The Clockyard - Abney Park

There was a young boy, in a clockyard,
Building himself from the pieces he found
Screwing on what's been left on the ground
Hoping to finish enough, one day, to leave

The years flew by, and some gears fell off -
Fears and rust and tears he doffed
And bravely searched, while parts he scoffed,
But soon he found -

There was a young man, in a clockyard,
Building himself from the pieces he found
Screwing on what's been left on the ground
Hoping to finish enough, one day, to leave

The years flew by, and some gears fell off -
Fears and rust and tears he doffed
And bravely searched, while parts he scoffed,
Until he found -

There was a grown man, in a clockyard -
Building himself from the pieces he found
Screwing on what's been left on the ground
Hoping to finish enough one day to lead

He thought to himself, "If I wait too long
To find the pieces I need, then my chance might be gone
What I need might be outside the gate
But I will never know, if I continue to wait."

And then he had a dream:
An old man cried in a clock yard,
Giving up on the scrap that he found on the ground,
"I can't build myself from this scrap all around!"
The man woke up and said, "I must leave."

Sleep - Poets of the Fall

Hear your heartbeat
Beat a frantic pace
And it's not even 7 AM

You're feeling the rush
Of anguish settling
You cannot help showing them in.

Hurry up then,
Or you'll fall behind and
They will take control of you

And you need to heal
The hurt behind your eyes
Fickle words crowding your mind

So...
Sleep, sugar, let your dreams flood in,
Like waves of sweet fire, you're safe within
Sleep, sweetie, let your floods come rushing in,
And carry you over to a new morning
Try as you might
You try to give it up
Seems to be holding on fast

Its hand in your hand,
A shadow over you,
A beggar for soul in your face

Still it don't matter
If you won't listen,
If you won't let them follow you

You just need to heal,
Make good all your lies -
Move on and don't look behind

Day after day
Fickle visions
Messing with your head
Fickle visions
Sleeping in your bed,
Messing with your head
Fickle visions
Fickle visions

The Cat and the Moon - The Lord of the Rings

It's a good day for nonsense! :D



There’s an inn of old renown
Where they brew a beer so brown
Moon came rolling down the hill
One Hevnsday night to drink his fill!

On a three-stringed fiddle there,
Played the Ostler’s Cat so fair
The hornèd Cow that night was seen
To dance a jig upon the green!

Called by the fiddle to the middle of the muddle where the cow with a caper sent the small dog squealing,
Moon in a fuddle went to huddle by the griddle but he slipped in a puddle and the world went reeling -

Downsides went up - hey! Outsides went wide,
As the fiddle played a twiddle
And the Moon slept till Sterrenday!
Upsides went west - hey! Broadsides went boom,
With a twiddle on the fiddle inn the middle by the griddle
And the Moon slept till Sterrenday!

Dish from off the dresser pranced,
Found a Spoon and gaily danced -
Horses neighed and champed their bits,
For the bloodshot Moon had lost his wits!

Well, Cow jumped over, Dog barked wild -
Moon lay prone and sweetly smiled!
Ostler cried, “Play faster, Cat!
Because we all want to dance like that!”

Gambol and totter till you’re hotter than a hatter and you spin all akimbo like a windmill flailing!
Whirl with a clatter till you scatter every cotter and the strings start a-pinging as the world goes sailing!

Downsides go up - hey! Outsides go wide!
You can clatter with your platter
But the Moon slept till Sterrenday!
Upsides go west - hey! Broadsides go boom!
With a batter and a clatter you can shatter every platter
But the Moon slept till Sterrenday!

Fi-fo-fiddle-diddle!
Fi-fo-fiddle-diddle!
Hey-yey-yey-yey-oh-ho
Hey-yey-yey-yey-oh-ho!
Hey-hey-din-dang-do
Hey-hey-din-dang-do!
Hoo-rye-and-hott-a-cott-a ho
Hoo-rye-and-hott-a-cott-a ho ho!
Hott-a-cott-a-hotta-ko
Hott-a-cott-a-ko-cott-a-ko-ho!
Fi-fo-fiddle-diddle-hi-ho
Fi-fo-fiddle-diddle-hi-ho!
Ho fiddlee-ding-galli-do
Ho fiddlee-ding-galli-do
Hoo-rye-hoo-rye oops-oops- ay!
Hoo-rye-hoo-rye oops-oops- ay!
Hotta-cotta-hotta-cotta-mi-fo-fo
Hotta-cotta-hotta-cotta-mi-fo-fo!
Hotta-cotta-hotta-cotta-hotta-cotta-hotta-cotta-hotta-cotta-hotta-cotta-mi-fo-fo!

