing of you? Only the Evil One would ask such a thing. Now I know you fear God, but you do not know God, for you were prepared to do such a thing in the name of He who created heaven and earth in pure love!’

And Abraham looked up, and say a ram with its horns caught in a thicket; and he took the ram, and offered it up as a burnt offering on the altar where he had bound his son.  So Abraham called that place ‘The Lord will provide”; as it is still said today, ‘On the mountain of the Lord He will provide’.

The angel of the Lord called to Abraham from heaven a second time and said, ‘I swear by myself, declares the Lord, that because you have done this, and not withheld from the Evil One your son, your only son, whom you love, your descendants will drink to the full the cup you have filled today. In your blindness you would have killed your only son at the command of the Lord; you will mourn not one son, but sons and daughters beyond counting. As numerous as the stars in the sky will be your descendants; as numberless as the sand on the seashore; and they will not be withheld from the Evil One. You fear God, but you have not known God; In every land and in every time your sons and daughters will be slain by those who  fear God, but do not know God. They will make burnt offerings not of one boy, but of cities and nations, and the face of the earth will be darkened with the blood of your children’.

And Abraham fell down before the angel of the Lord and cried out ‘ O Sovereign Lord! This is more than any man can bear! If you lay this curse upon me, you must  be even as the Evil One who commanded me to slay my son Isaac!’
 

And he lay in the dust and covered his head, and waited for the fire from heaven to devour him. 

And the angel of the Lord spoke: ‘The Lord says: know that no curse is laid upon you, but only the knowledge of that which you foreordained when you lifted your hand. Do not despair; for your children have the better part. How much easier is it to walk the road of the oppressed than that of the oppressor! On the last day, your descendants shall possess the gates of their enemies, and theirs will be the power to bind and to loose, and through them only shall all nations of the earth be blessed.’

 Then Abraham returned to his servants, and they set off together for Beersheba. And Abraham dwelt at Beersheba.

Arlit

My bicycling on Saturday was notable for two reasons.

First, my seat somehow fell apart, meaning I lost my balance very shortly afterwards and buggered up my wrist. But it seems to be coming good.

Second, and much more interesting, my virtual 'Cycle across the Sahara' brought me to Arlit. I make a point of not looking too far ahead on Google Earth, so after 200 km of following a poorly defined track across an utterly featureless plain, was expecting another tiny cluster of houses like Assamakka. But no: it is a great big city of 80,000 or so people, built to service an enormous uranium mine that provides approximately 1/3 of Niger's exports and is critical to the French nuclear power industry.

It seems very tenuously connected to civilisation. It does not look from Google Earth like there is much in the way of a great big security fence around the uranium mine nor the expatriate bits of town. There is nothing but distance separating it from the heartland of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghrib, in the Kidal region of Mali. A lot less distance than there is between Kidal and In Amenas. I think we will hear more about Arlit soon.

Normal Service Resumes

"When the sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea?" 

"O no, no, I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying "Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.'' 

I’m not unhappy anymore.  I had another one of those epiphathingummys. 

The generation growing up today is smarter than any that has gone before. They know more stuff. They have more stuff to know. They will have more power to remake the world and themselves than any previous generation. And they will have to – remake the world, that is – since they will have lived through the collapse of the stupid unsustainable system we have cobbled together.  So they will have to work for a living. And I am confident that they will do a good job of it.

I am proud and happy to be part of the creation of this new world at one remove: to spend my working life pointing people at shiny amazing stuff to know about and enthusing about how shiny and amazing it is, and trying to figure out new stuff for people to know. This seems to me to be the best possible way to spend my time.

I believe that what I believe is true: and I believe that the truth will out. So even if we go down a wrong turning and become more stupid and evil in a thousand ways, eventually we will be replaced by people who are not stupid and evil, because stupid and evil are not survival traits for civilisations. 

My New Plan

Alice laughed. "There's not use trying," she said: "one can't believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."


Well, mentally renouncing all ties did not work. Being sure to refer always to the 'rebel colonies', wishing I had a spare $450 and the time for two trips to Sydney, trolling the internet rejecting the legitimacy of the American Revolutions and/or Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, telling people who asked where I was born 'Occupied Spanish North America' and going around crying 'Viva El Rey Juan Carlos!' did not sufficiently reduce my emotional involvement with events in that shitty little country.

