Canon and Theme: Notes on Belief and the Loss of Magic

“What do you think is become of the art of forcing the thunder and celestial fire down, which the wise Prometheus had formerly invented? ‘Tis most certain you have lost it; ’tis no more on your hemisphere; but here below we have it. And without a cause you sometimes wonder to see whole towns burned and destroyed by lightning and ethereal fire, and are at a loss about knowing from whom, by whom, and to what end those dreadful mischiefs were sent. Now, they are familiar and useful to us; and your philosophers who complain that the ancients have left them nothing to write of or to invent, are very much mistaken. Those phenomena which you see in the sky, whatever the surface of the earth affords you, and the sea, and every river contain, is not to be compared with what is hid within the bowels of the earth.”

―Rabelais, 1534

†

“There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life. But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.”

―H. P. Lovecraft, 1922

†

“It had taken him years, and much conniving, to get access to the mighty, and more trickery still to learn which of them had dreams of magic. When pressed. He’d used the jacket, seducing those who fawned upon potentates into revealing all they knew. Many had no tales to tell, their masters made no sign of mourning a lost world. But for every atheist there was at least one who believed; one prone to moping over lost dreams of childhood, or to midnight confessions on how their search for Heaven had ended only in tears and gold.”

―Clive Barker, 1987

†

“See, this is my opinion: we all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God’s sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they’d allowed to wither in themselves.”

―Robert R. McCammon, 1991

The Canon ― Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel

Excerpt: Gargantua and Pantagruel, by François Rabelais

What do you think is become of the art of forcing the thunder and celestial fire down, which the wise Prometheus had formerly invented? ‘Tis most certain you have lost it; ’tis no more on your hemisphere; but here below we have it. And without a cause you sometimes wonder to see whole towns burned and destroyed by lightning and ethereal fire, and are at a loss about knowing from whom, by whom, and to what end those dreadful mischiefs were sent. Now, they are familiar and useful to us; and your philosophers who complain that the ancients have left them nothing to write of or to invent, are very much mistaken. Those phenomena which you see in the sky, whatever the surface of the earth affords you, and the sea, and every river contain, is not to be compared with what is hid within the bowels of the earth.

―5.XLVII

Sometimes It Just Works

Every once in a while, inevitable humor just happens to coincide with one’s mood. That nexus of circumstance is the difference between this sort of thing being mildly amusing or just annoying enough to make one cuss beneath his breath. On this occasion, the merchandise arrangement at a Barnes & Noble had everything it needed, though in this case the one factor that makes the joke work is beyond the control of any hapless employee who figured it would be negligent, even counterproductive, to skip the obvious. One would not be surprised, indeed, if these were the merchandising instructions. But with comedy, timing is everything, and yes, in those days ‘twixt Thanksgiving and Christmas, it is also more generous. Besides, it’s all more decent than I would be. You know, Keep calm and go f―

That is to say, er … um … ah … as we were saying.

Right.

Carry on, then.

Blue Rabbit in Real Time

A “blue rabbit” is, simply, the term I use for an occasional random flash of insight. Specifically, it has to do with something already in your memory and knowledge base suddenly fitting together with a similar component, resulting in a brief, but usually useless flash of dialectic resolution.

The term comes from third grade; a girl complained about a boy coloring his rabbit blue. The teacher blithely mediated: “Well, I think there might have been blue rabbits, maybe. But there aren’t anymore.” Six years later, for absolutely no reason I could remember, it struck me over breakfast: There never were any blue rabbits.

It’s not like this was a particularly vexing question; I had long forgotten the episode until, suddenly, right: There never were any blue rabbits.

Thus prefaced, a note for Steven Brust, and several years later than … er … right. So, the only reason to even mention this is the fact that the pieces took years to correspond, join up, and click into place.

So, anyway: Ingenious use of the inclined plane?

Yeah. That one finally hit me. I’m accustomed to playing Where’s Devera? but I freely and even gladly admit that it never occurred to me to ask, “Where’s Eddi?”

And just like wrecking Buddy Ebsen’s credit record, Steve knows why. Well, most likely.

And maybe he’ll even tell us.

Anyway, yeah. Now it’s just a matter of digging up the text.

____________________

Image credit: via The Dream Café.

Good News, Everyone!

