Updates from the World

A Lost European Culture, Pulled From Obscurity

New Model of the Universe Says Past Crystallises out of the Future

Trees Communicate with Aspirin-like Chemical

Rudiments of Language Discovered in Monkeys

David Foster Wallace's Toy Cement Mixer

"Nothing is more free than the imagination of man; and though it cannot exceed that original stock of ideas furnished by the internal and external senses, it has unlimited power of mixing, compounding, separating, and dividing these ideas, in all the varieties of fiction and vision. It can feign a train of events, with all the appearance of reality, ascribe to them a particular time and place, conceive them as existent, and paint them out to itself with every circumstance, that belongs to any historical fact, which it believes with the greatest certainty. Wherein, therefor, consists the difference between such a fiction and belief?"
-David Hume, from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

The Unlimited Story Deck – Artist’s Statement

“I think we should put some mountains here. Otherwise, what are all the characters going to fall off of?” -Laurie Anderson

As a storyteller and theorist on the role that narratives play in our lives, I am concerned with how we produce stories, particularly in our contemporary, hyper-mediated age. We are exposed to narratives everywhere we turn, from the news and movies, to the expression of our memories and daily experiences. Despite this overwhelming abundance of narrative forms, it seems that people often take in stories passively, and do not think about how each of us are continually narrating the world around us. The uncertainty over the future of print media and the Internet’s allowance of the production of rapid and potentially low-quality narratives point to a pressing need to encourage people to continue to learn and enjoy the art of good storytelling. To this end I have created a game and technology, called the Unlimited Story Deck, which can be used to highlight the ways in which we construct narratives, both individually and as communities, and encourage people to tell and enjoy telling new and quality narratives.

There is a myth that that the authorial process is a challenging, mystical, and solitary craft. On the contrary though, everyone is telling stories all the time; the ability to form narrative connections between diverse concepts in our lives may be one of our most rudimentary abilities. Scott McCloud, in his Understanding Comics, suggests that we make such intuitive narrative connections when making sense between the panels of comics . We recognize patterns and desire causal or associational relationships between the contents of our experience, regardless of what those contents are or the contexts and mediums in which they are encountered, just as in comics we don’t need to be told how to interpret the variously arranged and disjointed panels. The Unlimited Story Deck works by presenting its users with a variety of such juxtaposed concepts, from which we can recognize and express our narrative connections.

But what are these contents or concepts we recognize and construct narratives from? The Pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximander believed that all reality was constructed from one underlying substance that he called the Unlimited, essentially a storehouse or database of all potential qualities that could be intermixed and expressed in the world . While this was subsequently disproved as a valid physical theory of the Universe, it may serve as a metaphor for the field of storytelling, in that all narrative realities are constructed from the intermixing and expressing of the unlimited storehouse of conceptualized language. Specifically, we find in stories concepts for characters, settings, events, objects, and dynamics, which are intermixed and expressed in a variety of ways. Each card of the Unlimited Story Deck presents one of these types of storytelling concepts, which can be played in a variety of ways to construct narratives.

While one of my aims is to see how we tell stories outside of expected forms or mediums, (otherwise how might they be novel), it seems we can tell stories from concepts because they are familiar or recognizable from our experience; we know the associations and trappings and how they might be used. There are through the wealth of human narratives certain types of stories that are told again and again, and which anyone who has ever read a book or watched a movie might immediately recognize. Like Anaximander’s Unlimited, one imagines a database of all available narrative types, a technology that Heidegger would call a “standing-reserve” of concepts , which reveal these concepts for us to use in story creation. For the Unlimited Story Deck I have collected such recognizable types of content, which should allow its users to more readily and enjoyably create narratives. Though the form of a deck is limited, physically by the need to shuffle the cards, the permutations of narrative connections between any of these concepts is as unlimited as the human imagination.

While I believe our ability to form narrative connections is intuitive, telling stories still takes work. As media theorist Espen Aarseth suggests, texts are machines for the production of narrative meaning that require the input of a human user to make them operate . Even traditional narrative forms like the novel require some amount of feedback and interpretation from the reader to make sense of a story. On the other hand, this ergodic feedback can be fun, when viewed as games that encourage us to enjoy the act of problem solving or narrative resolution . While it does not present the kinds of goals typical of games, the Unlimited Story Deck is intended to induce the same kind of fun when played by randomly generating concepts that we have to express as narratives, and as such stands in a tradition of storytelling and card games that require interaction to form narrative connections.

Aarseth notes that one of the oldest books, the Chinese I Ching, makes use of discrete nonlinear/random methods for being read, producing 4096 possible distinct readings from the permutations of its symbols . A similar and more direct antecedent is the divinatory system of the Tarot, which presents its users with randomly drawn cards that each contain a concept or archetype from which a reading is constructed. Some important aspects of the Tarot to note are that 1). The archetypes are drawn from familiar or basic situations in human life, 2). Provide open guidelines for the spatio-temporal arrangement and reading of the cards, and 3). Ask the reader to consider the cards and their constructed narrative as a representation of the reader and their personal associations to the cards’ contents.

This last point becomes important when considering another antecedent: that of role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons. Though many actions in RPGs are decided through the chance of dice rolls, this kind of game’s fun comes primarily through the story that the players and game master construct and express from the randomness of events and charts of possible outcomes. The players are encouraged towards this act of narrative construction because they identify themselves with the characters in the story. While the Unlimited Story Deck could be used in a similar, self-representational way, it seems that this identification between reader and character may be an integral part of how we interpret stories: by imagining ourselves into the situations and relationships presented these become real for us. Many of the cards in this deck have thus been addressed to the user to encourage their involvement in the stories that can be constructed.

A last few antecedent forms to consider include collectible card games, such as Magic: The Gathering, where players place cards on the table that each represent different characters or forces operating on each other. While this may look the most like the Ultimate Story Deck, collectible card games don’t generally encourage narrative creation and have very particular constraints of game play and goal-situations. Another card game worth mentioning though is Fluxx, where the cards played change the rules and end-situations of the game. This is closer to the player relationship to the cards played in the Ultimate Story Deck, but once again without the use of narratives. Lastly is the card game 1000 Blank White Cards (which I have yet to play, and so can’t speak freely about how it operates), essentially blank cards drawn on by the players to make up the game as it goes along. The Ultimate Story Deck seems very similar to this, but with a preset range of cards and a focus on narration somewhat more similar to the Surrealist storytelling game Exquisite Corpse, where a narrative is made up by people passing around sentences to be finished or continued.


This project is still unfinished, the cards are being designed and should hopefully be done next week in time to start play-testing how the Deck works. More details forthcoming.


1. Scott McCloud. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: HarperPerrenial, 1994) 62-4
2. Philip Wheelwright [Ed.] The Presocratics (New York: Macmillan, 1985) 53
3. Martin Heidegger. The Question Concerning Technology. Basic Writings. David Farrell Krell [Ed.] 322
4. Espen Aarseth. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: John Hopkins University) 20-1
5. Raph Koster. A Theory of Fun for Game Design (http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20041203/koster_01.shtml, 11.30.09)
6. Aarseth 9

Punctuation and Post-literal Communications, or the curious life of !

