Undead commentary

We have now discovered a motive which can explain the idea that the souls of those who have just died are transformed into demons and the necessity felt by survivors to protect themselves against their hostility.

(Sigmund Freud: Totem and Taboo)

- They were chasing me... screaming... I was scared.

- Who were chasing you?

- My mom... my dad... They were trying to kill me. There were others, too.

(a bit of dialogue from 28 Weeks Later)

Roger: You'll take care of me when I go, won't you, Peter?

Peter: Just rest, man. Save your strength.

Roger: I don't want to be walkin' around... like THAT!... Peter... PETER?

Peter: I'm here, man!

Roger: Don't do it until you are sure I *am* coming back! I'm gonna try... not to... I'm gonna try... not to... come back. I'm gonna try... not to...

(a bit of dialogue from Dawn of the Dead [1978])

Having a loved one turn into an inhuman (but still recognizable) monster who seeks to harm you is a primal fear. The modern remake of Dawn of the Dead knows this and exploits it to the maximum. From sleeping happily in her husband's arms, in a matter of seconds the protagonist finds herself being chased by that same husband, now suitably zombified. Meanwhile, the Apocalypse rages around her.

This review of the movie in Cinematical states that the film (especially the terrifying beginning set to Johnny Cash's "The man comes around") manages to evoke the feeling of horror and disorientation of 9/11, at least for the reviewer.

I would also say that the underrated 28 Weeks Later is a perfect metaphor for some aspects of the situation in Iraq, and for our current climate of fear in general. The first three minutes of the movie are here. Zombie films: great sources for sociopolitical commentary.

Poets and Publicists

This post on The Mumpisums reminded me of...

"Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time-"

That's the sort of thing she would have written before the rise of advertising. The correlation is perfectly clear. Advertising up, lyric poetry down. There are only so many people capable of putting together words that stir and move and sing. When it became possible to earn a very good living in advertising by exercising this capability, lyric poetry was left to untalented screwballs who had to shriek for attention and compete by eccentricity."

(Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth: The Space Merchants [1953])

Bothered by Buddha

(WARNING: Massively ignorant opinions in this post about a religion I don't know well.)

Spotted at The Toynbee convector:

Buddhists do not admit the existence of “selves” or “souls”

This is one thing I don't understand about Buddhism. Buddhists affirm that there are no selves, that identity is an illusion. And yet, they (most of them, at least) believe in samsara, the infinite (if you don't manage to break it) cycle of deaths and rebirths. But if there are no selves, then what gets reincarnated, exactly? In what sense can you say that newborn person A is "the same as" recently deceased person B? You can't! Belief in reincarnation and belief in the illusionary nature of the self are incompatible in my view. I seem to recall that Max Weber briefly commented on this problem in his The Religion of India, but I don't have the volume handy to quote from it.

Well, it's not like logical consistency is the primary characteristic of religions. But still, how that contradiction came about? Maybe reincarnation is a leftover from Hinduism too fundamental to leave behind?

Or maybe there is another explanation. A religion must give something to its followers. It must state that there is a problem and then offer itself as the solution. Otherwise, why convert to it, why practice it? But if reincarnation doesn't happen, then there is no "problem". Everybody would automatically achieve Nirvana (if you understand Nirvana as nonexistence) upon death, even if they ignored Buddhist teachings altogether. Buddhism without reincarnation is a pointless doctrine. There is no incentive to preach it and there is no incentive to learn it, unless it offers something for the here-and-now, like a method for relaxation, a way to gain self-control, cool martial arts moves, or whatever.

Corrections and explanations are welcome. By the way, what is the best book to read if one is interested in an account of how the old Vedic religion evolved into Hinduism? The Axial Age and all that stuff.

Affordable, universal beauty

When beauty is universal, it loses its power to move the heart, and only its absence can produce any emotional effect.

(Arthur C. Clarke: The City and the Stars. Is Clarke saying that beauty is a kind of positional good?)

The bartender's smile widened. His ugliness was the stuff of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it.

(William Gibson: Neuromancer)

What's more, beauty is now a mass phenomenon, almost as ubiquitous as electricity or water. Hard to remember, but high-speed, high-quality color printing is only about 50 years old (the same is true for color television). Our world, in which ordinary people view hundreds of lifelike, full-color, drop-dead gorgeous images daily, is entirely the product of that brief period. For most of history, ordinary people saw few, if any, deliberately beautiful images in their entire lives. Paintings and sculptures were for palaces and cathedrals; most human beings until recently lived on farms or in isolated villages. If they visited town and saw a beautiful statue in the square, the sheer rarity of that experience would heighten the sense that this beauty was in no way related to their common lives.

