Difference and Indifference

I’ve become aware of an interesting phenomenon over the past month or so regarding the reading of argumentative non-fiction. It’s probably because of the JPo project, in which we read a bunch of literary criticism about our focal poet, but I’ve experienced it regarding other subjects as well, including philosophy and politics.

What I’m talking about without naming is essentially an experience that I’ve had multiple times, in different forms: I read a book. I disagree with the argument of the book, and “officially” declare that to be my response to the book. I go about my life. Days, weeks, or months later, I encounter something related in some way to the argument the book made. I then approach the new situation in the light of the book I previously read, whether explicitly or implicitly, and treat it as providing me a unique insight into the new situation, regardless of the fact that I completely disagree with the book when I originally read it.

I have a theory as to why this happens. Essentially, I think, when I read something, I’ve invested several hours, perhaps days, into reading and thinking about what it is I’ve read; that time spent has created an emotional bond with the material. I may disagree with what it says, but I disagree with it; I don’t just vaguely not like that way of approaching the subject, I have grappled with a particular person’s argument and formed an emotional bond with it – perhaps negative, but still, an emotional.

After writing that last sentence, it occured to me that this seems related to something I’ve written before, I don’t remember where, about interpersonal relationships. To dislike someone is still to have an emotional connection to someone. To actively dislike someone – rather than simply ignoring them – is to have a closer bond with someone than to just vaguely not mind their being around.

Also, I think, a strong enmity is more likely to turn into a strong friendship than into nothing at all; and, in fact, I think it is more likely to turn into a strong friendship than is a weak friendship, by which I mean one where the two people are not good friends not because they don’t know each other well, but because they just don’t particularly like each other, even if they don’t particularly dislike each other. The former case, after all, is just one of changing the type of emotion felt; the latter is one of changing the intensity of emotion, a more difficult proposition.

The Paradox of Martyrdom

The concept of martyrdom is, on its surface, a simple one. A martyr is someone who is willing to die for their faith; martyrs are generally considered to be saints – meaning they go to heaven – and deserving of a special respect, since they were willing to die for their faith.

But the motives for martyrdom become confused. A martyr is someone who is willing to die for their faith – someone who is willing to endure something bad, death, because their faith is so strong. But martyrdom itself is considered good, and martyrs are rewarded with a special place in Heaven, and so quickly you have many people who desire martyrdom – not who are willing to be martyred for their faith, but who actively desire to be martyred.

These people’s faith would have to be strong, otherwise they wouldn’t believe that if they martyr themselves they will go to Heaven – but because they believe martyrdom is good, they no longer look at it as “willing to endure something bad because their faith is so strong” – they are willing to endure death, which is no longer considered that bad anyway because they will go to Heaven when they die, so that they can be a martyr.

This attitude has always been around, and it has generally been seen as severely flawed. There are references to it as early as the Martyrdom of Polycarp, a document from the second century AD, which is careful to point out that Polycarp didn’t have this attitude – he tried to hide from the people looking for him, rather than actively seeking out capture and martyrdom.

But something always strikes me as odd about these claims that specific saints did not seek out martyrdom. They were men of deep faith; they would have believed that, if they died a martyr, they would go to Heaven; why would they not seek it out? Because to do so is to seek out Heaven, rather than demonstrate faith in God, and so it makes you not a martyr at all. And so, whenever I read about how a given saint tried to avoid capture and execution, it feels like the saint was evading capture only reluctantly; they actually wanted to be captured, to be martyred, but felt that they had to avoid it because, counterintuitively, avoiding martyrdom was a better way of proving their love of God than being martyred.

I sometimes thing the reason counterintuitive situations like this arise in Christianity is that Christians are so focused on Heaven as where you go when you die, and how you are rewarded in the afterlife for your actions in this life. If there were no Heaven, after all, it would be silly to martyr yourself in order to get there – you would only allow yourself to be martyred because you would rather die – enter oblivion – than renounce God. Martyrdom would still be considered heroic, but it would be a kind of futile heroism, and not one that anyone would ever seek out.

I don’t think we should stop believing in Heaven just because it makes the issue of martyrdom confusing, of course. But I do think we might be better off if we stopped saying that “if you’re good, when you die you’ll to Heaven”, and start emphasizing instead that “if you love God, when you die you’ll be with God” – shifting the focus of hope from faith, the least of the theological virtues, to love, the greatest.

One Way of Avoiding the Issue

I  recently read The Anubis Gates, a sci-fi/fantasy/time-travel book by Tim Powers involving an English professor specializing in Romantic poets being brought as a tour guide to 1810 to listen to a lecture by Samuel Taylor Coleridge who gets stuck there (err, then).