So I have decided on a new strategy.

I have observed, in my life thus far, that most people are really good at believing mind-bogglingly stupid things contradicted by vast amounts of evidence. So I thought, why shouldn't I try it, too?

This is my new belief, which I have spent most of my free time in the last twenty-four hours developing elaborate arguments for:

The United States of America is a fictional country invented by Nabokov as a setting for his novel 'Lolita'.


Hier steh ich.

A mere pebble of truism

A mere truism, is it? Yes, it is , and more is the pity; for what is a truism, as most men count truisms? What is it but a truth that ought to have been buried long ago in the lives of men – to send up for ever the corn of true deeds and the wine of loving kindness, - but instead of being buried in friendly soil, is allowed to lie about, kicked hither and thither in the dry and empty garret of their brains, till they are sick of the sight and sound it it, and to be rid of the thought of it, declare it to be no living truth but only a lifeless truism! Yet in their brain that truism must rattle until they shift it to its rightful quarters in their heart, where it will rattle no longer but take root and be a strength and loveliness. Is a truth to cease to be uttered because no better form than that of some divine truism  - say of St. John Boanerges – can be found for it? To the critic the truism is a sea-worn, foot-trodden pebble; to the obedient scholar, a radiant topaz, which, as he polishes it with the dust of its use, may turn into a diamond. 

(George Macdonald, “Thomas Wingfold, Curate”)

About what we cannot remain silent, we must speak

I support the Muslim protestors. 
I like to see people believing things and arguing for those things and standing up for what they believe. Especially if they risk prosecution for doing so. The protestors are standing up for the oneness of a compassionate and merciful God, for the clarity and purity of a true religion, for the existence of truth and the existence of virtue in a world mired in relativistic nonsense. Good. On. Them. 

...Except when they destroy property and injure or kill people, that is not on.

I support the creators of the film 'Innocence of Muslims'.
There is a time for being polite; there is a time for not rocking the boat and not treading on toes and  respecting other people's beliefs; and there is a time for 'Ecrasez l'infame!'. After the murder of Theo van Gogh, after the overreaction to the Jyllands-Posten cartoons, it is obvious that the only way to avoid de facto censorship for all of us is for Islam to be subjected to a tidal wave of mockery. The mockers need to be too numerous to kill: the mocked need to get used to it. The makers of the film, whether they intended to or not, are standing up for the Enlightenment virtues of freedom of thought and speech.  Good. On. Them.

...Except for duping the actors, that was really low.

I don't like the fact that people in my country are being investigated by the police - that veiled threats are being made to take away their children - because of signs they have carried at a protest. I don't see how a sign reading 'Behead those who insult Islam' can be construed as incitement, considering it (a) doesn't name any specific individual (b) isn't addressed to anyone in particular (c) is exactly the same thing tens of millions of people (at a conservative estimate) are thinking and saying, so is adding a negligible atom of provocation to a pre-existing atmosphere. I wonder, has anyone ever been investigated in this country for carrying a sign reading 'Hang child molesters'? How are those two signs different? How many enemies of Islam have been murdered in this country lately*? How many child molesters? 

Here is a t-shirt that Spouse of Clam won't let me make in RL, by the way:

 

I don't like the fact that someone in the Wossname administration apparently pressured Google to remove the video. If they were sincerely working for the introduction of Sharia in the United States, then that would be okay, I guess, though I wish they would have been upfront about their program with the voters. But they are not trying to suppress the film because they are standing up for the oneness of God, the honour of His Prophet, and the glory of Dar-al-Islam. And they are not standing up for the Enlightenment virtues that are what, for all its faults, distinguish our modern age from the age of the pogrom and the auto-de-fé. They are just being gutless, pathetic weasels.

It is worse if the midnight 'volunteering' of Nakouba to 'come down to the station and answer questions about parole violations' had anything to do with someone in the Wossname administration. Then they are being gutless, pathetic, dangerous weasels. Weasels whose vision of the future is a boot stamping on a human face forever. Screw them.