Recently I have become more involved with sending text messages as a useful and quick form of communication. Usually I prefer face to face communications, or if that is not possible, then long monologuous letters (in an attempt to keep alive that dying art form). I absolutely loathe the telephone, mainly because it gives the illusion of having a real conversations, except that all you get is someone's disembodied and ghostly voice in your ear, but not all the gestures, non-verbal cues, pheromones, that make real live communication so intricate and exciting. The issue of course is the level of mediation between the conversants, which, as our technology and ability to quickly communicate through little boxes increases, destroys the necessity of those heightened modes of articulation inextricable from the meat.

Also destroyed however is any pretense at actual emotion, particularly when you are limited to a miniscule number of character spaces and want to communicate something of such vast importance, or even with an element of friendliness, etc. I find that when I write a text message (and this I'm sure applies to Twitter, though I have no desire to get caught up in that ephemeral epiphenomenon), that if I don't include punctuation and read it back to myself before hitting send, it often reads to me as somewhat dour, or at least, mechanical. How could these few typographical symbols convey anything of the complexity of what I am actually feeling? The easiest solution I have found is simply to tag an exclamation mark at the end of the message, which, though it conveys perhaps even less of what I mean, also conveys (for me, and this is important) a sense of immediacy and positivity that allows me to know that my message will not be read in a negative light.

An article on the history and contemporary use of the exclamation mark suggests that: "The origin of the exclamation mark is uncertain. The first one appeared in print around 1400. The exclamation mark, it has been argued, derives from the Latin Io (which means joy). One day (we hypothesise) somebody wrote a joyful upbeat sentence and to clinch that sense, they concluded it by putting the second letter of Io under the first."

However, "Shipley and Schwalbe are right when they say a sentence without exclamation marks is less friendly than one with at least two. When, though, did friendliness become the arbiter of orthographic etiquette? There is surely a point after which exclamation marks no longer express friendliness. In this post-literal time, exclamation marks become signs of sarcasm as witty correspondents rebel against their overuse. Hence: "I loved your last email! OMG did I LOVE it!!!!!!" The point is they didn't. They were being IRONIC."

Sure too much of anything makes it meaningless, but personally, I don't find anything ironic about the exclamation mark, for me it is still a symbol expressing io: excitement, epiphany, agreement. But then again, I don't care much for the emotional irony that hallmarks our postmodern age. When I text for example "I love you!" I don't mean that ironically. I mean it more emphatically then just "I love you", where the lack of punctuation is like a cliff you can fall off of into all the ambiguity and sadness of the contemporary world. Granted, there is much good poetry, fiction, etc. that intentionally dis-uses punctuation in order to convey that uncertainty of effect, but once punctuation marks no longer signal what they are supposed to (imagine a period meaning &, or to skip a sentence), then the doors are open for every typographic symbol to become unattached from its accepted meaning or phoneme, with the possibility that any letter in this sentence could actually refer to something else. Granted, this might not be such a bad thing, as that is the basis for cryptographic transmutations, but the whole point of language, particularly written language, is that it is a commonly understood means of communication, without which none of this would make any sense at all!

Saving Middle-Earth: The Power of Recording Reality in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings

Saving Middle-Earth: The Power of Recording Reality in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings

Every quest has a goal, but sometimes these goals contain subtler, more far-reaching effects than their stated purpose. In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the explicit goal is to save the world of Middle-Earth from the evil of Sauron by destroying the One Ring. While this act certainly rids the world of evil, it also serves another purpose for its inhabitants, cultures, and environment: that of allowing this reality to continue into the future. In this sense, ‘saving the world’ preserves or records what has come before for those who are yet to come. And though we do not find ourselves slaying evil warlocks in our daily lives, we too can participate in this quest through the symbolic applicability of the ideals in The Lord of the Rings to our modern life. This paper will examine the ways in which this preservationist sense of ‘saving the world’ is illustrated in the history of Middle-Earth, in the early stages of the ring quest, and in the writing and reception of Tolkien’s masterpiece in our own reality.

If the whole world is at stake in the quest, we must first understand what that world is before it can be saved. The epic story told in The Lord of the Rings is only the tip of the iceberg, or the dénouement, of a long and winding history stretching back thousands of years before men, much less hobbits, were even conceived. In many places in the text, references are made to historical persons and events that, while not bearing directly on the tale, are still an integral part of that reality. In a letter to his publisher, Milton Waldman, Tolkien discusses this history, suggesting that Middle-Earth grew out of or was invented to house his imaginary languages of the Elves (143). Already we can see this world as a kind of record, moving from creation myths to the histories of the Elven people, respectively recorded by Tolkien in the Music of the Ainur and the Silmarillion (146). Middle-Earth is a world created by the gods (who imagined it as a story), but it is incomplete. In order for the world to be fully made it has to be made for someone: the Children of the Gods, who are the Elves, and later Men (147). The world is made in order to pass it on, like a grand inheritance, including all the cultures and ideals that world contains.

As the history of Middle-Earth deals primarily with the Elves, it is necessary to look at how Elven culture helped shape the Middle-Earthian ideals of preserving the world. Elves are immortal, and thus concerned with, “the griefs and burdens of deathlessness in time and change” (146). Elven magic is a sub-creative art rather than a dominating power, and they desire to use magic to “benefit the world and others,” including the environment, through the “adornment of earth, and the healing of its hurts” (146, 151). Tolkien similarly points out that Elrond’s house represents Lore; the art of the Elves includes, “the preservation in reverent memory of all tradition concerning the good, wise, and beautiful” (153). If the elves have a flaw however, it is in wanting to preserve this beautiful world around them as it is, despite the passage of time. But as the world inevitably changes, their art eventually becomes ineffectual, “a kind of embalming” (151). The main purpose of the Rings of Power stems from (and perverts) this Elven desire: “the prevention and slowing of decay” (152). This brings out another facet of ‘saving the world,’ that we can only safeguard reality for those who come after us, and not for ourselves.

While the Elves are First-born, it is their duty in turn to fade like the gods, and to pass Middle-Earth on to the Followers, Men. Having no magic of their own, Men are not as concerned with the preservation of goodness and beauty in their world, and they more readily fall prey to the dark forces at work in Middle-Earth. The elves however passed on to Men a “strand of ‘blood’ and inheritance” on which the art and poetry of man depends (149), that is, the ability and desire to pass on their own ideals through the art of cultural transmission. This is highly significant, because unlike Elves, Men are mortal. In his article, The Quest Hero, W.H. Auden suggests that quests serve as “symbolic descriptions of our personal experience of existence as historical” (33). The telos, the goal or end point, of any life is in death, and as such the quest is always in some way an attempt to defy death, which is attempted in two drastically different ways. The Men in the Second Age of Middle-Earth are denied immortality, but still act out of the received Elven ideals of preserving themselves, by desiring either more time in life or to escape death altogether (Tolkien Letters, 154-5). This desire for eternal life unfortunately results in the aligning of the kingdoms of Men with Sauron against the gods in a terrible and world-twisting battle (ibid, 156). On the other hand, Men can face death by saving the world: by both defeating the evil forces that encourage destruction and by leaving behind cultural records for the benefit of the world that follows. At stake in the Third Age of Middle-Earth, in which The Lord of the Rings takes place, are not only the world itself, but also the ability to continue to save the world through the preserved legacies of mankind.