There’s a lot of stuff I could say about this book, but what I want to focus on is, the romantic (lower-case “r”) element of it. One thing I’ve noticed in the various Powers books I’ve read (Declare, Three Days to Never, The Stress of Her Regard) is that Powers isn’t particularly good at doing believable female characters or believable love stories. He gets around this in The Anubis Gates by… well, basically never having the two characters who are fated to get married (time travel, remember?) interact, or have any romantic tension, and end the book by bringing them together and implying that yes, they do fall in love and get married.

This all reminds me in some ways of Aragorn and Arwen in the Lord of the Rings – that romance is always in the background, not the foreground. It’s one way of avoiding having to portray romantic love convincingly: just say it happens off-stage.

I think it works in LotR, though, and not in The Anubis Gates. Why? I think it’s because in LotR, it’s in the background because it has to be – it’s not a particularly important part of the plot, they’re already in love when the story starts, and so it doesn’t feel like cheating when we see them get married without seeing their falling in love. (And we do see that, kinda, in the appendices.) Also, Arwen isn’t that major a character, so Aragorn is in love with someone who’s already off-stage; it’s OK to have the romance be off-stage as well.

But in The Anubis Gates, it is a major part of the plot, is talked about over and over, and is the only reason at all for one of the main character’s presence (the girl really isn’t important except because she eventually marries the guy, but she’s present throughout the book). So the two characters involved are on-stage, but the romance itself is off-stage. And not that plausible. It’s like he set up the romance, then decided it would be too hard to write it actually happening, so he didn’t try.

Ah well. I guess the lesson is, be careful about when and how you portray romances in a story. If it’s not done carefully it can be an irritating distraction, not an addition to the story.

Polite Dishonesty

I’ve noticed something interesting about people recently. It seems obvious, once you think about it, but it’s worth thinking consciously about, even if it is obvious. That thing is: people are more comfortable being dishonest when it means they’re being polite, even when the person they’re talking to is begging them to be honest.

I’ll give an example to show what I mean: A friend of mine recently got the DVDs of a BBC Sherlock Holmes series. We had been planning to hang out on a certain night, and he proposed to me and one other person that we should watch an episode of this show that night while hanging out. Neither of us thought this was a good idea, but… we didn’t say so. We said stuff like, “well, maybe”, “I don’t know”, “perhaps”, etc. Even when the friend said something (I don’t remember exactly what) along the lines of “really, guys, tell me the truth, I don’t care either way”, we continued to hedge, instead of just saying “no, not tonight”.

Now, both me and this particular friend are not very polite people, in fact we the opposite, but the fact that someone was asking us a direct question to which we knew what answer he wanted was enough to make us really hesitant to answer it contrary to his desires. What this says about humanity is obvious. Put simply, we don’t want to disappoint people.

Now for what this too-obvious-to-state-clearly fact, stated clearly, reveals: It’s cruel and usually fruitless to ask people their “honest opinion” when it is clear what answer you want. Cruel, because it puts them in an uncomfortable situation – if the answer was “yes” (say it’s a y/n question and “yes” is the answer you wanted), they would have said something like that anyway, and if it was “no”, it forces them to find a way to say it so that it won’t upset you while still being “honest”. Fruitless, because if they answer “yes”, you’ll have no way of knowing they’re actually being honest, and if they answer “no”, well, the fact that you were asking for an “honest opinion” means you suspected their answer was “no” in the first place, and so you were probably going to act as if the answer was “no” regardless.

The reason we make such demands for honesty, I think, is that we have a desire for omniscience. In certain situations, we tell ourselves we would rather know the answer, even if it’s “no” when we want “yes”, than go forward with our lives without knowing. The problem is merely demanding certainty does not provide it for us, and we have to live our lives anyway.

Now, the DVD-watching example was a fairly trivial one, but I’m sure you can think of more serious ones. They’ll probably have to do with romantic entanglements of some kind or another. Those are one of the things people take most seriously in their lives and demand the most certainty about, even though those are the very situations where it is most impossible, I suspect, to have that certainty; at least, certainty is possible, but if you’re in a situation where you feel the need to demand it, it’s probably not possible in that situation.

The Goddess

We recently read Shakespeare’s play Othello in class. Now, I had already heard something about the play, and knew the basic plot, but I did not really expect to find the play as powerful as it was… and, strangely, it was not the character of Iago (who is considered the most interesting part of the play) that caught my attention, but rather the character of Desdemona. So I’m going to try to explain why this is.