Downsides go up - hey! Outsides go wide!
With a twiddle on the fiddle in the middle by the griddle
And the Moon slept till Sterrenday!
Upsides go west - hey! Broadsides go boom!
With a batter and a clatter you can shatter every platter
But the Moon slept till Sterrenday!

Hey!

The Devil is a Liar - Seawind

This song is dear to me more for reasons of personal history than for contemplative purposes, but it's perfectly suitable for that as well.

(Also, my website is now apparently the only place online with the lyrics!)



How many times, in the back of your mind,
Have you heard a voice - calling to you?
Won't you come over here, let me talk in your ear -
I have something tempting for you...

I can give you all of the world,
With buildings that reach up to the sky!
Just sign your name in my book today,
And give me your soul when you die...

There are bunches of cars, and big black cigars,
People living their lives by reading the stars
Nobody's watching you now, you can take what you want
Wouldn't you rather have than have not?

Don't be a fool! 'Cause
I can give you all your desires!
Precious diamonds and rubies found so rare
Just sign your name upon the line
And give me your soul if you dare...

But don't you believe - you'll be deceived
You're playing with fire...
Because the devil is a liar

But don't you believe, you'll be deceived
You're playing with fire
Because the devil is a liar

He'll promise you all his kingdoms of gold
Then he'll leave you standing alone in the cold
He'll trick you and tease you
Entice, and then leave you a fool...

The devil's done a number on you, yeah
The devil's done a number on you, yeah
The devil's done a number on you, yeah
The devil's done a number on you, yeah

Every hour of the day, the game of life goes on
And you and I will have to choose the right way from the wrong
And just when you have made your choice, for the game you want to win
The tireless voice you know so well starts tempting once again!

He tells us... there's no God above
And only foolish people fall in love
But it's plain to see
The devil hates you and hates me

He'll trick you and tease you
And then he'll deceive you

But don't you believe - he's a liar
But don't you believe - the devil's a liar
Don't you believe, you'll be deceived, you're playing with fire,
But don't you believe, the devil's a liar
Don't you believe, you'll be deceived, you're playing with fire,
But don't you believe, the devil's a liar
Don't let the devil do his number on you, no...

Dandelions - Five Iron Frenzy

In a field of yellow flowers, underneath the sun
Bluest eyes that spark with lightning - boy, with shoes undone
He is young, so full of hope, revelling in tiny dreams
Filling up his arms with flowers, right for giving any queen!

Running to her, beaming bright while cradling his prize
A flickering of yellow light within his mother's eyes -
She holds them to her heart, keeping them where they'll be safe
Clasped within her very marrow, dandelions in a vase!

She sees love where anyone else would see weeds
All hope is found; here is everything he needs!

Fathomless, Your endless mercy; weight I could not lift...
Where do I fit in this puzzle? What good are these gifts?
Not a martyr or a saint, scarcely can I struggle through -
All that I have ever wanted was to give my best to You!

Lord, search my heart! Create in me something clean
Dandelions - You see flowers in these weeds!

Gently lifting hands to heaven, softened by the sweetest hush
A Father sings over His children, loving them so very much
More than words could warrant, deeper than the darkest blue
More than sacrifice could merit - Lord, I give my heart to You!

Lord, search my heart! Create in me something clean
Dandelions - You see flowers in these weeds

What Good This Deafness? - Trans-Siberian Orchestra

It's a pretty pathetic state of affairs when I can't even be bothered to post a song to think about in a week.



[From the shadows a beautiful spirit, Fate, and her deformed dwarf son, Twist, emerge to inform Beethoven of what he has already deeply suspected, that this is to be his last night on earth. They are accompanied by numerous spirits and ghosts from his past.]

[With each successive crack of lightning the spirits move closer and eventually Beethoven finds their distraction unbearable.]

Beethoven:
What good this deafness, when my whole life I have dread?
What good this deafness, with these voices in my head?
What good this deafness, when this prattle I must hear?
If I were blind, I'm sure they wouldn't disappear!

Twist:
Do you really want to believe what you're saying?
Do you really want to be here alone?
Have I interrupted a moment of praying?
While your life's decaying -
Your sins, are they weighing?
While you've been carving your stone...
All on your own?

Do you really want to sit here in silence?
Could it be that brooding is... part of your art?
Is it an extension of artistic license?
A moving defiance,
Of all of life's tyrants!
While you've been searching your heart...
...Alone? :)
...With us. :D
...In the dark! 8D

[Beethoven implores the spirits to leave him alone, but Twist tells him that as shadows they only exist by the light that Beethoven's life has cast and as that light is fading, it is only natural that they should cling to its last moments of illumination. As the clock strikes midnight their conversation is suddenly interrupted by the appearance of Mephistopheles. His presence causes all the other spirits to shrink silently back to the corners of the room...]

