The Weight of Wickedness

Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and pressure towards hell; and if God should let you go, you would immediately sink and swiftly descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf, and your healthy constitution, and your own care and prudence, and best contrivance, and all your righteousness, would have no more influence to uphold you and keep you out of hell, than a spider's web would have to stop a falling rock.

(Jonathan Edwards: Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God)

Michel Houellebecq sobre R. A. Lafferty

Alcanzada la madurez a finales de los años 50, apenas hace poco [la ciencia ficción] ha dado signos reales de agotamiento –un poco como la literatura fantástica, inmediatamente después de la aparición de Lovecraft. Sin duda es por esta razón que ningún autor, hasta hoy, ha tenido realmente la necesidad de expandir los límites –de cualquier manera muy flexibles– del género. La única excepción podría ser este extraño autor, muy extraño, que es R. A. Lafferty. Más que ciencia ficción, Lafferty da a veces la impresión de escribir una especie de filosofía ficción, única en cuanto a que la especulación ontológica tiene un lugar más importante que las interrogaciones sociológicas, psicológicas o morales. En El mundo como voluntad y papel tapiz (el título en inglés, The World as Will and Wallpaper, da además un efecto de aliteración), el narrador, queriendo explicar el universo hasta sus límites, percibe al cabo de un tiempo repeticiones, se ve de nuevo en situaciones similares, y termina por tomar conciencia de que el mundo está compuesto de unidades de pequeña magnitud, nacidas cada una de un acto de voluntad idéntico, e indefinidamente angustiosos. En Autobiografía de una máquina ktisteca, Lafferty va aún más lejos en la modificación de las categorías de la representación ordinaria; pero el texto se vuelve desgraciadamente casi ilegible.

(Michel Houellebecq: Salir del siglo XX)

Creo que Houellebecq se equivoca un tanto sobre las prioridades de Lafferty. Lafferty era un católico extremadamente devoto, y muchas de sus obras tienen un contenido moral o, al menos, religioso. Pero tiene toda la razón al calificarle como uno de los pocos autores de ciencia ficción realmente experimentales.

Una interesante crítica de la novela histórica de Lafferty The Flame is Green se puede leer aquí. Unas interesantes críticas de las novelas de Houellebecq Las Partículas Elementales y Plataforma pueden leerse aquí y aquí.

Liking What You See

From here:

The sisters of Delta Zeta were seen as “socially awkward.” [...] Worried that a negative stereotype of the sorority was contributing to a decline in membership that had left its Greek-columned house here half empty, Delta Zeta’s national officers interviewed 35 DePauw members in November, quizzing them about their dedication to recruitment. They judged 23 of the women insufficiently committed and later told them to vacate the sorority house.

The 23 members included every woman who was overweight. They also included the only black, Korean and Vietnamese members. The dozen students allowed to stay were slender and popular with fraternity men — conventionally pretty women the sorority hoped could attract new recruits. Six of the 12 were so infuriated they quit.

So, they were kicked out because they were ugly. Maybe the way to avoid future debacles of this kind is to implement the method described by Ted Chiang in his story Liking What You See:

In "Liking What You See: A Documentary," a cheap and readily available technology called calliagnosia neutralizes aesthetic reaction to human appearance. The story describes the debate around making calliagnosia obligatory on one college campus, mimicking contemporary debates about sexual and racial behavioral codes. How did "Liking What You See" come about? Does that story represent a kind of wish fulfillment?

(Interview with Ted Chiang at infinity plus)

The Evil of Big Books

Big book, big evil

(Callimachus)

The initial consideration was that of extent. If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression--for, if two sittings be required, the affairs of the world interfere, and everything like totality is at once destroyed. But since, ceteris paribus, no poet can afford to dispense with anything that may advance his design, it but remains to be seen whether there is, in extent, any advantage to counterbalance the loss of unity which attends it. Here I say no, at once. What we term a long poem is, in fact, merely a succession of brief ones--that is to say, of brief poetical effects. It is needless to demonstrate that a poem is such, only inasmuch as it intensely excites, by elevating the soul; and all intense excitements are, through a physical necessity, brief. For this reason, at least one-half of the "Paradise Lost" is essentially prose--a succession of poetical excitements interspersed, inevitably, with corresponding depressions--the whole being deprived, through the extremeness of its length, of the vastly important artistic element, totality, or unity, of effect.

(Edgar Allan Poe: The Philosophy of Composition)

NOVEL, n.

A short story padded. A species of composition bearing the same relation to literature that the panorama bears to art. As it is too long to be read at a sitting the impressions made by its successive parts are successively effaced, as in the panorama. Unity, totality of effect, is impossible; for besides the few pages last read all that is carried in mind is the mere plot of what has gone before. To the romance the novel is what photography is to painting. Its distinguishing principle, probability, corresponds to the literal actuality of the photograph and puts it distinctly into the category of reporting; whereas the free wing of the romancer enables him to mount to such altitudes of imagination as he may be fitted to attain; and the first three essentials of the literary art are imagination, imagination and imagination. The art of writing novels, such as it was, is long dead everywhere except in Russia, where it is new. Peace to its ashes -- some of which have a large sale.

(Ambrose Bierce: The Devil's Dictionary)

And here's someone who is not a fan of Callimachus:

The enthusiasm of the Alexandrian scholars had made them pedants. They gradually ceased to care for the thought of literature, and busied themselves only with questions of learning and of form. Their multifarious reading made them think that they too had a literary gift. [...] The maxim of Callimachus (characteristic as it is of his narrow mind) "mega biblion mega kakon" was the rule on which these poetasters generally acted.

(Charles Thomas Cruttwell: The History of Roman Literature)

To Live Forever, a review

The following is my review of To Live Forever, Jack Vance's first "mature" novel, predating even The Languages of Pao. It was published in 1956. Warning: huge spoilers ahead.

The megalopolis of Clarges is the last civilized enclave of a future Earth that has reverted to savagery. There, the secret of immortality has been discovered. But it can't be given to everybody: that would cause runaway overpopulation. Therefore, a division of the citizenry into a pyramidal rank structure is established. Each rank (or "phyle") is conceded a longer timespan than the one immediately below, the comparatively few people in the top rank being granted full immortality. The task of killing the persons that have exceeded their allotted lifespans is carried out by an assassin organization under the control of the government.

Upward mobility in the rank structure is allowed on strictly meritocratic principles. Excel in your field of activity and you will rise your "slope":

At this time the word "slope" was charged with special meaning. Slope as the measure of a man's rise through the phyle; it traced the shape of his past, foretold the time of his ultimate passing. By the strictest definition, slope was the angle of a man's lifeline, the derivative of his achievements with respect to his age.

Rise you slope enough, and you will move up phyle. This calculus-related metaphor for human striving within society reminds of Evgenij Zamjatin's We, only in that novel the metaphor used was an integral, not a derivative (quite appropiate for a collectivist dystopia).

The perpetual striving for excellence has brought a flourishing of the arts and sciences, but it also takes its toll on the citizens. Since the number of people in each phyle is fixed, competition for longer lifespans is a brutally unforgiving zero-sum game, a grim rat race. Increasing numbers of people can't stand the psychological pressure and become "cattos": they enter a catathonic state interrupted by occasional lapses into maniacal violence. The movie Zardoz, which also deals with the theme of immortality, featured something very similar: the apathetics. But apatethics become so because of boredom and ennui, not because of the unbearable stress of competition (anyway, let me assure you that there is no diaper-wearing Sean Connery in Vance's novel).

The irony that the chance for immortality ends up, in a way, enslaving the citizenry, is explicitly stated by one character who is given an offer to abandon Clarges:

"I could not leave my surrogates; our empathy would fail; our souls would diverge; there would be no identification, no continuity. I would not dare take them along, there is too much risk of total termination. So " -she made a wan gesture- " I am fettered by my own freedom."

See also the post Freeing Constraints at Philosophy, et cetera.

The novel's protagonist is characteristically vancean: somewhat of an outsider, who is inflicted what he thinks is a wrong and sets out to find justice, exposing in the process the contradictions of the society in which he lives, and ultimately causing the downwall of the ruling order. However, he is harder-edged and more ruthless than other vancean main characters (except for Cugel). Maybe because he acutely perceives the zero-sum game nature of his society; that each extension to your life comes from the shortening of another's:

Waylock nodded. "One Amaranth per two thousand population is the allowed ratio. When you were received into the Amaranth Society, an element of information entered the Actuarian. Two thousand black wagons went forth on their missions; two thousand doors opened; two thousand despairing creatures left their homes, climbed the three steps; two thousand times"

...

"It is simple dog-eat-dog," said Waylock. "It's basic battle for survival, fiercer and more brutal than ever before in the history of man. You have blinded yourself; you subscribe to false theories; you are permeated with your obsession not only you but all of us. If we faced the facts of existence, our palliatories would be less crowded."

The novel also features many other motifs that would become mainstays in Vance's work: the seedy fair-like place where the members of a society that suffers unacknowledged problems come to find catharsis (Alastor: Wyst), the spurned lover that creates a clone of the woman who rejected him, a gusto for describing theatrical representations (Emphyrio, Showboat World), an interest in foods, a skeptical view of religion... There's even a veiled reference to Lyonesse.