“Lady Teldra wakes up, realizes she’s just a collection of gender signifiers, and goes back to sleep. You’re welcome.”

—Steven Brust

Never mind.^†

Anyway, Corwin says … er, at least we think it’s Corwin:

His next project as regards Vlad is Vallista, something he may or may not be working on at this very minute. Even though it’s Saturday afternoon. He says his boss is a dick, as though that were an excuse. I won’t say I interviewed him, but I did get permission to run this review and may have attempted to collect facts overtly. Stalkings by sexy fangirls never came up. He is clearly having no fun at all.

Oh, right. Cover art. Hawk.

October.

____________________

^† No, really, do I need to disclaim that’s not a real spoiler? So help me ….

A Note for Steven Brust: Philosophy and Fish

It’s just one of those things; as long as I don’t do anything about it, the idea preys on my mind. Now, having actually scribbled it down, it seems kind of useless. Then again, it’s an exorcism, so ….

From Steven Brust’s Tiassa (p. 293):

“That is true, Brigadier. You have often said that when you assume, you are thinking like a fish.°”

• • •

° In the Northwestern language, the word “assume” consists of syllables that, when taken apart, are not dissimilar to the sound for “fish” followed by the symbols that form the word “thought.”

Meanwhile, from the anime FLCL, episode five (“Brittle Bullet”)—the English-language voiceover:

KITSURABAMI: [shooting an anti-tank rifle] Blue! [fires] Blue! [fires] Blue! [fires] Blue! [fires] Cobalt blue! [fires] If Seven of Nine heaves a sigh, what do you have? Cyborg!

HARUKO: [swings bass guitar, slaps shot back] Cyborg, my butt!

KITSURABAMI: [gasps with alarm]

MAMIMI: [holding Takkun-cat] Actually, confusing cyborgs with robots is a common mistake.

And a more transliterated version in the English-language subtitles that accompany the Japanese dialogue:

KITSURABAMI: [shooting an anti-tank rifle] Blue! [fires] Blue! [fires] Blue! [fires] Blue! [fires] Cobalt blue! [fires] If you write “fish” and “blue”, and it looks like … saba for mackerel!

HARUKO: [swings bass guitar, slaps shot back] Mackerel, my butt!

KITSURABAMI: [gasps with alarm]

MAMIMI: [holding Takkun-cat] Actually, writing fish with blue is a common mistake.

And thus having exorcised the blue cyborg mackerel demon, I’ll shut up, now.

My opinion, based on someone else’s critique of yet other people’s opinions, or something like that

If you want my two cents on the fractious relationship between genre and literature (derived, of course, in consideration of someone else’s), it’s over at the Southern California Writers’ Conference blog.

If you don’t care either way, disregard this note.

Oh, for the love of ….

Lily Burana decided, for some reason, that Anne Rice’s recent decision to quit being a Christian meant she needed to tell us her life story.

At some point when I wasn’t looking — I was distracted by punk rock, alt.feminism or maybe yoga — the dominant tenor of Christianity became almost unbearably shrill. As America in general became more stratified along religious and political lines, I slunk to the margins, caring less and less. Now, something rebellious and itchy has awoken in me, and I care a lot. Despite the frequent impulse to just keep quiet and hope that someone will rescue Christianity for the rest of us, I want to engage. Even if I have to start a lot of sentences with “I’m a Christian, but…” Even if I end up sounding like a two-bit Anne Lamott with anger-management issues.

After all, the self-satisfied and self-righteous have come for me, too: “YOU, a Christian? With those politics? With that past? Not with those go-go shorts, missy, your Queer Nation stickers, your unrepentant cursing, and your premarital everything.” I knew they’d show up, those stingy, uncharitable moral goalkeepers, with their underlined passages in Leviticus and their pointy-finger God. It just ain’t a Jesus party without this particular turd in the spiritual punchbowl. Maybe it’s the believer’s rite of passage — until you’ve encountered this type and had them declare a fundamental component of your identity an “abomination,” you kind of haven’t lived. The challenge is to have your faith tested this way and not blink.

And it’s testimonies like these, and Rice’s announcement via Facebook, that remind us so acutely that faith is something best kept between the believer and God.