The Road Goes On - The Lord of the Rings

There's a Road, calling you to stray
Step by step, pulling you away
Under Moon and Star - Take the Road, no matter how far!
Where it leads, no-one ever knows
Don't look back, follow where it goes
Far beyond the Sun - Take the Road, wherever it runs!

The Road goes on, ever ever on
Hill by hill
Mile by mile
Field by field
Stile by stile
The Road goes on, ever ever on

Mountain and valley and pasture and meadow
Stretching unending for mile after mile
Fenland and moorland and shoreline and canyon
Bordered by hurdle and hedgerow and stile

One more mile, then it's time to eat
Pick some pears, succulent and sweet
To the farthest shore - Take the Road a hundred miles more!
Sweet pink trout, tickled from a stream
Milk a goat, churn it into cream
Far beyond the Sun - Take the Road wherever it runs.

The Road goes on, ever ever on
Moor by moor
Glen by glen
Vale by vale
Fen by fen
The Road goes on, ever ever on

See the Road run past your doorstep
Calling for your feet to stray
Like a deep and rolling river
It will sweep them far away
Just beyond the far horizon
Lies a waiting world unknown
Like the dawn its beauty beckons
With a wonder all its own!

Númenna!
Auti i ré.
Yallume! Hilya!
Númenna!
Auti i ré.
Yallume! Hilya!
Hilya! Hilya! Auta. Hilya!
Númenna!
Auti i ré.
Yallume! Hilya!

Mountain and valley and pasture and meadow
Stretching unending for mile after mile
Fenland and moorland and shoreline and canyon
Bordered by hurdle and hedgerow and stile

The Storm - Blackmore's Night

A timeless and forgotten place,
The moon and sun in endless chase;
Each in quiet surrender, while the other reigns the sky...
The midnight hour begins to laugh -
A summer evening's epitaph -
The winds are getting crazy, as the storm begins to rise...

...

Wild were the winds that came,
In the thunder and the rain!
Nothing ever could contain the rising of the storm!
In the wings of ebony,
Darkened waves fill the trees
Wild winds of warning echo through the air!

Follow the storm, now, I've got to get out of here
Follow the storm, as you take to the sky
Follow the storm, now, it's all so crystal-clear
Follow the storm, as the storm begins to rise

It seems to come from everywhere -
Welcome to the Dragon's Lair!
Fingers running through your hair, she asks you out to play!
For all of Nature's sorcery,
The most bewitching entity -
Heaven hath no fury like the rising of the storm!

Follow the storm, now, I've got to get out of here
Follow the storm, as you take to the sky
Follow the storm, now, it's all so crystal-clear
Follow the storm, as the storm begins to rise

Meet the New Year!

...same as the Old Year!

I want to start taking advantage of the fact that there is more than one day per week. Sunday will be a day for sharing music, and possibly other art, that I find worthy of reflection. This category will be denoted with the tag "Selah".

Poets of the Fall - War

Do you remember standing on a broken field,
White crippled wings beating the sky?
The harbingers of war, with their nature revealed,
And our chances flowing by

If I can let the memory heal,
I will remember you with me on that field...

When I thought that I fought this war alone,
You were there by my side, on the frontline
When I thought that I fought without a cause,
You gave me a reason to try

Turn the page - I need to see something new -
For now, my innocence is torn
We cannot linger on this stunted view,
Like rabid dogs of war

I will let the memory heal
I will remember you with me on that field

When I thought that I fought this war alone,
You were there by my side, on the frontline
And we fought to believe the impossible!
When I thought that I fought this war alone,
We were one with our destinies entwined!
When I thought that I fought without a cause,
You gave me the reason why!

With no-one wearing their real face,
It's a whiteout of emotion,
And I've only got my brittle bones to break the fall

When the love in letters fade,
It's like moving in slow motion
And we're already too late if we arrive at all

And then we're caught up in the arms race -
An involuntary addiction -
And we're shedding every value our mothers taught

So will you please show me your real face,
Draw the line in the horizon?
'Cause I only need your name to call the reasons why I fought...

When I thought that I fought this war alone,
You were there by my side, on the frontline
And we fought to believe the impossible!
When I thought that I fought this war alone,
We were one with our destinies entwined!
When I thought that I fought without a cause,
You gave me the reason why!

Visual imagery

This is just something interesting I ran across.

You've probably heard of the notion that human beings were 'created in the image of God'. Biblically, the concept originates from Genesis, where the exact words used are tzelem elohim. 'Tzelem' means image, shape, form, &c; 'Elohim' is one of the titles of God (since calling him by name is grammatically verboten).

This may shed a new light on one of the other places where tzelem is used - in the second commandment "You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below". Here, tzelem is translated as 'idol' (in other translations, 'graven image').