Sauron is not defeated until the end of the third book of The Lord of the Rings, but the ways in which the story’s heroes can save the world through cultural legacy are already suggested early on in the quest, in The Fellowship of the Ring. The history of the One Ring itself highlights some of the personal challenges reflected in this theme of inheritance. As Elrond recalls the story during the Council of Elrond, the Ring was taken from the hand of Sauron and then lost by the human Isildur (320), who wanted to keep its power for himself. Isildur’s heir, Aragorn, inherits the Sword of Elendil, the broken blade of which symbolizes Aragorn’s duty to mend the damage caused by his ancestor’s greed. Aragorn does this by first protecting the peoples of the North, and then joining the quest that will restore him to his inherited place on the throne at Minas Tirith. While the One Ring passes from Isildur to Golem, these characters loose the ring because they want to preserve themselves and not their world. The next inheritor though, Bilbo Baggins, chooses to give up the ring to his nephew Frodo on his own accord (79). Frodo is Biblo’s heir, for his property, wealth, and stories. But it is the act of being given the Ring freely that allows Frodo the ability and desire to want to, “save the Shire” (96), and by extension, the rest of the world of Middle-Earth, which he does by going on the quest to destroy the Ring. The Ring is passed on for the sake of the future.

The quest to resolve the inheritance of the Ring is not the only way that the inhabitants of Middle-Earth in the Third Age are attempting to save their world. One might even say from the amount of stories, songs, and knowledge recorded in the text that the chief pastime of the Middle-Earthian races is the preservation and transmission of their cultural realities. Beyond the large-scale histories preserved through their retelling by Gandalf and Elrond, other historical events are recorded in the Elf-songs to Elbereth, Gil-galad, and Eärendil (117, 250, and 308), sung not just by Elves, but also by Samwise and Bilbo. Though the Elves are fading into legend their history is preserved in song, and more importantly their language is also being preserved, as Bilbo teaches Frodo the Ancient Tongue of the Elves (119). And it is not just the high culture of the Elves that is preserved; Glóin reounts the Dwarven attempt to reclaim their own cultural heritage by excavating Moria (316), and even Hobbit history is recorded, as in the legend of Gorhendad Oldbuck and the school song about trolls (141 and 276). Beyond these cultural inheritances, knowledge of the land itself is preserved in the stories of Tom Bombadil. The ancient Tom not only knows the secret stories of the trees and environment of Middle-Earth, but also willingly shares these with the Hobbits, so that they too can pass on the full history of their world (181). As we see from the Notes on the Shire Records that opens the text, Frodo’s three Hobbit companions go on after the quest is finished to record information on the legends, names, languages, calendars, and herblore of Middle-Earth (37), effectively preserving everything that has come before for the future ages of their world.

While these introductory Notes on the Shire Records bodes well for the result of the quest, they are only possible by the quest being both completed and recorded. And these are achieved through two instances of the intersection of individual inheritance and cultural legacy that highlight the theme of saving the world in The Fellowship of the Ring. The first of these instances is Gandalf’s search through the libraries of Minas Tirath for proof of the One Ring: a scroll written by Isildur that accounts for the inscription on the Ring. Despite Isildur’s desire to keep the ring for his own inheritance, he leaves this account, “lest a time come when the memory of these great matters shall grow dim” (331). Even the caretakers of the library had forgotten this scroll, and if Gandalf had not had the knowledge to find these memories of the past, the inhabitants of Middle-Earth would have been condemned to repeat their forefathers’ desire to hide or use the One Ring. It is the finding of the record of the inscription that ends Gandalf’s quest and begins Frodo’s journey. But once the journey is finished, how are the future inhabitants of the world supposed to remember the quest, much less we the readers, unless better records are left behind? To this end, Bilbo wants to record Frodo’s story as a book, and even asks him to bring back any old songs and tales he comes across on the way (327 and 364). Bilbo is already recording Middle-Earthian cultures and legends; a selection of his Red book of Westmarch has been published (in our own world) as The Hobbit (20). As such, Bilbo’s act of recording Frodo’s journey ultimately saves their world, as it becomes for us the books of The Lord of the Rings.

While the world of Middle-Earth began as a linguistic exercise, Tolkien suggests in his letters that he wrote The Lord of the Rings as an attempt to conclude and encapsulate all the histories and themes of his imagined world (159). There was however another goal at stake in Tolkien’s invention of Middle-Earth: the creation of a mythology which would fill a lack of that kind of story in his own country (144), if not in our whole modern world. Though there is no agreed upon definition of mythology, contemporary myth-theorists like University of Pittsburgh’s own Fred Clothey might argue that myths are symbolic narratives that order a people’s experience of reality and serve as paradigms for how that reality is to be lived. The reality in which Tolkien was writing The Lord of the Rings was a chaotic and rapidly changing one. The world was involved in a second global war, new technologies were destroying the environment, and cultural transmission was being devalued by the new medium of movies into mere entertainment. Tolkien stresses in his foreword to The Fellowship of the Ring that while his story is not allegorical for the real world it is certainly applicable. The war over the Ring serves as a symbol for the dangers of global warfare; the concern of the Elves for the environment of Middle-Earth, and the living desires of that landscape itself, serve as symbols for the need to preserve our own respect of nature. The focus on acts of remembering and recording the past serve as a strikingly paradigmatic symbol for us to not forget our own histories and cultural traditions.

Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings thus fulfills its author’s intention of being written as a myth, but it cannot fully become one until it too is passed on, and is accepted as myth by the people whose reality it records and symbolizes. While it was relatively unread during the first decade of its publication, Tolkien’s story eventually became the second most read book after the Bible. During the ‘60s, “Frodo lives!” was graffitied in New York subways, a suitably mythic response to that decade’s need for new cultural explanations. What really attests to the books’ power as myth is that they continue to hold such fascination and relevance for our contemporary century. These stories were recently made into a series of critically acclaimed and high-grossing films that seem likely to continue to pass on Tolkien’s vision and ordering of reality for generations to come. As such, the stories of Middle-Earth, in their history, text, and modern relevance, serve as Tolkien’s own inheritance to us. The Lord of the Rings literally saves his world and its cultural values so that we in turn will remember to keep saving our own world.