Now, Desdemona is essentially a Virtue figure, in contrast with Iago the Vice figure (the entire play being based structurally on medieval morality plays, with Othello in the middle of these two forces). But, this is not a morality play. All of the characters in it are human, not allegories, I should hope – otherwise, why the hell are we even reading this play rather than just reading Mankind? And indeed, Desdemona is not purely virtuous – she definitely screwed up in eloping with Othello, for example.

But what’s interesting about Desdemona is how all of the men in the play interact with her (except Iago, who is a different story altogether). Even if she is human, none of them view her as such – they all see her basically as a goddess, someone to be worshiped because she is amazingly virtuous, beautiful, etc etc. And of course all the guys in the play seem to be in love with her because of this (Roderigo, Michael Cassio, Othello obviously…). And Othello is finally brought to kill Desdemona by Iago suggesting that she is not, actually, perfect, and is actually cheating on him.

So, we have an extremely virtuous woman, who is nonetheless human. How do we know she is human, not a goddess? Because we examined her faults and concluded she had them. Othello was under the delusion that she was a goddess as well, and was finally disabused of that notion – and brought to hate her – by examining her faults and concluding she had them. Drawing a loose connection between these two, it seems to me that, Othello is suggesting something like this: “When you are in love with someone in this disorderly worshipful way, the only way to stop worshiping them is to decide that they are not perfect – which will result in you not loving them at all”.

That’s a kind of disturbing thought. It means there is, really, no connection at all between true love and the kind of infatuation Othello is engaged in…

Book Review: Martin the Warrior

Over Spring Break (15th till the 25th), among other things, I plan to read several books – Phantastes (by George MacDonald), the Poetic Eddas (a collection of Old Norse poetry – translated, of course, I don’t know Old Norse), and (yet another) book about Tolkien. This in addition to my assigned reading for school of two books of Paradise Lost and one book of the Nicomachean Ethics, and to all of the other stuff I plan on accomplishing this week. I should be rather busy.

So, of course, as soon as I got home Friday night I immediately decided to pick up another book. It was Martin the Warrior, by Brian Jacques – one of the Redwall series. A children’s book, but one of my favorite, and I had been talking a few weeks ago about Redwall with some people, so I decided to re-read it. It only took five hours or so, if that.

Now, the books undoubtedly have their flaws. As this xkcd strip points out, the morality is not particularly complex (bad guy bad! good guy good! why? uh…). The writing isn’t brilliant. As the series went on (it’s reached eighteen books now, I think), it got rather repetitive – the same plots recycled over and over. But Martin the Warrior was one of the better Redwall books – along with the original Redwall, Mossflower, Outcast of Redwall, and Mattimeo (or so I’ve heard – I’m not a big fan of Mattimeo, myself, but it’s certainly better than, say, The Long Patrol), and perhaps a few others.

There are a few reasons to like it. For one, it has (somewhat strong, as a friend of mine pointed out) echoes of the Iliad, especially with how Felldoh, mimicking Patroclus, goes out to fight Badrang, dies through treachery, and is avenged by Martin. I also like how the book raises the question of what it is to be a warrior, and whether it is good to be one. It actually does it in a surprisingly well-thought-out way. Finally, and related to both of these, I like how Jacques is (at least in this book) not afraid to let major characters die, in tragic ways.

First of all, Felldoh dies – perhaps slightly predictable, since Jacques often has the most bloodwrath-ful warriors (mostly badgers) perish in battle. But this time, his death is not in sacrifice to save the main character. Really, his death seriously harms the efforts of the good guys. He starts the battle too early by charging up and attacking Badrang alone, which forces his friends to chase after him and try to save them, but then they get caught by the much larger bad guy army. You can interpret him as being redeemed in the end by taking so many bad guys with him before he dies – but, in the end, is he really? I don’t know. Jacques doesn’t usually leave moral ambiguities like this unanswered. I thank him for leaving this one open.

Then, unexpectedly, Rose dies. The first time I read it, I didn’t realize immediately that she was dead – she is killed by Badrang almost in passing. He’s trying to escape, he sees the hedgehog, who is curled up in his way; he pokes at the hedgehog with the sword. Then he runs past him, sees the mole, who tries to hit him with a ladle; he pushes the mole out of the way. Then this mousemaid runs up and tries to stop him; he graps the mousemaid and throws her against a wall. Then the duel between him and Martin begins. Oh, and by the way, the mousemaid died from hitting her head like that. Martin doesn’t even notice until after he defeats Badrang, but the mousemaid he swore to protect – who he was in love with – was killed. He failed, and now his victory has been made bitter.