In my experience this commandment has been the subject of confusion among Christians I've known, including pastors and teachers, since on the surface it seems to be a restatement of 'you shall have no other gods before me', so this connection was something of a minor epiphany for me. God is specifically forbidding depictions of himself for worship, in any form - no balls of fire, no golden calves, no Nehushtan - follow that link, it's a really interesting one - possibly not even the crucifixes and nativity scenes we're all so accustomed to, though I'm not nearly qualified enough as a theologian to say that with any certainty yea or nay.

Why this unique ban? Because God makes his own idols, from clay, that no human artisan can reproduce, and one of them is you. I don't recommend worshiping them - that would violate the preceding commandment - but loving them, on the other hand, is specifically encouraged. :)

...an Eternal Golden Braid

Continued from last week, when we were discussing strange loops!

Quick review: a strange loop is anything that linearly relates to itself - if you pick some one action to perform on it, you'll eventually return to exactly where you were when you began.

Now - per the last example last post, human consciousness is itself a strange loop, as shown whenever you think about thinking, or think about why you think or feel the things that you do. So it should be no surprise that philosophy, psychology, mathematics, art, and so on can all be shown to be complex, tangled hierarchies full of strange, looping structures. Here's a couple more examples, for fun:

• Storytelling. Structures which return the characters to the place they started from at the beginning - physically, mentally, emotionally - are common throughout great literature. The Hero's Journey is a perfect example - albeit an overly specific, misleading, and rigidly stratified one. In the Iliad, the Greeks go to war; in the Odyssey, the last of them finally comes home. (In the beginning of the Odyssey, Odysseus almost gets home but fails.) There and Back Again. Don Quixote. The answers are always in the place you started, but you need the intervening book in order to recognize them.
• Feynman diagrams. Antimatter and matter are always created together in nature, and annihilate each other when they converge again. Feynman diagrams are just how scientists keep track of their interactions. Particle creation and annihilation is happening constantly, everywhere, and usually the two particles that formed together also destroy each other shortly thereafter - the diagram looks like this (incoming energy waves convert into two particles with mass, which move apart, collide again, and re-release the energy). You'll notice, though, that the regular particle is marked with a forwards arrow, and the antiparticle is marked with a backwards arrow - because one possible interpretation of the math is that there is only one particle and it appears to sometimes be an antiparticle because at that point it has begun moving backwards in time. In other words, the particle is 'creating' and 'destroying' itself, in a single infinitesimal moment, forever.
  
• Fractals. You can zoom in indefinitely and get the same image you started with, yes? Well, not for all fractals - the famous Mandelbrot Set, for instance, is unimaginably more complex than that.
• Let's talk (briefly) about the Mandelbrot Set. Do you know the coordinate plane? With an origin and a defined axis, you can locate any point P(x, y), x units left or right and y units up or down. One of the many, many things we can do with this is to apply a formula to P to define a second point - call it P1. Let's say that if P is x units right and y units up, we'll start at the origin, and move (x squared minus y squared) units right, and (twice x times y) units up. Then, we'll move it x more units right, and y more units up, and call that P1. X and Y can be absolutely anything, and we'll always get another point... so let's say that we take what we just did to turn P into P1, and do it to P1 to get P2, then P3, P4... and so on. We'll do it forever. (Mathematicians have sneaky tricks to find out what happens if you keep doing something forever.) If we keep going forever, we'll find that either our point is now racing toward the edge of the coordinate plane, an infinite distance away - or it's still meandering about, passing by our original point P every so often. Every point that hangs about when you do this is part of the Mandelbrot Set; in this picture, these are the points in black (the non-black points are coloured based on how quickly they run for the horizon). But if the point keeps doubling back on itself when we keep doing the same thing... the Mandelbrot Set consists of all of the points that generate strange loops from a given formula. Awesome? Awesome.
  

Moving on.

Strange loops can be bewildering at times because our minds are adapted to a conventionally categorical, hierarchical way of thinking - the classic riddle of shallow philosophy, "the chicken or the egg", writ large. The two hands cannot actually be drawing each other, after all! That looping sort of cause and effect makes no sense to our ordinary perception.

So it's very helpful that Hofstadter addresses this. None of the loops we've discussed, he points out, are actually self-sustaining or self-perpetuating. Rather, we can restore part of our usual understanding of things by noticing that every point of the loop has both an internal cause - somewhere else in the loop - as well as an external cause, generally one single one for the loop as a whole. You stand on any step of the Penrose staircase by climbing there from a lower step - and because Penrose conceived of the staircase. Characters reach the fulfilment of their stories with the unnoticed aid of their author. A quine is produced by being run, but only because it was first run on a computer. (The bits that make up computer memory are also strange loops, tiny tiny circuit segments that continuously feed themselves their own voltage as new input.) The trigonometric functions, and fractals, and especially the Mandelbrot Set, were discovered by expanding upon math that was already known. Particle-antiparticle pairs form from errant energy waves nearby in the universe. The Liar Paradox needs someone to say it or there is no "I" to be lying and not lying.