Bibliography

Auden, W.H. “The Quest Hero.” Understanding the Lord of the Rings. Eds. Rose
Zimbardo and Neil Isaacs. Houghton Mifflin Co. Boston: 2004

Tolkien, J.R.R. “The Fellowship of the Ring.” Ballantine Books. New York: 1965

Tolkien, J.R.R. “The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien.” Ed. Humphrey Carpenter. Houghton
Mifflin Co. Boston

The Unsayable

As a writer, or more generally an artist, something that has become increasingly more important to me is the ability, desire, or perhaps necessity to express the inexpressible, to represent in some form those situations, characters, feelings, or ideas that either defy representation, or are shades of experience that others have not found ways of representing before. Heidegger, I believe, discussed experience or perception as being similar to driving over the surface of the world, that is, one can only or most readily articulate the outermost (or perhaps innermost) layer of reality. I take it for certain that many deep and true things have been said in the past, that language has been used in innumerable ways, that any subject has been discussed, any combination has been to some degree tried out (one only has to turn to Joyce’s “Finnegan’s Wake” for illustration of that). But I also resent how much schlock and ironic, surface content is thrown around these days, how easy it is to not have the courage to face the unfathomable in one’s self and in the world. A fellow student in my fiction class told me that he once wrote a story putting in a lot of himself and his real feelings and decided that it was so intense that he’d rather not do it again. I fear it’s indicative of our age.

And yet, as far as one can or chooses to push words, music, and visions, it seems that there will always be something more that is left unexpressed; that any art is ultimately a medium, a mediation of a reality that is still immediate and sensorially complete, and more, carrying in every moment associations to memory and imagination, references to culture and history, and gods know what else besides. Emotions, thoughts, sensations, intentions. And even then, if one where able to accurately convey all these modes of perspective, there still remains some ineffable and overwhelming quality, the spirit or life-ness of reality that has not yet come across through any artifice. Though one can come closer, through pushing ones’ perspectives and means of expression. Freud and other psychologists have called this inexpressibleness the ‘uncanny,’ or, by the religious theorist Rudolf Otto, the ‘numinous’. It reveals itself in what is weird, non-rational, fascinating, and terrifying, in the unexpected, unprecedented, and juxtaposed. It is processed in dreams, prayed to in religious rituals, and approached tentatively through an artist’s imagination and vision. Some have called it God but I think that’s just a symbol and it’s something else entirely, something wholly other than the surfaces we say it is.

For a visceral example take the body. For many the body as material is the surface, what it looks like, what’s on it, or the mass, the weight. For those trained to see it otherwise, like doctors, the body is series of elaborate processes, organs, meat, hidden beneath the outward skin. But how often do we have a total lived sense of this (excepting of course moments of illness and malfunction), on an aesthetic or even spiritual level? Or apply it outwards to the rest of the world? One of the most intense and inexpressible moments for me of this sort was not religious or drug-induced, but was the result of seeing the Bodyworlds exhibit several years back: the plasticization of human bodies and organ systems and parts of bodies, all splayed open in exact form, some refracted or expanded to bizarre, inhuman proportions. And yet all still recognizably human, still recognizably my form. One was split down the middle and folded open so that he was standing in two place at once, and I felt my own body trying to physically know what that felt like. I left acutely aware of my every organ, of every living layer within me, and when I walked out into the city and looked around I was just as aware of the insides of every other thing: the trees, machines, animals, building, the air itself even. It was awe-inspiring in such a way that I still don’t know if I’ve gotten it across.

Or on the other hand there are the psychological approaches toward memory and emotion, therapy or artistic transmutation. You could spend a lifetime tracing out the symbols and associations of your individual psyche, and still there might be some part of what makes you tick that you can’t quite lay your finger on. Or perhaps you begin to recognize feelings that you’ve never felt before and can’t yet explain. I am currently working on a story which the character goes through a transformation of a wide spectrum of emotions, and in doing so I am forced to similarly process my own emotions towards an emotional perspective that I know I’ve never felt before and certainly don’t yet know how to express. Several of my friends and classmates have asked why I am writing this piece if it is such an intense and inexplicable process, to which my response has invariably been that this is why I am writing: to experience something that hasn’t been experienced or expressed before in order to offer it up to others and the world.

On the Improper Propagation of Ideas

While I generally am interested in mythology, shamanism, personal and cultural enlightenment, etc. I am also, and perhaps more, interested in rational and well-written discourse. I am often flabbergasted by the mummery that passes for philosophy (the postmodern deconstructionism of Derrida and ilk) and religion (the new-agey second-rate Castaneda-ism) these days. The problem being that one can't really turn to science to talk about all the intangible, emotio-cultural, and even otherworldly concepts that also need to be grappled with. The problem also being that language is a frail, frail invention, and that in a world entirely consumed by the reproduction of the word it is almost entirely possible to say something that isn't slanted immediately into a thousand quite subjective perspectives. In other words, there is no objective dialogue. To paraphrase José Donoso, the author of a fabulous novel I'm currently reading, the limitation of would-be writers is that they believe there in the existence of a reality to portray. This is why I love stories. Unlike modern attempts at journalism, which fail because they can never be objective enough, literature by its very nature takes on the perspective of a narrator, and any information or ideas couched in the story are almost more palatable for being couched in what we already read as a biased perspective. Narrators lie, they can be obsessive or misinformed, and we love them all the more for it, qualities that would make us cringe in a journalist.

Distorted Reflections of Reality in Borges' “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”

Distorted Reflections of Reality in Borges' “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”

In his essay “Avatars of the Tortoise,” Borges claims that art “requires visible unrealities” (Borges, 207). Of all the combinations of words that might resemble the universe, there are some stories that seem to be the real world in which we live. Yet however real we think these fictive worlds are, Borges argues that there are structural weaknesses that show them as false. Like the paradox of infinity, these “crevices of unreason” (Borges, 208) allow the reader to refute the existence of the world, or worlds, within the text. Borges’ story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” can serve as an example of this creation and refutation of the fictive universe. Though Uqbar, Tlön, and Orbis Tertius are clearly the visible unrealities within the story, their presentation through a narrative device of magnified or distorted reflections allows them to become crevices of unreason, through which the “reality” in the story is shown to be equally fictional.

At the beginning of the story the narrator states that he owes “the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia” (Borges, 3), that is, to a reflection of language. This phrase is immediately reflected in a quote the narrator’s friend had found in an encyclopedia article on the imagined county of Uqbar, and then reflected again when we learn that his friend had misquoted the text: “The visible universe was an illusion… mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply and disseminate that universe” (Borges, 4). It seems characteristic of Borges that this quote within the story refers to the narrative device at work in the text as a whole. We are told that this quote is the only interesting passage in an otherwise boring, which is to say believable, article, fortuitously found in the back of a single copy of a reprint of another encyclopedia. Here we see the mechanism at work: the Anglo-American Cyclopedia is a reflection in which is found the unreasonable crevice of the additional pages. The pages on Uqbar are a reflection of a believable country in which is found the dubious quote. The quote is reflected in its misquote and in its peculiar significance is found the possibility of an imagined country. What might have been an otherwise realistic evening is now cast under the question of Uqbar’s existence.