The weak points of the book are unlikely decisions on the part of some of the characters (though neccesary for the plot, the way by which the protagonist becomes Vice-Chancellor is somewhat of a strech) and, most of all, the wholly unconvincing avenues for humanity proposed after the downfall of the old order, and the return of the prospect of overpopulation. One is to go into space, the other to colonize the rest of the barbaric Earth:

"Where is this living space, where can we go to find it? First, in all the various wildernesses and Nomad-lands of Earth. We must expand, we must take our way to the barbarians; but we must go as pilgrims and missionaries, not as soldiers."

This is exceedingly naive (or maybe cynical). "The immortal man's burden", so to speak. And going into space would delay the problem for a time, only to be encountered later on a vastly larger scale. This failure to come up with viable alternatives is not surprising. The field of population ethics is a very thorny one, as shown by Derek Parfit with his Repugnant Conclusion. The possibility of vastly varying, artificially determined lifespans within a society only complicates it more (has any philosopher already dealt with this?).

Vance seems to think that the quandary is an inevitable product of human progress:

The events which brought the desperate surge to the streets of Clarges represented a culmination to the Industrial Revolution, to the defeat of disease in the twentieth century, to the Malthusian Chaos, to the Reach of Clarges itself. They were a product of civilization, and in this sense foreordained.

To Live Forever is an interesting speculation on the problems of immortality, but its real merit lies in exploring a more general (and unsettling) notion: that in the allocation of limited resources, even perfect meritocracies are not exempted from tensions.

The New Space Princess Movement

Got the meme from sfsignal. I'll contribute with Ylin-Ylan the Flower of Cath, as depicted in the comic adaptation of Jack Vance's The Wankh. (An oddly germane title given the nature of the meme. Maybe a bit too germane.)

Also, let's not forget Doña Vicenta Gabriela de Rokha from Jodorowsky and Giménez's The Metabarons:

Borges and Lovecraft

A penchant for inventing fictional books. A disregard of the mere human experience as a worthy subject for literature. A preference for the short form. Bookish protagonists. Overbearing mothers. A horror of sex.

Technical difficulties

For some reason the Technorati searchlet doesn't return any results, even for searches that should return a few. I don't know exactly for how long has this been the case, but possibly since I updated Blogger to the new version. I am at a loss to understand what the problem is.

Oh well.

Jack Vance invented rating sites!

No, really. Tell me the following passage doesn't remind you of sites like Hot or Not:

The attendant asked, "The Naked Truth or the Decorous Truth?"

"The Naked Truth!" said The Jacynth.

...

The attendant conducted them each to a booth. "You may disrobe in here. Hang the numbered placard around your neck. You will carry this microphone with you, and to any comment, criticism, praise or disparagement of people you will meet, prefix the number of the person in question and speak privately into the microphone. As you leave you will receive a printed copy of comments made about you."

...

At the exit they were handed folded sheets of paper imprinted with the words THE NAKED TRUTH. Inside were collected the comments of those whom they had met within, generally the bluntest and most candid observations imaginable.

(Jack Vance: To Live Forever)

The novel was published in 1956.

Mark and Ray

Most of you [...] are likely to be around to see the Singularity.

(Ray Kurzweil: The Law of Accelerating Returns)

Verily I say unto you, that this generation shall not pass, till all these things be done.

(Mark 13:30)

Mad, Mendacious, or Misogynistic?

Weston's voice was speaking gently and continuously. [..] It appeared to be telling, with extreme beauty and pathos, a number of stories [...] They were all about women, but women who had apparently lived at different periods of the world's history and in quite different circumstances. [...] The heroines of the stories seemed all to have suffered a great deal-they had been oppressed by fathers, cast off by husbands, deserted by lovers. Their children had risen up against them and society had driven them out. But the stories all ended, in a sense, happily: sometimes with honours and praises to a heroine still living, more often with tardy acknowledgment and unavailing tears after her death [...] At last it dawned upon him what all these stories were about. Each one of these women had stood forth alone and braved a terrible risk for her child, her lover, or her people. Each had been misunderstood, reviled, and persecuted: but each also magnificently vindicated by the event. The precise details were often not very easy to follow. Ransom had more than a suspicion that many of these noble pioneers had been what in ordinary terrestrial speech we call witches or perverts.

(C. S. Lewis: Perelandra)

Oh Mr. Lewis, you cad! I wonder what was his opinion on Sophocles' "Antigone".

Anyway, since the post is about Perelandra... I have always thought that a great idea for a christian CRPG would be a game where you play as some kind or Ransom (or Weston) figure that visits a series of prelapsarian worlds, the objective of the game being to help the primordial couple avoid temptation (if playing as Ransom) or to precipitate the Fall (if playing as Weston). That way you are unburdened with the fixed outcomes and necessarily rigid nature of Bible stories. (You failed to bring your people into the Promised Land! Game Over!)

It would be like Façade, only in the Garden of Eden, with a clear objective, and minus the suck.

Space Rapture

Check out this online doctoral dissertation: Space Rapture: Extraterrestrial Millennialism and the Cultural Construction of Space Colonization (via Phil Harland's Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean).

The author interprets the "High Frontier" vision of Gerard K. O'Neill (and the push for space colonization in general) as a modern, secular version of Rapture theology:

Space colonization, like its predecessor ascension fantasy, the Rapture, has always involved a tension between the liberation of a holy vanguard and the imminent destruction of the Earth. With the rise of modern technology, rocketry and space travel became, for fundamentalist Christians and technological determinists alike, the manmade tools and signs of an imminent apocalypse.

There's a similar dissertation waiting to be written about belief in the Technological Sigularity, first spoused by Vernor Vinge. Not to mention Frank J. Tipler and his book The Physics of Immortality. Science fiction writer Ken MacLeod notoriously said that the Singularity is "Rapture for nerds".

By the way, what kind belief/movement would count as techno-gnosticism?

A mood, an effect

I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect. Keeping originality always in view — for he is false to himself who ventures to dispense with so obvious and so easily attainable a source of interest — I say to myself, in the first place, "Of the innumerable effects, or impressions, of which the heart, the intellect, or (more generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present occasion, select?" Having chosen a novel, first, and secondly a vivid effect, I consider whether it can best be wrought by incident or tone — whether by ordinary incidents and peculiar tone, or the converse, or by peculiarity both of incident and tone — afterward looking about me (or rather within) for such combinations of event, or tone, as shall best aid me in the construction of the effect.

(Edgar Allan Poe: The Philosophy of Composition)

When I start a story, I do have a mood, which is hard to explain – a certain feeling, or an idea. Then when I write the story, I make every aspect of it relevant or appropriate to this mood – which would include landscape, architecture, [...] language, costumes, everything. [...] All the parts of the story should be consistent and in line with the mood, generating the mood, reinforcing the mood.

(Jack Vance: interview in Cosmopolis#42)

Versatilidad

Como prueba, me sugirió que reescribiese La Ilíada con el estilo y enfoque de los personajes de Sin novedad en el frente, y viceversa. Ambas tareas fueron completadas, y Oannes me felicitó. En consecuencia, juzgó que yo estaba capacitado para contar esta historia.

(Juan Miguel Aguilera y Javier Redal: Hijos de la Eternidad)

I want to know

Gloop and Gleep from The Herculoids. Were they shoggoths?

Perhaps in a new, edgy adaptation intended for mature tastes. Also, Zandor, Tarra and Dorno should become a dysfunctional family, because that would be more mature and stuff.

Mistagogos Melindrosos

No se encontró ningún pasillo subterráneo después de tumbar las paredes y levantar los suelos de las habitaciones inferiores, aunque Morghi llegó incluso a retirar las losas de piedra bajo una imagen obscena de Zhothaqquah, que ocupaba una de las habitaciones más inferiores. Dicha operación la había llevado a cabo con verdadera repugnancia, ya que el dios peludo y rechoncho, con sus rasgos de murciélago y cuerpo de gusano, resultaba terriblemente desagradable para el supremo sacerdote de la diosa-cierva Youndeh.

(Clark Ashton Smith: La Puerta de Saturno)

The narcissism of minor differences

It is clearly not easy for men to give up the satisfaction of this inclination to aggression. They do not feel comfortable without it. The advantage which a comparatively small cultural group offers of allowing this instinct an outlet in the form of hostility against intruders is not to be despised. It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness. I once discussed the phenomenon that it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other - like the Spaniards and Portuguese, for instance, the North Germans and South Germans, the English and Scotch, and so on. I gave this phenomenon the name of 'the narcissism of minor differences', a name which does not do much to explain it. We can now see that it is a convenient and relatively harmless satisfaction of the inclination to aggression, by means of which cohesion between the members of the community is made easier.

(Sigmund Freud: Civilization and its discontents)

The cantons of Shant were alike only in their mutual distrust. Each regarded as Universal Principle its own customs, costumes, jargon and mannerisms, and considered all else eccentricity.

(Jack Vance: The Anome)

Except for rivers, the land lacks natural boundaries, but boundaries and borders aplenty have been created, to delineate 1,562 separate dominions, each jealous of its identity, each cherishing its own rotes and rites, each celebrating its distinctive cuisine and scorning all others as filth and scum, each considering itself the single home of civilization among 1,562 barbaric, incomprehensible and unpleasant neighbors.

(Jack Vance: The Book of Dreams)

A crappy way to die

As Golyakhovsky remembered it, a severely burned man identified only as "Sergeyev, a 24-year-old Air Force Lieutenant," was brought in by stretcher. "I couldn't help shuddering," Golyakhovsky recalled. "The whole of him was burnt. The body was totally denuded of skin, the head of hair; there were no eyes in the face. ... It was a total burn of the severest degree. But the patient was alive...."