You'll notice I skipped humans, because the human mind is more complex than any of these - it is a self-modifying strange loop. In this sentence, I am now making you aware of the fact that you are thinking about strange loops, such as this sentence and your thoughts. You've just added an additional metarecursion onto that cycle, and you can keep doing that to potentially infinite degrees, limited only by your boredom! But for the moment I'm going to tie whatever cycle you're currently on back to this sentence by noting that by thinking about that uppermost layer and the process by which your mind reflects on itself you've constructed a strange loop of strange loops. With my help, of course. This blog post provides initial external instigation. ;)

My point is, though, that your mind doesn't necessarily need the external instigation. I have no idea how many strange loops that cycle in the last paragraph, for instance, and you might have easily realised the loop of loops without my assistance. This is because your mind is a more complicated, tangled, crazy, and wonderful place than you may have ever realised before! :D

I'm not going to be able to finish this in only two posts. Next time: we have to go deeper.

Gödel, Escher, Bach

I just realized I've never actually discussed Gödel, Escher, Bach in detail here before, and then I went and made reference to it in my last post. Shame on me. It's awesome.

Gödel, Escher, Bach is a book by Douglas Hofstadter, whose subject cannot be really concisely explained. It's about everything. At it's core, you could say it's mostly about human consciousness. And music. And math. And art. (Kind of as implied by the title. You remember Kurt Gödel, right?) And puns, and palindromes, and Möbius strips, and vinyl records that destroy the record players that play them, and the holism/reductionism dichotomy, and computer programming, and artificial intelligence, and Charles Babbage's parable of Achilles and the Tortoise, and... and, it's amazing and you should go read it. Skim the parts that are too jargony for you, if you must, but keep going through it.

Let's talk about a construct that Hofstadter introduces, called a "strange loop". It's a shorthand way to talk about things that linearly relate to themselves. It'll probably be clearer if I discuss examples instead of trying to define it:

• You've seen M. C. Escher's lithograph of the endless stairs? (The artwork is called 'Ascending and Descending', by the way. The structure itself is called a Penrose staircase, after the fellow who actually invented it - if you can tell me who famously used the correct name, you get an imaginary cookie.) That's a strange loop. You start anywhere on the stairs, and do nothing but walk up - linearly, one direction - and you still return to the point you started from.
• A quine is a computer program that, with no input, produces its own exact source code as output. This is a strange loop - you proceed linearly down the generations of output, and each one is still the same code with which you began.
  
• The trigonometric functions are a strange loop. For the function y = sin(x), the rate at which y changes with respect to x changing is y' = cos(x). The rate at which y' changes is y'' = -sin(x). The rate at which y'' changes is y''' = -cos(x), and the rate at which y''' changes is y'''' = sin(x) = y. Applying one procedure over and over takes you back to the original result.
• The Liar Paradox - "I am lying right now" - is a strange loop. The thought process goes, if you are lying, then that statement is a lie, so it must not be true that you are lying right now, so you must not be lying. But if you're not really lying, then when you say you are lying you must be telling the truth, in which case you really are lying. Paradox.
  
• The way your mind itself works is a strange loop. This is the process called introspection - you are able to recognize that your brain is producing thoughts, and this recognition is itself one of those thoughts.

People tend to think of strange loops as tricksy, exotic, complicated, mind-blowing things, but in reality, they're everywhere. People just tend not to notice them, or to think too hard about them, when they encounter them in real life. It's both frustrating, and depressing.

I'll elaborate on the significance of this next week, but in the meantime, you can go to another fantastic strange loop by following this elegant and finely-crafted link.

Moment of clarity, possibly?

I just finished 'I Don't Want To Kill You', by Dan Wells. Brilliant, but mostly unrelated. Now I'm thinking about why I find mentally-ill people so sympathetic; it's apparently a bit unusual. Mom, at least, has never hesitated to give voice to the fact that she finds it disturbing and wishes I wouldn't; I don't find it disturbing at all, and unlike some of the other things I enjoy or at least don't mind, I'm not even entirely sure why it might be seen as disturbing. Sociopaths, schizophrenics, malignant narcissists, what-have-you are all in basically the same position as the rest of fallen man but even worse off, because their suffering is, I don't know, an intrinsic part of who they are? (This is kind of a part I can't express well, but it gets down to the idea that personality disorders are harder to treat than broken bones.) It frustrates me to have Mom worry that this kind of concern is itself psychologically unhealthy. (Of course this may all just be justificationary reaction on my part, but I'm increasingly unconfident in that and will continue so until I know otherwise.)