One could imagine this movement of reflection and distortion being carried on to infinity, but it seems that Borges settles on three reflections as enough to convey the effect. This narrative device achieves a paradox similar to the argument of the third man presented in “Avatars of the Tortoise:” If two men are placed in an archetype, “one would have to postulate another archetype to include them all, and then a fourth…” (Borges, 203). By positing multiple fictional realities in his story, Borges manages to suggest that the number of possibly created worlds is endless; a set that includes and invades what seems to be the conventional reality.

Each of these visible unrealities is reflected and distorted from the one before, and even their manner of discovery functions through a similar telescopic mechanism. Tlön is first mentioned in the article on Uqbar as an example of the kind of literature from that imagined country, literature that “never referred to reality” (Borges, 5) but to other imaginary realms. However, beyond being just a reflection of the vaguely believable Uqbar, Tlön is magnified into a reality where the entire language, aesthetics, and philosophies are vastly different from our own. Similarly, the discovery of Tlön reflects that of Uqbar in being in an encyclopedia discovered by a friend. But what was a mere four-page article in a conventional encyclopedia has now become an entire volume in a set all related to the imaginary world, and what was Bioy Casares’ hazy recollection of Uqbar becomes the mysterious book mailed to Herbert Ashe after his death, and fortuitously discovered by the narrator.

We find another set of distorted reflections in Orbis Tertius, literally the third world created in the text. At first only referenced on a seal in the front of the Encylcopedia of Tlön, a letter from one of Herbert Ashe’s friends reveals that Orbis Tertius was created by the secret society who constructed Tlön, but was a whole planet written in one of the imaginary languages of that already imaginary country. Though little detail is given of this third world, besides that it is in a language consisting only of either verbs or adjectives, the device of distorted reflections used in the story might lead us to try and imagine a world infinitely more unlike our own than even Tlön.

It is at this point that reality breaks down in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Having been presented the first crevice of unreason in the form of Bioy’s misquote, the world in the story is now confronted with a potential infinity of counterfeit realities that threaten to enter into that world. As the narrator relates, artifacts from the imaginary Tlön make there way into the “real” world, followed by re-editions of the imaginary encyclopedia and the teaching of its languages and history in “real” schools. “The world will be Tlön” (Borges, 18), the narrator states, and in a world where such visible unrealities are able to exist from distorted reflections of reality, it is perhaps impossible for the universe to be anything but another fictional construction of language.



Works Cited

Borges, Jorge Luis. “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” and “Avatars of the Tortoise.” Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings. Edit. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. New York: New Directions Publishing Corp., 2007. Pp. 3-18, 202-208

[I am posting this essay due to James Gyre's excited comments over this masterful story from Borges. Everyone please go out and read “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius."]

The Incoherence of the Sentence in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony”

The Incoherence of the Sentence in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony”

“Forgive me if my explanations seem rather incoherent” (Kafka 144). Such is the officer’s response, in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” when he discovers that the explorer sent to witness the execution does not yet understand the method by which the sentence is executed on the condemned prisoners. The officer claims that by having the sentence inscribed into their bodies, the prisoners have an enlightening moment in which they fully comprehend their crime, but this claim is continually undermined by the theme of inexpressibility that runs throughout the story. Though the method of execution seems inhumane to the explorer, the circuitous explanation of the device of torture, the practice of not informing prisoners of the terms of their guilt, and several miscommunications that beset the characters suggest that the officer’s plea for clemency in his use of the apparatus is incoherent, and the meaning of the sentence will inevitably remain unrevealed.

While the officer becomes shocked that the method of execution had not previously been explained to the explorer, he is at first pleased, and wants nothing more than to give his own description of the apparatus. However, he is unable to do this in a manner that the explorer fully understands. When the officer notices the explorer’s first interest in the machine and “stop[s] explaining in order to leave a space… for quiet observation” (143), it is the first hint that he wants the explorer to give his own judgment of the execution. Yet the officer does not let the explorer utter a full sentence before butting in with a technical description of the apparatus’s parts, which still leaves out the main detail of how the device actually works. The officer later shows the explorer the old Commandant’s plans for the apparatus, but the explorer only sees “a labyrinth of lines crossing and recrossing each other” (148), and cannot understand the sentence. Though the officer points out each letter of his own verdict, “BE JUST” (161), the explorer still cannot see the sentence in the confusion of lines. Like the validity of using the apparatus, the elaborate script of its sentences is only clear to the officer, and does nothing to convince the explorer of the machine’s rightness.

Similarly, the prisoner does not understand the machine or even the charges against him, which further displeases the explorer. When asked about the penal colony’s judicial process, the officer explains that the prisoner does not know his sentence, does not know that this or any sentence has been passed on him, and has not been given a chance to defend himself. The only evidence of the man’s guilt is the word of his captain, and the officer suggests that if he had interrogated the prisoner, “things would have got into a confused tangle” (146). While this already seems a barbaric lack of judicial clarification, the incoherence of the sentence for the prisoner is exacerbated by the condemned man’s inability to understand the officer’s French language. Through the story, the prisoner tries to follow the officer’s explanations, but even when he is placed under the Harrow, the part of the apparatus that does the inscribing, it is not indicated that he has any comprehension of what is going to happen to him. It is shortly after this incoherent parody of justice that the explorer is first tempted “to denounce this execution or actually try to stop it” (151).

Despite the officer’s gradually more insistent pleas for help, it is this desire to intervene that stays with the explorer. But when he finally passes his own sentence on the apparatus of execution, he does not directly explain to the officer that he disapproves of the procedure because it is inhumane. Due to this miscommunication, the officer is led to believe that the apparatus has been negatively judged because the explorer “did not find the procedure convincing” (160). Consequently, he decides to condemn both himself and the machine. While earlier describing the moment of enlightenment that comes to the prisoners, the officer suggests that this “might tempt one to get under the Harrow oneself” (150). When the machine is finally put into motion however, it does not produce a sentence on the officer’s back, but merely stabs him to death, and the explorer notes that there is no such moment of understanding on the man’s face.

Through these instances of inexpressibility in “In the Penal Colony,” Kafka is suggesting that it may be impossible to pass a sentence, whether on a person or a cultural practice, and have that sentence by understood.

Works Cited
Kafka, Franz. “In the Penal Colony.” The Complete Stories. Ed. Nahum N. Glatzer. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. New York: Schocken Books, 1971. Pgs 140-167

A Definition Among Many

"Myth (may be) a symbol system expressed in story form generally modeled from the given factors of the human situation and expressing a people's or possibly an individual's view of reality by chronicling past events perceived to be definitive and authenticating and ascribing them an aura of ultimate significance so that the story often serves as a paradigm for human activity." -Dr. Fred Clothey's final words on myth, from his lectures on Myth, Symbol, and Ritual.

