Faerie as Other

I’ve been thinking recently, for assorted reasons, about what I don’t like about Dostoevsky as an author. In doing so, I think, I have come up with a good explanation of what the word “faerie” means. So here goes my attempt to explain it.

One of my problems with Dostoevsky is how he completely ignores the physical world. Yes, he has characters interact with the world, the two main ways being that people have different amounts of money and people get diseases. But their interactions with the world are always anthropocentric; the world has no value in and of itself, as something inhuman. A Dostoesvky book consists almost entirely of people sitting around having conversations with one another. They don’t go out and interact with the world.

Contrast this with a few of my favorite authors – Herman Melville, G.M. Hopkins, J.R.R. Tolkien. They are very different in style and content, but one commonality is that all of them treat the physical world in and of itself as something interesting. So what is interesting about the physical world, and why ought authors to care about it?

I’m going to shift radically for a moment here and talk about people. There is one way to look at the world that separates the “I” from all others; the “I” is the subject, the perceiver, while everyone else is from this view just an object in the world. This way of looking at things doens’t allow us to recognize other people at all; it just allows us to recognize external things.

Another way of seeing people is socially; “obviously” we are all people, we can talk to each other, interact with each other morally, etc. All good so far, right?

But then there’s the physical world, nature – the thing that is part of the “object” of the subject-object way of looking at the world, but is not part of the “society” in the societal way of looking at the world. It is other – neither way we look at the world allows us to consider it similar to the “I”. But it still exists, and is important – God created the heavens and the earth before he created mankind.

It is this otherness, combined with it being created by God, and thus for a purpose, that is captured in the idea of faerie. We men cannot fully understand nature, individually or collectively, but it exists, and was made by God for a reason, though we cannot grasp the reason or even the nature of its existence.

So in this view of faerie, the idea of Elves, of a race separate from us and natural but also somehow rational, is fey because it echoes this separateness; the other race is like us, but somehow not us, and usually more natural-seeming than we are; Tolkien’s Elves do not have the same gap as is between man and nature. Magic itself is fey because it is physical – it is not a direct emanation from God – but it is incomprehensible; it emphasizes the otherness of nature, even as the wielder controls nature.

Mental Types

Yesterday afternoon/evening I was hanging out with a few friends and we had a really long conversation (~5 hours) about philosophy, theology, literature, psychology… just about everything, really. It was one of the more productive such sessions I’ve had in a while, in terms of bringing together disparate ideas and synthesizing them, as well as coming up with new ways of looking at things; one of the easiest to explain results (though not at all the most important) was this idea of “mental types.”

The basic idea is, there are certain great writers (philosophers, writers of fiction, poets, etc) with whom each individual identifies more than other. So it is an interesting exercise for a person to identify them and then draw what conclusions may be drawn from that list about himself.

This approach has its dangers, of course. We don’t want to say person X is better than person Y for thinking in a certain way, but also, we don’t want to become relativists, saying all ways of looking at the world are equally valid. But, I think, if we realize this danger we have a good chance of avoiding it.

So what writers do I most identify with?

• J.R.R. Tolkien, obviously, though perhaps less so than a few years ago.
• Herman Melville, whose philosophy I disagree with in many ways but whose approach to the world feels very similar to mine.
• Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose poetry resonates with me in a way few others’ does.
• Thomas Aquinas, whose dry, Q/A approach to theology I recognize as flawed, but whose systematic nature is very similar to my own.
• Ludwig Wittgenstein, whom I have not read much of but who I feel like I understand more than really any other modern philosopher.

What do these people have in common? I have a few theories:

• They are interested in the self, and how the self relates to the world. Melville’s Moby-Dick is about, among many other things, how man attributes his own symbols and meaning to the world at large, and attempts to make himself omniscient and omnipotent; Hopkins’ most important poems all deal with both the self taking in all of creation and the self isolated, cut off from nature; and Aquinas and Wittgenstein, given their fields of study, are almost forced to address this question.
• They are interested in the world itself, and do not approach the world purely phenomenologically; they give the world an independent existence, which they examine as interesting in its own right. Tolkien created an entire mythology; Melville spends pages upon pages in Moby-Dick describing whale skeletons and the history of whaling; Hopkins tried to understand the inscape of things by examining them until he almost became them; and Aquinas followed Aristotle in categorizing all of nature.
• They have a  real sense of the divine in nature; as my German teacher told us  the Romantics said, “Natur ist sichtbare Geist, Geist ist unsichtbare Natur.” Tolkien has the concept of faerie, Melville has the Whale as a symbol for God; Hopkins’ entire worldview was based around the idea of sacramentality, and similarly for Aquinas; and Wittgenstein’s one statement about prayer, as I recall, involved a man walking in the woods pounding his walking stick.
• They are fascinated by language, and the power of words, rather than passively using language without examining its nature. Tolkien was a linguist; Hopkins made up his own words and cared immensely about how words could carry meaning; and Wittgenstein said that “there is an entire mythology stored within our language.”

