Redge's Trek Through the Web

Once there was a slow-moving river, and in the middle of the river stood a rock. It had been there for thousands of years, and would stay there for thousands more. Every day, every second, water came up to the rock, then flowed around.

Western Culture: Be like the rock. Be unmoving, uncompromising, in the face of all adversity. Be bold, corrageous. When all has passed, only you will remain, victorious.

Eastern Culture: Be like the water. When you encounter an obstacle, do not think, do not work, but by your very nature, flow around it without offering resistance, then continue on your way.

Well I’ve been thinking about some of the books I like, or rather series of books because the kind of book I like comes in a trilogy at the least. And it seems to me that if you summarize them enough, they always seem to come down on the main character or characters trying to find their way on a line between two opposites. I want to do a series of posts about what line each of my favourite books comes down to. For my second post, I’ll talk about The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen Donaldson.

The first thing to note is that Stevenson’s writing is a bit difficult. He tends to use complicated words where simple ones will do, and sometimes he will go off on a philosophical tangent before returning to the story. On the other hand, he is quite gifted in making his main characters come to life for the reader. He will write at length about what the character is thinking, how his entire previous life relates to the character’s current situation, and how his next actions are motivated by these thoughts.

Probably Stevenson’s most interesting character is Thomas Covenant. Covenant suffers from leprosy, a diseasy that destroyes nerves. As a consequence, Covenant can no longer feel parts of his body, not even pain. This numbness alone does plenty to shape his rich psyche, but an even bigger influence is the scorn the disease brings him from his fellow human beings, who seem to implicitly blame him for contracting a disease that has since ages been associated with sin.

Covenant is grim and cynical. Because of his disease, he can easily get wounded without being aware of it. Therefor he must never loose his tight grip on himself, constantly checking himself for little scrapes or nicks. He believes that hope is the one thing that will kill him: it could cause him to forego the iron discipline and brutal realism that is the only thing keeping him alive.

Not to give too much of the plot away beforehand, but one day Covenant finds himself in a fairytale world, where everyone is happy and healthy and the people think him the reincarnation of a lost hero. Covenant is convinced this world is not real, that he is hallucinating and loosing his precious grip on reality. On the other hand, the world before him is as real to every sense as the normal world. From this conflict, all his actions are motivated.

It is not easy to pick out the true theme of the Covenant stories, because the stories feature a great number of themes. The major theme of the first book, for example, is wether the world Covenant finds himself in is real or not, and wherther Covenant is a fool or a hero for choosing not to believe in it. There is one theme, however, that underlies all Covenant books, and it is made explicit in the first book of the second trilogy. It is this: guilt vs innocense, power vs powerlessness. The two are related, in the Covenant chronicles, thus: only the powerless can be innocent. Those with power either use force, losing their innocense, or stand by when they have the power to intervene, and thus gather guilt.

Covenant wants to see himself as innocent, but cannot help but see himself as his fellow human beings see him: guilty, his disease the physical proof of his sins. But once he enters the fairytale world, he is given great power. First he withholds his power, convinced that the world he finds himself in is an illusion, and he not responsible for what happens in it. Tragedy strikes, and Covenant stands by passively, and the guilt for this is more then he can bare. Then he decides to use his power, but in the process, must kill other beings. Again he finds himself guilty.

This theme continues through all Covenant novels (nine so far, the final tenth book to appear soon). Sometimes Covenant finds himself powerless, in which case he can maintain his innocense but is also unable to prevent tragedy from striking. Sometimes he has power but refuses to use it. And sometimes he uses power and garners guilt. The finales of many of the books are when Covenant finds a still point, what he calls “the eye of the paradox”, where he can use power and still maintain his innocense.

Like I said, Stevenson’s writing style is quite dense, and as you may have noticed, carries heavy underlying philosophical notes. You’ll rarely crack a smile while reading the Covenant novels. But if you can live with this, reading the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant can be quite a profound experience.

That is all for now. Next time I will discuss the fantasy trilogy that has made the deepest impact on me of any book I’ve read: “His Dark Materials” by Phillip Pullman.

Well I’ve been thinking about some of the books I like, or rather series of books because the kind of book I like comes in a trilogy at the least. And it seems to me that if you summarize them enough, they always seem to come down on the main character or characters trying to find their way on a line between two opposites. I want to do a series of posts about what line each of my favourite books comes down to. For this first post, I’ll talk about Terry Pratchett’s great series: the Discworld.

Discworld is one of the most extensive book series I know about. Wikipedia lists 39 titles so far. Although some of these tell one-time stories, most of them are about one of a set of themes, each of which has its own setting and major characters. There are the stories about Rincewind, a wizard, and those about Granny Weatherwax, a witch. There are a few about the adventures of Death, and some are about Sam Vines, commander of the City Watch. The most recent books have introduced two new themes: Moist Von Lipwig, which take place in the same city as the one in which Sam Vines works, and Tiffany Aching, a young witch whose stories always include Granny Weatherwax.

