.:. Another Likely Story

Tossed and turned when I tried to sleep yesterday, and my mind caught on this piece by Tin, discussing Bede's Ecclesiastical History Of the English People. Excerpt below.

Looking closely at the text, which is beautiful in itself, one perceives that the thane's thought opposes certain age-old habits of mind which persist even today. Those who, like Vigny, see life as a luminous interval between two infinite periods of darkness readily depict those two shadowy zones of before and after as inert and undifferentiated, a kind of frontier of nothingness. For Christians, despite their belief in a blessed or infernal immortality, what will follow after death (they pay little attention to what came before life) is perceived, above all, as eternal rest. Invideo, quia quiescunt, said Luther. For this unknown man, in contrast, the bird issues from a storm and returns into a tempest. Between these two storms, the thane interprets the flight of the bird across the hall as a moment of respite (spatio serenitatis). That's quite surprising. Edwin's thane knew perfectly well that a bird which has flown into a house of men darts about madly, running the risk of dashing itself against walls, of burning itself in the fire. Life as we know it is hardly a moment of respite. Yet, there it is.

Reading more of Perdido Street Station, reading madly. What's truly amazing is that Mieville isn't actually creating that much new stuff; 99% of these are tropes I've seen before, but he handles them so well. I'm sure this is a total cliche but I do feel like New Crobuzon is an excellent metaphor for his own writing -- crowded with a million styles and genres that all are tied together by some mysterious junction that links all his works. A friend whose taste I trust has already mentioned that Perdido Street Station has a Bad End so I am on tenterhooks, but enjoying the ride so far ...

(Also, is it just me or is this book seriously obsessed with body fluids. It's like a 14yo boy trying to see how many times he can get excrement into a book.)

Went to Borders last night, trying to take advantage of their liquidation. Of course the rest of the city had the same thought and I didn't find most of what I wanted. But I did pick up a copy of Iain M. Banks' Surface Detail, which I bought actually because I read a somewhat critical review whose criticisms made me really, really interested in the book.  We'll see how this turns out.

After everyone else in the world already has ... I finally started reading China Miéville's Perdido Street Station. I am really enjoying the fantastic worldbuilding.

“Ged,” Isaac asked. “What can you tell me about the garuda?”

Ged shrugged, and he grinned with pleasure at imparting what he knew.

“Not very much. Bird-people. Live in the Cymek, and the north of Shotek, and the west of Mordiga, reputedly. Maybe also on some of the other continents. Hollow bones.” Ged’s eyes were fixed, focused on the remembered pages of whatever xenthropological work he was quoting. “Cymek garuda are egalitarian…completely egalitarian, and completely individualistic. Hunters and gatherers, no sexual division of labour. No money, no rank, although they do have sort of uninstitutional ranks. Just means you’re worthy of more respect, that sort of thing. [...]”

[...] “Well, seeing as you know so arsing little about them, I might as well just stop talking to you,” said Isaac.

To Isaac’s astonishment, Ged’s face fell.

“Joke, Ged! Irony! Sarcasm! You know fucking loads about them. At least compared to me. I’ve been browsing Shacrestialchit, and you’ve just exceeded the sum of my knowledge. Do you know anything about…uh…their criminal code?”

Ged stared at him. His huge eyes narrowed.

“What you up to, Isaac? They’re so egalitarian…well…Their society’s all based on maximizing choice for the individual, which is why they’re communistic. Grants the most uninhibited choice to everyone. And as far as I remember the only crime they have is depriving another garuda of choice. And then it’s exacerbated or mollified depending on whether they do it with or without respect, which they absolutely love…”

“How do you steal someone’s choice?”

“No idea. I suppose if you nick someone’s spear, they don’t have the choice of using it…What about if you lie about where some tasty lichen is, so you deprive others of the choice of going for it…?”

“Maybe some choice-thefts are analogies of stuff we’d consider crimes and some have absolutely no equivalent,” said Isaac.

“I’d imagine so.”

“What’s an abstract individual and a concrete individual?”

Ged was gazing at Isaac in wonder.

“My good arse, Isaac…you’ve made friends with some garuda, haven’t you?”

