Preparation By Contrast

What goes Up must come Down

Relativity

Nothing in man’s life is absolute. Absolute zero is a never-reached theoretical state of cold. Absolute black, the total absence of photons, is also only reached in the imagination, as is absolute white.

This is also true in art and tales. Cold is less warm, hot is less cold. Black is more dark and white is more light. All things exist in relation to those things that are nearby. We judge if a thing is cold, hot, black, or white by comparing it to the other things next to it. This is the artist’s principle of relativity.

A light thing seems more white when it lies next to something dark, which then seems more black.

In tales, ‘next to’ means: ‘before or after.’

Ups ’n’ Downs

Therefore a wise talesman gives his hero a rare victory just before he meets a crushing defeat. And he shows us how the hero loses his last hope just before he turns to his final victory. And he tells us how all hope of love is lost, just before love comes back.

Before each great and powerful scene where he would have us feel the most intensely, the talesman will make us lie in the bed of the opposite feelings. This is what my teacher, Frank Daniel, called ‘preparation by contrast.’

For us in the audience, we find this trick to be the rare one that works best when we can see through it. When we see the soldiers take time out in the midst of a campaign to chase a butterfly, doze in the sun, and feel at peace, we know all too well, with a gnawing sense of dread, that at the next moment a bullet or shell may come whistling in with death. And on the far end from this, when we see the hero has lost his last hope and fears that he stares into the maw of total defeat, we can enjoy the secret hope that he is wrong, and that this is not to be the end.

In Life Too

This rule seems to hold in life as well. For when we look back at our past (as we have shaped it in our memories) it does seem as though it ‘was darkest ere the dawn.’ Day does follow night, as winter follows summer. But the truth is that our memories are great talesmen in themselves, and these turnabouts are true only in how we see them.

It may be, in truth, that all the laws of talesmanship come, in the end, out of the way our minds reshape the events in our lives. But that’s another tale for another day.

(Composed with pen on paper Thursday 31 January 2008)

Talesmanship

A good tale is good even when the talesman mumbles

Skin & Bones

In this our degraded age, when the Artists have conquered and storytelling lies abandoned in disrepute, we have to make an effort to see through the pretty surface of a tale and judge it by its bones as well.

In written tales, we have to look beneath the apt word, clever phrase, the well-shaped paragraph. In movies, we have to look beneath the appealing stars, pretty photography, spectacular special effects, stirring music and sound design. In stage plays, we have to look beneath the electric acting, our connection with those onstage, the moving speeches. In radio drama, we have to look beneath the great voices and moods our imagination builds off the sound effects and music. In television we have to look beneath the bonds we form with the characters and attractive stars we visit episode after episode. In oral storytelling, we have to look beneath the voice, facial expressions, and performance of the storyteller.

Beneath all these lies the tale itself.

The Tale Itself

The tale itself has no skin. It can thus be expressed in any number of ways or take on any number of skins. It can be stretched out long or squeezed down tight. It can shape itself into a written story, a movie, play, radio drama. All these are but the media that bring the tale to us. All these are but skin and there is beauty in skin, but in the end what appeals most to us in skin is the flesh and bones that lie beneath it, and give the skin its shape.

The Test

The true test for a tale’s quality is to think of it with the least adorned skin we can imagine. Not perhaps a skin ugly or repellant, but rather bland, common, a skin that has no special appeal of its own, so that it does not distract us from the tale that lies beneath. The movie shot by beginners with no budget, acted out by competent but uncharismatic performers. The story written with no clever phrases. The stage play with minimal sets and props, in a bare theater, performed by mediocre actors with no great speeches to deliver.

The art of talesmanship consists not in how the talesman mounts and presents each scene or each part of his scenes. It lies rather in what scenes and parts of scenes he chooses to tell us, in what order he arranges his scenes, and how long he spins them out or condenses them. It lies in what tale he chooses, and whom he chooses as his hero, and in the place and mood from which he looks at the events in his tale. (Does he look back or forward at the events? Does he present them as happy or sad, thrilling or repulsive? Does he consider the end of his tale to tell of some good thing or evil?)