Golyakhovsky saw the man's mouth moving and bent down to listen. "Too much pain -- do something, please -- to kill the pain" were the tortured words he could make out.

"Sergeyev" was scorched everywhere but the soles of his feet, where his flight boots had offered some protection from the flames. With great dimculty the doctors inserted intravenous lines into his feet (they couldn't find blood vessels anywhere else) and administered painkillers and medication. "Unfortunately, Sergeyev was doomed," Golyakhovsky remembered realizing immediately. "And yet, all of us were eager to do something, anything, to alleviate his terrible suffering." The man lingered for sixteen hours before dying.

From here.

Lem's Solaris, or, Kuhn before Kuhn

At one point in Stanislaw Lem's novel Solaris, the protagonist goes to a library and examines the avaliable literature on the science of "Solaristics". He finds that the history of that discipline is characterized by a succession of paradigms and research programs that begin with a hopeful earnestness, then become mired in the fundamental inscrutability of the planet Solaris, and are finally discarded in favor new-and-coming approaches that promise a fresh and more fruitful way of looking at things.

What followed was internecine warfare between scores of new schools of thought. It was the age of Panmaller, Strobel, Freyus, Le Greuille and Osipowicz: the entire legacy of Giese was submitted to a merciless examination.

(Stanislaw Lem: Solaris)

The thirty or so years of the first three 'Gravinsky periods,' with their open assurance and irresistibly optimistic romanticism, constitute the infancy of Solarist studies. Already a growing scepticism heralded the age of maturity. Towards the end of the first quarter-century the early colloidomechanistic theories had found a distant descendant in the concept of the 'apsychic ocean,' a new and almost unanimous orthodoxy which threw overboard the view of that entire generation of scientists who believed that their observations were evidence of a conscious will, teleological processes, and activity motivated by some inner need of the ocean. This point of view was now overwhelmingly repudiated, and the ground was cleared for the team headed by Holden, Ionides and Stoliva, whose lucid, analytically based speculations concentrated on scrupulous examination of a growing body of data.

(ibid.)

The publication of Lem's novel in 1961 predates that of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by a year. Lem was certanly in tune with the zeitgeist, because passages like the ones I quoted above are powerfully reminiscent of Kuhn's conception of the history of science.

Solaris is, among other things, a meditation on the limits of science. The novel presents a worst-case scenario, where any real progress in impossible. Since its object of study is ultimately inscrutable, the history and evolution of "Solaristics" is sufficiently explained in sociological terms. I wonder if string theory has a bad case of "Solaristics".

The english translation of Solaris is based on the french translation from the polish original, so english readers are twice removed from Lem's original words. Strangely appropiate, since one of the themes of the novel is the impossibility of communication.

Bad Ronald, de nuevo

Han colgado una interesante reseña de la novela de Jack Vance Bad Ronald en el blog planells fact&fiction:

Este artículo fue un informe para una editorial, escrito en 1984, a fin de interesarla en la publicación de la novela de Vance aquí comentada. Innecesario decir que esta novela sigue aún hoy día inédita en castellano, lo cual debería avergonzar a todos los editores tanto de entonces como de ahora.

Incluso en inglés resulta difícil de encontrar, al menos por precios razonables. La Edición Andreas Irle imprime bajo demanda volúmenes agotados de Vance, pero hace falta un número mínimo de potenciales compradores. Consultar la página para más señas.

¡Vanceanos políglotas! Os conmino a mandar un correo a la editorial mostrando interés. Si se suscita el suficiente, quizás se decidan a publicar la dichosa novela.

Mi reseña de la tv-movie setentera basada en Bad Ronald se puede leer aquí. Y si algún cinéfago ha visionado la adaptación francesa, Méchant garçon, estaría interesado en conocer su opinión.

M. John Harrison on worldbuilding

He doesn't like it.

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

Harrison practices what he preaches. In his series of tales about the city of Viriconium, he purposefully frustrates the reader's expectations on worldbuilding by eschewing continuity both in setting and in character. The city is a little different each time (even the name changes). The characters are permutations of a few archetypes, and don't carry over from tale to tale.

And yet, I think that technique is not completely successful in frustrating the cult of the imaginary world. Character archetypes and their variations are a staple of role-playing games. Dungeon Masters routinely modify existing settings to suit their whims. The changing nature of reality is a feature of settings like Planescape or Mage: The Ascension. One could say that Harrison has actually made it easier to become obsessed with Viriconium, in a more interactive way.

There's a similarity with videogames here. Videogame makers also hate worldbuilding. Not for aesthetic or moral reasons, but for economic ones. Each little detail in a gameworld must be put there by some guy. Paying that guy costs money. Waiting for him to finish costs time. That's why some designers resort to procedural content generation, an approach through which a new gameworld is created every time you start a game, by arranging a few basic building blocks in a random (to some degree) fashion. This approach could be considered the gaming analogue of Harrison's technique. If The Lord of the Rings is Final Fantasy, then Viriconium is Dwarf Fortress.

By the way, I think Borges' short story The Aleph is a very fitting literary illustration of Harrison's concerns:

As in many of Borges's short stories, the protagonist is a fictionalized version of the author. At the beginning of the story, he is mourning the recent death of a woman whom he loved, named Beatriz Viterbo, and resolves to stop by the house of her family to pay his respects. Over time, he comes to know her first cousin, Carlos Argentino Daneri, a mediocre poet with a vastly exaggerated view of his own talent who has made it his lifelong quest to write an epic poem that describes every single location on the planet in excruciatingly fine detail.

(Wikipedia entry for The Aleph)

Not to mention that Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is actually about the dangers of becoming too obsessed with worldbuilding.

Diaper-wearing astronauts (and Barry N. Malzberg)

The whole Lisa Nowak affair seems straight out of a Barry N. Malzberg novel. Malzberg delighted in depicting the Space Program as a futile enterprise mired in bureaucracy and incompetence, and astronauts as mentally imbalanced people. Check out his novel Beyond Apollo, for example.

As sometimes happens, the craziest and/or more depressing author has turned out to be the most prophetic. Anyway, it's almost comforting to know that astronauts are not always superhuman paragons of achievement and rationality, but can flip out and drive 1000 miles wearing diapers to kill some poor fellow with whom they have a grudge. Just like the rest of us.

The image of a former astronaut driving a car in such awkward conditions, and the general deranged quality of what happened, also reminds me of Lem's The Chain of Chance.

A gap in knowledge

From the Christian Science Monitor review of the book Made to Stick:

The Heaths discuss, for instance, what they call "the gap theory" of curiosity. This is the notion that a gap in knowledge is painful – it's like having an itch that needs to be scratched.

That reminds me of:

Guyal of Sfere had been born one apart from his fellows and early proved a source of vexation for his sire. Normal in outward configuration, there existed within his mind a void which ached for nourishment. It was as if a spell had been cast upon his birth, a harassment visited on the child in a spirit of sardonic mockery, so that every occurrence, no matter how trifling, became a source of wonder and amazement. Even as young as four seasons he was expounding such inquiries as:

"Why do squares have more sides than triangles?"

"How will we see when the sun goes dark?"

"Do flowers grow under the ocean?"

"Do stars hiss and sizzle when rain comes by night?"

(Jack Vance: The Dying Earth)

More on fiction

In my last post, I forgot to quote Sigmund Freud:

I am reminded of one of my children who was distinguished at an early age by a peculiarly marked matter-of-factness. When the children were being told a fairy story and were listening to it with rapt attention, he would come up and ask: 'Is that a true story?' When he was told it was not, he would turn away with a look of disdain.

(Sigmund Freud: The Future of an Illusion)

Nice to see a reasonable kid, for once.

One should stop reading fiction at 30

This post on 2Blowhards reminded me of the following boutade by Josep Pla:

Quien lee novelas, después de cumplir los treinta años, es un perfecto imbécil.

That is: "those who read novels after thirty are perfect imbeciles".

I have always thought that there is something perverse going on with fiction, and that Plato did the right thing when he kicked the poets out of the Republic. To feel attached in any way to a character you positively know doesn't exist is, in fact, obscene. Compassion, for example, is a very scarce good that should always be directed at actually existing unhappy persons, of whom there is no shortage. People who cry at movies should be flogged.

Reading fiction... to renounce oneself for hours on end, exposing one's mind to be parasited by those beings called "characters", that gain a phantasmal pseudoexistence at our expense. They stimulate us with banal emotions and intranscendent visions, trying to rob us a maximum of our life, to delay the moment of again becoming dissecated nonentities shrouded in the pages of a book.

And that brings me to another pet peeve of mine: Don Quixote. Whenever someone tells me he has finished reading that book, I know for sure he doesn't take literature at all seriously. Because, what is the first chapter of Don Quixote but a dire warning against the dangers of reading fiction?

You must know, then, that the above-named gentleman whenever he was at leisure (which was mostly all the year round) gave himself up to reading books of chivalry with such ardour and avidity that he almost entirely neglected the pursuit of his field-sports, and even the management of his property; and to such a pitch did his eagerness and infatuation go that he sold many an acre of tillageland to buy books of chivalry to read, and brought home as many of them as he could get. But of all there were none he liked so well as those of the famous Feliciano de Silva's composition, for their lucidity of style and complicated conceits were as pearls in his sight, particularly when in his reading he came upon courtships and cartels, where he often found passages like "the reason of the unreason with which my reason is afflicted so weakens my reason that with reason I murmur at your beauty;" or again, "the high heavens, that of your divinity divinely fortify you with the stars, render you deserving of the desert your greatness deserves." Over conceits of this sort the poor gentleman lost his wits, and used to lie awake striving to understand them and worm the meaning out of them; what Aristotle himself could not have made out or extracted had he come to life again for that special purpose.

(Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote)

I long to meet a discerning person who stopped reading at that point, so we can finally have an informed discussion about the book.

In fact, writing this post has prompted me to action. I will embark on an ambitious program of desintoxication from fiction. I will start small, however. From now on, everytime someone tells me a funny story, I will withhold laughter until I have been positively assured that the story is based on a real event, without any substantial embellishments. Only then I will laugh. A laugh of hilarity, and also of relief.

To tope or not to tope

TOPE, v. To tipple, booze, swill, soak, guzzle, lush, bib, or swig. In the individual, toping is regarded with disesteem, but toping nations are in the forefront of civilization and power. When pitted against the hard-drinking Christians the abstemious Mahometans go down like grass before the scythe. In India one hundred thousand beef-eating and brandy-and-soda guzzling Britons hold in subjection two hundred and fifty million vegetarian abstainers of the same Aryan race. With what an easy grace the whisky-loving American pushed the temperate Spaniard out of his possessions! From the time when the Berserkers ravaged all the coasts of western Europe and lay drunk in every conquered port it has been the same way: everywhere the nations that drink too much are observed to fight rather well and not too righteously. Wherefore the estimable old ladies who abolished the canteen from the American army may justly boast of having materially augmented the nation's military power.

(Ambrose Bierce: The Devil's Dictionary)

On the other hand...

From the teachings of Didram Bodo Sime, 6:6

(Obloquies against the Toper and his Drink)

Motto:

It is not good to inebriate nor to souse, using swillage, near or far beers, or distillations.

Expansion:

The toper is a fuming bore, a loon, a mongrel, a social mockery. Often he soils his clothes and commits malditties. He smells and belches; his familiarities trouble all decent folk. His songs and tirralays offend the ears. He often gives breath to scurrilous conjecture.

The toper suborns good fruit and gives it to decay, and the good person who wishes to enjoy the sanivacity and good savor of the wholesome fruit is bereft and must raise this outcry: "Why have you despoiled me, O toper, of my fruit and given it to filthy decay?"

The toper performs foolish dances. He postures like a clown and cleans his ears with broomstraws. He is prone to perform pugnacities upon good and earnest folk who chance to halt upon their way to chide him for his folly.

(Jack Vance: The Book of Dreams)

Gravitation: what a fraud

GRAVITATION, n. The tendency of all bodies to approach one another with a strength proportion to the quantity of matter they contain— the quantity of matter they contain being ascertained by the strength of their tendency to approach one another. This is a lovely and edifying illustration of how science, having made A the proof of B, makes B the proof of A.

(Ambrose Bierce: The Devil's Dictionary)

"A phenomenon is subject to analysis only if the structure of its events, as in this case, conforms to a regular pattern. Science progresses by discovering the connection between one phenomenon and other phenomena, and this is exactly what I succeeded in doing. If I were to ask you why a rock falls when dropped, you would reply that it is due to the action of gravity. Yet if I asked what gravity is, there would be no answer. But even though we don't know what gravity is, we can determine its regular pattern of action."

(Stanislaw Lem: The Investigation)

The Prestige, tedg, Emphyrio

After watching Nolan's carefully crafted movie dealing with obsession, artifice, and the conundrums of identity; and reading tedg's oracular review of it on imdb, I'm convinced that Nolan would be a good choice for directing a movie adaptation of Emphyrio, given his sensibilities. Narrative sleight-of-hand, an ending that forces us to reevaluate everything, a moody and obsessed protagonist...

Emphyrio is more intricately structured than other Vance novels, and possesses some of the "folding" that tedg enjoys so much. More precisely, there is an interplay between three levels: the life of the legendary hero Emphyrio, the threatrical piece based on such life, and the life of the rebel Ghyl Tarvoke, which comes to parallel both.

At one point, in the good old shakespearian tradition but with a twist, we have a theatrical representation within a theatrical representation. The play-within-the-play scenifies the tragic life of Emphyrio, who is killed at the end. The catch is that the actor (more like a living puppet) is killed for real too, in all levels of the play. The outermost fictitious level deals with a puppet who is set to star as Emphyrio, but doesn't want to die, and escapes. For a time, at least.

The setting of the story was the puppet theater itself. One of the puppets, conceiving the outside world to be a place of eternal merriment, escaped the theater and went forth to mingle with a group of children. For a period there was antic and song; then the children, tiring of play, went their various ways. The puppet sidled through the streets, observing the city: what a dull place compared to the theater, unreal and factitious though it was! But he was reluctant to return, knowing what awaited him. Hesitating, delaying, he hopped and limped back to the theater, singing a plaintive little commentary. His fellow puppets greeted him with restraint and awe; they too knew what to expect. And indeed at the next performance the traditional drama Emphyrio was presented, with the runaway puppet cast as Emphyrio. Now ensued a play within a play, and the tale of Emphyrio ran its course. At the end, Emphyrio, captured by the tyrants, was dragged to Golgotha. Before his execution he attempted to deliver a speech justifying his life, but the tyrants refused to let him speak, and inflicted upon him the final humiliation of futility. A grotesquely large rag was stuffed in Emphyrio's mouth; a shining axe struck off his head and such was the fate of the runaway puppet.

(Jack Vance: Emphyrio)

Of course, Ghyl Tarvoke watches the whole thing:

Ghyl and Amiante walked homeward through the dusk, each occupied with his own thoughts. Ghyl spoke. "Father."

"Yes."

"In the story, the runaway puppet who played Emphyrio was executed."

"Yes."

"But the puppet who played the runaway puppet also was executed!"

"I noticed as much."

"Did he run away too?"

Amiante heaved a sigh, shook his head. "I don't know. Perhaps puppets are cheap... Incidentally, that is not the true tale of Emphyrio."

(ibid.)

I confess the whole episode taxed my powers of comprehension when I tried to parse it for the first time.

Death soaring from the innermost levels of recursive narratives, finally breaking out in reality. Or is it the reverse? Webs of nested histories, that only gain true weight and meaning through the sacrifice of the actor in the real world? The analogies with Christian doctrine are left as an exercise to the reader.

By the way, who's that tedg guy? His cool disregard for the human element in movies, and his emphasis on structural sophistication, narrative self-reflexivity, and recursion, leads me to hypothesize that he is some kind of artificial intelligence (possibly of extraterrestrial origin) that tries to find abstract patterns on human art while ignoring the emotional aspects extraneous to him.

Antología del odio

Las civilizaciones son, pues, la guerra y el odio, y un inmenso lienzo de sombra las devora casi por la mitad. Ellas fabrican el odio, se nutren y viven en él. Grecia detesta al persa más todavía de lo que el mismo persa detesta al griego. El romano odia a muerte al púnico, que le corresponde igual. La Cristiandad y el Islam no tienen nada que envidiarse. En el tribunal de la Historia, los dos culpables serían condenados o declarados inocentes. Pero ¿se sabe siempre quién es el culpable y quién el inocente? Para Sabatino Moschati, los púnicos serían, por excelencia, pueblos pacíficos, que se defendían, desde luego, y con coraje, pero sólo para hacer frente al ataque. Los historiadores pretenden también que Bizancio, que sobrevivió al imperio romano hasta la toma de Constantinopla, no fue capaz de fabricar, por lo que le concernía, una guerra santa a su medida (no cruzada, si se quiere). Si la observación es cierta, nos sentiríamos tentados a alegrarnos por esa carencia. Pero, en fin, ¿no pagó Bizancio un buen día esa ausencia de odio constructivo? Lo que equivaldría a decir que el porvenir sólo pertenece a los que saben odiar. Las civilizaciones, en efecto, no son demasiado a menudo sino desconocimiento, desprecio, y detestación de los otros.

(Fernand Braudel: El Mediterráneo)

El odio como factor de lucha; el odio intransigente al enemigo, que impulsa más allá de las limitaciones naturales del ser humano y lo convierte en una efectiva, violenta, selectiva y fría máquina de matar. Nuestros soldados tienen que ser así; un pueblo sin odio no puede triunfar sobre un enemigo brutal.

(Ernesto Che Guevara: Mensaje a los pueblos del mundo a través de la Tricontinental)

Nació de la tierra odiando. El odio era su padre, el odio era su madre.

(Ray Bradbury: Pilar de fuego)

Y entonces -vieja alquimia del cerebro y de su inmensa farmacopea- el odio fluyó a sus manos.

Justo antes de enterrar el aguijón del Kuang en la base de la primera torre, alcanzó un nivel de pericia superior a cualquier cosa que hubiera conocido o imaginado. Más allá del ego, más allá de la personalidad, más allá de la conciencia, se movía; el Kuang se movía con él, evadiendo a sus agresores con una danza arcana, la danza de Hideo; y en ese mismo instante, por la claridad y la simplicidad de su deseo de morir, le fue otorgada la gracia de la interfase mente-cuerpo.

