Reading as Writing

But there’s something deeper going on. Even before we actually tell any stories, the language we use teems with them in embryo form. There are words that simply denote things in nature: a pebble, a tree. There are words that describe objects we make: to know the word chair is to understand about moving from standing to sitting and appreciate the match of the human body with certain shapes and materials. But there are also words that come complete with entire narratives, or rather that can’t come without them. The only way we can understand words like God, angel, devil, ghost is through stories, since these entities do not allow themselves to be known in other ways, or not to the likes of me. Here not only is the word invented—all words are—but the referent is invented too, and a story to suit. God is a one-word creation story.

                                                                      Tim Parks

I do read a lot.  It is getting harder and harder to hold my attention with the difficult and the boring, but I still try to plow through these things.  The act of reading allows me to better understand the world, to try and place myself in another's place and understand the complexities of another's life.

I think that I tend toward the fiction end of things because, when they teach me something, they do it on the sly, leading me toward a solution space.  Non-fiction is the work of people like my Professors, outlining a region of the solution space and bludgeoning it until it submits to their worldview.

Lately, my reading has been two remarkably different non-fiction books:

1. Limits to growth : the 30-year update / Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows.
2. Where I'm reading from : the changing world of books / by Tim Parks.

Bouncing back and forth between these two has been very enlightening,  By interleaving my reading back and forth, I can definitely get the real sense of the difference outlined above.  A search for the truth versus an explanation of what the truth consists of.

Limits to Growth was a seminal book in my early education.  It is now thoroughly vilified by anyone who measures with money and power.  The newer update I am reading now is from the turn of the millennium with much of the same as the 1972 version, albeit with more "I told you so's" and the requisite babble about how, if the greater bulk of humanity would just change their ways, the world can achieve the true millennium and live in a peaceful and stable world of ..... well...good things.

In a way, they are close relatives to the Christer's out there selling their brand of millennium.  A small sect, telling everyone to just set up a system where evil is constrained by good and all will be well.

But Qui Bono lives on, and people every, I repeat, people everywhere have wants which are simple.  They want what they want. And they want it now, and fuck anything that gets in their way.  So, the simple idea that just laws can tamp the urgency of peoples wants and needs and reproductive capacity are, while an excellent idea, just not going to work.

Nope, folks will drive their SUV's until they are empty.  They will stripmine heaven and earth for their toys and vittles, and they will look surprised when the pumps no longer work down at the gas station and they are looking at another plate of beans.

Now, you may think that the above rant was a digression from the original intent of this article.  No buckaroos, it was just a setup for the main point.  Reading is the real story of the article.  Jorgen and Donella and Dennis didn't write a story that was new.  They wrote a story that was old, as old as the lead in to the golden calf and to Ragnarok and to Kurukshetra.  Hubris and Nemesis have always been excellent story lines.  And no one ever listened to Cassandra.

So what story are we starting to write now?  The story line of population reduction by passivity and marginal malnutrition seems to never have been used before.  And this is with a good reason.  Because it is a lousy story.  What I am interested in is what old story are they going to recycle for this next go around?

Cri de Couer

“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,” ....Samuel Johnson

I am not feeling that one at all.

Look, this little affectation under Alphabet's watchful eye has never made me a dime.  The chances of me writing something that will spin me into the lottery system that is the publishing industry is only marginally more achievable than winning PowerBall.

So why do I do it?

I think that simply put, it is a diary.  Now if I were a 17th century man, I would probably be doing the same, merely with a wastepaper book and a quill, rather that tapping away at little beveled plastic squares and watching the letters appear on an LED.   But the process is the same.  Just write down what is passing through my brain that day.

The only difference is there are some odd souls and friends dropping by occasionally.  By intenet standards, I might at well be tacking a piece of paper on a bulletin board in downtown Milwaukie and I would probably get greater readership.  So, the question comes back, why do I do this.

I have been pondering this a lot lately.  I can't really explain this.  I just need to write something every day or I get crabby.  Whether or not people read it is secondary to the act.

I think that more and more it serves as a means for me to point things out.  We live in a society of people who, to me, appear to spend the bulk of their lives in quiet desperation.  The way that they get through the day is to ignore the impending and place all their hope in the idea that it will be better tomorrow.

So this little bit of nothing, tucked away in the belly of the beast, allows me a free rein to my worldview.  Where the Everyman on the way to work or the everywoman trying for something better is out there chasing yesterdays dreams are in their shiny new car, I sit here in my apartment writing.  They are looking toward a better future.  I am looking for a changed future.

Idea seed: 3, magic as an ability to access the polycosm

Holes in sides of the tunnels of time was the phrase that I laid down in an aide-memoire for another post about writing.   Now, this may sound somewhat kitschy and maybe even serve as a working title, but I think that I will spend some time writing more about the nature of magic in the world that I am imagining.  