This was much more emotionally powerful, I thought and think, than any other death in the Redwall series. Warriors in the series often die in battle – but they die as heroes, taking down enemies, and their deaths accomplish something. Rose’s death just seems so pointless and wasteful. And the emotional connection between Rose and Martin actually seemed real, so it felt like Martin actually lost something when she died. Jacques has tried to do stuff like that in a few different books – The Bellmaker springs to mind, where one of the pair of buddies whose names I can’t remember dies and the other lives and ends up being the one telling the story – but it usually seems forced. Here it worked.

And it underscores something that I think is crucial to understanding good literature (literature about war – any kind of war, so long as it might involve death – especially). People have to die, and the reader has to care about their death. In all of my favorite books that involve some sort of armed struggle, major characters die, and those deaths are a large part of what make me like the books – even if the fact that, in the sub-created world, they are dead, deeply saddens me. Piccadilly from the Deptford Mice trilogy, Gollum and Frodo (who didn’t die, but suffered a truly horrible fate, which I think makes any catalog of tragic endings for individual characters in the midst of happy endings overall) from the Lord of the Rings, a whole host of characters from the Silmarillion… their deaths improve the books they are in. Even Dumbledore from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I have great problems with the Harry Potter series, but one thing J.K. Rowling did right was let Dumbledore die. (I wish she had had the guts to have someone important die in the seventh book – a few people died, sure, but none major. I suppose some people cared deeply about Lupin and Mad-Eye Moody, but I never did, really. Part of that, I’m sure, has to do with how the books completely failed to make any emotional connection with me. Anyway, this would be another essay entirely, so I’ll stop now.)

Imagine a Martin the Warrior without Rose dying, or a Lord of the Rings without Gollum dying or Frodo going off into the West, or a Romeo and Juliet with the couple living happily ever after. This may seem somewhat of a stretch, but I think they would be like a Resurrection without a Crucifixion. Don’t think this comparison blasphemous – the life of Christ is, as Tolkien said, the one true myth that other myths (and stories in general, I would add) all echo, to one degree or another.

I’ll end with a quote from the final chapter of the Silmarillion – after the Valar have returned, defeated Morgoth, and saved what was still left to be saved. In other words, after the happy ending. As happy as it could be, given the circumstances.

Here ends The Valaquenta. If it has passed from the high and beautiful to darkness and ruin, that was of old the fate of Arda Marred; and if any change shall come and the Marring be amended, Manwë and Varda may know; but they have not revealed it, and it is not declared in the dooms of Mandos.

Love is the Only Truth (3/4)

Then there’s Kamelot, an American band led by Roy Khan on vocals and Thomas Youngblood on guitar, with the two of them co-writing the songs. (I’ll mention right off the bat that those two names are pretty awesome. Roy Khan’s actual name is Roy Khantatat, and Thomas Youngblood is the guy’s real name. I think that’s amazing, since those names seem like perfect power metal musician pseudonyms.)

Kamelot is in medium much more like Blind Guardian than Rhapsody of Fire. This isn’t surprising – I doubt anyone else could pull off what Rhapsody of Fire does. It’s just too weird. Most epic metal groups, Kamelot included, are better off with albums in which different tracks are about different things (though all of them epic), with a concept album or two thrown into the mix – but no concept albums so engrossed in their conception that they forget they’re albums at all.

I have four of Kamelot’s albums – Karma, Epica, The Black Halo, and Ghost Opera. Karma is roughly analogous to Blind Guardian’s earlier work, in that it is fairly standard power metal (and quite good power metal at that). Epica and The Black Halo are, taken together, roughly analogous to Nightfall in Middle-Earth; they’re concept albums loosely translating the story of Faust. Ghost Opera is roughly analogous to A Night at the Opera, with the basic idea being “these are various stories you would see if you went to the opera-house one night”.

Interestingly, both have tracks centered on the story of Pontius Pilate (“Up Through the Ashes” and “Sadly Sings Destiny”, respectively). I also wonder about the beliefs of the member of both of these bands – it seems to me Kamelot is inspired greatly by Catholicism, and I think at least one of them was probably raised Catholic, but they seem to have a mixed view of the Church. Blind Guardian is similar. I’m not sure what to make of that, but it’s certainly more interesting than Avantasia’s blatant anti-Catholicism.

Anyway… despite these similarities, Kamelot’s work is not analagous to Blind Guardian’s in content. They never talk about mythopoeia directly, except in their most recent album Ghost Opera, and even there the idea is only implied. Blind Guardian might be best termed an “artist metal” band, in that they deal with artistry per se, and Rhapsody of Fire could be called a “myth metal” band, in that they don’t just talk about making myths, they do make myths, but Kamelot is probably best called a “philosophy metal” band.