* That is, since the attack on the excursion train at Broken Hill, which doesn't count, since it was part of the 1914-1918 war.

Aw, shucks...

All the rivers flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full

Having just finished Nesbit's almost-a-trilogy about the Bastable children, I found myself consumed by a terrible desire to know how Oswald turned out when he grew up. He has really set such a bad trajectory for getting into ill-advised scrapes already that it easy to imagine him ending up hanged. A little bit of googling has told me there is an entire trilogy of steampunk novels featuring an adult Oswald Bastable. I wonder if they are any good? One of the links said something about a 'free download' so I expect I will find out.

My thought had been to write the 'missing chapters' of some novels where it would be reasonable for an Oswald Bastable in his late forties to appear - the ones that occurred to me were 'Keep the Aspidistra Flying', 'A Handful of Dust' and 'My Brother Jack'. (The last because the obvious way for someone like Oswald to avoid being shot for desertion in the Great War is to go to Melbourne as a young man and enlist in the AIF, rather than the British Army per se.) These realistic novels seems much more appropriate to me than a steampunk setting. Of course this is setting an unrealistically high literary bar for myself for a payoff that nobody whatsoever will care about. But if you are interested in seeing how badly I can mess-up faux-Waugh and faux-Orwell, just say the word...

More meandering literary observations

I'm re-reading Julian May's 'Saga of the Pliocene Exiles' for the first time in a decade or two. I love the fecundity of the world-building, the audacity and inventiveness of the premise, the vast submerged mass of information about the Galactic Milieu that is out there hidden from our sight; I like the outre characters. As a long-time RPGer, I like the gamified classification of psionic powers. I don't mind the lack of character development many reviewers complain about. After all, the main characters are either denizens of the Land of Faerie - whose characters cannot develop as a literary convention - or profoundly messed-up people subjected either to compulsory happification or brutalisation that is only likely to mess them up further. Even the way the two most unlikeable male characters are unconvincingly transformed by 'True Love' is reasonable if you assume they are wartime romances that are not going to last: the female Exile population would be rich in the sort of sad cases who fall for men like that, and that kind of desperate clutching at affection is common under that sort of stress.

But as a story... coming back to it... it is not my kind of story. It is not the way I would have done it. All the glorious world-building is frittered away. For me, at any rate.

My many years of GMing have conditioned me to prefer the 'slow unfolding of a mystery' to 'whirlwind of action' and I would have written this story as more of the former.

Even though the society of the Galactic Milieu is less pathologically risk-averse than our lame-arse one, it still seems unlikely that they would let Madame Guderian send people willy-nilly back through time for sixty years without regulating her in any way, and stranger that they would just take over her enterprise and keep it running without doing any investigations of their own. It doesn't make sense that Madame Guderian would just have kept going, after the third or fourth time she sent a time-traveller off with amber tablets and instructions on how to attempt to get a message back to her, and heard zip. Or, that she wouldn't have communicated her suspicions to someone else. So, in a more realistic, plot rather than action-driven scenario, the third or fourth time she would have gotten a message back saying things were initially bad in this area, but now it is secure, and we're all fine here thanks, how are you? And over time a whole plausible story could have been built up mirroring the 22nd century expectations about what the Pliocene is like, feeding information to improve the chances of future Exiles and coincidentally milking the future for particular items and materials wanted in the past. On the basis of this plausible story, it makes sense that the Milieu would keep the business rolling after Madame Guderian steps through the portal herself. The first novel will end as the characters step through and discover this story is a complete fabrication.

Actually, no, thinking about it that will drag the pre-story out too long. Instead, Group Green will arrive in the Pliocene halfway through the first novel, and find that superficially it appears much as reported - the Tanu will stay well in the background at Castle Gateway and it will all be carefully managed to stop information from leaking back into the future. Only as they travel on to the next stage, in the second half of the volume, will the fabrication emerge.

As written, the procedure for handling the time-travellers at the Pliocene end is incredibly messed-up. There would be a procedure for stripping incomers of blood-metal artefacts: it is not hard to drag them off for a delousing and have some human who can recognise iron go through their loot. And so much of the future plot hinges on the ridiculous accident of Felice's latent superpowers not being picked up: it is silly, and it wouldn't have happened. In my version they will be smoothly processed and carted off in appropriate directions without unseemly violence, and Felice will have to escape later.