There are also a few writers who, although clearly great, I do not really identify with. The two most important, I think, are

• Plato. Why? Because, I suppose, he is too much an idealist for me; he refuses to deal with the world. He skips straight to the isolated self.
• And Dostoevsky. Why? Because he also refuses to take on the world, dealing only with people and God; his books are about morality and inter-personal relationships, but never about the larger world.

Well then. What does this tell us? If there is any conclusion to be drawn from it, it is that I am a realist; I refuse to allow people to ignore the world, and I identify most with writers who have the same preoccupation with the world itself, rather than ideas.

Life as Inductive

It’s strange how quickly we can form habits. For example, there is a certain apartment in the student apartment complex on campus that I have visited around 50 times this semester; 50 is not that large a number, yet whenever I’m in the vicinity I instinctively gravitate towards it. And I can even still feel the tug of the apartments and dorm rooms I often visited last semester, even though I don’t even know the people who live there now.

These sorts of habits are good evidence, I think, for my idea that life is inductive. What do I mean by that, exactly? It’s hard to explain, but basically, I mean that the mysterious process of sensory experience being translated into thought is one not of distillation, but of induction. We do not just boil down the complexity of everything we see into something manageable; rather, we take a finite set of data and extrapolate general laws that will explain that finite data set.

Look at language. I have read or heard any given word a finite number of times. The data set of the contexts in which I have heard the sound of the word or seen the sight of it is finite. Yet what I understand the word to mean, while based on those experiences, is not reducible to them; moreover, I could show those experiences to someone else who had never heard this particular word before and they might well achieve a different understanding of the word. I take this to mean that my understanding of the word is infinite – unable to be captured within a purely finite universe.

This inductive power, I think, is essentially what we mean when we say that humans are “rational animals,” and say that it is this rationality that makes us spiritual as well as physical. If our ability to conceptualize involves moving from the finite to the infinite, it means we transcend the physical universe through our reason.

Incidentally, I suspect that what I’ve written above is essentially what Thomas Aquinas was getting at with his own discussion of reason as necessarily immaterial. But since language is an attempt to communicate thoughts, which are infinite, through the physical world, which is finite, reading the words on the page is not enough; we still have to move from them to the infinite thought Aquinas meant to communicate. And often we can only do this through a process that superficially resembles mere rephrasing of what we have read.

Spells

“Spell” is one of my favorite words. It relates language and magic; to spell a word is to describe what phonemes it is composed of, to cast a spell is to say a word of power and thus control reality. It also just means “word” or “news,” as in “Gospel” = “Good News,” and its German cognate “Spiele” means, in  addition to everything the word means in English, “play” and “game” -  “Ich spiele Cello,” “Die Baseball-Spiel hat Spaß gemacht.”

This is just one of the reasons that the poem I’m almost certainly going to choose for my “exemplary poem” in Junior Poet (we choose one poem by our poet, memorize it, recite it at the beginning of our panel, then give a reading of it; at that point the professors start asking questions and other poems come into the picture) is “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves,” supposedly the longest sonnet ever written in the English language (there are eight stresses per line).

Earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable, ‘ vaulty, voluminous, … stupendous
Evening strains to be tíme’s vást, ‘ womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night.
Her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west, ‘ her wild hollow hoarlight hung to the height
Waste; her earliest stars, earl-stars, ‘ stárs principal, overbend us,
Fíre-féaturing heaven. For earth ‘ her being has unbound, her dapple is at an end, as-
tray or aswarm, all throughther, in throngs; ‘ self ín self steepèd and páshed—qúite
Disremembering, dísmémbering ‘ áll now. Heart, you round me right
With: Óur évening is over us; óur night ‘ whélms, whélms, ánd will end us.

Only the beak-leaved boughs dragonish ‘ damask the tool-smooth bleak light; black,
Ever so black on it. Óur tale, O óur oracle! ‘ Lét life, wáned, ah lét life wind
Off hér once skéined stained véined variety ‘ upon, áll on twó spools; párt, pen, páck
Now her áll in twó flocks, twó folds—black, white; ‘ right, wrong; reckon but, reck but, mind
But thése two; wáre of a wórld where bút these ‘ twó tell, each off the óther; of a rack
Where, selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless, ‘ thóughts agaínst thoughts ín groans grínd.

