Chesterton Through The Eyes of Borges

My wife rescued Daylight and Nightmare, a collection of Chesterton's stories and fables, from a library booksale. I tend to read prefaces*, yet often regret it. This time it was worth it. The collector dedictes the volume to Jorge Luis Borges, whose Ficciones I read and loved in college. I had not known that Borges was a very great fan of Chesterton, and could quote long sections from memory. It seemed strange to me for but an instant, as their significant compatibilities overwhelm the very different categories they are assigned to in the modern mind. As many of you may not be familiar with both, Borges was considered much among the moderns: friends with Sartre, influenced by Schopenhauer and an influence on Eco; assigned in college lit classes, drawn to the weird and disquieting, fond of twists and inversions on time and infinity - "The Garden of Forking Paths," "The Infinite Library." Chesterton is regarded as entirely a creature of the Old World, read mostly by traditional Catholics and a few other Christians today, but little regarded in the academy.

Others who have commented some on the Borges- Chesterton connection, if you're interested. Nick Milne and Out of the Woods Now (twice).

Yet GKC also gravitated to much of the strange, or perhaps uncanny would be a better word. The description of Sunday, and indeed the entire unsettling, even frightening world of The Man Who Was Thursday, even in the mystery genre with its full measure of murder and gore, readers find unnerving even now, a hundred years later. Borges notes:

Chesterton restrained himself from being Edgar Allan Poe or Franz Kafka, but something in the makeup of his personality leaned toward the nightmarish, something secret, & blind, & central....

We don't always think of him that way - we think of Father Brown, or of his biography of the gentle St. Francis. Yet once mentioned, it is noticeable everywhere in his work, and one wonders how it had escaped notice.



Borges suggested we read all works as if the were written by some radically different author to see them more clearly - to pretend in the mind that "Hamlet" had been written by James Joyce. I could barely refrain from pretending the short pieces were written by Borges, or imagining one Ficciones "An Approach to Al-Mutasim" as a work by GKC. It was surprisingly easy. "Approach" is about a book review on a book which does not exist. The review prompts it to come into being. Very Chesterton. So also, Chesterton's "The Taming of the Nightmare," starts with the comic and keeps returning to it, yet rapidly falls away into eeriness after each rise.

Little Jack Horner sat in a corner - so far the traditional surroundings of the nursery hero correspond with those in which we find him for the purposes of the story, but there being no Christmas pie in the neighborhood, he was unable to give vent to the joyful, if somewhat egotistical, sentiment which is recorded of him elsewhere.

Jack is almost immediately accosted by goblin-wind and brought to the borders of an unknown land with "a low, lonely wall, beside which there was a dillapidated notice board, looking the other way, stating that trespassers would be prosecuted, by order of somebody, no one knew quite who." The first creature he meets beyond the wall is a mooncalf who recites verse initially comic:

The Calf was the Mooncalf, The Cow was the Moon,
She died from effects of a popular tune...

until we find that the calf does indeed believe the moon is his mother, and sings to her constantly, with round eyes and singleness of purpose night upon night, though the moon takes no notice.

It is something of a reverse of the effect of Monty Python, in their Quest For The Holy Grail movie. There every scene begins nobly, seriously, at times even frighteningly, yet quickly deteriorates (or elevates) into comedy. In Chesterton, homely streets turn sinister in a few blocks, with the buildings remaining normal but the sky becoming crooked. Queer characters sit next to unsuspecting diners at cafes and tell them stories that end inconclusively.

The style of writing is old now, and fables aren't told that way anymore. The inklings were much influenced by GKC, and the last echoes of the style appears in their works, perhaps. Tolkien's Farmer Giles of Ham comes near it; the initial description of the gray city in Lewis's Great Divorce has a Chesterton feel. The eerier, or more mythic modern fantasies, from Ursula LeGuin or Scott Donaldson, have something of the flavor.

*Preface, foreward, introductories - anyone know what the distinction is?

The Library of Babel

I was assigned Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges in college - one of the great things from the true purpose of education that William & Mary ever did for me - and loved it. A few of the stories stuck in my mind, including Tlon Uqbar Orbis Tertius, and random others. In true Borges fashion, one of the most memorable paragraphs was in fact a footnote about the Simurgh, the "Thirty Birds" of Persian mythology. In his universe a footnote may contain more than an encyclopedia. 