The Paragraph

For any tale we read, or see, or hear, we can sum it up in a few words of our own, at most a few sentences. If we do that, we will begin to know the tale in its boniest sense. This is the first step toward knowing what works best for us in tales, and how to judge talesmen not as poets but as storytellers.

(Composed with pen on paper Wednesday 30 January 2008)

How to Rule Your Life

The Hand guides the Head as much as the Head guides the Hand

Unfree Will

The other day I wrote about Unfree Will. This is the conclusion many neuroscientists have reached, that in many ways our idea of Free Will is an illusion. We do not, it seems, consciously, freely choose the things we do. In most cases it seems we begin to do something and then, a moment afterwards, our conscious brain sees what we are doing and assents to it. Then by an odd alchemy in the brain, this assent is ‘back-dated’ two moments so that it seems to us we decided before we began to act. This has been shown in tests to be the case, and that our idea of conscious choice is no more than an illusion.

‘A man can do what he wants, but he can’t want what he wants.’

It seems that the right hemisphere of our brain, or our ‘unconscious brain’ and the hand choose for us. Our left hemisphere or ‘conscious brain’ only observes. But it can also categorize, interpret, and plan. The right brain lives only in the present moment. The left brain can go into past and future. The left brain can also influence the right brain through their common tongue of dreams. We can dream of a future situation, and in the dream we can rule our dream acts with full free will, not touched by the needs of our bodies. We can go this again and again, until these rehearsals act as guide to the right brain, and it starts to see that ‘in this place and time, this is what I ought to do.’

Another way to gain more control over what we do is to change our surroundings, as I wrote earlier. This is summed up in the example of tying a string on our finger when we want later to remember to do something.

Conundrum

This raises a paradox all the same. How can we choose to tie the string on our finger when we can choose nothing at all?

There is no simple answer I know of, and this whole area of thought is being researched even now. There is much I don’t know about it. But maybe part of the answer is that in our imagination, in dream, hypnotic trance, and meditation, we free our left brain, that part of us that we think of as ‘I’ more than any other single part, from the shackles of the body, the ‘other’ part of us, and we talk to our right brain, the ‘unknown’ part of us. It might be in these states the two brains join as one, and only heed the dictates of the hand indirectly, from a distance as it were. The body after all only responds to what is now about it, and that is the dream we give it when other physical senses are not touched strongly. Through rehearsals and visualizations in these states we can train our hand and our right brain to act as we would choose, as if we did indeed freely rule our own acts at the moment we begin them.

There is another face to mastery, and that is the power to say No. our left brain becomes aware of our action not after it is done, but while it is being done. We see that we have begun to do something, assent to it, affirm it, and believe then this assent came before. But must we give assent? What if instead we said, ‘No, don’t do that — put that away — I didn’t want to do that.’ For so long as we trust that we choose our every act, we condemn ourselves to walk in trance and give over all conscious control. But as soon as we come to see that it is the right brain and the hand that chooses, we gain greater freedom to inhibit our acts and nip them in the bud. Jean-Paul Sartre is said to have claimed that man’s only freedom lies in the power to say No, and this notion agrees with him. And yet this has its limits if the hand’s wish is too strong. Try to stop scratching a persistent, bedeviling itch. You can stop it once, twice, maybe thrice. But if the itch goes on, odds are you won’t be able to keep from scratching it forever. (It has also been noted, by the way, that in denying ourselves one pleasure we weaken our resolve to deny ourselves some other pleasure.)

An Outside Force

When we think of all this, we see we can win at least some rule over our deeds and our lives. But I doubt that most of us can ever win full rule. Only enlightened souls can reach so far. And I think that leaves the rest of us still lacking the last bit of rule that might change our lives to the best, in the way we most fondly hope we might.

For that, we need another’s help.

We need an outside force.

We need someone else, someone who is dedicated to our best goals, with wisdom, who is not touched by our right brains.