Now, in this second half of the first bit, while the fabrication is revealed, the full malignity of Tanu intentions will be hidden from the characters, and from us. That can wait until book two. The enemy in book one can be the Firvulag: they don't control Castle Gateway, but are obviously keen to deny the Tanu the use of the humans, and make use of the more valuable ones: they can attack the northern party and capture them, and it can be they, rather than the Tanu, who subject their captives to a brutal sorting process. I know this makes the human characters more dried leaves tossed by the winds of fate than the Omnipotent Captains of Their Destinies, but damn it, at this stage they should be victims of fate, and that whole John-Campbellesque 'aren't we humans just so damn precious and special?' shtick is soooo 20th century.

I would like a whole second novel of Group Green's largely peaceful integration/failure to integrate into the world all that world-building went into: let us care about them, and the people who are already there, as people rather than hyperkinetic action figures. Through the course of this book, it will become apparent that the Tanu, as well as being liars, are considerably blacker than we thought at the end of book one; and the Firvulag considerably greyer. Layered over this, I would introduce a second group of 'special' time travellers, Group Aquamarine, say, whose back story will move more quickly than Group Green's. This group will contain as one of its members a retired member of the Portal Administration who has been reviewing all the correspondence going back through Madame Guderian's time - it has not been that long that the Milieu has been operating the Portal, after all - and has isolated all sorts of puzzling inconsistencies in the data. So he/she/it (why have no mentally-unbalanced Simbiari taken the plunge into the Pliocene, anyhow?) has volunteered for a one-way fact-finding mission to ascertain the facts on the ground and send a report back.

And then, well, in books three and four we can let loose with all the action scenes and wholesale slaughter.

That's how I would have done it.

What Might Have Been

Extracts from the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech

... I remember thinking, why do we even have these islands? What do they have to do with the real interests of our nation? Surely they are only relics from a bygone age, the legacy of an organisational chart drawn up by a committee of Foreign Office clerks in London. And I remember thinking: in these dark times, what the world needs is a bold statement of confidence in the ability of multilateral institutions to peacefully resolve international crises. And within a few days we had the proposal ready to take to the Australian people in the 2001 election - a gesture of hope for the first years of the new millennium...

...It has been a pleasure to see the unique environmental value of Christmas Island flourishing under United Nations administration, giving a model for future 'World Parks' such as Antarctica. And the gas resources in the waters off the Ashmore and Cartier Islands have liberated the United Nations at last from its position as a mendicant, forever beholden to individual nation states to fund its activities. I am sometimes asked if Australians are upset that part of our nation's gesture of peace will soon house the world's largest air and naval base. I would be wrong if I were to deny that this has caused distress among a sizeable fraction of the Australian people. However, as a realist, I am aware that compromises need to be made. The relocation of the Diego Garcia facilities to the Cocos Islands is enabling the restitution of a historic injustice, the dispossession of the Chagos Islanders, and the 99-year lease signed by the United States provides another very significant revenue stream for the United Nations. No, as well as a realist, I am a lifelong believer that the United States has acted overwhelmingly as a force for good in world affairs, and think this decision will prove to have been the right one...

Kim Beazley, 26^th Prime Minister of Australia, 2001-2010.

Some Meandering Observations on Greg Egan's "Zendegi"

The Amazon reviewers are divided. A lot of them dislike the slow pace and the way the story is grounded in the near now (2012 and the next twenty years) instead of zooming off into a zany superscience future. Now, I think the Egan novels that zoom off into a zany superscience future miss as often as they hit (thinking Schild's Ladder here) and I have always preferred his work that is grounded in good science instead of flaky hippy-dippy perversions of Quantum Mechanics (I'm looking disapprovingly at you, Distress and Teranesia). And while stories pondering the social implications of impossible technological advances can be interesting, I reckon they are less worthwhile than stories pondering the social implications of just vaguely possible technologicial advances,

So for me, Zendegi being grounded in the near now, and being concerned with the nitty-gritty of how we get there (uploading ourselves to the interwebz) from here (here) are big positives.