Borges was my preparation for W.P. Kinsella, author of Shoeless Joe ("Field of Dreams") and the even better The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, yet I find as time goes on that there are Very Few of his stories that keep getting referenced by others, usually The Library of Babel and The Garden of Forking Paths. There may be selection bias at play, as I started as a math major, loved Martin Gardner, Lewis Carroll, and the highly mathematical (but terrible at maths) CS Lewis, and still seem to gravitate to writers who have similar odd fascinations - mystic software engineers, near-fanatic liturgical applied mathematicians, tech writers embedded in magical realism, spiritualist chemists, Jewish cognitive scientists whose grandfathers were Hasids. I can't decide whether they are unusual and I just find lots of them or this is the typical state of the ultra-logical, that they cannot help but be mystics.

That was a lot of references but knowing this group, many of you just shrugged "Well, of course" during the description and the others said "What ho! That's one I hadn't heard of that I need to seek out." I should throw in Tom Stoppard for you in case you missed that Carroll/GKC/Godel/Borges/Gardner/Kinsella/Stoppard cluster. The reader may choose to add to that zoo in the comments. Plenty of sci-fi writers also, really.

I think all this just to notice the oddity that so many Borges pieces resolve to a very few in the imagination - which is surely an illuminating revelation about imagination itself. It is contradictory, in that such things should lead to expansion, but such is the need for tidiness and efficient storage in the mind that they narrow instead. Many works of Borges are beloved by his fans, but are other stories still creeping into the conversation, or is it just Babel and Forking Paths now?

Looking For Things - Borges

There is a difference between looking for a type of thing, such as blueberries or gaps in the trees that provide a view, and a specific thing, such as car keys. The specific thing can only be in one place, and the likelihood of any given place might turn out to be entirely irrelevant.  The searching is frustrating.

I swear there was an alternative-world scenario by Borges in which your keys would actually be 20% in one place, 15% in another, so that you could eventually get up to a good enough percentage to make them usable.  I can't find it.  Perhaps I made up the idea myself and only thought that Borges would be the correct person to write it up.

Deciphering the Ancestors

I am slogging through David Anthony’s The Horse, The Wheel,and Language, about the origins of the Indo-Europeans. Great info that I really want to know, except that Anthony, being an archaeologist is obligated to describe all the changes in terms of pottery and artifacts. So that... the other archaeologists will know exactly why he is saying what he is saying. I get the impression that like historical linguists, there are longstanding arguments, and people are prepared to pounce on every word.  I’ve got page after page of outlines of urns with a few random shards filling in spots, plus descriptions of the materials and methods.  My favorite bit so far: Cucuteni-Tripolye has such an unwieldy name because the Romanians call it Cucuteni and have their listed phases, while the Ukrainians call it Tripolye and have their listed phases.  So by convention, they kept both names so that all archaeologists would get the picture, but everyone else is confused. Pre-CucuteniIII is the same as TripolyeA, so they just use them both at once, presumably so no one’s feelings get hurt. 

A note on the phases, p. 164. 

There is a Borges-like dreaminess to the Cucuteni pottery sequence: one phase (Cucuteni C) is not a phase at all, but rather a type of pottery probably made outside the Cucuteni-Tripolye culture; another phase (CucuteniA1) was defined before it was found, and never found; still another (CucuteniA5) was created in 1963 as a challenge for future scholars, and is now largely forgotten; and the whole sequence was first defined on the assumption, later proved wrong, that the Cucuteni A phase was the oldest, so later archaeologists had to invent the Pre-Cucuteni phases I, II, and III, one of which (Pre-Cucuteni I) may not exist. 

Borges indeed.  They are just playing with me here.

It’s a little better with the bronze tools and weapons: analysis of the copper reveals its place of origin and thus, what peoples they traded with. Fewer variables there. I get the overview of the burial customs as well, illustrating cultural changes of increased social hierarchy and suggestions of religious beliefs. Ochre and positioning of the body are significant, as are the status good in the grave. Yet overview is the word I would be looking for here, not a cataloguing of every burial spot.  I suspect the book is designed to be an assigned textbook, well above introductory level. I suppose I could have just read the Wikipedia article on the Yamnaya three times, following some links, and saved myself some pain.