I think this is the life coach, and not the psychologist. The psychologist can only work on and through our left brains (though some psychologists are also hypnotherapists, and some act as coaches). but lacking rule over ourselves, we can’t trust that the change in our left brains will show itself in what we do or how we act. The coach, on the other hand, doesn’t care what we feel or think or imagine. He only cares what we do.

If we choose a coach, trust him, and give way to him, we will be more likely to do as he says and not as our right brains want. If he can shame us, so much the better.

Sometimes it is enough to make public what we plan to do. Then even without an official coach, we will feel more pressure to follow our plan, since we know those who will see what we do, and we told them what we planned.

A Physical System

The hand learns best by real experience. Physical reward or punishment teaches it best and most directly. Then it follows that a coach is more effective when he controls us physically — at least so far. This means a system of physical rewards and punishments can help, whether we administer them ourselves, or ask another to do so.

Better Coaching

Our first coach we find inside ourselves. Through plans, intentions, imaginative rehearsals repeated over and over, we guide and shape what the right brain and hand choose to start to do. Through constant watch and use of No, we can stop, often enough, our body carrying through when it starts to break our plans and intent. We can also make our surroundings help us to stick to our plans. And so we can hope to make our will into habit.

Our second coach we find in the people always about us, in those places where we would change our acts. If we tell them openly and often how we want to change how we act, we build pressure on ourselves not to be shamed by failing in front of them. And we can ask for their help to remind us and tell us when they see us fail.

Our third coach and maybe our last hope, is a stranger, whom we take on as master, to tell us what to do. And in the last choice we can grant him the power to punish and reward us along the way.

(Composed with pen on paper Tuesday 29 January 2008)

The Way My Mind Works

Why I write all this

The Head of an Engineer

My father is an engineer. So I can only trust that it was through him that the attitude of an engineer has somehow entered into how I look at things. The ‘attitude of an engineer’ is always wondering How. When an engineer meets a thing that works well, he has to wonder How does it do that? When he meets a thing that works poorly he wonders, How could this work better?

An engineer sees cause and effect, and he sees process. In any process, there is the Agent, the Receiver, and the Effect. The Agent works upon the Receiver in such a way that the Receiver is changed to a certain Effect. If the Agent is conscious, then the Process also holds the Agent’s Intent.

With this attitude I approach talesmanship. The Agent is the talesman, the Receiver is his audience, and the Effect is what the audience learns or how they feel when they hear the tale. The talesman wants his audience to learn a thing or feel a certain way, and that is his Intent.

Pick It Apart

This atitude has been with me a long time whenever I found a tale that particularly enchanted me — almost from the start. But at the very beginning of it all, when I was a young child, I was only content to wonder, and want more. Later my desire for more made me try my hand at telling my own tales. This was the point where I began to wonder How. And from that point on I not only studied the tales that worked well for me, but also those that disappointed me. ‘How could this tale have been told so that I’d like it better?’

In the beginning, I only wanted to please myself, to broaden and deepen the joy I took when I heard a great tale, and add my own great tales to the library of my delights. Afterward (probably in school where they made me look at tales from a wider critical point of view) I began to look at the tales in a more abstract way.

Few Surprise Themselves

There is one joy in a tale that is hard to pull off, and that is surprise. It’s all but impossible for a talesman to surprise himself. (It does happen,and is one of the rarest joys of making a tale for the first time.) This and other thoughts made me look beyond myself, and think about the audience that was not me, the audience in the abstract.

What does the audience want? What delights them even though they don’t want it? What works for them, for all audiences that ever were or will be? What works for them, those particular audiences of some times and places and moods and tastes?

I, Stewpot

The Engineer has a logical mind. His mind sees the branching of axiom to corollary in logical steps. If he knows the principle laws and he can reason, he will know most of the rest of his field; what is left is trial and error. Every conclusion he tests in the real world, sees what happens, compares it to what is law told him to look for, and if need be he then changes his theory and moves on to test some new part.

This is an area of the Engineer’s mind-set, alas or happily, that is not mine. In fact it is the memory of the Engineer that I lack.