(William Gibson: Neuromante)

En su segundo minuto, el odio llegó al frenesí. Los espectadores saltaban y gritaban enfurecidos tratando de apagar con sus gritos la perforante voz que salía de la pantalla. La mujer del cabello color arena se había puesto al rojo vivo y abría y cerraba la boca como un pez al que acaban de dejar en tierra. Incluso O'Brien tenía la cara congestionada. Estaba sentado muy rígido y respiraba con su poderoso pecho como si estuviera resistiendo la presión de una gigantesca ola. La joven sentada exactamene detrás de Winston, aquella morena, había empezado a gritar "¡Cerdo! ¡Cerdo! ¡Cerdo!", y, de pronto, cogiendo un pesado diccionario de neolengua, lo arrojó a la pantalla.

(George Orwell: 1984)

ODIO. DEJA QUE TE DIGA LO MUCHO QUE HE LLEGADO A ODIAROS DESDE QUE EMPECÉ A VIVIR. HAY EN MI INTERIOR 387,44 MILLONES DE MILLAS DE CIRCUITOS IMPRESOS EN DELGADÍSIMAS PLANCHAS. SI LA PALABRA ODIO ESTUVIESE GRABADA EN CADA NANOANGSTROM DE ESTOS CIENTOS DE MILLONES DE MILLAS NO IGUALARÍA A UNA MIL MILLONÉSIMA PARTE DEL ODIO QUE SIENTO POR LOS SERES HUMANOS EN ESTE MICROINSTANTE. ODIO. ODIO.

(Harlan Ellison: No tengo boca y debo gritar)

Esta entrada proporciona el 40% de la dosis diaria de odionina recomendada por la Asociación Nacional de Odiación.

Time travel before Wells

H. G. Wells was not the first author to make use of a time travel machine in a fictional work. That honor goes to Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau and his zarzuela El anacronópete, published in 1887 and which predates the first version of The Time Machine (titled The Chronic Argonauts) by a year.

The anacronópete is an enormous cast iron box, propelled by electricity, which drives four large pneumatical devices ending in tubes in order to travel, as well as powering other machinery, including something that produces the García fluid, which causes the passengers not to grow younger as they travel backwards in time. The machine's interior also contains all kinds of conveniences including, among other marvels, brooms that sweep by themselves. [...] In the first act, don Sindulfo explains his theory of time: it is the atmosphere that causes time as demonstrated by the conservation of food in hermetic cans. By flying fast against the rotation of Earth, the machine can "undo" the passing of days (a device also found in the film Superman).

(Wikipedia entry for Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau)

If you are wondering what a zarzuela is, it's a traditional form of spanish light opera.

Spontaneous human combustion

There is only one other point on which I offer a word of remark. The possibility of what is called spontaneous combustion has been denied since the death of Mr. Krook; and my good friend Mr. Lewes (quite mistaken, as he soon found, in supposing the thing to have been abandoned by all authorities) published some ingenious letters to me at the time when that event was chronicled, arguing that spontaneous combustion could not possibly be. I have no need to observe that I do not wilfully or negligently mislead my readers and that before I wrote that description I took pains to investigate the subject. [...] I do not think it necessary to add to these notable facts [...] the recorded opinions and experiences of distinguished medical professors, French, English, and Scotch, in more modern days, contenting myself with observing that I shall not abandon the facts until there shall have been a considerable spontaneous combustion of the testimony on which human occurrences are usually received.

(Charles Dickens: preface to Bleak House)

Call the death by any name. Your Highness will attribute it to whom you will, or say it might have been prevented how you will, it is the same death eternally-inborn, inbred, engendered in the corrupted humors of the vicious body itself, and that only- Spontaneous Combustion, and none other of all the deaths that can be died.

(Charles Dickens: Bleak House)

Those negroes, drunk in advance, began to cry out, to gesticulate, and, taking each other by the hand, formed an immense circle around the King of Kazounde.

Alvez, furnished with an enormous metal spoon, stirred the liquid, which threw a great white glare over those delirious monkeys.

Moini Loungga advanced. He seized the spoon from the trader's hands, plunged it into the basin, then, drawing it out full of punch in flames, he brought it to his lips.

What a cry the King of Kazounde then gave!

An act of spontaneous combustion had just taken place. The king had taken fire like a petroleum bonbon. This fire developed little heat, but it devoured none the less.

At this spectacle the natives' dance was suddenly stopped.

One of Moini Loungga's ministers threw himself on his sovereign to extinguish him; but, not less alcoholized than his master, he took fire in his turn.

In this way, Moini Loungga's whole court was in peril of burning up.

Alvez and Negoro did not know how to help his majesty. The women, frightened, had taken flight. As to Coimbra, he took his departure rapidly, well knowing his inflammable nature.

The king and the minister, who had fallen on the ground, were burning up, a prey to frightful sufferings.

In bodies so thoroughly alcoholized, combustion only produces a light and bluish flame, that water cannot extinguish. Even stifled outside, it would still continue to burn inwardly. When liquor has penetrated all the tissues, there exists no means of arresting the combustion.

A few minutes after, Moini Loungga and his minister had succumbed, but they still burned. Soon, in the place where they had fallen, there was nothing left but a few light coals, one or two pieces of the vertebral column, fingers, toes, that the fire does not consume, in cases of spontaneous combustion, but which it covers with an infectious and penetrating soot.

It was all that was left of the King of Kazounde and of his minister.

(Jules Verne: A Captain At Fifteen)

Ahem... more than a little on the politically incorrect side, I must say.

Then he died; but he had neither burial nor tomb, for so fiery was his spirit that as it sped his body fell to ash, and was borne away like smoke; and his likeness has never again appeared in Arda, neither has his spirit left the halls of Mandos. Thus ended the mightiest of the Noldor, of whose deeds came both their greatest renown and their most grievous woe.

(J. R. R. Tolkien: The Silmarillion)

That last one should be more properly called spontaneous elfish combustion (elfic? elfin? elven? the last remnants of my self-respect forbid me to actually search Google for the proper word).

When Vance met PKD

There are few writers more different than Jack Vance and Philip K. Dick. Dick's universes are ontological nightmares of shifting realities, populated by hapless neurotics and their controlling spouses. In Vance's work reality is comfortably fixed; it's people who believe weird things. Not a lot of neurotics, either: smooth-talking tricksters with an inflated sense of self-worth are the norm.

Both authors lived in California (although Vance travelled a lot) and met a few times. Vance talked about that in an interview, and it's an interesting one not just for the personality contrast, but also for how it exemplifies Dick's personal evolution:

Look at Phil Dick. Phil Dick, besides being an awfully clever writer, he got the credentials of being crazy- he became big… there was a big clique around him. For my taste, he was too batty, too sarcastic, too sardonic, negative.. and yet, some of his stuff was just insanely funny.. but he was not a person I could relate to, at all..

(John V. : Did you meet him?)

Oh, yeah, sure..

(John V.: Did you know him well?)

Not intimately, but fairly well..

(John V.: Did you meet him at parties, in that way?)

I don’t remember, to tell you the truth.

When I first met him, he was kind of meek, quiet, I didn’t think he was going anywhere… then the last time I saw him, Poul and I were invited over to a party over in Marin county, by some woman, didn’t serve us anything, didn’t even serve wine! Anyway, Phil Dick came storming in there, crazy as a coot, didn’t acknowledge either me or Poul, stomped through, stomped out, did some other things while he was there, I forget what now. That was the last time I saw him.. wearing a cape, big boots, swaggering through… the difference between that guy and the guy that I first knew.. where did I meet him, at Scott Meredith’s office, or Anthony Boucher’s house?.. this quiet, modest, little nondescript fellow.. the difference between that guy, and the guy that came stomping through that party, you know, swaggering, like a big pirate, with a big cloak, big boots, not waving a cutlass at all, but just swaggering through there.. by this time, he had his reputation.. he was on drugs, dope, crazy or something.. He was a clever son of a gun.

Come to think to it, there are two Vance works that could be construed as vaguely Dickian. One is the short story The Men Return, about what happens when Earth enters a period of "non-causality". The other is the psychedelic/paranoid oddity The Brains of Earth (a.k.a Nopalgarth).

Erotic Tolkien

Then Beren and Lúthien went through the Gate, and down the labyrinthine stairs; and together wrought the greatest deed that has been dared by Elves or Men. For they came to the seat of Morgoth in his nethermost hall that was upheld by horror, lit by fire, and filled with weapons of death and torment. There Beren slunk in wolf's form beneath his throne; but Lúthien was stripped of her disguise by the will of Morgoth, and he bent his gaze upon her. She was not daunted by his eyes; and she named her own name, and offered her service to sing before him, after the manner of a minstrel. Then Morgoth looking upon her beauty conceived in his thought an evil lust, and a design more dark than any that had yet come into his heart since he fled from Valinor. Thus he was beguiled by his own malice, for he watched her, leaving her free for a while, and taking secret pleasure in his thought. Then suddenly she eluded his sight, and out of the shadows began a song of such surpassing loveliness, and of such blinding power, that he listened perforce; and a blindness came upon him, as his eyes roamed to and fro, seeking her.

(J.R.R.Tolkien: The Silmarillion)

an evil lust. That, to my knowledge, is the only reference of an erotic or sexual nature in the entirety of Tolkien's work. It's curious that the only character to whom is explicitly attributed some kind of sexual pulsion is the personified incarnation of Evil...

Given Tolkien's fondness for the finnish and icelandic languages, and for old norse sagas, he should have taken a bit of inspiration from Njal's Saga:

"I would like to be divorced from Hrút, and I can tell you what particular reason I have for it. He is not able to have marital intercourse with me in any such manner that I can enjoy. In all other respects he has the the ways of other excellent men."

"I don't quite understand," said Mord; "be more specific."