The second problem is Russian names. The Pontic-Caspian area in question extends from Ukraine to Kazakhstan, including that section of Russia north of Georgia. Therefore not only are all the place name Russian, but the people supervising the digs and publishing the papers are as well.  They all start with Kh- and have l’s and v’s scattered throughout them. Sredni Stog, which is both a place and a culture, is one of the easy ones. The worst I’ve hit (so far) is Maikop-Novosvobodnaya, which I have trouble differentiating from Novotitoravskaya.  I am not holding these different places in mind very well.  They all run together. Studying for a quiz on this material would be intimidating. For those who deal with the places all the time I’m sure it is straightforward, but it’s hard to drop into the middle of that conversation. At some dim level I do realise it probably isn’t easy to summarise just the concepts, as how cultures influence each other is not straightforward. Arrows go out in all directions from each name, in a web that is unbuilt in my understanding.  It means more to others, I’m sure.

Quick idea summary: Domesticating horses in order to ride them and control larger herds of horses and other meat on the hoof allowed smaller groups to control more wealth so long as they could find pasturage.  The axled wheel allowed carts and the transporting of tools, water, and temporary shelter.  Together, these open up the vast – like thousands of miles vast – Eurasian Steppe as an environment humans could live in and prosper. Prior to this they had to cluster around the rivers: Danube, Dneister, Dnieper, Don, Bug, Volga, Ural. With the horses and wheels, they could go for entire seasons deep into this uninhabited pasturage, and soon, learn to live there year round, moving at need across large distances.  A cultural change from this is the rise in raiding cattle and defending against raids, which increased the importance of brothers.  Settled land passes from parents to children, whether via mother or father, but herds require the mobility of a small group of the loyal. Cousins yes, allies maybe, but brothers were the ones to trust. The group that learned about wheeled carts from the south and took them north also mastered horses with rope or leather bits - and spoke an Indo-European language, which spread east and west along the steppes all the way to the Altai Mountains. Ultimately then into Europe, Iran, and India, like sparks being thrown from a spinning wheel, over a period of thousand years or so.  It's the importance of cattle and raiding and the culture that goes with those, all the way into Ireland and Scotland, and the American Southwest beyond.

Karl Rove's Favorite Authors

According to what he told Vanity Fair.

Who are your favorite writers?
In alphabetical order: Jorge Luis Borges, Gabor Boritt, Ray Bradbury, G. K. Chesterton, Winston Churchill, David Herbert Donald, T. S. Eliot, Joseph Ellis, Gary Gallagher, F. A. Hayek, Paul Horgan, Paul Johnson, Tom Lea, C. S. Lewis, Abraham Lincoln, John D. MacDonald, David McCullough, Merrill Peterson, Robert Remini, Andrew Roberts, William Shakespeare, Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, Evelyn Waugh, and Robert Wiebe.

A Book Without Covers

I read some time in the 80s that men are better at remembering exactly when and where they learned something, while women are more likely to "just know it." This fit a popular idea of gendered brain differences, which turn out to be minimal, if they exists at all. As I could usually identify with some precision where I had run across a fact, to the point of remembering where it was on the page, I kept it in my back pocket for a few years, but it eventually went into a trunk in the attic. I did a rough comparison questioning a few people I knew then and found that there did seem to be some male-female difference in remembering the provenance of an idea or fact. I wouldn't bet the farm on it, however. 

I think that ability has deteriorated in me over the years. Making up a plausible explanation on the spot, it may be that when we are young our knowledge is more atomised. Facts sit alone in a few folders in a drawer. As we grow older more facts go on each page, more pages go in each folder, each drawer receives more folder, on up to Borges The Library of Babel. The network becomes more important than the folder.

I have found a strong exception to this theory in myself, however, and in two of the subjects I know best. I have noted for years that I care little for chapter and verse in Scripture compared to other Christians, and remember concepts rather than filing system. I can tell from wording whether something is Gospel, Epistle, Wisdom, History, Prophet, etc, aided by how the concepts connect, but which prophet or which epistle I usually have to look up if there are not other contextual clues. As in reading music versus playing by ear, it is better to have both, but people do just fine leaning entirely on one

This is also true from my knowledge of CS Lewis. I can nearly always identify which work of fiction something is from and where in the story it goes, but I often cannot even narrow things down very well if I can't find some cheat clues in the context.* In discussion, I will think of an applicable Lewis phrase but be unable to recall whether it is from Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, or The Four Loves. I might narrow it down to being from an essay, but be uncertain whether it is something from God In The Dock, The Weight of Glory, or Of This and Other Worlds. Owen Barfield wrote "what Lewis thought about everything was secretly present in what he thought about anything." The interconnectedness of his thought still astounds me. It is not quite a cylindrical book in my mind, but the dividers are few.