My memory is more like a pot of ste. The bits I learn go in and sink in the bubbling broth. They never come out again but in a new shape with a new hue and flavor. Deep in the stew the bits break down and remake themselves. The lend one another color and flavor. What comes out, when I dip in my spoon, is a new blend.

This is good, where it helps me make ‘new’ tales from the stock of all the tales that I have ever heard, guessed, or told. But it is bad when I try to learn these rules that teach of talesmanship and talespinning.

There are times when a talesman needs to learn no rules. He can hear the great talesmen who go before him, and he can make his own tales like theirs. In this way the laws of talesmanship are bodied in the bits and pieces of the tales themselves, and prosper and are renewed. Thus it has been for a hundred thousand years and more, ever since the first talesman back in Africa.

But something happened some six score years back, in Europe. The avant-garde was born, and talesmen began to grow ashamed of their calling. Narrative in its broadest sense broke into two camps. The avant-garde ruled one camp, disdained talesmanship, and espoused Art in its place. Talesmanship was left to the more humble popular side, to pulp tales, children’s stories, to genre, to movies, radio, and television where wide popularity is required to support the high costs of production and distribution.

The scholars joined the Artists. They too pushed talesmanship aside as unworthy. And so today, and for some scores of years, talesmanship has not been taught in the schools of the West, it has not been held up as a goal worth seeking, and the best and most ambitious and talented would-be writers ignored it, condemned it, and neither studied nor learned it.

Today talesmanship is starved of those great minds. It is only the feebler youths, the less ambitious, or those fiercely independent of all their teachers and the leaders of arts in their societies, who uphold it. But they are only humble workers in the field. They do not lead universities and they are not the prominent critics in the most-respected journals. So talesmanship is all but unknown outside these few. And it grows haggard and lean as a result.

So Now

So now I try to teach myself talesmanship. I know I can not keep what I learn clear in my mind, so I write it down. And I publish it here in the hope that some would-be talesmen can gain from what I find, and tell tales that may delight me. Also I publish so that those of us who love a good tale can know better how to judge a good tale from a bad, and why one is strong and another weak. So that we can claim once more the honor of what talesmanship ought to be, and hold our heads as high as those who lie in the camp of Art.

(Composed with pen on paper Monday 28 January 2008)

Backwards Characters

Some characters are seen from end-to-start

Icelandic Tales

In medieval Iceland, sagamen organized and wrote down the tales of the first Icelandic settlers and their families. The sagas span generations, showing how events in the past bear fruit a hundred or two hundred years later. We follow the characters through there whole lives, as children, as youths, and as adults. And in all their lives characters don’t change. A brave man was brave as a youth and a boy. A lying, fear-ridden man was much the same when he was a sniveling 8-year-old.

I have always fancied that what accounts for this consistency is the nature of the great sagas, the ‘true’ sagas that evolved from actual history. Every man in history has his one hour and his one deed. Few men are known for more. And in this deed, he shows us, we suppose, his inner heart, the truth of him.

So when a man was known for a brave a noble defense of his home, though it ended in death, the talesmen bore this fact in mind when they wrote of his birth and boyhood. They could not get rid of the thought of him at his brave end, and so when they told of his playing ball as a boy, they could only see him as brave and noble then.

This made a wonderful consistency in character building in these great tales.

Add to this backward glance a couple of other notions the old Norse believed in:

1. Blood will tell
2. Fate will run its course.

Blood

The Icelanders believed in class. There was, to them, a link between kin and character. There were thralls, and those men were low and base and fear-ridden. There were noble men, and they were brave, handsome, open-handed. This was only a loose link for the old Norse, though: they told of men born of the highest stock who were mean, cringing, thieves and cowards, and the told of poor farmer’s sons who were strong, tall, brave men. But on the whole good men have good sons, weak men have weak sons.

From this we could say that the old Norse thought a man’s nature was fixed from his birth. It came of his blood, and it told in his every deed. The one famous deed in a man’s life proves and shows his nature, and so we can look for that same nature in every deed in his life.