I finished writing my research paper in time to hand it in at class this evening, though when I laid down to sleep I started thinking about particular themes and symbols from the myth that I wasn't able to touch on in the paper, nor frankly was sure just how to interpret. I realized that though I felt I did a good job trying to show how Indra-Vṛtrahan may have been a manifestation of the power of the Vedic nobility, I may never really know what some of the symbols mean, nor for that matter what the entire myth actually meant for its culture. Which returns to Dr. Clothey's perspective that interpretation, and theories in general, are themselves a form of mythmaking, and we can never quite keep from brining our own subjective givens to whatever we look at.

We transitioned into our discussion on symbol tonight and Clothey stressed the distinction between direct signification and the potentiality of meanings possible in symbols, in that signs act like religious dogmas that delimit and exclude other perspectives, and symbols openly invite thought and community. To illustrate this he contrasted Western discourse's use of A/not-A logic to the Jain philosophical arguments of "Viewpoints" (nayavāda) and "Maybe" (syādvādha), which are taken together as the "Doctrine of Manysidedness" (anekāntavāda) in which discourse can have a conception of possibilities that recognizes the finitude of individual perspectives. I asked why, if such open and flexible discourse is possible, is Western Culture still stuck on A/not-A? Dr. Clothey, who had just been very animated in his discussion, suddenly grew quiet and after pointing at Plato as the origins admitted he didn't know. Then he went on tell how in all his years studying religion and trying to promote open dialogues in religious communities around the world, he had seen that whenever violence was done in the name of religion it often stemmed from a fundamental ignorance of the other guy's position, and an inability to recognize the finitude of one's own. Holding back both evident tears and growing rage he said that often, if not always, you can't understand your own perspective until you look someone else in the eyes and take their perspective seriously. After which he apologized for ranting, asked for our papers, and told us to go home.

Towards The Ineffable

Tracking down that religious feeling... in the brains of nuns (via KurzweilAI.net) and in the morals of culture.

After thousands of years the clearest thing we might be able to say about the sacred is that it just defies expression. And yet mankind is still haunted by the presence of the divine, the transcendent, the mystical. As Epicurus, an ancient Greek atomist, perhaps jokingly put it, the clearest proof in the existence of gods is that every culture has them. Though he also went on to suggest that as the gods are "immortal and blessed," their lives were too excellent to be bothered by such matters as keeping the cosmos spinning or being angry if humans did not perform the appropriate sacrifices.

The Body of the Text

The Body of the Text
How unique is your sense of language?

100 most common words in the English language:
1 the
2 be
3 to
4 of
5 and
6 a
7 in
8 that
9 have
10 I
11 it
12 for
13 not
14 on
15 with
16 he
17 as
18 you
19 do
20 at
21 this
22 but
23 his
24 by
25 from
26 they
27 we
28 say
29 her
30 she
31 or
32 an
33 will
34 my
35 one
36 all
37 would
38 there
39 their
40 what
41 so
42 up
43 out
44 if
45 about
46 who
47 get
48 which
49 go
50 me
51 when
52 make
53 can
54 like
55 time
56 no
57 just
58 him
59 know
60 take
61 people
62 into
63 year
64 your
65 good
66 some
67 could
68 them
69 see
70 other
71 than
72 then
73 now
74 look
75 only
76 come
77 its
78 over
79 think
80 also
81 back
82 after
83 use
84 two
85 how
86 our
87 work
88 first
89 well
90 way
91 even
92 new
93 want
94 because
95 any
96 these
97 give
98 day
99 most
100 us

25 most common nouns
1 time
2 person
3 year
4 way
5 day
6 thing
7 man
8 world
9 life
10 hand
11 part
12 child
13 eye
14 woman
15 place
16 work
17 week
18 case
19 point
20 government
21 company
22 number
23 group
24 problem
25 fact

Verbs
1 be
2 have
3 do
4 say
5 get
6 make
7 go
8 know
9 take
10 see
11 come
12 think
13 look
14 want
15 give
16 use
17 find
18 tell
19 ask
20 work
21 seem
22 feel
23 try
24 leave
25 call

Adjectives
1 good
2 new
3 first
4 last
5 long
6 great
7 little
8 own
9 other
10 old
11 right
12 big
13 high
14 different
15 small
16 large
17 next
18 early
19 young
20 important
21 few
22 public
23 bad
24 same
25 able

As compiled by the Oxford English Corpus

god is the absent narrative: notes on formation

memory is a narrative. for memory to be constructed,
a degree of forgetting is necessary; the idea of a negative narrative.

a narrative is a measuring of time.
we function within the illusion that we have moved forward in time.

all narrative is ritualistic.

the ritual has a beginning, a middle and an ending.

in the absence of ritual, there is no culture.

the basis of all culture consists of stories.. i.e. myth.

the basis of our idea of myth: muthos: stories, neither true nor false, neither realistic nor logical.

dreams are neither true nor false (and not necessarily realistic or logical).

"our own myths we call reality."

"in my beginning is my end."

word is gold

i knew i wouldn't be able to sleep, so i went on a long walk around bloomfield from the hollow to the playground swings behind Ritter's, scheming up the next piece of 'anamnesia' and a counterpoint to last night's ramblings on language. then when i might have passed out i got my nose stuck in the anthology of surrealist poetry i picked up last week and ended up with this whimsical little ditty about four in the morning (the excessive ellipses are only in leu of indentation, and not morse code):

I am beginning to see whatever I say becomes real.
Birds
. . . . . fly fluttering feathers from lips,
cakes and carousals
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . turn round the tongue
and every secret is illumined with
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . .. . . . .starlight.
I will never thirst again, sleep when I whisper
can tell the helicopters to finally
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . be quiet
and always have the most exquisite
. . . . . . . . . .. . . .. . . . . . . . . . . .beautiful day.
Immediately I called for a parade:
. . . . ... . . . . . .. . . . . .. . . . .. ... . .elephants
acrobats,
. .. . . .. . . brassband banners
. . . . . . . . . . . . .. .. . . . . .. .. . billowing out,
huge crowds promenading down the boulevards.
Called for
. . . . . . . . . insane ecstasy
. . . . . . . .. . . . . . .. . .. .. . . nonstop laughter,
what the gods felt when they spoke the world.
I began to experiment,
. . . . . .. . .. ... ... . . . ... porcelain cacophony
rained tea cups and toilet seats for weeks
and no one could keep their hands off
the insatiable piano
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . .or the velvet sunrise,
even if it burned a little on the edges.
I quickly learned to not say words like
pain or police or palpitate
. . . . . . . . . . . .. .. . . . . . .. . for fear
of the red jagged beating and woe
if I ever uttered
. . . . . . . . . .. . . a final Armageddon;
loose, these lips really could sink ships.
But this is no big thing, we do it every day,
most of us never noticing how with a word
we bring the heavens down on our heads.
So I kept at it, crying for
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . .. . peace
possibility,
. . . . . . . . . . full bellies
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..and free speech,
and all the war machines sprouted flowers
prison bars bent into ornamental gates
groceries exploded across the streets
and everyone said exactly what was on their minds.
It was sheer chaos and reveling and many asked
me to say
. . . . . . . . .normalcy
. . . . . . . . . . . . .. . .. .or at least
. . . . . . . ... .. . . . . . ... . . . . .. .. .silence,
but I only smiled, and said
. . . .. . . . . . . . .... . . . . . .. everything.