I don’t want to give a detailed reading of this poem right now – perhaps in a month or so. But keep it in mind. It’s one of my favorite poems in the English language, and one of the main reasons for that is its incantatory quality – Hopkins said it was meant to be “almost sung” – and howo the word “spelt” is there in the title. What does it mean? That the prophecy of the Apocalypse (this poem is about the end of the world) is there to be read in the Sibyl’s leaves? Or that the prophecy is spelt out, caused, by the fact of it being prophesied? I think both connotations are meant to be present. And that’s what’s great about the word spell – it takes many distinct but related concepts and gives one word to the entire set, so you can use this one word “spell” and evoke an entire backdrop of meaning – “language,” “magic,” “news,” “game,” etc.

Alice and Bob is Married

Several friends of mine are taking Symbolic Logic this semester, and one of them has brought to my attention something somewhat bizarre. His textbook, it seems, treats “and” as if it is never equivocal. Just intuitively, this seems wrong.

Take these two examples: firstly, “The lines A and B are parallel,” secondly, “Alice and Bob are Moroccan.” In normal English, the first example almost always means that the lines A and B are parallel to each other; re-phrased unambiguously, one would say “The lines A and B are parallel to each other.” But in normal English, the second example almost never intends any connection between Alice and Bob, except for their both being Moroccan; it could be re-phrased “Alice is Moroccan and Bob is Moroccan.”

Even worse, though, there are some words that can be taken either way by a reasonable person. Take the sentence “Alice and Bob are married.” Usually this means “Alice and Bob are married (to each other).” But I could imagine a situation where it meant “Alice and Bob are married (to Charlie and Deborah, respectively).” The word “and”, it seems, can be ambiguous even knowing the definitions of all the words in the sentence – while the textbook writer for this Symbolic Logic class wants to claim it is never ambiguous, ever!

It took a few minutes of thinking for me to figure out exactly how to phrase the ambiguity formally, but here it is. “A and B are C” can mean one of two things. Either “A and B are C” = “A&B are C” = “(A is C)&(B is C)”, or “A and B are C” = “{A,B} is C” – the collection of objects {A,B} possesses a quality, namely C. This is what we mean when we say “line A and line B are parallel,” or “Alice and Bob are married (to each other).”

In other words, we use “and” to do two different things – to apply attributes to multiple things at a time (what we do when we mean “A&B are C”), and to associate things into groups, and then talk about the groups (what we do when we mean “{A,B} is C”). And there’s no way to distinguish between the two without context.

There’s an easy way to fix this, of course. Change the grammar so that when we mean “{A,B} is C”, we don’t say “Alice and Bob are married” – we say “Alice and Bob is married.” It makes sense; after all, we don’t mean “Alice is married and Bob is married,” we mean they can be considered as a unit – “Alice and Bob” – and that unit is married. Is. Not are, because it’s one thing. It’s a set containing two elements, but it’s still a single set.

of course, we’ll never actually talk like this. It sounds stupid. “Alice and Bob is married”? But it does eliminate considerable ambiguity. It’s worth thinking about.

Ofermod

We recently read the Battle of Maldon in my Medieval Literature class. It’s essentially a narrative of a battle between heathen Viking invaders and the Christian Englishmen, resulting in the defeat of the English and tribute – “danegeld” – being paid to the Norsemen.

What people find interesting about the poem is the description of the main character. It portrays Beorhtnoth, the English thane, as a courageous, pious man, who is ‘tricked’ by the Danes into letting them cross a bridge, essentially giving up a defensible position and making it inevitable the Danes would win. By ‘tricked’, I mean the Danes asked him if they could cross and he said yes.

The poem is ambiguous as to whether this was a wrong action or not – the word used to describe his character at that point is “ofermod”. There are no other examples of “ofermod” in Old English, so we just don’t know what it means. It is literally “over-courage”, “over-heart”; but does this mean he has too much courage, i.e. is foolhardy, or that he has an impressive amount of courage, a good thing? No one knows. People read it different ways. (Incidentally, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a play, “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son”, about the aftermath of this battle, that addresses the ambiguity in question. It’s good, go read it.)