Fate

The old Norse surely dwelled on Fate. What came about, for good or ill, came about because it had to come about. Just as a tree from its seed will grow into branch and leaf from the kind of seed that sprouted it, so the present has grown out of the past, and the nature of a family, community, or nation is told in advance in its first founding.

But Fate told its tale through the nature of things. An evil fate did not force a good man to fall prey to unheard-of fear and craving at his life’s end, but rather the evil fate drew men of constant hearts together into a weave that pitted the best against the best in such a way that there was no way out but baseness, and these great men could not act basely, not even to save themselves.

Building Character

Out of all these joined thoughts, the sagaman built his characters for us not in abstract telling of desires, fears, or inner fancies. They built their characters for us when the told us of concrete deeds the characters did. One, two, three — in several short scenes, usually telling of the man’s boyhood, the sagamen show us how the boy acted, and in each scene the boy acts in much the same way. Out of these scenes we come to know him, and because we know his heart cannot change its nature, we also know what kind of man he’ll be.

True Tales not False

These sagas told of deeds based on historical truths. And these truths were well known by all. The heroes of the great sagas were the famous men in Iceland’s history.

This adds to the joy in hearing of them as boys and youths. We in the audience also know each famous man’s one great, defining deed, and so we take pleasure in seeing him act much the same when he’s a boy out fishing. And we could not trust in a tale that would have us believe that a man who died bravely, meeting his end head-on, could ever have been a base and sniveling child.

And Now?

What then of today’s tales, that are wholly made up, whose basis lies not in any tales we already know? I wonder if any tale is wholly made up, and has no basis in any other tale. But be it so: what can we learn from the way the sagamen build their characters?

I can tell from my own reading of the tales, that though I (no Icelander) did not know the events of the tale when I read it for the first time, and had never heard of these men, even so: I enjoyed seeing the way the characters were built up in small concrete scenes in their boyhood, and the consistency in with they were maintained. There is a frisson of pleasure in foreshadowing, no less, when in the early scenes in Njal’s Saga a man asks his brother about his little girl and how pretty she is. ‘She is fair enough, and many a man will smart for it,’ the brother answers. ‘Still, I wonder how thief’s-eyes came into our family.’ From these few words I know what to anticipate in future scenes of Swanhild’s fatal career and marriages. Or the scenes of quarrelsome Grettir as a boy, bloodying some other lad’s nose in ball-play, because he has to have his way: from this I know he will ever have trouble in his dealings with others, and so long as his strength holds out, he will hold the upper hand. But no man’s strength lasts forever.

(Composed with pen on paper Sunday, 27 January 2008)

Ayn Rand and the Ghostly Hero

The godlike hero has no tale of his own

The Superman Flaw

When Siegel and Shuster created Superman for the comics, he was a lot weaker than he is today. He could leap as far as one-eighth of a mile; he could run as fast as a speeding train (how fast was that in 1938? Eighty kilometers an hour?); and his skin was impervious to anything less than an exploding shell. But in the course of the Second World War (and maybe faced with the competition of Fawcett’s Captain Marvel, Earth’s Mightiest Mortal), Superman’s powers grew greater. He could fly; he could sink a battleship with a single blow; his skin became impervious to anything but kryptonite. And in twenty years Superman could survive in outer space and fly faster than the speed of light and travel through time.

As a result, once the great War ended, Superman could find no antagonist worthy of his mettle. He could overcome the occasional natural catastrophe such as a plane falling out of the sky, earthquakes, volcanoes, floods. But a bank robber with a gun posed no challenge. So we could never feel fear for Superman’s safety in such a situation. The outcome was never in doubt. There could be no suspense, which is the balance in our minds hearing the tale, between what we hope will happen and what we fear will happen.

To solve this problem of talesmanship, the writers and editors matched Superman not with strong antagonists, but weak ones, clever ones, and magical ones. For example, Mr Mxyztlepk was a magical creature from another world or dimension who (in a nod to Rumplestiltzkin) could not be overcome unless he said his own unpronounceable name backwards. Therefore the challenge was to Superman’s wits rather than to his brawn. The other main story type they made up involved Lois Lane’s unending efforts to woo and wed Superman, and uncover his secret identity. Time and again Lois learned Superman was Clark Kent with absolute evidence, and Superman had to use his wits again to fool Lois into believing that what she had proved to be true was false.