Now the Discworld is a difficult series to categorize as a single set of opposites, because the series as a whole is actually rather a parody on modern culture and fantasy literature specifically. This works wonderfully because Pratchett has a sharp and insightful sense of humor. But it does mean that many of the stories are defined not by themselves, but also by the thing they parody.

But at the core of things, there is one thing that all Discworld stories have in common. They always include, whether it is named explicitly or not, what Pratchett calls Narrative Causality. It means simply that because the Discworld books parody other literature which has a well defined structure, the narrative of each story also has that structure. The unusual thing is that most main characters in Discworld novels are aware of this, consciously or not. Witches Abroad is, I think, the quintessential Discworld book. In it, the Witches travel to a kingdom of fairy tails and encounter talking wolves, princes made from frogs and bakers being sentenced for not having rosy cheeks. Why? Because the secret leader of the country knows about stories, and wants to reshape the world to better fit the stories.

And this forms the line among which Discworld characters must place themselves: to accept their role in the story, or to fight it.

Sam Vimes, for example, is based on the detectives from Noir novels and films. He knows this, and accepts it. If you put him out in the streets, at night, in the dark, in the rain, trying to catch killers and thieves, he’ll be completely happy. But dress him up in fancy clothes, name him a duke and put him in a room full of nobles, and he’ll be miserable.

On the opposite side we find Granny Weatherwax. She is a witch. Therefor she can either be a bad witch, which means cackling and shoving little children into your oven, or be the good witch, which means handing shining swords to heroes and helping lost travelers find their way. But Granny Weatherwax is stubborn. She refuses to be pressed into something she does not want. So she has to be the good one, much to her own chagrin, but she doesn’t have to like it and she doesn’t have to be nice.

Death is supposed to be ominous and frightful, and he knows it. The problem is that he’s not very good at it. He keeps messing up his lines. Trying, for example, to make a little joke to try and lift the spirits (pun intended) of the recently departed. But because his delivery sucks, the ghost in question asks him to explain the joke, and all sense of Death being ominous is suddenly gone.

Rincewind finds himself in the role of the adventurer, but he doesn’t want to be. What he mostly hopes for is a warm meal and no worries, but people keep giving him missions and pushing him into dangerous situations, which he then has to weasel his way out of again.

Moist Von Lipwig is a con artist. He keeps telling the world stories about who he is, and is amazed when the world buys into it. Then, to his dismay, it turns out that he is actually playing the part of the story he has made up about himself, thinking to himself that he can stop at any moment, he just wants to wait a little bit longer.

Tiffany Aching is just a little girl when she finds out she’s a witch, but not quite like other witches. She plays a role in an ancient story about the life of the land itself. The problem is that she doesn’t know the role she has to play, and she finds out as she’s going along.

So that is the core of Discworld novels. Each parodies existing stories, and the characters that can find out what that story is, and how they fit into it, can use it to shape their own destiny.

Next time I’ll talk a bit about one of my favourite book series: The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen Donaldson. Donaldson has a very dense and deep writing style, making it a challenge to summarize. Until next time!

I decided to translate the first verses of my favorite spiritual text, the Tao Te Ching, into Latin (don’t ask why). I based it on my favorite translation, the one by Stephen Mitchell, but I added my own interpretation. I haven’t translated Latin in years, so my conjugation is probably off here and there.

Via monstrare potest non est via vera.
Nomen vocare potest non est nomen verum.
Innomine, veritas aeternus est.
Nomine, mater res decamilles est.

Cupire absolvus, mysterius intelleges.
Cupire irretitus, res decamilles solum intelleges.
Sed mysterius atque res decamilles ab origo idem emaniunt.
Hoc origus calligatius est.

Calligatius intra calligatio,
portus sensu omne.

I’ve had a bit of a revelation tonight that I would like to share with you. It’s about how to conquer fear. Sounds dramatic, and actually it kind of is. But like most personal revelations, it’s hard to predict whether you, the reader, can relate to it. Let’s find out.

I used to think I had no fear, or rather that I’d made a conscious choice to let go of fear. What I was thinking of was actually the kind of vague anxiety that many people feel from time to time, like anxiety about whether you’ve studied enough for the test or how you’ll do in performance reviews at work. I don’t feel that way, and haven’t for years. It’s kind of easy: in stead of worrying, you imagine what will happen if the worst should come to pass. What if you don’t do well on the exam? You’ll have to take it again. So? No problem. What if you don’t do well in the review and loose your job? There’ll be other jobs. Or there won’t be. Either way, life goes on. So why worry? Here’s a mantra for you. “What will be, will be. What is, is what must be. What has been, could not have been otherwise.”

I was wrong about fear though. Anxiety and fear have many of the same properties, but they differ greatly in intensity. For me, fear always had a face. That of Pennywise the Clown from the movie of Stephen King’s “It”.