(David Von Drehle: Looking good. The Washington Post)

Timeline

Recently I was thinking to myself: "Wouldn't it be great if something like Google Earth existed, but for temporal, instead of spatial, information?" Well, turns out that such a thing already exists and it's called Timeline. A related project called Exhibit allows you to easily create your own timelines (and maps). Timeplot also looks interesting.

"the Castile of the Near East"

The austere, arid plateau of Iran -the Castile of the Near East- was the traditional heart of the Persian Empire.

(Peter Brown: The World of Late Antiquity)

Things to Come

December l0. Stanley calls after screening H. G. Wells' Things to Come, and says he'll never see another movie I recommend.

(Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 Diary at The Kubrick Site)

sfsignal has posted the video of the movie.

A useful social function

So then: these were Srenki, men whose virtue was the excess of vice, who with leaden zest performed quintessential evil and so redeemed their fellows from turpitude.

(Jack Vance: The Gray Prince)

Three empty seats

In the palace of Khusro I Anoshirwan at Ctesiphon [...] three empty seats stood beneath the royal throne. These were for the emperor of China, for the great khagan (the ruler of the nomads of central Asia), and for the Roman emperor, in case these rulers came, as vassals, to the court of the king of kings. The three thrones summed up the vast horizons of the Sassanian empire.

(Peter Brown: The World of Late Antiquity)

There's a pair of posts about sassanian stuff down at Zenobia, Empress of the East. And here is a history of the Sassanian empire on Project Gutenberg.

Speaking about Late Antiquity, Avram Davidson wrote a series of novels set in that time period, sprinkled with touches of fantasy and humor: the Peregrine books.

No son tantos los muertos

En este post de Edad de Oro se cita a Flannery O'Connor diciendo que "los muertos son un millón de veces más que los vivos".

La señorita O'Connor (o el personaje en cuya boca pone esas palabras) exagera un poco. En el número de Septiembre de Investigación y Ciencia, se comenta que en 2002 la población mundial representaba aproximadamente el 6% del total de la gente que haya nacido hasta esa fecha. O sea, que los muertos son sólo unas 17 veces más que los vivos. Más información, aquí.

Aún así, está claro que si los muertos votasen, ganarían siempre por mayoría absoluta. ¿Cuántas historias de fantasía habrán literalizado la frase de Chesterton de que la tradición es la "democracia de los muertos"?

Ozimandias en A Coruña

En general, lo nuevo -ya se trate de un objeto o de una idea- posee una cualidad abrasiva sumamente desagradable. Sólo una vez que sus aristas han sido pulidas por el roce del Tiempo, lo nuevo pasa a ser medianamente aceptable y podemos tolerar su presencia sin fruncir el ceño. (Ya sé que existen fetichistas de lo nuevo, pero pervertidos los hubo en todas las épocas.)

De ello se deduce que todo acto de creación es de mal gusto. Pero si uno, empujado por el orgullo o la imprudencia, se empeña en crear algo, ¿cómo hacerlo con la mayor delicadeza posible, para minimizar la irritación causada al tejido de nuestro cosmos exangüe? La solución obvia es hacer pasar lo nuevo por antiguo.

Así pues, tu radical e innovador movimiento político-social debe presentarse como la largamente demorada recuperación de alguna Edad de Oro situada en el pasado, real o imaginaria. Si eres arquitecto, que tus edificios semejen ruinas, y pasen a estar abandonados desde su misma inauguración. En ese aspecto, La Cidade da Cultura me parece injustamente denostada. Sospecho que, en el fondo, el estímulo cultural que se pretendía es el que las ruinas suscitan en la imaginación romántica.

Y si eres escultor, que tus novísimas estatuas parezcan provenir del saqueo de alguna capital antiquísima. Se diría que ésta es la aproximación de Igor Mitoraj, cuya obra puede contemplarse en la la plaza de María Pita:

(foto sacada de este artículo en Galicia-Hoxe.com)

Las figuras esculpidas por Mitoraj a veces parecen estar envueltas en sudarios o vendajes, lo que refuerza el efecto.

Edit: "El roce del Tiempo" (Time's rub) es el título de un relato de Gregory Benford sobre la entropía, la inmortalidad, la identidad, y la paradoja de Newcomb.

R. A. Lafferty on Lulu

Reading the message board of the R. A. Lafferty Devotional Page, I learnt that More Than Melchisedech, a very hard to find book by Lafferty, can now be bought from the print-on-demand company Lulu. Here is the link.