OK, the firs thing is that the world this is being written in is effectively ours, with all of it's warts and inconsistencies.  But the basis of this story is that magic, having been pretty darned near killed through a combination of technology, Christianity, and booze, is beginning to get some traction on its return.  The return is by no means assured.  The things that depressed it are still there and active.

Now, magic isn't all that impressive.  For the most part it appears to be the ability to channel a smallish portion of the magic field to change the consciousness of yourself and the people around you.  Most of the time the changes are trivial and don't involve anything difficult.  But sometimes the changes are serious enough to shift the user out of this "world" world and into a parallel track where the changes are possible.

Most of the big changes are precluded by the "big three" magic depressors.  But now that the depressants are beginning to lose their efficacy, magic is starting to happen. 

Idea seed: 2 Underlying Causes

The past 300 or so years have been ruled by the odd marriage of science and Christianity.  Christianity is dying out in the west, and the American flavor is kind of tainted irreparably by the peculiar devotion to Ayn Rand that serves as an addition pillar of "Christianity" here in the good ol' USA.  Let's posit that one of the reasons that it hung on is that alcohol served to depress that part of us that might attune us to magic.

Hence the importance of wine in the Christian Ritual. Christ's first miracle was turning water into wine.  I have almost no doubt that other drugs were available and their effects known, but the long history of Greek and Roman boozing is still with us.

Now, we weren't the only major culture that likes their booze.  The Persians are fond of their Shiraz, and Abu Musa Jabir ibn Hayyan invented the alambic in the long ago.  But the technology didin't really take off until nearly eight centuries later with the advent of the industrial revolution and the need for more.

So, just to make it clear, I am by no means going to stop my long-standing love of the booze due to this odd-ass writing seed, I am just curious as to what depressed the knowledge and use of magic in the last three centuries.  I am thinking that the depression of magic might be multivariate in nature.  I am thinking through a bunch of different changes that could be shanghaied by fiction to support a strange story.  Possible candidates for this are:

1.   Booze as a depressant and magic suppressor
2.   Newtonian thinking as a way to not focus on the courtesy required to work with the magic "vectors"
3.   Population as a thinning agent for the medium of magic, there is a certain bandwidth available for the actual medium of magic, and everyone has some ability to access the bandwidth.  Also, everyone has limited use of magic (hence dreams and serendipity) but in population concentrations, the ability to access gets badly diluted.

More to come on this, I figure that I have to work out the "magic" system prior to get going on characters.

Idea Seeds

I can't think of how many times I have started novels.  It is really kind of embarrassing to contemplate. I have thrown away pages and pages of work because I either ran out of gas or ran out of interest.  Plots falling apart and becoming ridiculous.  Of course I always tried to write "hard" sci-fi, which meant a slavish attention to scientific detail and a lot of the plotlines I wrote fell apart when I couldn't make them conform with physics.

So, now that I am in my dotage, and in the middle of a intellectual late-life crisis, I am revisiting my dreams of writing.  I think that I will discard the hard sci-fi bent I so worshipped in the past.  The constraints of physical science are being questioned.  What I see as the limits of science and technology just lead to differing flavors of dystopia's.

So, since we are in the time of transition in the real world (and anyone who thinks that business as usual will continue is in a fool's paradise) I am thinking that maybe a novel about transition will be a way to go.  But what transition do I think will be interesting?  That is the question.

So, since I have been spending time slumming over at JMG' trying to ure out what the hell is all about the old "knowledge" of witchcraft and occultism and other previously untouchable (untouchable to me in my salad days anyway) subjects, I am thinking that those subjects and my not yet discarded yet slavish attention to the scientific method may provide an avenue of writing interest.

Now, I am by no means thinking that I am the first person to come up with such an amazing idea.  Waldo and Magic Inc. came out long ago, and Neal Stephenson's DODO had a pretty fair go at this particular sub-sub genre.

So what I am thinking is a novel about the reintroduction of magic into the world.  As outline above, the genre has been tried before.  One might even say that the attempts have been pretty fair.  But what to emphasize?  Is the protaganist a hard scientist who converts or a soft scientist who is the missionary?  Or do I do a two-protaganist novel that bridges and documents the dialectic?

One of the big questions will be how does the magic rise out of the dead ground that science has relegated it to?  Both the Magic Inc. and DODO novels did quite a bit of hand waving around this subject.  I think that DODO did the best job of generating a believable scenario, but if if go down this genre-path, I will have to define the loosing of magic.

Also needs to be discussed is the physical means of writing such a thing.  I am gradually coming to the conclusion that, for me, writing may not be the solitary activity so enamored by current urban myth.  Characters must be an outgrowth of reality, and if I write dialog between character without grounding the same in actual human interaction, what the writing becomes is an exercise in intellectual masturbation.