There’s a similar disagreement about the poem “The Windhover”, by Gerard Manley Hopkins (whom I’m studying for Junior Poet). The word is “buckle”. Does it mean that the thing buckling is collapsing? That it is being bound together, as in buckling a belt? Does it mean “buckle” as in “buckler”, a type of shield? No one knows, and which it is makes a huge difference in how the poem is read.

I’m not sure what to think of ambiguities like that. They are certainly interesting, and make possible multiple interpretations. To that extent, I like them.

But this might be just because I don’t like having a work of literature be too “preachy”, and having ambiguity makes it less preachy – but really, ambiguity only makes it seem less preachy, it doesn’t change the actual meaning of the poem, assuming there is one. After all, it seems like the poet himself knew what the poem ought to have meant, but that we cannot, which is immeasurably frustrating, and implies the poet failed somehow. Especially when which it is doesn’t determine just some nuance of meaning, but how to read the entire poem.

Which is it? Is ambiguity in literature desirable? If so, to what extent? This is a question I haven’t been thinking about for as long as I probably should have been, and I don’t really have an answer formulated yet. I have a gut reaction against books that try to preach a certain moral, and try to avoid doing so in my own stories, but then again most of my favorite books do have messages they’re trying to convey, and I don’t fault them for it. What’s going on here?

What Makes a Good Poem

I’m taking “Junior Poet” right now, and we’re starting off the semester reading a lot of more modern poetry. Particularly, we spent an entire day of class analyzing the poem “Persimmons”, by Li-Young Lee. There was much conversation about how great a poem it was, mostly based on the fact that he uses the poem to talk about the nature of poetry and sexuality in an interesting manner, and tells a somewhat interesting story.

I pretty much disagree with everything the professor had to say about the poem’s worth.

It’s not that I don’t think the poem is about the nature of poetry (it is), or that it doesn’t narrate a somewhat interesting story. It’s that all of those things are irrelevant if the music of the words themselves – the simple cadence of the phrases, regardless of the meaning – aren’t beautiful while still conveying meaning not through words, but just through the sound of the words, and if the inages used aren’t unusually evocative and memorable. If it doesn’t do those things, it seems to me, it’s really just a prose passage with funny line breaks.

But instead, the JPo class seems to go in assuming its a great poem, not looking at the form of the poem much at all. Because there’s really not much there – there’s a few tricky ornaments added, but that’s like having statues and stained-glass-windows propped up in midair without the cathedral holding them up. They fall down.

It’s not that I hate modern and contemporary poetry or don’t understand free verse. T.S. Eliot is an amazing poet who succeeds at what poets have to succeed at, as I outlined a few paragraphs up – Prufrock is actually the poem I was primarily thinking of when writing that. But many poets today seem to have forgotten what poetry is actually about.

Book Review: Watership Down

I apologize for my lack of posting this last week; I’ve been busy securing an apartment to live in this coming semester and buying furniture to put in it. I’ll be doing that for another week, then I move in August 31st and the semester starts. Until then, though, I have a decent amount of free time.

Well. That said, even though I wasn’t posting, I found the time last week to read Watership Down, one of my favorite books from years gone by. The premise: a group of rabbits leave their warren on the basis of a vision of doom one of them had, and they set out trying to make a life for themselves on remote Watership Down. Once there, they realize their group is entirely bucks, no does, and so they try to find a warren that will give some females to them. Instead they find a warren led by the Nazi-esque General Woundwort. Meanwhile, a mythology is being built up of Elahrairah, the rabbit folk hero.

Anyway, I hadn’t touched it in over three years, and decided I needed to revisit it. Verdict: It is, as I remembered, awesome; it’s maybe even better than I remembered it being. (So, if you never have, if you get nothing else out of this post – go read it!)

But there’s an interesting caveat to this endorsement I want to explore. The book’s awesomeness is definitively not because of the characters. I like Hazel, and Fiver, and Blackberry, and Bigwig; General Woundwort is indeed a disturbing villain, for a rabbit; Elahrairah makes a cool folk hero, Lord Frith and Prince Rainbow are both well-done gods, and the Black Rabbit of Inle is awesome in its role as the Grim Reaper. But -

Those characters aren’t why the book is amazing. It’s rather how well the author, Richard Adams, paints the outlines of the rabbits’ world, making up his own “rabbit language” and convincing the reader that it is real (“silflay hraka, u embleer rah!” is left untranslated in the text of the book, but the reader already knows what it means by then, and using it doesn’t break suspension of disbelief at all), showing how differently they think about things (they don’t realize cars are machines; only the most intelligent among them understand floatation), in general presenting rabbitting society as alien and yet compelling.