Let’s start with Karma. The first track (with lyrics – “Regalis Apertura” is instrumental only), “Forever”, is about a guy wondering what has happened to his dead lover, and whether they will be reunited once he dies as well. “Wings of Despair” has to do with, well, despair, at the idea that everything is predestined. “The Spell” laments that the modern world is too scientific and isn’t magical enough (at least that’s my take on the lyrics). “Don’t You Cry” is a tribute to Thomas Youngblood’s deceased father, talking about how father and son are still connected. “Karma” has an evil king realizing he has lived an evil life, and wishing he could trade his karma with someone else. “The Light I Shine On You” – well, I don’t really understand it, but it seems to be about the power lovers have over each other. “Temples of Gold”, well, a simple love ballad. Then right back to the philosophy with “Across the Highlands” claiming that immortality would be torture, that the narrator “is dead if life itself is condemnation”. The final three tracks are the Elizabeth Bathory series, about the historical Hungarian countess who bathed in the blood of virgins because she believed it would give her eternal youth.

Ghost Opera is quite similar. “Rule the World”? Man’s fear of the Other. “Ghost Opera”? Perseverance through hardship, or something like that. “The Human Stain”? Life itself is perhaps an evil. “Bluecher”? The fate of love when facing death on the battlefield. “Love You to Death”? Same thing, sans the battlefield. “Up Through the Ashes”? Whether or not Jesus was the Christ. “Mourning Star”? War and the fear of death inspiring belief in God. “Silence of the Darkness”? Similar to “Rule the World”. “Anthem”? “What’s the miracle, if life itself is not? /Who am I to praise it’s worth / With a hymn?” Finally, “Edenecho” is about the despair felt at romantic love – destroyed.

So it seems to me that Kamelot has two main interests – the meaning of romantic love and death/afterlife/immortality. These seem to be the predominant themes in Karma and Ghost Opera, anyway.

Now let’s take a look at Epica and The Black Halo. First, note that they chose the legend of Doctor Faustus for their concept double-album. Like Blind Guardian’s choice of the Silmarillion for Nightfall in Middle-Earth, this tells quite a lot about how to view the two albums. The story of Faust, especially as Goethe tells it, is one of love versus pleasure versus eternal salvation. (If you don’t know the basic plot, you should look into it – it’s a fascinating story, and several great works of art have been inspired by it.)

All this is well and good, but… now that we know what Kamelot’s questions are, we should ask – what are their answers? The entirety of the Faust sequence is Faust searching for these answers, but in the final few tracks – “Nothing Ever Dies”, “Memento Mori”, and “Serenade” – we see what he arrives at. I think that Faust’s answers are ones Kamelot would agree with, though of course I can’t be sure.

In Nothing Ever Dies, Faust proclaims that

Love is the only truth
Pure as the well of youth
Until it breaks your heart

He follows this up with

And the final winter comes to us all
Life is treacherous
But you’re not the only who must pretend

We’re a second in time
We’re the last in the line
Of the prey that walks the earth
Good and evil combined

I am the god in my own history
The master of the game
I may believe if she would come to me
And whisper out my name

So – man is doomed to die, a beast, and yet a god, and he achieves this godhood through love. I find it fascinating that “love is the only truth”. This seems similar to Rhapsody of Fire’s emphasis on “pure love and great emotion”, but it is much stronger. Love is the only truth? And I ask – what is love? Romantic love? Since in the next song Faust talks about how “she (Helena) [will] come to me / and whisper out my name”, I think that is what he means.

Interestingly, Kamelot seems to place romantic love in opposition to sexual desire. Kamelot’s idea of love seems to be quite spiritual and ethereal. I like that in many ways, but I wonder if they don’t tend too much towards that extreme – after all, humans are physical, and the purpose of romantic love is in some sense procreation.

Onwards and upwards. The final track, Serenade, isn’t part of the Faust saga per se. It seems to be meant as a summation of the ideas discussed in the preceding two-dozen-or-so tracks. The chorus goes,

So bow down with me
Where summer fades into fall
And leave your hatchets of hate
Bow down with me
And sing the saddest of all
The song we all serenade

This saddest song that “we all serenade” is apparently the fact that, as humans, we are doomed to death. The idea seems to be that we ought not to fight each other, because death will come for us all anyway – instead, we ought to love. It sounds cliche, but it is a noble sentiment nonetheless.

I find it interesting that in the track “III Ways to Epica”, from Epica, Faust says that

Maybe God is the melody
We all serenade

Kamelot seems to be suggesting either that God is death, or that God is love – two very different ideas. It seems that death and love are deeply, perhaps irreversibly intertwined in Kamelot’s philosophy; perhaps the ambiguity is intentional.