This leads me back around to "I Don't Want To Kill You", because of why I love John Cleaver so much as a protagonist. Not only is he suffering from sociopathy, but he is consciously aware of, and fighting, it. Self-awareness is key. It's a meta-recursive strange-loop thingy, which as I concluded from Godel, Escher, Bach is both an intrinsic component of the human intellect and even more intrinsically a divine attribute, and therefore a part of how man is made in God's image. It is, consequently, absolutely and totally mind-boggling to me in a violently facepalming why would you do that screaming kind of way why anyone would consciously do that, yet circumstantial, testimonial, and, yes, internal evidence suggests that it happens all the time. Forgetfulness and apathy, mostly. But even that aside, it often seems people don't even try. Or think that they're already doing it - I know I'm not the only one who's noticed this. This empathy business doesn't seem to be all it's cracked up to be, frankly. Can't people honestly examine and question themselves? Why is 'DOUBT' such a scary word?

This is where my chain of reasoning breaks down, because the moment of clarity has passed, I am falling asleep, and my attention and thoughts have been drifting into other places even since I started writing this. But, it seems to me, I can try to bring this to peoples' attention. Help to complete that particular strange loop, raise self-awareness, whatever. I'm sure conscious rejection is possible, if inexplicable, but I can help prove the choice to more fully resemble the image of God. I need to write about it, because that's what I can do and what I seem to be decent at. And that comes back to casting traditional 'them's in a different light, playing Devil's Advocate in person, writing stories that enable readers to question whether that are themselves mad, or villainous, or absolutely in the right. Pride is pervasive and in need of deflating.

This moment of clarity, of course, is foremost just a restatement of what I already believe, albeit one that has seen multiple pieces of that net suddenly 'click' together, as well as one that demands rather more action from me than I usually give it. (Sloth is definitely my worst vice.) It's not really all that clear, even, considering how often I point out I'm unsure of some bit, which rather lends support to the idea that this is just a rationalization of my own preexisting behavior. That said, I can not think of a single thing that would contradict this and show why it might be wrong, but, of course, "the light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it", &c. (Side-question: does the darkness understand the darkness? The light presumably understands both...) ...and there I go fixating on meta-recursion again. Plus I've implied a distinction between those who are self-aware and those who are not, which given my loathing for "Us-vs-Them" categories makes me quite a hypocrite. And that sentence establishes me as a self-aware hypocrite trying not to be, which I happen to think is the best kind of hypocrite to be, placing me back in the "good-guy" slot in my own mind... though the fact that I feel wrong considering myself a "good-guy" could just be showcasing a symptom of depression that I should be trying to avoid... but that statement is itself just a rejection of responsibility on my part...

Given that entire last paragraph, I'm really praying that this note at least started out on the right track.

A comment on God...

Really, God is basically the Eldritch Abomination to end all. Unimaginably vast? Check. Entirely not-of-this-world, existing in forms and places we can't imagine? Check. Not to be looked at directly lest you Go Mad From The Revelation? Check. Gets around that by manifesting in metaphorical images that may suggest to outsiders that you might be mad anyway? Check. Not to be named because no one knows how to pronounce it? Yay verily, and more! Thinks and acts in ways that the human mind cannot comprehend? Check. Likely to cause the end of everything if it pokes reality the wrong way? Check. What is NOT bloody freaking AWESOME about this picture?

And now you're going to tell me your hero doesn't like that and is going to kill him by poking him with an exceptionally shiny stick. And then insinuate that my problem is lack of creativity and imagination and zeal for the new and unfamiliar. Right.

Defending the Arts

I wrote this essay some time ago after being invited to watch Come What May, a film from a private Christian production team, with my sister's NCFCA Apologetics group. Their main reason for this is that many of the actors, writers, and various other members of the production team are homeschoolers and NCFCA alumni; my main reason was, frankly, free pizza. I've cut out the bits which deal directly with that film itself, since it obviously has not won fame and renown and so I should not need to caution anyone against seeing it; what remains are some of my thoughts on contemporary Christian art in general.

To begin with, "contemporary Christian art" is notoriously poor. This is more than a simple application of Sturgeon's Revelation ("90% of everything is crap"); music groups - the most common example - as well as game producers and such are considered extremely derivative, mostly due to the popular practice of marketing their work as "the Christian version of [insert secular example here]". In the arts that encompass works of fiction, including film, literature, and the very late, 'bout time you showed up forays into the realm of comics and graphic novels that have more recently come to attention, such plagiarism is frowned upon; but there are other commonalities that I think tend to diminish these works and continue to reflect poorly on their fellows.
(1) Moral conflict is oversimplified and waved at the reader with Aesopian fury.
(2) Every protagonist either begins as a Christian or converts by the end of the story (generally, to the denomination espoused by the author). Every villain is actively opposed to the same to at least some degree (because everyone who isn't a Christian themselves is a godslaying sociopath, of course).
(3) The plot itself favors the heroes, leaving the villains in a position in which they themselves would be obviously better off abandoning their villainy, begging the question of what their motives were to begin with. (There is also a corollary, in that the hero - the person whom the audience is meant to support - is always the protagonist - the person through whom the audience experiences the story. There is a common root here, in which the author feels that the audience must give all of their sympathy to the hero without allowing any to the villain, which would happen naturally if the villain was allowed to provide a point of view.)