And probably it’s that very achievement – the establishment of so alien a culture for all the characters to live in – that makes it so the characters are hard to relate to. In the end, Hazel’s a good guy, but he’s just a rabbit, and I could never have a conversation with him, even if we spoke the same language; we’d have nothing to talk about.

And because the lack of compelling characters is a direct result of the nature of the book as semi-anthropomorphic fiction, I doubt Adams could have done any better. It’s a problem with the medium he’s working in.

Epic Metal Playlists

I recently fixed something with my computer so that I can once again scrobble (i.e. submit lists of listened-to tracks to last.fm, which will then give me musical suggestions based on my listening habits). In celebration, I suppose, I put together two playlists on my last.fm account, both of which point out phenomena I find interesting in the music I listen to – the tendency towards really long songs, songs which often tell a story and move from one “movement” to another, and the tendency to use a certain language specific to epic metal, by which I don’t mean singing in foreign languages (though this is seen as well), but rather using certain words and phrases much more often than they appear in ordinary English.

Epic Length Epic Metal – ‘Epic metal bands (i.e. viking, folk, power, symphonic, progressive metal bands) have a tendency to love really long songs. This is a playlist of all of the songs in my library over 8 minutes long. There’s a lot of them; they make up 51/828 songs in my popular music library (6%), and take up 8 hours, 52 minutes of the 66 hours, 23 minutes of music there (13%).’

Language of Epic Metal – ‘There are a certain set of words that appear over and over in the titles of songs I listen to – meaning, songs of the “epic metal” genre (viking, folk, power, symphonic, and progressive metal, to be precise). This isn’t surprising; every subculture develops its own distinct language, with words that carry special significance for its members. This is an exploration of those words. The playlist includes every song I have from these genres that contains in its title one or more of these often-appearing words (defined as appearing in >9 titles). The words: Dark, Dream, Land, Night, Song, Time.’

You probably can’t listen to the playlists on last.fm unless you’re a subscriber, but you can still look at the track listing and compare them with your own music library, if some of your musical tastes overlap with mine.

Monkeys, Typewriters, and Interpretation

It’s a common statement. “Enough monkeys with typewriters, given enough time, could eventually write Hamlet.” The idea being that all human artistic accomplishment, and Creation in general, is essentially just random noise, and inherently meaningless.

Well, firstly, the claim is false… give typewriters to monkeys and they probably won’t even try to type with them, or if they do they’ll just hit the same key over and over and over. It won’t be the string of random letters and symbols needed to “eventually write Hamlet”. And even if they did just write random symbols, the experiment would have to be run for an impossibly long time before they produced anything. If every atom in the universe were a typewriter spewing out a random character every second, it would take longer than the universe has been around to write just a sonnet of Shakespeare’s, let alone Hamlet, which is much longer.

Not that that proves much; I never saw the monkey analogy as a very good one for random chance bringing about human art in the first place.

The issue isn’t whether monkeys could really write Shakespeare. Rather, we are meant to wonder why, if Hamlet is a finitely long work that can be converted into a number (take a text file with the content of Hamlet in it; that file is just a string of 1s and 0s, i.e. a really long number), call it H, that a random number generator would eventually spew out if it ran for long enough, why should we look at it as in any way transcendent? Why should we look at human thought as in any sense transcendent if everything it produces is finite?

The answer, I think, is that even if the random number H could be generated by a random number generator, it can’t be interpreted by the random number generator. There needs to be someone out there who picks out H from the other random numbers our RNG spews out, says “this is Hamlet”, reads it, and gets from it what there is to be gotten from the play Hamlet. That requires language, something that doesn’t seem to have a very good finite representation. Without a way of translating those 1s and 0s not just into letters (which can be done with a computer program), but into words, H is no more meaningful than H*1.1 or H*0.9.

I think it’s interesting that H, as a number, is meaningless in and of itself. The computer needs pre-written rules for how to translate H into a series of letters and symbols. If it has a dictionary installed it could then try (if it were told to) to analyze the strings of letters it sees and paraphrase the entire thing. But the computer would never look at the strings of letters and see words, by which I mean things that have meanings that we can try to approximate with other words, but cannot define exactly.

It seems to me that language is really what separates humans from computers, RNGs, or monkeys with typewriters – those all manipulate symbols, but humans actually use words, language. So the fact that humans speak a language, rather than just manipulate symbols, is what makes the number H not equivalent to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. They are the same quantitatively, but not qualitatively.