More Than Melchisedech appears to be tied in some manner with The Devil is Dead, one of Lafferty's "difficult" novels. This later book has the best preface (Lafferty uses the word "promantia") for a novel, ever. In it, we are promised many things, among them...

Given here, for the first time anywhere, are the bearings and correct location of the Terrestrial Paradise, down to the last second of longitude. You may follow them. You may go there.

(R. A. Lafferty: The Devil is Dead)

Is this the beginning of a trend, in which we see previously unavaliable works by Lafferty start surfacing? We can only hope.

Edit: Apparently, the word "promantia" means something like "the preferential right to consult an oracle."

Academic conferences

It is common knowledge that there are two kinds of scholar these days: the stationary and the peripatetic. The stationaries pursue their studies in the traditional way, while their restless colleagues participate in every sort of international seminar and symposium imaginable. The scholar of this second type may be readily identified: in his lapel he wears a card bearing his name, rank, and home university, in his pocket sticks a flight schedule of arrivals and depatures, and the buckle of his belt -as well the snaps on his briefcase- are plastic, never metal, so as not to trigger unnecessarily the alarms of airport scanners that search boarding passengers for weapons. Our peripatetic scholar keeps up with the literature of his field by studying in buses, waiting rooms, planes, and hotel bars.

(Stanislaw Lem: The Futurological Congress [1971])

On the following day Laurz Mur called the conclave of xenologists to order. Standing on the speaker's podium, he swept the audience with an appraising eye. Five hundred xenologists came under his purview: every sort of philosopher, explorer, biologist, anthropologist, historian, cultural psychologist, linguist, analytical aesthetician, philologer, dendrologist, lexicographer, cartologist, and a dozen other more recondite professions. Some were scheduled speakers; others would listen and engage in the important work of intellectual cross-fertilization. Still others had brought papers they intended to read, if the opportunity offered, or even if not: somehow, by hook or by crook, the precious paper with its carefully honed phrases and engaging new ideas must be heard!

(Jack Vance: Night Lamp. By the way, "cartologist" seems to be a real word. Is it a mere synonym for "cartographer", or has it some particular shade of meaning?)

One possible way to enliven the closing ceremonies of academic conferences would be to arrange a "PowerPoint collage" by taking one slide from each of the transpired presentations, and then forcing one unfortunate attendant chosen at random to defend it as if it were his own paper. If he didn't make a convincing case, he would be erased from the proceedings. Fun for everyone, except one! (If the congress is about Moral Philosophy, the utilitarian guy should be chosen.)

No one around

If humanity suddenly dissapeared, for how long would traces of our existence remain? The World Without Us by Alan Weisman explores that question.

Poul Anderson's haunting short story "In Memoriam" does the same, in a more fictionalized form. It begins like this:

Against the inexorable forces of time, will humanity leave any lasting mark?

The last man on Earth knew not that he was. Nor would he have cared. He had met very few other humans in his life, and none since his woman coughed herself into silence.

Roleplaying in the Dying Earth

In the essay "Rules to Mock Your Vain Ambitions", noted RPG designer Robin D. Laws describes what were his aims when adapting Jack Vance's "Dying Earth" setting to a Role-Playing Game.

I find fascinating the discussion of how the game mechanics were carefully tailored to achieve a proper "Dying Earth" feeling during play. Besides design artistry, it required a deep knowlege of Vance's stories: the identification of their recurring themes, motifs, an character archetypes, not to mention an ear for his use of language (the players are encouraged to speak in the rarefied dialogue peculiar to the series, and the rules themselves are written "in voice".) It's no wonder then that the essay doubles as an interesting commentary on Vance's work.

The bit about the different dice "personalities" is amusing:

Maybe I'm crazy, but I've always found that the different dice used in RPGs all carry different emotional temperatures. The d4 is primal, parsimonious, and, as anyone who has ever stepped on one knows, hostile. The d12 is your goofy uncle, the one who tells you stories aren't supposed to hear and asks you to pull his finger. The d20 is a serious-minded juggernaut of decimal regularity. The six-sider, on the other hand, is a Dying Earth die all the way. A cube, it is elegant, spare, and classical. As the die used by normal civilians, the d6 offers a kind of bridge out from the world of RPGs, just as the Dying Earth stories straddle the boundaries between genre fiction and literature.

Léon Bloy lee a H. G. Wells

6 DE NOVIEMBRE. He acabado la nueva novela de Wells, Los primeros hombres en la Luna. Es un Julio Verne escritor, es decir, un monstruo. Ateísmo anglosajón. Este hombre da la sensación de que escribe desde el fondo de un pozo. De todos modos, como invención es un libro muy inferior a La guerra de los mundos, pero no tiene nada de la abominación capital, primigenia y transcendental de La isla del doctor Moreau, libro negro entre los atroces, donde hasta el propio Demonio parece salir difamado.