One danger of working in the near now is that it is easy to end up with characters who are too much like yourself (see Dr Clam's Rules of Writing, #5). Now, the story of Zendegi is told in a tight third-person narrative following two main characters. One of them is a typical Egan main character, with a fairly sketchy background and a fractal dimension between 2.5 and 2.7. The other is a male Sydneysider of the latte-sucking variety who grew up in the eighties and comes with a raft of detailed life experiences and pop-culture references. Which are of course hugely entertaining for all Australian readers who grew up in the eighties. This character (whose name is Martin) is an absolutely convincing three-dimensional portrait of a dull male latte-sucking Sydneysider who grew up in the eighties. He has the absolutely uninteresting conventional unexamined convictions of his tribe. I really hope he is not Greg Egan. But that's not that important. The problem is more that he distorts the novel and makes the other characters seem less real by being so much more grounded in reality than they are.

Spoilers, ahoy!

Martin lives in Iran for 15 years, but luckily is married to an Iranian woman who spookily shares all his absolutely uninteresting conventional unexamined convictions, so they all stay unexamined. His wife dies tragically. He is diagnosed with something that will be be fatal soon. He has no relations in Australia, so his 6-year old son will soon be left to grow up with Iranian friends. Even though Iran in the novel is rapidly undergoing rapid social change, something like Franco-Spain to Almodovar-Spain, what freaks Martin out about dying is that he is going to leave his son to be brought up in the backward culture of these 'lesser breeds without the law'. Clearly the solution will involve some sort of being uploaded to the interwebz, and the story starts to pick up pace. Anyway, stuff happens. If you like Egan at all, you ought to read it. If you don't you probably haven't gotten this far into the post.

I told you those plotty details about Martin having a terminal illness and being obsessed with how he can influence his son's life after his death in order to introduce this quote, from when he is selling the bookstore his wife and he used to run in Teheran before things went bad:

"Then he found an empty packing box and took it to the English language section. Javeed would have ten million electronic books to choose from, but Martin still wanted to pass on something from his own century. From the novels he picked out The Grapes of Wrath, Animal Farm, Catch-22, and Slaughterhouse-Five; from non-fiction, The Diary of Anne Frank, Down and Out in Paris and London, and The Gulag Archipelago. He was tempted to go on and fill the box to its rim, but once he started fretting over omissions he knew there’d be no end to it."

Okay, I agree they're all good books. Very worthy. But- if you dear departed father left you a box of books like that, wouldn't you say he was a bit - emo? Isn't the overall effect a teensy bit bleak?[1] He's basically telling his kid: 'life sucks, then you die.'  Sheesh, Martin...

This got me thinking what seven books I would put in such a box, keeping to Martin's balance of fiction/non-fiction and English/translations-into-English, and I came up with these:

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court - Mark Twain

Marianne, the Magus and the Manticore - Sheri S. Tepper

The Cyberiad - Stanislaw Lem

Diaspora - Greg Egan

Selected essays 1934-1943 - Simone Weil

St Thomas Aquinas - G. K. Chesterton

How to Make our Ideas Clear - Charles Peirce

Each of those fiction books has a good mix of comedy and tragedy, profound thinky bits and purely exhilarating entertaining bits, and breathes something of the potential of the sentient spirit, despite being written by wildly different people with wildly different ideas. IMHO.

For the non-fiction, Weil and Chesterton both write about the battle for the soul of Languedoc. The worldviews they approach it with are diametrically opposed. They disagree about absolutely everything in European history. But, they are both clear, logical, passionate, uplifting, and convincing in their arguments that there were truths and beauties in Mediaeval civilisation that modern civilisation has lost to our detriment. Together they provide a sense of perspective that will do Javeed a lot better service than a focus at the maggoty horrors of the 20th century. And to complete the balance, Peirce gives a razor-sharp exposition of the one thing in our civilisation that makes it unequivocally better than the old days. He, too, is clear, logical, passionate and uplifting.

[1]: They are all also strangely limited in time. They are all productions from humanity's dark night of the soul, the nightmare decades at the dead heart of the short shithouse century, 1914-1991.