Whenever I find a hero so wise, so strong, so fast, or so skillful that he can overcome all obstacles between him and his goal with ease I think back to the changes in Superman. So I call this the ‘Superman flaw.’ Unlike Achilles’ heel, the Superman flaw is not a weakness but rather too much strength.

Ayn Rand and the Heroic Ideal

Ayn Rand fell prey to this ‘Superman flaw’ in her writings also. And when we study her approach to her heroes, we can learn a lot from her mistakes about how to make our own heroes, and what laws a hero needs to obey in order to star in a compelling tale we will long remember.

Rand wrote many times that her goal in writing was to describe and elaborate on the ideal man. This was a Romantic goal as well as a romantic goal: Romantic art in general works in regions that are larger than life, bordering upon Eartherea in this respect; and Rand’s personal motive was to create in her tales such men she wished she could love, and who would love her.

But for Rand, ‘ideal’ meant ‘perfect.’ Her perfection was not physical in the sense of Superman, though her heroes were extraordinary in their physiques and physical skills, able to master any physical skill with seeming ease and quickness. But to Rand this was by the way, a natural consequence of the moral and intellectual or rational genius of her heroes. And she concerned her heroes with moral and intellectual wars to win.

A logical consequence of the hero’s moral and intellectual superiority was, to Rand, the villain’s moral and intellectual inferiority. As outstanding as her heroes were, her villains were equally contemptible.

The Hero Who was Loved

Rand at first could not even bring herself to write about her heroes directly. Though she had found in her childhood many examples of heroes of the late Victorian era in pulp tales of bold dashing British officers, explorers, and soldiers of fortune, she turned her back on these when she grew up and came to America. She had endured the troubles of the Russian Revolution, and in collectivism she had found her ultimate evil. After this she could only contemplate heroes who would oppose and overcome such grand social evils.

Unable to create her first hero, Rand took recourse in one of her first tales in English, ‘The Man I Loved,’ to depict rather the feelings of a woman in love with an idealized man. But she did not dwell on the qualities of the love-object. Her aim here was simply to indicate the degrees to which a woman would go in order to express and uphold her love for a man. The man is presumed to be great rather than shown as such, and the woman’s greatness, her heroic quality, lies not in her own creation, but rather the depth and purity of her feelings of love, or worship, for her man, and her refusal to compromise her love for the sake of social conventions.

The Hero of the Parable

Ten years later, Rand made her first hero. He is the nameless ‘we/I’ of her tale Anthem and he hardly exists as a character. Anthem in its hero and the world of the future it depicts are shown with a blurry, impressionistic vision. Rand as yet couldn’t bring her hero into sharp focus, and so in Anthem she attempts something more like a parable or fable, a fairytale of anti-collectivism. And just as the hero and his world are blurred, so too the drama is muted. The drama isn’t well done at all and here again the problem is that Rand wants to show us the moral and intellectual rebellion of her hero, and not its physical counterpart. There are no hair-raising escapes, trials, firing-squads, battles, near-misses, as we love in Dumas père’s tales or the science-fantasies of Amazing and Astounding pulp magazines. The struggle in Anthem is all very quiet, and rather dull.

Two Heroes

Howard Roark in The Fountainhead is a great leap forward for Rand. She portrays Roark much more clearly. His moral struggle to design and build buildings only in the best way he can find, without regard to the aesthetic opinions of the masses or his clients, causes him great pain. He loves to build, he longs to build, and it hurts him with a pain almost physical not to be able to build.

But in The Fountainhead Rand introduces another dramatic flaw. She conceived the tale as a contrast between the careers of two men: Roark, the uncompromising individual, and Peter Keating, the architect who never wanted to be an architect, but wanted success in the world as the world defined success: fame, fortune, prestige. Keating’s story is a long nightmare of rise and fall, fall, fall.