Having run the religious gamut myself (I’ll skip the liturgy) the one thing I can say, after years of discussions both spoken and written, countless observations of diverse people’s behavior, and witnessing the train wreck that “Christianity” has become in our public discourse, there is no greater testament against conversion to faith than the faithful themselves. Seriously. In the name of Christ, she’s no longer a Christian? Or Anne Rice can leave, but Lily’s staying?

How about, fuck off?

Really, how is it that alleged Christians can rally behind lies as a call to arms? How is it that a Christian conscience can advocate torture? How the hell can a bunch of homophobes rally up behind gay preachers denouning homophobia? Perhaps it has something to do with the static superficiality of the discourse. No, seriously: This is what it comes to?

Why should we care? Aren’t there better things to worry about? Oh, right, here’s why we should care: 76% of American adults identify as Christians, according to Wikipedia. That’s a three to one margin over all other religious outlooks combined. This is the driving moral and philosophical force in American culture and thought, and this is what it’s come to?

Why would anyone ever want to be like these people?

The ants go marching ….

Okay, so this is like really, really cool. Victoria Gill, writing for BBC, lets us in on the coolness:

In Africa and in the tropics, armies of tiny creatures make the twisting stems of acacia plants their homes.

Aggressive, stinging ants feed on the sugary nectar the plant provides and live in nests protected by its thick bark.

This is the world of “ant guards”.

The acacias might appear overrun by them, but the plants have the ants wrapped around their little stems.

These same plants that provide shelter and produce nourishing nectar to feed the insects also make chemicals that send them into a defensive frenzy, forcing them into retreat.

It is actually a fairly intricate relationship, with the ants territorially protecting a food source, including the swarming of larger herbivores, and the tree being able to chemically prevent the ants from causing too much havoc. Dr. Nigel Raine, at University of London, explained:

“The flowers seem to produce chemicals that are repellent to the ants,” said Dr Raine. “They release these particularly during the time when they’re producing lots of pollen, so the ants are kept off the flowers.”

In recent studies, described in the journal Functional Ecology, Dr Raine and his colleagues found that the plants with the closest relationships with ants – those that provided homes for their miniature guard army – produced the chemicals that were most effective at keeping the ants at bay.

“And that was associated with the flower being open,” he says. “So the chemicals are probably in the pollen” ….

…. The repellent chemicals are specific to the ants. In fact, they attract and repel different groups of insects.

“[The chemicals] don’t repel bees, even though they are quite closely related to ants. And in some cases, the chemicals actually seem to attract the bees,” says Dr Raine.

The researchers think that some of the repellents that acacias produce are chemical “mimics” of signalling pheromones that the ants use to communicate.

“We put flowers into syringes and puffed the scent over the ant to see how they would respond, and they became quite agitated and aggressive” he explained.

“The ants use a pheromone to signal danger; if they’re being attacked by a bird they will release that chemical that will quickly tell the other ants to retreat.”

Dr Raine says this clever evolutionary system shows how the ants and their plants have evolved to protect, control and manipulate each other.

Aynal adventures

A couple paragraphs worth reading:

But much as Rand craved appreciation for her work (as sadly reflected in the worshipful eyes of The Collective and her bitterness about every negative book review she ever received), it’s hard to imagine that she would have been terribly happy about its current appropriation by a motley assortment of conservative populists, who mix quotes from The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged with Christian Scripture and the less-than-cerebral perspectives of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck. In her own view, Rand was nothing if not a systematic philosopher whose ideas demanded an unconditional acceptance of her approach to metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, psychology, literature, and politics.

Rand’s famous intolerance should not be dismissed as simply the psychological aberration of a flawed genius. She feared, for good reason, what lesser minds might do with the intellectual dynamite of her work when divorced from its philosophical context. The prophetess of “the virtue of selfishness” made rigorous demands of herself and all her followers to live self-consciously “heroic” lives under a virtual tyranny of reason and self-mastery, and to reject every imaginable natural and supernatural limitation on personal responsibility for every action and its consequences. Take all that away–take everything away that Rand actually cared about–and her fictional work represents little more than soft porn for middle-brow reactionaries who seek to rationalize their resentment of the great unwashed. This is why Rand was so precise about the moral obligations and absolute consistency demanded both of her fictional “heroes” and her acolytes. She hated “second-handers,” people who borrowed others’ philosophies without understanding or following them.