 

*It is the same with Lord of The Rings. Sometimes I can't remember if something was said by Gandalf or Elrond, Merry or Pippin, but the others are clear.

Everyman Poetry

Because I thought of Frost's "Stopping By Woods" WRT women writers, noting that the narrator could easily be female, as indeed it could be someone of any race I pushed it further.  We can all zip ourselves into that one. There is admittedly some difference because of our expectations of the time period. Why would a black woman be out late with a horse cart in New Hampshire a century ago? It would distract us from the poem, thinking that there must be something else up that we are missing. Yet a black woman might zip herself into the narrator's head as she reads and have much the same experience as anyone else. It's an easy identification. Nor does the poem change much if Frost assigned the property to a woman...no wait, that does change it a lot, of a man contemplating a woman's forest.  Never mind. the narrator can be Everyman, but the locale and time is so specific that other deviations from Generic Person for the Setting will make it a different poem.

His other poems mostly do the same. The narrator of Christmas Trees, or The Road Not Taken could be easily imagined as many things other than a white male of productive age. Fire and Ice might change a bit in meaning if we thought the narrator a woman, but I don't think racial differences would matter much. Mending Wall could theoretically have a female narrator - this would be a farm wife after all, not a woman from the city - but somehow it doesn't quite work, and Two Tramps In Mud Time would have all sorts of extra meanings of them expecting her to give up her work for them to do instead, and her reaction to that. Interesting meanings, perhaps, but definitely different.

I have no inclination to consider the other poets. Not my remit. It does have a flavor of Borges asking us to imagine what Don Quixote, word for identical word, would mean if it had been written in the 20th C.

Piranesi

Piranesi is new enough (2020) that I don't want to give any spoilers. I went with my wife to her book club last night to discuss it. We are uncertain who the main character is at first, nor the Other - the only other living person until well into the plot, nor the bleached bones which Piranesi names, tends and gives offerings to.

Nor the House itself where Piranesi lives, which is populated by hall after hall of statues and is washed over day by day with interacting tides. Everything is uncertain at first and we leap at guesses. There are multiple references to CS Lewis, especially Narnia; to Jorge Luis Borges "The Library of Babel" and "The Minotaur," to Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose and as we speculated last night perhaps a half-dozen other writers and artists. I recommend rereading The Magicians Nephew beforehand. 

We gradually learn that the mysterious aspects are part of an actual murder mystery with multiple victims. We are in the dark because the narrator has remarkable clarity in some thinking, but is misled and deceived in other aspects.  I was particularly taken with its issues of identity lost and gained, and the hypothesis that it is intended as a Planet Narnia example of being under the influence of Neptune, and the effect of the occult on the good versus the evil characters.

Highly recommended. Short but full.

Future Travel

Bumped.  I think Earl's list in the comments, and my responses, were more about future settings.  This clarifies for me that what I really wanted to ask about stressed the idea of actual time travel to the future.

I’ve imagined traveling to the past many times.  Traveling to the future just doesn’t hold the same romance for me.  But traveling to the future – even to a possible future* – would certainly be a lot more useful.  Things that aren’t easily changed, like earthquakes, asteroid strikes, or four-foot ocean rises would be especially nice to know.

I have no experience wandering in imagination in that world.  Science fiction writers imagining futures near or far have shown pretty limited accuracy.  (So far, that is.  There’s lots still TBD.) But there is a problem-solving, puzzle aspect to this as well.  If you got to move forward say, twenty years, what spot would you like to land on? I have a couple of thoughts, but others who have imagined this more may know that some scripts go boring very quickly.  For traveling in the past, we know that Medieval and Renaissance, WWII, and one’s personal past are some of the good ones.  Victorian England has been making a run recently.  I’d like to know where the well-worn paths of the future are.  Anyone up on these imaginings?  And if not, have a hand at the fresh puzzle yourself:  where does your time machine land?  (Or if you prefer, what do you bring with you?)

*In Jorge Luis Borges fashion, this should suggest to us that time travel to the past might not be to the past, but a possible past.  We don’t think that way, and always assume that there was only one real past, which we remember or can rediscover with varying degrees of accuracy.  But any given state of affairs might have many possible causes.  Reversing the flow of events, there might be just as many possible pasts as there are possible futures.  I dunno.  Never been there.  Seems unlikely, but fun to imagine.