Isaac raised one eyebrow, and nodded quickly.

“Damn!” Ged shouted. People at the surrounding tables turned to him with brief surprise. “And a Cymek garuda…! Isaac, you have to make him--him? her?--come and talk to me about the Cymek!”

“I don’t know, Ged. He’s a bit…taciturn…”

“Oh please oh please…”

“All right, all right, I’ll ask him. But don’t get your hopes up. Now tell me what the difference is between a fucking abstract and concrete individual.”

“Oh, this is fascinating. I suppose you aren’t allowed to tell me what the job is…? No, didn’t think so. Well, put simply, and as far as I understand it, they’re egalitarian because they respect the individual so much, right? And you can’t respect other people’s individuality if you focus on your own individuality in a kind of abstract, isolated way. The point is that you are an individual inasmuch as you exist in a social matrix of others who respect your individuality and your right to make choices. That’s concrete individuality: an individuality that recognizes that it owes its existence to a kind of communal respect on the part of all the other individualities, and that it had better therefore respect them similarly.

“So an abstract individual is a garuda who forgot, for some time, that he or she is part of a larger unit, and owes respect to all the other choosing individuals.”

There was a long pause.

“Are you any wiser, Isaac?” asked Ged gently, and broke off into giggles.

Isaac wasn’t sure if he was or not.

“So look, Ged, if I said to you ‘second-degree choice-theft with disrespect,’ would you know what a garuda had done?”

I finally decided to start reading up on semiotics, which is the study of symbols/signs -- in the ways that humans generate, parse, and use them -- and all the processes that depend on symbols/signs, such as semantics, communication, etc.

You'd think I had already done some reading if only for the sake of appearances, ahem, but I had always resisted. My resistance was not based on not believing in semiotics. On the contrary, I believe it too much. Humans by necessity process the world in signs and symbols because face it we just don't have the cycles to do otherwise. When I see an object from many angles in multiple instances, I compress them all into one symbol that signifies the object, instead of thinking each view represents a different object altogether*. When I receive many experiences, I learn from them by generalizing to "the big picture" -- another "sign". In fact we do this to our detriment (thinking everything is a monolith is just one of many symptoms ...). In the end we need symbols and signs for shorthand, we need keys to efficiently retrieve the tons of data entries swimming in our brains.

So as you can see it would be so easy for me to become (if I haven't already skirted that line) something like a first-year philosophy major who goes around analyzing EVERYTHING OMG EVERYTHING IS A SIGN AND WHAT DOES THAT SYMBOLIZE and thinking that eeeeverything is miiiiindblowingggg. Woooooooooo! I couldn't stand that much obnoxiousness and neither could you.

And yet, having blathered all about this, I've been pretty engrossed in the reading, especially because I think that semiotics is a valid angle to approach how we think, and thus informs slightly more "practical" (or at least more provable) fields like, oh, linguistics and natural data processing, etc. I don't really intend to work on those things but I'd be silly not to think they matter and will be very powerful when they are finally worked out better. And it also gets at things that I like to read and write about, namely memory and experience. It's always helpful to have more material/resources if only for bullshitting purposes, and if that's the way my interests lean ...

(Especially since now that I've read up on the basics ... suddenly Italo Calvino's The Uses of Literature makes 80% more sense than before. But that's a ramble for another day.)

* Borges said this much better in his brilliant short story Funes, The Memorious.

Too funny to keep this to myself. Choice excerpts:

There is this thing currently going around tumblr about why dating a writer is good. I think it’s nice that this thing is going around, because I like writers, and lots of us could use more dates. As a writer who has dated people, though — including other writers — I would like to offer some correctives to this list.

2. Writers will write about you. You don’t want this. Trust me.
8. Writers are really passionate. About writing. Not necessarily about you. Are you writing?
9. Writers can think through their feelings. So don’t start an argument unless you’re ready for a very, very lengthy explication of our position, our feelings about your position, and what scenes from our recent fiction the whole thing is reminding us of.
18. Writers are surrounded by interesting people. Every last one of whom is imaginary.

Read the whole thing here!