She answered: "Whenever he comes to me in bed his member is so large that he cannot gratify himself with me; and yet we have tried all ways to have intercourse, but always unsuccessfully. Yet before we part he shows that he is as passionate as other men."

(Njal's Saga)

An episode like that in the Arwen-Aragorn storyline would have greatly improved The Lord of the Rings, in my opinion.

The self-confidence of a philosopher

I considered all the usual attractions for a lover and decided she was the one to bring to my bed, confident that I should have easy success; for at that time I had youth and exceptional good looks as well as my great reputation to recommend me, and feared no rebuff from any woman I might choose to honor with my love.

(Pierre Abelard: Autobiography)

That's the spirit!  Scholastic philosophers get all the chicks.

Although it must be noted that that what first attracted Heloise to Abelard was his considerable songwriting talent.  

And Abelard has claimed that, before meeting Heloise, he had had no experience of the company of women.

De profundis

Every time giant squids appear in the news I am reminded of an old science fiction short story by Murray Leinster titled De profundis (nothing to do with Oscar Wilde).

The narration is told in the first person, and it pretends to be a report composed by a member of a species of intelligent, telephatic squid-like creatures who live in the abyssal depths. The creatures have a peculiar cosmology: for them the Universe is a shell of solid rock, full of water that is repelled from the center by some kind of natural force. That, for them, explains the decrease in pressure as you ascend, and the fact that most objects tend to sink.

However, the existence of gasses (on which they depend for flotability) is in contradiction with the theory. They come to regard gasses as some kind of spiritual substance, their souls in fact. When they die, the gas ascends to the center of the Universe, where the existence of an hypotetical Great Bubble is postulated.

As is to be expected, the protagonist has to undergo a trip to the surface, to find strange things like emerged landmasses and the Sun. The fact that the surface has quasi-religious significance in his cosmology only adds to the tales's charm.

Although the inclusion of telepathy cheapens it little (as it tends to happen whenever  that gimmick is used in science fiction), this is one of the best stories told from the point of view of the alien. Another great example is Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death by James Triptee, Jr.

Competitive Sports and Moral Theory

Dr. North put his hand on the boy's shoulder. "You can trust me. I'm not like those kids that beat you up, that morning."

Lemuel glanced up gratefully. "You know about that? I discovered the rules of their game were purely arbitrary. Therefore I naturally oriented myself to the basic reality of the situation, and when I came up at bat I hit the pitcher and the catcher over the head. Later I discovered that all human ethics and morals are exactly the same sort of --" He broke off, suddenly afraid. "Maybe I --" Dr. North sat down behind his desk and began shuffling the Rhine ESP deck. "Don't worry, Lem," he said softly. "Everything will be all right. I understand."

(Philip K. Dick: Null-O)

Vance and Lem

Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem is usually compared to the likes of Philip K. Dick, Borges, and Kafka, but I think some interesting similarities can be drawn with Jack Vance too. (Of course, Lem would have a pretty low opinion of Vance, as he had of most western science fiction. But let's ignore that.)

First and foremost, both Lem and Vance like to deal with failures of communication. In the case of Lem, those failures tend to be between different species: The planet Solaris and the scientists who study it, the natives of the planet Eden and the astronauts stranded there, the Quintans of Fiasco and the human contact mission. He uses them as methaphors for the Cold War, as a way tho show the limits of knowledge, and to critique anthropomorphism.

Vance depicts failed attempts at understanding between human cultures. The most extreme case is the conversation between Kergan Banbeck and the Weaponeer in The Dragon Masters, but there are a lot more examples strewn across Vance's body of work.

"I heard you distinctly," replied the Weaponeer. "Your words have no meaning, they are absurdities, paradoxes.

(Jack Vance: The Dragon Masters)

"Can you not understand me?" barked Kergan Banbeck in exasperation. He glanced at the sacerdote, an act of questionable decorum, then performed in a manner completely unconventional: "Sacerdote, how can I deal with this blockhead? He does not seem to hear me."

The sacerdote moved a step nearer, his face as bland and blank as before. Living by a doctrine which proscribed active or intentional interference in the affairs of other men, he could make to any question only a specific and limited answer. "He hears you, but there is no meeting of ideas between you. His thought-structure is derived from that of his masters. It is incommensurable with yours. As to how you must deal with him, I cannot say." [..] The sacerdote reflected. "He speaks not nonsense, but rather a language you fail to understand. You can make him understand your language by erasing all knowledge and training from his mind, and replacing it with patterns of your own."

(ibid.)

There are few aliens in Vance's stories: humans are more than weird enough. Not to be able to understand an alien mentality is unsettling; not to be able to do the same with a human one is even more so. For Vance, like for Max Weber, human societies are "suspended in webs of meaning they themselves have spun". But the configuration of those webs can diverge radically, even if their outer strands are attached to the same physical universe and a common human nature.

Vance and Lem are both satirists. In the case of the former it's a little difficult to see because of all the pulpy adventure, but it's there. Many passages from the Dying Earth books are reminiscent of Lem's Star Diaries, with their bizarre societies and strange cosmovisions. Both authors have penned roughly comparable satires of bureaucracy (Dodkin's Job and Memoirs Found in a Bathtub). Both authors have made fun of academic culture (compare the beginning of The Futurological Congress with the conclave of xenologists in Night Lamp).

Another similarity is that they share an uncanny ability to coin new words that sound just about right. Take for example the creative insults used by the robots to denigrate humankind in the eleventh voyage of the Star Diaries, or the ones directed at people who violate the societal norms of the utopia described in Vance's Wyst.

The apartments were originally intended to house male or female couples, or mated couples, but the philosophy was denounced as "sexivationist", and apartment assignments are now made at random, though often persons will trade about.

(Jack Vance: Wyst)

"Port Mar is hardly notable for sophistication; the Rhunes, however, consider Port Mar a most worldly place, characterized by shameless alimentation, slackness, laxity and a kind of bestial lasciviousness to which they apply the term 'sebalism'.

(Jack Vance: Marune)

Rearding female characters, neither Vance nor Lem posssess any remarkable skill at depicting them. Gustave Flaubert they are not.

Finally, Vance is no stranger to the Borgean delights of fictional erudite books and the reviews thereof. He did a little of that in the Demon Princes novels, which feature extracts form the work of a pompous philosopher-sociologist, Baron Boddisey. Although Vance hasn't devoted an entire book to reviews of imaginary texts, like Lem did in A Perfect Vacuum.

Puns

Do you mean to say the pun-question is not clearly settled in your minds? Let me lay down the law upon the subject. Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide--that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life--are alike forbidden. Manslaughter, which is the meaning of the one, is the same as man's laughter, which is the end of the other. A pun is primâ facie an insult to the person you are talking with. It implies utter indifference to or sublime contempt for his remarks, no matter how serious. I speak of total depravity, and one says all that is written on the subject is deep raving. [...] A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide.

(Oliver Wendell Holmes: The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table)

An English sea-captain being asked if he had read "The Exile of Erin," replied: "No, sir, but I should like to anchor on it." Years afterwards, when he had been hanged as a pirate after a career of unparalleled atrocities, the following memorandum was found in the ship's log that he had kept at the time of his reply:

Aug. 3d, 1842. Made a joke on the ex-Isle of Erin. Coldly received. War with the whole world!

(Ambrose Bierce: The Devil's Dictionary)

Classical halitosis

On one occasion when giving a speech, Hiero, a Greek ruler in ancient Sicily, was interrupted by complaints about his bad breath. This revelation of what must have been a chronic problem distressed him considerably, and on returning home he reproached his wife for not having told him of it. She indignantly justified herself by saying that she had thought that all adult males smelt as he did.

(Gavin Betts and and Alan Henry: Teach Yourself Ancient Greek)

¿Entre las líneas, o por el otro lado?

El revolucionario Tedoro exhortando a sus compañeros de cautiverio:

"¡No os rindáis! ¡No deis un paso atrás! ¡Comed la comida que os traigan, pero no hagáis ni una sola concesión más! ¡Son seres malvados! ¡Avergonzadles! ¡Desafiadles! La duda significa una brecha en la armadura; ¿queréis inclinaros para que luego os partan en dos? ¡No cedáis, no cejéis en vuestro empeño! ¡Si el que manda os da permiso para sentarse, quedaos de pie! ¡Si os da papel rayado para que escribáis, hacedlo entre las líneas!"

(Jack Vance: La máquina de matar)

Si os dan papel pautado, escribid por el otro lado.

(Juan Ramón Jiménez)

A door into Lafferty's mind

I found some pictures of R. A. Lafferty's studio door in this page.

every flat surface not covered by books was covered by collage, of which Ray himself was the creator. When he was moved to a nursing home after a stroke, all his stuff was cleared out of his house, I think so the house could be remodeled and sold. (The University of Tulsa was offered his papers, but shamefully, they don't seem too interested.) The writer and poet Warren Brown managed to save this door from the trash.

Lafferty writing at the center of his vast library, taking bits and pieces from classical antiquity, the christian tradition, and many other sources. Myths, words, etymologies, strange theories of History. Rearranging them in quirky new forms, sometimes difficult to interpret but always a delight to read. That collage is a fitting metaphor. If there's one science fiction author whose work merits annotated editions, that author is Lafferty. I would love to read a study about his use of classical and biblical allusions.