Thursday Links (and a quote)

 Intelligence isn't Really Sexy.  At least, not at first.  It's pretty good for survival and mate stability, but looks and humor are your best lead cards

Martin Gurri at the Free Press  "Young men and women today are at war with the world. Deprived of the lubricant of local habits and traditions, they tend to experience reality as exasperating friction and suffer inordinate levels of anxiety, depression, and suicide. Their politics are outbursts of frustration" (Italics mine)

A frequent commenter here has a post at the True Crime Times. Most of you have seen earlier versions of this work.

The claim (from the emails) is that Jeffrey Epstein was "a dealmaker and fixer at a very, very elite level" with intelligence agencies, including ours. Steve Hsu does the interview with Murtaza Hussain at Drop Box News.  Well don't look at me.  It sounds plausible, but everything sounds plausible at this point.

Grammatical Gender with a great quote from Jorge Luis Borges.

Heather Cox Richardson-ism  It looks like I should be up on this sort of thing, but frankly, I just can't work up the energy. 

Post 7500 - Full Circle (or reversal): Newton, Lewis, Stoppard

And a whole lot of other guys...

There was a single-panel cartoon in the 1980s which I put on my office door, of a elderly man and his wife siting on beach chairs as he scowls out at the ocean.  "I've come full circle.  I think things are as they seem." This is the type of "thinking that we so desperately need today in these trying time of crisis and universal brouhaha."

It is productive surprisingly often, and worth a good many literature papers, to compare a writer's earliest work with his last. I wrote a few years ago that Thornton Wilder's last book, Theophilus North, was the inverse of his first The Cabala. While all of CS Lewis's works can be found in one way or another in Till We Have Faces, one of the strongest parallels is with his first book The Pilgrim's Regress.  Tom Stoppard started as an absurdist playwright, heir to Beckett and Ionesco.  In the Theater of the Absurd, sensible sounding things are seen to have no meaning, as in "Endgame," or "The Chairs," or even more especially "The Bald Soprano," in which the dialogue is built from the language book Ionesco was using to learn English. In Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" he keeps dragging us into odd corners with wordplay.  Is this a game or is this dialogue? Was that a meaningful plot hint or is he suckering me into thinking so? In "The Real Thing"  the first scene in the play, a couple fighting about unfaithfulness, is itself a scene in a play-within-a-play, which we don't discover until scene two. He then plays with this further, as the lives, actions, and accusations in the interior play interpenetrate those in play we are supposedly watching. Stoppard even makes fun of himself in this.  In "After Magritte" a series of puzzling, unlikely descriptions of an event that all the characters have witnessed and are strenuously arguing about is revealed in the last scene as the lights go down to be a simple, pathetically comic event they have all misinterpreted.

He comes full circle in 2015. The mind-body problem is the subject of his one-act "The Hard Problem," a series of arguments among researchers about whether consciousness exists or all is mere complexity of brain connections. (As with most Stoppard plays, the characters are embroiled in romantic and sexual interactions to keep audience attention up. This is not only good theater but a theme of his, marveling at the wild random chances of mating and new humans.) The main character is determined to show experimentally that there is a real consciousness in the human brain, while just about everyone else is determined to convince her she is simply wrong and a fool. She is beaten to earth but not quite defeated throughout, and as the paper she believes will vindicate her suddenly has to be retracted, she closes the play by leaving for another country and another profession in what seems complete loss - until we learn that there has been a thread of ridiculous coincidence running under the surface of the play, which seems to...tie everything together with meaning far beyond what could occur by chance. 

He started, then, in Absurdism, with the idea that humans overfit and perceive patterns, logic, and reasons that are not there but ends late in his career with the view that we underfit the data and refuse to see realities that we don't like. This theme is often found in religious literature, yet not only there.  It is the foundation of mystery and spy stories - protagonist perceives a pattern in events that the others around her miss, speculative fiction from Kinsella to Borges to Bradbury, and even some science fiction, such as Asimov's Foundation or Herbert's Dune. We do not clearly see the meaning.  Many of those who claim to see the meaning are lying.  It is tempting to throw up our hands and say there is no meaning, for anything else seems to undermine our free will.  And yet there is meaning, just not what was expected. Douglas Adams's "Hitchhiker" series plays at both ends, destroying meaning in some places and discovering it by surprise in others, with humorous effect being his guiding principle on that. It's all over early heroic fantasy, with Gandalf noting that Bilbo was somehow meant to find The Ring, or Will Stanton born to fill a particular cosmic role in The Dark is Rising, or the "Redwall" series, where even mice and otters not only have a destiny, but the enactment of that destiny is unclear and uncertain and ultimately teaches a deeper lesson still.*