when language spills over...as opposed to that purity and fullness of language in which every word becomes real, which harks back to the work Ezra Pound and others did in showing how ideogramatic (Chinese) poetry relied purely on images working out their own fate, words also have a tendency to fill up with so much meaning that they overflow, and produce all manner of absurd juxtapositions. This is pointed at in Hakim Bey's article on the taoist philosopher Chaung-Tzu's idea of spillover language, refers to the process by which images fill up with so much meaning, or minds with so many images, that they spill over like a full gourd and create new unprecedented ways of looking at the world. This idea found its peak as a body of technique in the surrealists with their automatic writing and exquisite corpses, that while sometimes being just ridiculous (like the meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table, the line that sparked their movement) also have a way of recreating the way one looks at the world in every moment. in relation to the pure expression of language, this sense of bizarre juxtaposition can both mask the image being presented and express more facets of it, for example saying "oceanic swiss" both masks the reference to the moon, and highlights its cratered landmass and gravitational pull on water, and has the added benefit of positing a fleet of scuba-diving mice upon the moons surface, if your brain takes you there. of course, not all these images really carry such a surplus of meaning, and we haven't yet accounted for where these divulgent images come from...

Expanding Language

While trying to do some research on hypersigils the other day, I stumbled instead into its definition in the Double-Tongued Word Wrester Dictionary, which like the similair Urban Dictionary sports such edgy words as slobberknocker and cocaine bugs, but also goes beyond the call of posting just any new definition to track extensive citations through cultural usage. Yes, it does trace hypersigils back to Grant Morrisson.

"Double-Tongued Word Wrester records undocumented or under-documented words from the fringes of English. It focuses upon slang, jargon, and other niche categories which include new, foreign, hybrid, archaic, obsolete, and rare words. Special attention is paid to the lending and borrowing of words between the various Englishes and other languages, even where a word is not a fully naturalized citizen in its new language."

But my question still remains, if a hypersigil is a creative work, often a story, intended to bring about change (and all good storie do), then what is the process called whereby a person takes previously existing stories and art and uses them to shape the story they choose to live out in their own lives?

...or neurolinguistic reprogramming

Something else Wilson mentions when talking about the mesopotamian use of dream interpreters is that the process of breaking down dream symbology may have been very similar to that of unpacking meaning from their newly created pictographic written language, which radically cahnged the way they approached the world. One might even wonder if their language came from an attempt at trying to represent their interpreted dreams in a more readily communicable form. The shift from dreams to memes, perhaps.

Sifting through lj, I came upon these presuppositions of neuro-linguistic programmingin an article about trance induction and biurnal beating in the chaosmajik community, which basically seeks to identify and pass on skill sets based on modeling "patterns of excellence," in the same way that high end memes operate. These suggestions reminded me of some of the guidelines we were trying to come up with today for providing radical health care that takes into account the subjective nature of people's expereinces, and the desire to pass on the skills necessary to enable others to take care of themselves in the way best fit for them.

"The fundamental presuppositions of NLP are:
1. The ability to change the process by which we experience reality is more often valuable than changing the content of our experience of reality. (i.e. Changing the structure of our communications and/or sensory
representations tends to make much more difference than changing the
content.)
2. The meaning of your communication is the response you get. (i.e. It's the responsibility of the healer/magi/communicator to change
their behavior if they're not getting positive and effective results, not the client's.)
3. All distinctions human beings are able to make concerning our environment and our behavior can be usefully represented through our visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory, and gustatory senses. (i.e. Everything we're able to do is driven by a corresponding set of
neurological processes, and can be modeled and understood in terms of how we're using our five perceptual senses.)
4. All of the resources an individual needs to effect a change in their life are already within them. (i.e. Human beings are whole and complete by nature, and all of the states and strategies we need to learn and do anything are already possible by recombining and/or restructuring what we already know in new ways.)
5. The map is not the territory, but the territory is the map. (i.e. Sensory perceptions are representations of our experience, not the
experience itself, and words are not reality, but merely subjective representations of reality. Although we create and change reality by
deriving behaviors from our internal models and resources, it's very valuable to have an open mind and the willingness to learn constantly from new experiences.)
6. The positive worth of the individual is held constant, while the value and appropriateness of internal / external behaviors is questioned. (i.e. There is no such thing as a "bad" or "evil" person, and all human beings are inherently good / spiritually perfect by nature. However, within most contexts, some behaviors get better results and/or tend to be more socially acceptable than others.)
7. There is a positive intention motivating every behavior, and a context in which every behavior has value.
(i.e. Even behaviors that seem overtly negative on the surface are still being driven by positive values and worthwhile motivations, although these may well be out of awareness for the person performing the behaviors in question. Correspondingly, most "problem" behaviors tend to represent past adaptations to challenging or incongruent environments that ensured survival and success for the individual, but have been overgeneralized.)
8. All results and behaviors are accomplishments, whether they achieve the desired outcomes within a given context or not.
(I.e. There is no such thing as failure, only feedback. Every strategy produces whatever results it does consistently within any specific context, even if the results are not the ones desired. In addition, the ability to do anything and get any set of results represents an act of neurological learning for the individual; thus, with appropriate restructuring and contextualization, negative content and ineffective strategies can be transformed into positive and functional resources.)"

Of course, I imagine these techinques could just as easily be called metaprogramming, or cultural deprogramming, as the word programming itself at least in my mind carries with it some severely mechanistic interpretations, and NLP itself fell from its original intentions to become a toolkit for marketing agents and ad creeps. Like the sumerian me if you had the instructions in your hand for how to get people to do things and wanted money or power, what would you do with them? If I'm not mixing my myths, isn't hoarding this knowledge why babel fell in the first place?

Remember, always share information responsibly.

the taboo against saying what you believe to be true

It seems the self-expression vs. self-repression memeplex is floating around right now, as I just read several lj entries all dealing with accepting one's own peculiarities and longings enough over society's mores to be able to actually express what we feel. I've been going through this for a long time too, trying to get the jump on the cop in my head, trying to severe myself enough from the super-ego where I can just not give a fuck what comes out of my mouth. Granted I am one of the more repressed people that I know. It's a sad fact but one I am learning to deal with. I don't talk much, but when I do people usually look at me funny. More often now they look at me funny anyway, which is fine as long as I don't care. At least that feels honest. Several weeks ago Joel and I were having this conversation, when he brought up the idea of "not giving a fuck", and said something to the effect of if you are not personally attached to the words that come out of your mouth, other people will be more likely to accept them for what they are, and accept you for what you are. Of course, Joelski usually has to worry about saying too much rather than too little, but at least that's honest too. For example we went on to talk about Christian booty rap (of all things) and he eventually started rapping "who's my mother-fucker? God's my motherfucker!" Which could have been extremely offensive if we were actually attached to the memes of religion and it wasn't a true statement in their mythos. Afterwards I used this as a test to see just how much one could get away with saying in a social setting and repeated this story loudly at several bars. When I got to the "god's my motherfucker" line, people usually laughed, and then said if they hadn't heard it in the context of a story about not giving a fuck what you say they might actually have been offended by it.