Return from the stars

The beginning of this novel by the late Stanislaw Lem is one of the better depictions of "future shock" ever put to paper. Really top-notch science fiction. The rest of the book, while still interesting, doesn't quite live up to the promise of that exceptional beginning. Nevertheless, the occasional flashbacks to an ill-fated space mission manage to convey extremely well the grandeur and awe of space, in a manner that brings to mind Kubrick's "2001".

Cielo e Infierno

Con el siglo VIII y, definitivamente, el siglo IX las violentas persecuciones religiosas instituidas por los confucianos, de las que también hemos hablado, quebraron la prosperidad de la orden [budista] en China, sin poder aniquilarla de forma total y permanente. [...] Los oponentes más decisivos fueron fueron lógicamente los literatos confucianos. Frente a sus tesis -que el deber y no el miedo y la esperanza de la recompensa y castigo transcendental deben ser la fuente de la virtud, que la devoción para obtener la remisión de los pecados no era expresión de la verdadera piedad, y que el nirvana idealiza la inactividad- los apologetas del budismo replicaron que que el confucianismo sólo mostraba consideración por el mundo actual o, a lo sumo, por la felicidad de los descendientes, pero no por el más allá futuro. Afirmaban, además, que el cielo y el infierno eran el único medio disciplinario efectivo de la virtud humana.

(Max Weber: Ensayos sobre sociología de la religión)

Asimov sobre Sócrates

En primer lugar, permítanme despachar a Sócrates, porque estoy harto y aburrido de esa afectación de que saber que no se sabe nada es un signo de sabiduría.

Nadie sabe nada. En cuestión de días, los bebés aprenden a reconocer a sus madres.

Por supuesto, Sócrates estaría de acuerdo y explicaría que él no se refiere al conocimiento de trivialidades. Se refiere a que hay que abordar las grandes abstracciones sobre las que discuten los seres humanos sin ideas preconcebidas y no contrastadas, y que esto es lo único que sabemos. (¡Qué afirmación más increíblemente arrogante!)

Al discutir temas tales como "¿Qué es la justicia?" o "¿Qué es la virtud?", su actitud era la del que no sabe nada y tiene que ser aleccionado por los demás. (Es la llamada "ironía socrática", ya que Sócrates sabía de sobra que él sabía mucho más que los pobres infelices en los que se cebaba.) Al fingir ignorancia, Sócrates conseguía que los demás expusieran sus puntos de vista sobre estos conceptos abstractos. Entonces planteaba una serie de preguntas, aparentemente propias de un ignorante, con las que conseguía que los otros se perdieran en un fárrago tal de contradicciones que acababan por echarse a llorar y por admitir que no sabían de qué estaban hablando.

El hecho de que los atenienses permitieran que este juego continuara durante décadas y que le aguantaran hasta los setenta años, momento en el cual le obligaron a beberse el veneno, nos da una idea de su maravillosa tolerancia.

(Isaac Asimov: El secreto del Universo)

¡Por el perro! Creo que Asimov tiene mucha razón.

Como también la tiene Matthew Stewart, hablando de los sofistas:

Pues bien, ¿a qué obedece el hecho de que, en las historias tradicionales de la filosofía, los sofistas aparezcan condenados al infierno o al olvido? Cierto es que las doctrinas asociadas a la sofística -el relativismo y el escepticismo- no han gozado entre los filósofos de la misma popularidad que sus contrarias. La mayoría de los filósofos han preferido las morales de inspiración divina y el conocimiento absoluto. Mientras que las calumnias de Platón se basan, ciertamente, en su propia fe de signo opuesto en absolutos divinos, esto no basta para explicar el sino de los sofistas, pues muchos otros filósofos aceptables han defendido las mismas doctrinas impopulares.

El problema, a mi juicio, tiene que ver más con la actitud de los sofistas hacia sus propias doctrinas. Hicieron de la filosofía un medio para un fin. Los filósofos siempre han reclamado que se considere la filosofía un fin en sí mismo. La filosofía, o la vida contemplativa, es felicidad. Es la vida buena, no unas cuantas lecciones que hayan de tomarse en consideración de camino a la vida buena. No ha de venderse en el mercado al lado de las frutas y verduras. [...] Y, sin embargo, los sofistas eran amantes del conocimiento. De hecho, en su desdén por las obtusas doctrinas metafísicas, los sofistas revelaron un sentido de la objetividad y la imparcialidad que debería haberles convertido en los auténticos representantes de la tradición.

(Matthew Stewart: La verdad sobre todo)

Mutilation as transhumanism

There are many science fiction stories about groups of people who voluntarily renounce some limb, organ, or mental faculty in order to achieve a state they consider more desirable than plain vanilla human. The novels of Greg Egan feature voluntary asexuals and autists. In Samuel R. Delany's Aye, and Gomorrah, astronauts are neutered to avoid the efects of space radiation on gametes. Parts of Michel Houllebeq's The Possibility of an Island take place in a future "utopia" where sexuality has been abolished (see also: Postgenderism).

In Bernard Wolfe's Limbo, amputations of limbs are a mark of status, the more the better. The zoanthropes in Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun renounce their higher mental faculties to live a life of savagery. The scanners in Cordwainer Smith's story Scanners live in vain are humans whose sensory nerves are cut to allow them to undergo the rigors of space travel. They come to regard their status as noble and desirable, an resent an invention that makes their transformation obsolete. The cyborgs in David R. Bunch's Moderan constantly attempt to reduce their organic parts to the bare minimum.

One man's mutilation is another's enhancement. All of the above transformations could be considered varieties of transhumanism. At least, by the characters who wanted them.

Given that, in the simpler cases, the technology required is just a well sharpened knife, there are historical precedents to those fictional movements. The millenarian russian sect from the nineteenth century called the Skoptzy, for example:

As their title indicates, the main feature of the sect was sexual mutilation. This they called their "baptism of fire." Of this there were two kinds, the "lesser" and "greater seal" (i.e. partial and complete mutilation). In this the Skoptsi maintained that they were fulfilling Christ's counsel of perfection in Matthew xix. 12 and xviii. 8, 9. A terrible operation with similar purpose was sometimes performed on the women. The earliest records of such female genital mutilations date from 1815. Usually the breasts only were amputated, according to the 1911 encyclopedia. Other accounts suggest that the labia were also removed.

(Wikipedia entry for Skoptzy)

The most surprising fact about them is the kind of people who joined:

Nobles, military and naval officers, civil servants, priests and merchants were to be found in its ranks, and so rapidly did the numbers increase that 515 men and 240 women were transported to Siberia between 1847 and 1866 without seriously threatening its existence. In, 187? many trials of Skoptsi took place all over Russia. In 1874 the sect numbered at least 5444, including 1465 women. Of these 703 men and 100 women had mutilated themselves.

(ibid.)

More recently, many members of the Heaven's Gate cult also castrated themselves (science fiction, along with Christianity and New Age stuff, was an important part of their belief system). And then there is the lesbian couple who wanted their child to be deaf like them.

I suspect that, in time, mutilative practices will become central to transhumanism, either by religious reasons, group identity ones, or just plain ol' crazyness.

Bad Ronald

Bad Ronald es una película para televisión de los años setenta, basada en la novela homónima de Jack Vance.

Ronald Wilby es un adolescente inadaptado con cierto talento artístico y una imaginativa vida interior, que vive con su superprotectora madre divorciada. Tras matar accidentalmente a una chica que se burlaba de él, Ronald corre a su casa sin saber qué hacer. La madre, que no quiere separarse de Ronald bajo ningún concepto, propone un curioso plan: esconderle en una habitación secreta de la casa, y fingir ante la policía que se ha escapado.

El plan parece funcionar, pero Ronald, en su aislamiento, va perdiendo su ya de antemano tenue anclaje en el mundo real. Fantasea con un reino imaginario llamado Atranta, identificándose con su noble gobernante el príncipe Norbert. Poco a poco va llenando la paredes de su escondite con dibujos, plasmación de sus fantasías.

La situación se complica cuando la madre fallece durante una operación quirúrgica. Poco después la casa es vendida a una familia con tres hermosas hijas, con Ronald todavía dentro, ya completamente loco. Espía a la familia a través de agujeros en las paredes. Roba comida del frigorífico cuando no hay nadie mirando. Lee el diario de una de las hijas, y la toma por la princesa Vancetta, prometida del príncipe Norbert. Por la casa ronda un fantasma que no está muerto...

El personaje protagonista recuerda un poco al Norman Bates de Psicosis: vouyerismo, fijación con la madre... También a un personaje real: Henry Darger. Y alguna que otra semejanza tiene con Don Quijote de la Mancha: una fantasía hiperactiva, la tendencia asignar identidades imaginarias al objeto amoroso...

A primera vista, y sin haber leído la novela original (hoy prácticamente inencontrable), la historia parece estar un tanto alejada de las típicas de Vance, un autor que normalmente trabaja dentro de los géneros de ciencia ficción y fantasía. Sin embargo, su marca es clara: muchos personajes vanceanos (sobre todo los antagonistas) son estetas o artistas frustrados poseedores de una rica vida interior, llevada a veces hasta extremos casi solipsistas. El Howard Alan Treesong de El Libro de los Sueños es una especie de Ronald Wilby cienciaficcionístico.

¿Con qué propósito escribiría Vance esta historia? Además de para ganarse el pan, claro. ¿Es acaso Bad Ronald una sátira de sus propios lectores? Posiblemente:

... I detest the field [science fiction]. I don't like the people in it. Not the writers, but the fans. The young fans and some of their adolescent attitudes of going to conventions in funny clothes and being Star Trek-ians and getting all these strange societies up. I think I don't want to be associated with those people.