There is a tension, then, in our modern thought whether we are overfitting patterns to the data, leading to unwarranted belief in spiritual realities or even to paranoia, versus considering the possibility that we are underfitting the data to realities, refusing to see uncomfortable truths. This is a new argument, dating from - I don't know, Voltaire in literature but Descartes and Pascal in philosophy even entertaining the idea that all might be meaningless and illusion.  Though - this just occurs to me - Solomon anticipates this long before that in Ecclesiastes, and the idea of pointlessness and despair is present in the Greek philosopher Gorgias (4th C BC?) long before Nietzsche made nihilism popular.  The Buddha rejected the idea in a roundabout way, and among the seventy million schools of thought in Hinduism, only a few embrace any idea that our lives are meaningless.

The ancients, including our immediate predecessors the medievals believed in underlying patterns to the world which it was man's job to discern.  We would now say that they wildly overfitted, leading to belief in alchemy and astrology as sciences and believing that human personality must derive from a nice box of four humors. 

There has been only a bit of Lewis and nothing of Newton to this point, but this has gone long, so I am again in the position of finding a stopping point and declaring "This was Part I."

*Though Jacques denied that there was anything more than goodies and baddies in his books, he liked his characters and stories enough that they dragged him in to deeper meaning.  Something similar happened with Piers Anthony, who was merely trying to make Xanth fun and adventurous but found himself contemplating the nature of evil almost despite himself.

(Post)Modern Medievalist Reimagining an Ancient Myth

I had the single thought of Lewis as a 60s writer, or perhaps a mid 1900s writer.  The Ransom Trilogy is sci-fi, a new genre at the time, however much Lewis inserted his medieval "Discarded Image" into it. Camus, Brecht, Kafka, In Till We Have Faces you have to bring yourself to the text and interact with it or you just aren't going to understand its unusual features. A woman veiling herself permanently and humans coinhering with shifting goddesses seems more like Kafka's Metamorphose, or something out of Brecht or Camus. It is turning into Ionesco's Rhinoceros. Reenacting the actions of gods and goddesses, which is unusual in modernist literature, yet has the same mythic quality as say, some of Vonnegut or Borges. The Owl Service by Alan Garner has 20th C people reenacting a pagan Welsh myth, rather helpless to change it, rather like Stoppard's hapless Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, unable to escape their fate because they are stuck in script of "Hamlet" no matter what they do, illustrated immediately by the coin flip never changing no matter how many times it is repeated. 

It is more modern, or especially postmodern, to retell (or reinscribe as the more postmodern term is) a myth paying attention to the motivations of the gods and goddesses. Ancient writers would give only the barest description - "Venus was jealous" and let the story unfold in ways that would leave the audience wondering "but why then did she not simply banish/kill/make the mortal ugly?" It was not unknown in the past. We see behind the characters' emotional curtains a bit in "The Trojan Women," and Paradise Lost pays significant attention to motives of divine, diabolical, or mythic characters. But it is rare. It is much more common to focus on a villain's or minor character's* POV in our day than it had been before. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was subtitled "A Modern Prometheus" and initiated the popularity of the idea, but it has become even common now.  Garner's Grendel, ** or the entire premise of "Wicked."

We want to force Lewis, and probably Tolkien, into a mold of nonmodern writers, forcing themselves back into older forms, or a mold of ancient or medieval writers updating them themselves for the present, but not really see them as 20th century writers.Yet their characters are seldom simply evil or good. They are mixed, with good motives barely surviving but not fully extinguished, and even the heroes bent or needing redemption in some way. Even before he was a Christian, Lewis had wanted to tell the story of Cupid and Psyche from the perspective of one of the jealous sisters. He even shows the improvement of Redival, the less-mentioned sister because she turns outward to care for others, her husband and children.But Orual judges her by other criteria than caring, and still finds her wanting. These are perspectives that would have been impossible for writers in most of history. 