Why Pennywise? I mentioned it once to my sister, and she though he was actually a hilarious character. But this is no small matter to me. In my life I’ve woken up screaming twice, and one of those times was after a nightmare about a weird combination of Pennywise and Jeff Wayne’s War of the World. I’ve thought about it a lot, and in the end, I came up with this: the threat of violence. That is what Pennywise represents to me. Not even violence in itself. Violence may be a horrible thing, but while it is actually happening, you’re not really afraid because you stop thinking sequentially. At least that has been my experience. It is the threat, the suspense. The feeling that unthinking violence is about to start any moment now, and when it does you’ll be helpless.

Anyway, I think we all know the feeling of fear that comes upon us in the dark at night, when we’re all alone. In fact, it has even become an internet meme. Recently, whenever I went to the bathroom in the dark, I had to fight a fear that I’d turn on the light and look in the mirror, only to find Pennywise staring back at me. At first I tried fighting the feeling with annoyance: annoyance at the clown for turning up every time, but even more at myself for allowing the fear to return time and again. But that didn’t work. In the end, the feeling never went away.

Tonight, I decided that I wasn’t going to put up with it anymore. So I sat down in the dark, relaxing, meditating, and started to explore this feeling of fear. That’s a hard thing to do. Like revulsion, fear is something that we instinctively turn away from. But if you immerse yourself in it, you’re focusing on the symptoms rather than the cause. In the end, I managed to look at my fear from a distance, far enough to not become distracted by it, close enough to see through it. Then it appeared to me that what I had really been afraid of all along was not the clown, or the violence: it was the suspense. Then I asked myself: why should I be afraid of the waiting for violence, but not of the violence itself? It didn’t make sense. I was trying to convince myself in this way not to be afraid anymore. It helped, but it wasn’t quite enough.

Then the revelation came. Why does the clown incite fear? What is his goal? To cause fear in people? To always threaten with violence, but never actually use it? What would be the point? Pennywise has a goal of his own, just as much as any other living thing. In that sense he is no different from me. In fact, if the clown really was stalking me all this time, but unable to physically touch me, he’d be frustrated as hell!

And then I saw it. Not with my eyes, which were closed at the time, but with “the mind’s eye”. The clown was standing right behind me, with one hand on my shoulder, threatening me. But it wasn’t there by its choice: it was there by mine. The clown hadn’t been stalking me, I had been dragging it along. Every time I turned on the light, half expecting to see his face, I’d called him to me, keeping him close by. It was standing behind me, a prisoner of my own fears and expectations.

What I did next came naturally. I brought him from my back to right in front of me. I acknowledged that he was there, not to threaten me, but because I had dragged him out there. Then I spoke to him. “Now I know you’re there, and why you’re there. You can go now. I release you.” And away he went. The funny thing is, once he was gone, I couldn’t even picture his face anymore.

Hollywood always portrays facing your fear as an ordeal, something you have to fight your way through. This was nothing like that. I was completely calm, I felt good. But there is one popular expression that is correct. “A weight was lifted from my heart.” That’s exactly how it felt after he left, and I was no longer dragging him behind me. I physically felt lighter, and was moving more freely, as if I’d taken some weights off of my limbs or part of my body had turned into air.

Now it’s been a few hours. I do catch myself thinking about him again when I come close to the bathroom mirror. But it’s an empty thought, more of a bad habit that I now have to get rid of. The content of the feeling, the fear, is gone. What will happen next? I’m eager to find out.

I’m sharing another term paper with you, this one for the Philosophy course “Embodied Cognition”.

They’re usually part of fantasy plots. The Watchers. In the movie Dogma they’re called the Grigori, in the novels of Anne Rice they are the Talamasca. They are an important part of the Buffy and Angel stories. And always they are the same thing: a group of people, often an occult society and often, for some reason, British, who have, throughout the ages, observed some object of study, observed, but never been part of. They watch from the shadows, their whole mission to see without being seen, to study but not interact.

I believe this archetype derives from science’s ambivalent relation to observation. What scientists would ideally like to do, and what is described with almost poetic fervor in Enlightenment literature, is to do exactly this: to observe a phenomenon from the outside, without interaction. Only by doing this, it is believed, can you truly study the natural world, by separating yourself from it.

Alas, equal to this wish for idealized observation is the harshness of reality. It is impossible to observe without interacting. It’s called the Observer Effect. By observing, by measuring, you change the thing you measure. The most extreme case is popularly known as the uncertainty principle: it applies to particle physics. When you measure the impuls (speed) of a particle, you cannot know it’s location, and vice versa. The same applies to a number of other properties. It is not a question of not having sensitive enough equipment. It is a law of nature that a particle for which you have measured the location, simple has no speed. Fritjof Capra gives a very intersting account of this effect and its implications in “The Tao of Physics”.

And like this unsung tragedy of idealized science, the archetype of the Watchers usually only enters the plotline when their code of observation without interaction is broken. In all previously mentioned examples of the Watchers in literature, they stray from their romanticized goals and become involved with the thing they observe, changing it. Of course, in a way this is the only way we can ever know about the Watchers. Because if they are doing their job correctly, we never know they’re there…