(Léon Bloy: Diarios. Editorial Acantilado.)

"abominación capital, primigenia y transcendental" tiene un aire a frase lovecraftiana...

The Immortalists

In an earlier post, I mentioned Alexander Bogdanov's pursuit of immortality. Not fairytales like the persistence of the soul, or flimsy, metaphorical substitutes like enduring fame, but honest to God physical rejuvenation.

Turns out that, a few years after his death, he had counterparts in the US attempting the same thing. In both cases the plan was to bestow eternal life on a restricted elite: the party leadership in the case of Bogdanov, some kind of eugenic camarilla in the case of Lindbergh and Carrel.

Pesadilla de un torero

Visto en CoverBrowser. En el sitio, aparte de infinidad de portadas de comics, se puede encontrar una interesante galería de las peores carátulas de discos.

Siento debilidad por las portadas de Heavy Metal y revistas afines. ¿Existe alguna página que recopile las de Zona 84?

Flatland

R. A. Lafferty didn't like modern society. He used the term "Flatland" (possibly inspired by Edwin Abbott's novel) to characterise a world which he he saw as unstructured and bereft of an spiritual dimension. Furthermore, Lafferty believed that the ability to remember the previous -more wholesome- state, and to perceive the degradation of the current one, was lost in the transition.

I am speaking literally about a real happening, the end of the world in which we lived till fairly recent years. The destruction or unstructuring of that world, which is still sometimes referred to as 'Western Civilization' or 'Modern Civilization', happened suddenly, some time in the half century between 1912 and 1962. That world, which was 'The World' for a few centuries, is gone. Though it ended quite recently, the amnesia concerning its ending is general. Several historiographers have given the opinion that these amnesias are features common to all 'ends of worlds'. Nobody now remembers our late world very clearly, and nobody will ever remember it clearly in the natural order of things. It can't be recollected because recollection is one of the things it took with it when it went...

(R. A. Lafferty: The Day After the World Ended. Collected in his essay volume It's Down the Slippery Cellar Stairs)

Maybe Lafferty selected the year 1962 as the "upper bound" of the End of the World because of Vatican II?

There is a vage memory that this late world had a large and intrincate superstructure on it, and that this came crashing down. There is some dispute as to whether we gained by the sweeping away of the trashy construction, or whether we lost a true and valid dimension in the unstructuring of our Old World, and wether we do not now live in "Flatland." There is no way to settle this dispute since the old structure cannot be recaptured or analyzed.

There is even some evidence that "Flatlands" are the more usual conditions, and that the worlds with heights and structures are the exceptions. Even if we could go back there, a Time Machine from Flatland and eyes from Flatland would not be able to see a dimension not contained in Flatland.

(ibid.)

The fourth (as yet unpublished) volume in Laffety's autobiographical series In a Green Tree is titled Incidents of Travel in Flatland. It covers the sixties and the seventies. I would love to take a look at it.

The idea that "it sucks, you just don't realize it sucks" is interesting, but the catch is that it can be used to argue that anything sucks. It's not that different from the approach taken by the Frankfurt school when they, too, tried to show that "it sucks". (Not that Lafferty would agree on anything with that bunch of pinkos, mind you.) On the other hand, "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle".

This concern of Lafferty shows in many of his works, most of the time in a veiled manner. Which is probably good, because I suspect I wouldn't like his philosophy if he had made it completely explicit. Instead, we have his stories and novels.

Predicando

Y Paul Le Jeune se quejaba en 1635 desde Nueva Francia porque un chamán local, viendo comprometida su propia reputación como sanador milagrero y hacedor de la lluvia, solía "divertirse a mis expensas, sugiriéndome palabras indecentes en su idioma [para que] tomase nota de ellas y asegurándome que no hay nada malo en las mismas, a fin de conseguir que yo pronuncie esas palabras soeces en presencia de los salvajes".

(Jonathan Wright: Los Jesuitas)

El episodio recuerda un poco al sketch "El diccionario de húngaro" de los Monty Phyton:

No es prudente aprender la lengua local precisamente de la persona a la que pretendes dejar sin trabajo, y que se encuentra comprensiblemente preocupada por tu intrusismo laboral. Me pregunto si serían posibles versiones más sofisticadas de la treta, por ejemplo: en vez de hacer decir palabrotas al pobre jesuita, construir cuidadosamente el "diccionario" de manera que lo que predique resulte herético para su propia doctrina.