Crystal Downing of the Wade Center calls Lewis the first postmodernist writer.  Jack would likely point to GK Chesterton and Owen Barfield as his influences that all artists and thinkers are products of their eras - including especially our own, which is the one most frequently neglected.  We view a subject through every prism on the table; but not the mirror on the wall directly across from us.

So that's it. Don't limit Lewis's categories, or Tolkien's.  They contain many eras.

*The New Testament way be the first work to focus consistently on the actions of minor or low-status persons as having importance.

**I was in a student-written production based loosely on Grendel, and got to beg for mercy but be killed anyway on stage.  Never die out in the open in the theater.  Find some way to land behind a sofa or rock, because otherwise you will have to lie absolutely still until the scene ends. "Grendel" was notable for its cast of seven male students with a rather bawdy female director, leading to a series of cast parties that were unrivalled, about once a month, last for a year. Drunken actors can get rather graphic in charades. I missed the enactment of "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang," but apparently it took the entire three minutes even though everyone knew the answer immediately.

Most-Visited Posts #26-30

Sometimes all it takes to finally understand a topic is One Fact. November 2016

Local Aristocracy and Nationalisation of Culture. A cultural change in my lifetime. November 2017

Kazimir Malevich.  In trying to solve a puzzle about this painter, I learned that I was entirely wrong, and there was no puzzle. But I learned a fair bit in trying. January 2018

Chesterton Through The Eyes of Borges. This is fun if you like either author, extra fun if you like them both. June 2011

Nigger. A discussion of the use of the word, or more exactly, who gets to use it and how weird this is to those of us who just refuse to ever use it. I think the ground has already changed since I wrote this in November 2013.  Many comments, some deleted.

Blogging Will Be Light

I will be reading rather than writing for a while.  There's no crisis or problem about it. At the moment I am reading a lot of Borges, who I have commented on before.

Absolute Truth

There is an op-ed in the Keene Sentinel about the constitutionality of gay marriage.  Next week there will be an opposing POV by Chuck Douglas, a pal of mine - a former US congressman and NH Supreme Court justice.  Remind me to catch that.

This week’s op-ed discusses gay marriage in terms of Loving v. Virginia, which ruled that the Commonwealth could not forbid interracial marriage. The writer asks if the Constitution likewise forbids banning marriage on grounds of sexual orientation.  Her paragraph-ending comment before discussion is “It absolutely does.”

Such phrasing puts me off.  I understand that this is something of a debate tactic, convincing others by one’s own certainty, as in my prior post about confidence versus correctness being the better evolutionary strategy.  Maybe it’s a lawyer thing, and works often enough to be the recommended mode of arguing.  Showing the least doubt might be fatal in front of a judge or jury.  But it has the opposite effect on me.  Jes’ sayin’.  It suggests that you are unable to understand an opposing POV, and thus have no justification for your assuredness.  Even harebrained ideas often have something going for them after all, even if they are not sufficient to carry the day.

I ran across a post on another site in which the author made good arguments, yet was so determined to strike down opposing views that he declared them to have zero truth values.  Zero is a very small number.  You might convince me that Samuel is very dangerous and Daniel is not very dangerous at all, but if you assert that Samuel will definitely become a murderer and Daniel will definitely not, then I know you are a fool.  In the instance of this particular essay, the zero truth value was not mere hyperbole or artistic license, it was the entire point of the post.  His assertion, quite cleverly put, was that there was no possibility whatsoever that there was any truth in his opponents claim. The claim had a Borges-like “Garden of Forking Paths” reality at best, but certainly no connection to this one.

It relates to my anosognosia and May We Believe Our Thoughts series from two years ago.  If one cannot allow even a 1% chance that one is 1% wrong, that is pathological. I am not that certain about even personal information, such as my name and date of birth, if it comes to that. (Yes, we can probably construct a situation under which I would allow 100% certainty for some bit of information.  But these don’t occur in nature.)

I have been toying with the idea that this is a personality trait in some cluster of very intelligent people, in which the authoritativeness is tied into some autistic, not-self-observant characteristic.  It is very easy (for me, anyway) to fall into confirmation bias on such imaginings, so I’m not pursuing it too hard.  One can construct both environmental (consistent experience of being the smartest person present, encouraged by parents who were similarly constructed) and brain-based (deficits in alternative-narrative abeyance located in the anterior cingulate gyrus or something) theories for it, but hell, that doesn’t make it more true, just more plausible.

Curious, though.