Though they are thankfully anything but universal, these seem to be widespread enough for commentary. (I would dearly love to know that I am wrong about this, so by all means, bring forth counterarguments and counterexamples!)

I can imagine two main defenses of this list - that these are hardly unique to Christian fiction, and more significantly, that these are necessary elements of any story that claims to have a basis in Christianity. My response to the first is that, beyond being a mere tu quoque, the stories that succumb to these patterns are usually propaganda, allegory, or children's stories, anything but great literature. "Secular" stories - a misnomer that deserves a post of its own - that possess these same characteristics but still win acclaim do so in spite of these properties, not because of them. These intentions have a place - in basic education and in parables, for physical and spiritual children - but as Christians we have a calling to make art that is more than just a reflection of ourselves and our culture. As in any other work, we are to glorify God, which means striving for anything merely mediocre is unacceptable! "Imitators of God", "Imago Dei", "sub-creators" all speak to human creativity as a divine attribute of the Holy Spirit, and anyone called to create should likewise be ready to say of their work that it is good.

This, of course, is what makes the second argument so potent.
Mustn't any work calling itself Christian art either uphold or permit Christian ethics or worldview, in the plot, the world, the story created?? Mustn't we do our best to affirm and communicate whatever is true, good, noble? Doesn't this place utmost importance on (1) absolute distinctions between good and evil, (2) clear lines between right and wrong, and (3) heroes like Christ and villains like Satan?

Yes! Yes! and NO, NO, NOOOOO!

Fiction fits in an awkward space between that which we hold to be true, and that which we believe to be false. It is unreal in that none of it ever has taken place, or (as you walk along the genre pier towards speculative fictions and fantasies) ever could have taken place; but it is nevertheless true in that the best fiction is internally sound, containing people who act and think like people, concepts and ideas that are comprehensible, events that cause and effect one another as events we experience actually do. The author writes his story with both absolute knowledge and power over its events, godlike in omniscience and omnipotence, but the reader is not, nor ought to be, nor can be placed, in the same position. (I imagine this is part of the reason why the first-person and third-person omniscient are considered so difficult to write well.) The reader is brought into the story through one or more of the characters and knows only what the author tells him. The author has privileged him to enter his world almost as a created being, more a ghost than an incarnation, to leave only when he decides this world is not to his liking (either because it does not contain things that interest him, or because it was crudely assembled) or when the author brings his visit to a close.
This means that to be an effective story, the reader must perceive it in the same way as he perceives the world. I affirm that good and evil both exist, while cautioning that if distinguishing between them were easy, or good was always rewarded, no one would ever choose evil. I affirm that reality is impervious to personal preference and that true and false are mutually incompatible, while knowing that only God has absolute certainty about which is which. I affirm that on at least one key point of conflict a hero must be good and a villain must be evil, while begging you to remember both that pure good and sheer evil do not exist in the created world and any work in which these are invoked is an allegory by default!

Finally, I would like to point out once again that universally-lauded literature, Christian or non, does avoid those three tendencies. Consider The Brothers Karamazov, The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, To Kill a Mockingbird, any others that may come to mind. Good literature can sometimes violate these rules within certain limits, such as being directed at a particular audience. True classics, however, do not.

A return to abnormalcy

I seem to know a surprising number of Christians who are fascinated by things most people find repulsive - because they are disgusting, eerie, unusual, horrifying, creepy, what-have-you - and, conversely, a disproportionate number of people I know who enjoy these sorts of things are Christians. This is more than a matter of those being the sorts of people I tend to know, though that's certainly the obvious explanation; rather, when I meet people who like the macabre, as often as not they turn out to be Christian after-the-fact, and when I meet Christians I often eventually discover that they have this fascination.

It's hardly a universally ironclad rule, but it is an interesting recurring pattern. I wonder if there is causality involved somehow in this correlation? It does seem to me that once a person has accepted that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, it's quite difficult to fear anything else.

Worldbuilding Worldview

I like to write stuff.

Actually, strictly speaking, I don't like the actual act of putting words on paper so much as I like coming up with the things that can be turned into words on paper, but that's part of the reason I got this blog in the first place.