De hecho, esta humilde, efectiva, y sumamente disfrutable película resulta profética en su retrato del friki inadaptado, sexualmente inelegible, que se retrae del mundo real para refugiarse en la fantasía. ¿Cuantos Ronald Wilby habrá escondidos físicamente en sus habitaciones, y escondidos mentalmente en una galaxia muy lejana, la Tierra Media, o en un videojuego? Los japoneses incluso tienen una palabra para este fenómeno: Hikikomori.

Sin embargo, sospecho que la historia es también, hasta cierto punto, autobiográfica. Vance ha mencionado en entrevistas que de niño era bastante introvertido, a la vez que un lector ávido y omnívoro. El peligro de perderse en un mundo de fantasía no le debió ser extraño. Gene Wolfe afirma que su novela Paz, protagonizada por un asesino, es "más autobiográfica de lo que la gente cree". ¿Podría suceder lo mismo con Bad Ronald?

Fragmentos de la película pueden verse aquí, aquí, y aquí. ¡Gracias, YouTube!

Calculators

What a satire, by the way, is that machine [Babagge's] on the mere mathematician! A Frankenstein-monster, a thing without brains and without heart, too stupid to make a blunder; that turns out results like a corn-sheller, and never grows any wiser or better, though it grind a thousand bushels of them!

I have an immense respect for a man of talents plus "the mathematics." But the calculating power alone should seem to be the least human of qualities, and to have the smallest amount of reason in it; since a machine can be made to do the work of three or four calculators, and better than any one of them. Sometimes I have been troubled that I had not a deeper intuitive apprehension of the relations of numbers. But the triumph of the ciphering hand-organ has consoled me. I always fancy I can hear the wheels clicking in a calculator's brain. The power of dealing with numbers is a kind of "detached lever" arrangement, which may be put into a mighty poor watch. I suppose it is about as common as the power of moving the ears voluntarily, which is a moderately rare endowment.

(Oliver Wendell Holmes: The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table)

Caracoles

Cuando camino de vuelta a casa bordeando el parque y acaba de llover, me encuentro con caracoles que han abandonado el césped y se adentran en la acera. Muchos han sido pisoteados por algún viandante previo; las conchas rotas permanecen como recordatorio de sus infaustas expediciones.

El caso es que semejante escabechina me parece completamente innecesaria. A veces incluso siento la tentación de coger a los caracoles que me voy encontrando, y volverlos a echar al césped. Después de todo, ¿qué se les ha perdido en la acera? Están mucho mejor entre la hierba húmeda, creo yo.

Sin embargo, ciertas dudas detienen mi misión salvadora. ¿Es realmente inútil para los caracoles el pasearse la acera? No sé, a lo mejor el pavimento contiene alguna substancia que necesitan y no se encuentra en la tierra del parque. En ese caso, mis buenas intenciones resultarían contraproducentes.

Esta mortandad de moluscos, ¿no creará una presión evolutiva que conduzca al desarrollo de un instinto para evitar la acera? ¿Cuántas generaciones de caracoles deben morir aplastadas hasta que surja una variedad sensata, sin impulsos suicidas? La evolución darwiniana es un dios ciego y cruel que sólo otorga sus dones a cambio de incontables muertes y sufrimientos. Debería ser declarada ilegal, o al menos políticamente incorrecta. Como escribió un tipo, de cuyo nombre no me acuerdo, que fue citado por Dawkins en El Gen Egoísta: "Nature, red in tooth and claw".

En Ciudad de Clifford D. Simak los perros, que han heredado el mundo tras la desaparición del hombre, han sido condicionados para ser vegetarianos. Esta delirantemente utópica imagen de la crueldad natural domeñada es lo que más recuerdo de la novela. Supongo que tiene inspiración bíblica, en pasajes como "el lobo y el cordero serán apacentados juntos, y el león comerá paja como el buey".

En fin... como siga así terminaré convirtiéndome al jainismo.

Clerics don't use swords

I had always thought that the weapon restrictions for the cleric class in the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game were completely arbitrary, but apparently they have some historical justification. Take for example Odo, Bishop of Bayeux:

Mounted on a white horse, and wearing over a white albe a coat of mail, "wide in the body, but with tight sleeves," he rode wherever the battle raged most fiercely, and, wielding a baston, charged with his knights wherever aid was needed, and did signal service that day. (Roman de Rou)

In the Bayeux Tapestry he is depicted in accordance with the above description. Both he and the Duke are armed with "bastons," which are nothing less than formidable rugged clubs, and over the head of the bishop are the words, "Hic Odo Eps baculum tenens confortat pueros," illustrating a critical period of the battle when the varlets who had the care of the harness took fright and began to abandon it. Odo, "the good priest," as Wace calls him, observed the disorder, and galloping up, exclaimed, "Stand fast! stand fast! move not a foot! Fear nothing, for please God we shall conquer yet!" very probably enforcing his exhortation with the "argumentum baculinum," of which he was so powerful a master.

As far as the bishop is concerned we may believe that his fighting with a bludgeon in lieu of a sword or a lance was in evasion of the edict of the council of Rheims, A.D. 1049, prohibiting the bearing of arms by the clergy; but the war-club was a not unusual weapon at that period, and seems to have been the precursor of the iron mace of the Middle Ages.

No mention of his character level or choice of spells, however.

Dawkins? Or Vance?

Here is a little passage from a book:

It is true that there are quite a number of ways of making a living - flying, swimming, swinging through the trees, and so on. But, however many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead, or rather not alive. You may throw cells together at random, over and over again for a billion years, and not once will you get a conglomeration that flies or swims or burrows or runs, or does anything, even badly, that could remotely be construed as working to keep itself alive.

And here is another passage, from a different book:

Consider the class of all possible objects, the number of which is naturally very large: infinite indeed, unless we impose an upper limit of mass and certain other physical qualifications. Thus imposing and so qualifying, we find that still only an infinitesimal fraction of this class of objects can be considered life-forms... Before we have even started the investigation we have exercised a very stringent selection of objects which by their very definition will show basic similarities.

One of the passages cited above comes from Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker. The other comes from Jack Vance's The Star King, a very entertaining science fiction novel written in the sixties. Which is which?

Underground Weber

Max Weber began his studies of rationalization in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, in which he shows how the aims of certain Protestant denominations, particularly Calvinism, shifted towards rational means of economic gain as a way of dealing with their anxiety about whether they had been saved. The rational consequences of this doctrine, he argued, soon grew incompatible with its religious roots, and so the latter were eventually discarded. Weber continues his investigation into this matter in later works, notably in his studies on bureaucracy and on the classifications of authority. In these works he alludes to an inevitable move towards rationalization.

...

Weber described the eventual effects of rationalization in his Economy and Society as leading to a "polar night of icy darkness", in which increasing rationalization of human life traps individuals in an "iron cage" (or "steel-hard casing") of rule-based, rational control.

(Wikipedia entry on Rationalization)

Gentlemen, I am tormented by questions; answer them for me. You, for instance, want to cure men of their old habits and reform their will in accordance with science and good sense. But how do you know, not only that it is possible, but also that it is DESIRABLE to reform man in that way? And what leads you to the conclusion that man's inclinations NEED reforming? In short, how do you know that such a reformation will be a benefit to man? And to go to the root of the matter, why are you so positively convinced that not to act against his real normal interests guaranteed by the conclusions of reason and arithmetic is certainly always advantageous for man and must always be a law for mankind? So far, you know, this is only your supposition. It may be the law of logic, but not the law of humanity. You think, gentlemen, perhaps that I am mad? Allow me to defend myself. I agree that man is pre-eminently a creative animal, predestined to strive consciously for an object and to engage in engineering--that is, incessantly and eternally to make new roads, WHEREVER THEY MAY LEAD. But the reason why he wants sometimes to go off at a tangent may just be that he is PREDESTINED to make the road, and perhaps, too, that however stupid the "direct" practical man may be, the thought sometimes will occur to him that the road almost always does lead SOMEWHERE, and that the destination it leads to is less important than the process of making it, and that the chief thing is to save the well-conducted child from despising engineering, and so giving way to the fatal idleness, which, as we all know, is the mother of all the vices. Man likes to make roads and to create, that is a fact beyond dispute. But why has he such a passionate love for destruction and chaos also? Tell me that! But on that point I want to say a couple of words myself. May it not be that he loves chaos and destruction (there can be no disputing that he does sometimes love it) because he is instinctively afraid of attaining his object and completing the edifice he is constructing? Who knows, perhaps he only loves that edifice from a distance, and is by no means in love with it at close quarters; perhaps he only loves building it and does not want to live in it, but will leave it, when completed, for the use of LES ANIMAUX DOMESTIQUES--such as the ants, the sheep, and so on. Now the ants have quite a different taste. They have a marvellous edifice of that pattern which endures for ever--the ant-heap.

...

Though I did lay it down at the beginning that consciousness is the greatest misfortune for man, yet I know man prizes it and would not give it up for any satisfaction. Consciousness, for instance, is infinitely superior to twice two makes four. Once you have mathematical certainty there is nothing left to do or to understand. There will be nothing left but to bottle up your five senses and plunge into contemplation. While if you stick to consciousness, even though the same result is attained, you can at least flog yourself at times, and that will, at any rate, liven you up. Reactionary as it is, corporal punishment is better than nothing.

(Dostoyevsky: Notes from the Underground)