Of course, the types of things that usually come out of my subconscious are generally less amusing and more perturbing if people don't have any understanding of where I am coming from. Like when I told Joel about seeing spirits in the corners of my room. Granted I was drunk and raving about all sorts of psycho-delic transcendence at this point (Joel is one of the few people who I can really let it all go in front of), but when I told him about the spirits he said that it sounded like I either needed to find a priest or a psychologist to talk to. At which I laughed and said most of the stuff in my head could easily get me locked up by someone with a normalized view of what is possible. At least I can draw a line between what I know to be real and all the crazy perceptions I put on top of the real to amuse myself and create change on deeper levels. But it's probably true though. If I really didn't give a fuck at all what came out of my mouth I might end up in a mental institution. Sometimes it feels like I say these things anyway precisely to push that boundary. The social limits set up to disuade people from talking madness are much deeper than those set up to keep people from expressing their true feelings for each other and the world. Saying you want to sleep with someone, or love them passionately, or you want to overthrow the government, these things are easy to say, almost acceptable to say, even when we pretend they are not. Other people may not agree with your sentiments, but they still find them as valid opinions. Talking to ghosts and communicating with other people through the backs of their heads are not so valid right now, at least in most circles. And then the question comes up, is this too just a faulty personal perception of what society deems acceptable?

The cop in my head has his claws in deeper than I first thought.

true names and the opening of the collective conscious

Yesterday I read Vernor Vinge's "True Names," and was inspired into finally using this blog account. This short story is perhaps one of the the key science fiction tales in shaping the vision and direction technology has taken over the last several decades as the first accredited depiction of cyberspace. Though that term didn't come about until later, from another sci-fi author, William Gibson, Vinge's "the Other Plane" essentially sets the foundation for the technological interface of humanity's information flows that we know of as the internet. It was a pretty good prophecy, as far as that goes. The interesting thing though was Vinge's choice to encode the story in terms of magick, the technological processes spelled out in terms of interpreting symbols and its most knowledgable users as warlocks. Which in a sense they are, the times not yet gone when working the complex code capable to craft a program, or even use a computer, seems to some a magical act. I personally know next to nothing about programming languages, but then again, I've been known to believe in magick.



The term 'true name' comes from magical traditions where it is believed that knowledge is power, and one of the surest ways to get knowledge of something was to have a name for it. A name being not only a definition but a contagious and associative link with the thing. The common words we use to refer to things are nothing more than a rudimentary label, whereas the true name of that thing is akin to a complete understanding of its entire being. If such a thing were possible. In Vinge's story this amounted to knowing the users real name and thus where their body was jacked in; you could do anything in the Other Plane just as long as no one could actually kill you. Though you could say that about the real world too.



There is an oft-quoted zen saying that claims a finger pointing at the moon is not the moon itself, as words are not the things they name but only reference pointers to them. All the concepts we have for objects, processess, and beings are nothing more than pointers, convenient fictions created to allow us to be able to make reference of discrete parts of the vast and oftentimes incomprehesible world around us. And as language is a function of communication, these symbolic tags are used mainly to represent our own disjointed experiences of the world in terms that others might understand. Which is in its essence the heart of story telling, creating symbol-complexes in which others can recognize experiences in their own lives and of life in general. In this light, one could say that any belief, any understanding of the world based on words, is just a story and contains no more truth than the teller (and listener) is willing to interpret into it; meaning belonging solely in the mind of the beholder and being not so much truth as comprhension in the pattern of one's own story. That being said, the truths of every great religion, culture and science are not truths at all but really convincing fictions. Even the belief that we have individual bodies interacting with other discrete beings is only a story for the flow of subatomic wavicles, the current quantum tale on the subject.



We have been telling ourselves stories since the dawn of history, in an attempt to give explanation and meaning to a world that proffered neither. And now we have reached a point where we are so wrapped up in the stories that we have forgotten they are just that, and go about in our beliefs as if they are the worlds they represent. Which, as language based creatures, for most intents and purposes they are. Our realities are fostered by our descriptions of it, the magical act being to change your description changes your reality. Now more than ever though, we can see that our stories, like the lower level words, are not static things; and it is through the interaction of different stories inside the larger discoursive flow of information that has allowed for all the breakthroughs of understanding that gave rise to the technologies we have today. Call them memes, themes, or belief constructs, but when ideas cross they either agree or conflict. And if they conflict either a synthesis occurs and both stories are broadened, or one steam rolls the other into oblivion and becomes the predominant belief structure; such is the case with the major religions, whose stories seems hopelessly out of date yet retain some amount of staying power by virtue of being really big. Regardless, the really groundbreaking changes have occured in our society when the stories have been allowed to influence each other and adapt accordingly, thus broadening our collective understanding of existence. Which is where the internet comes back in as a continually evolving matrix of humanity's stories, and thus the roots of all knowledge. A virtual Indra's Net or Tower of Babel, if you will, comparable to current stories of the Noosphere or global brain in which each person is a neuron or symbol processor. Another fitting metaphor is Borges's Aleph, a point which contains all other points, delightfully illustrated in "True Names" when Erythrina and Mr. Slippery become privy to the total flow of information on the Other Plane and essentially learn humanity's true name by experiencing it all at once.



One of the more magical properties of storytelling, as is expemplified by Vinge's "True Names," is that of prophecy. Stories are not only metaphors for life as we experience it, but projections of what life might be like, as we have the ablity to project our patterns ahead of us to understand what is likely to happen. Such subjunctive imagination is responsible for everything from the flight of airplanes to moment to moment survival, and at best allows anything we can think of to become real. In the realm of stories the most portentious visions of the future open up whole realms of possibility not previously imagined, allowing the future of today to become the past of tomorrow. Once we have a description of what a desired world might look like it is that much easier to find the steps necessary to bring it into being.

Which is precisely the intention of this blog, the collection and connection of stories that point towards a broader understanding of our experience in and manipulation of the world on a collective level.



The use of the term 'true names' is meant to be somewhat ironic, for as the Hashhashin sage Hasan-I-Sabbah reputedly said, "Nothing is true, everything is permissable," though a perhaps more fitting quote is the magical axiom "Everything is true in one sense, false in one sense, and meaningless in a third." I do not claim that any of the stories here-after told, or any of the connections I'll draw between them contain any explicit element of truth outside the meaning I and the rest of humanity have given them. As this is the case I do not expect people to believe what I say, since I don't myself, and would rather encourage them to comment with their own interpretations as that will only further the collective understanding of these stories and hence ourselves.



All that being said, welcome to True Names.