Anyway, in either case, this is probably not a huge surprise.

What I was doing recently, while I was writing - or, as the case may be, not writing - that's a well-worn joke by now, I'm sure - was designing a universe. Not from scratch, that's rather beyond me, but starting with our universe and... tweaking things about it. Adding new and interesting particle sets that act in unusual ways, making gravitational fields act perpendicularly to the movement of electrical charges, that sort of thing. But, since none of these worlds are particularly interesting without people in them, I get to worldbuild the people too - and, even more interestingly, how they think. This means some primitive sociology, since to understand how my fictional societies think I need to figure out how normal people think first. Tricky.

The modern world operates on what might simplistically be termed the scientific method - we try different approaches and use the ones that seem to work. Why is that, exactly? Well... we've tried it before, and it seemed to work, so we keep using it.

That's very intuitive, yes?

That's when it occurred to me that this is rather similar to the charge thrown at various religions by ardent scientific humanists - you know the one, that "you only believe that book because it tells you to!" This, in turn, led me to wonder what other kinds of worldviews I can self-justify in this way. Here's my list...

(*NOTE: This is a thinking exercise more than anything else, so it's okay if I'm reductive to absurd lengths.)

- Scientific: Try everything and keep what works. We've done this before, and it seems to work.
- Post-modern: We took a poll among everybody, and we all agreed that we're mostly sane and have an accurate perception of reality. So if we ask each other, we've got a good chance of getting the right answer.
- Separatist: No need to bring in other people. I'M more usually right than wrong. Right? Right.
- Authoritarian: This guy here is really smart/enlightened/powerful/inspired, and he's right most of the time, which indicates a strong connection with the truth. So when he says we can trust him, it makes sense to believe him.
- Intuitive: My very existence can be described as "I am true". I have this in common with everything else that's true, a connection I should notice. The things I know best are those which are most familiar to me, so the things that feel most familiar are most likely to be true - actual familiarity as well as gut instincts, intuitions, and feelings of deja vu. It gets trickier if things don't seem familiar, so I should keep finding more information until it does connect with something familiar.
- Gnostic: Everything I encounter, true or false, has in common that I have encountered it, and is therefore connected to everything else I've encountered. By exploring this inner existence and finding what is true about myself, and following the connections from myself to the world, I can determine truths about the world. Deep inside, you know I'm right.

What this exercise is demonstrating to me, more than anything else, is the importance of paying attention, not to where your theory is right, but to where it is wrong. You can prove anything you like; but you can't disprove the truth, and if you succeed you obviously did something wrong.

Test Yourself

Please choose the best answer for each question.

Name:
Quest:
Favorite Color:

1) What is nescience?
(a) Orange
(b) True
(c) False
(d) All of the above
(e) I don't know

2) What is veracity?
(a) Silver
(b) True
(c) False
(d) All of the above
(e) I don't know

3) What is your favorite color?
(a) Blue
(b) True
(c) False
(d) All of the above
(e) None of the above

4) What is melange?
(a) Grey
(b) True
(c) False
(d) All of the above
(e) None of the above

5) What is contradictory?
(a) Vermilion
(b) True
(c) False
(d) All of the above
(e) None of the above

6) What is the capital of Assyria?
(a) Ashur
(b) Calah
(c) Khorsabad
(d) Nineveh
(e) None of the above

7) What is the maximum airborne velocity of an unladen swallow?
(a) 1 m/s
(b) 5 m/s
(c) 11 m/s
(d) 200 m/s
(e) 42

8) Is this a question where one of the possible answers goes "blam"?
(a) No.
(b) BLAM
(c) BLAM
(d) BLAM
(e) Actually, I think several of your possible answer make that noise.

9) Cake. - True/False

10) Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! - True/False

11) This sentence no verb. - True/False

12) Think of a number, any number.

13) Where's Waldo?

14) Fill in the blank: __________

It's not Thursday yet, but this is just a tech update

I've added the feedback bar thing. I had wanted a nice number of dichotomies so you could tell me that your impressions are that what I write is kind or cruel, true or false, beautiful or ugly, confusing or clear, justified or unjustified.

Unfortunately, I can fit all those into the little box but they'll only put up a few anyway. Foul technology, curse your surprising but inevitable betrayal!

So now there's just three options - good if you think I was persuasive, bad if you think I was unkind, and ugly if it's just too confusing to tell what just happened. (I expect this one to be quite popular.)

Also, I've gone back and added a bunch of links into Socrates Meets Malacoda for explaining what I had in mind with all the various philosophy/literary/science-y geeky references I made - maybe this will clear things up a bit?

I am being lax

At this rate, I might as well change my name to "Once a Month".

Not done explaining Godel yet, sorry. But I highly encourage you to go check out this essay, as it is pretty awesome.