I do not think it is an accident that Rand shows Keating’s career, especially in his rise and how he wins his way to the acme of his profession, with greater excitement and detail than she shows Roark’s. Already with Roark Rand has created her first hero with the Superman flaw: after a brief period of training (and one mistake in building) Roark faces no problems in designing he can’t solve. His problem is solely in finding clients who will pay him to build in his own manner. He does this about a third of the way into the book, and never looks back.

Rand creates another hero in The Fountainhead named Gail Wynand. Wynand is a tragic hero, a flawed hero, and with Wynand’s tale Rand achieves her strongest and most compelling Romantic tale. Wynand’s tale stands as a reproach to the rest of Rand’s talesmanship, the one example that showed what she might have done in creating stirring, thrilling tales, if only she had not fallen prey to the twin mistakes of heroes with the Superman flaw and villains that were nonentities.

Wynand has a life story that could have been published with ease in the late Victorian pulps Rand loved as a child. Roark has no life story; the notion that her hero ‘makes himself’ backs Rand into a corner: Roark’s early life contains literally nothing, because there could be no drama in it. Wynand claws his way out of the gutter in a brilliant ferocious way. He chooses a life that has within it the seeds of his own destruction, for he chooses to rule by means that in the end demonstrate that rather than leading he had to follow. Therefore with great pain Wynand must face his own mistake, acknowledge (in the grand Romantic-tragic manner) that there is no going back, and chooses to kill himself rather than carry on. In the novel, Rand only implies that Wynand kills himself; it is the one weakness in the Wynand tale, and I conclude that Rand faced a dilemma here. For if Wynand was strong, bold, and moral enough to kill himself after Roar’s acquittal at trial proves that Wynand had been wrong about life from his earliest days — then Wynand would have been strong, bold, and moral enough to begin again. But that would mean another tale just when things needed wrapping up. So Rand represents Wynand in the last action we see him take as symbolically killing himself. In her movie adaptation of The Fountainhead Rand makes the better choice, and Wynand blows his brains out on the contract he has just signed to grant Roark his greatest commission.

The Ghost of Atlas

Atlas Shrugged was Rand’s last tale, and she claimed it was her crowning achievement. Its plot derives from an idea Rand had when she was a girl. But the tale she told as an adult was far weaker than anything the girl would have told.

Rand became wealthy from Atlas Shrugged whose success brought The Fountainhead back into print, and spawned a second career for Rand writing essays about her philosophy rather than spinning tales about heroes. She never needed to write fiction to earn her bread again. She claimed that in Atlas Shrugged she had reached the end, told of her greatest, unsurpassable heroes, and therefore had no more tales to tell. To tell of less would never satisfy her now. But I think the real reason she couldn’t tell any more tales was that she had, in Atlas, written and thought herself into a corner from which there was no escape.

Her hero in Atlas Shrugged was John Galt. Galt is described in physical terms as concrete as those Rand used for Roark. Galt, like Roark, has no past, he makes himself, and therefore he has no life story to be told. But he is perfect beyond Roark, in a way that utterly destroys any chance that his tale can be suspenseful. He is Rand’s full Superman, who is so sure of himself morally that he never has a doubt, who is so brilliant as a scientist that his inventions are more science-fantasy than science-fiction, and might as well be magic. Therefore Galt is barely in the tale at all, and when he does appear, he seems more like a ghost than a man. I’m sure Rand herself would not have thought so, but see for yourself: read the scenes where Galt is physically present, and you will see that he is more like the Holy Spirit than Jesus torn on the cross, even when Galt, like Jesus, is tortured by his accusers.

In Atlas Shrugged Rand completes her philosophical explorations into the nature of evil. Influenced by her follower Nathaniel Brandon, Rand considered psychology during the years she was writing Atlas Shrugged and concluded that the nature of evil was unreason. Since the world is rational, evil does not and can never work. Therefore evil men are impotent.

We find therefore the unhappy collision of the godlike, ghostlike, unconquerable hero confronting impotent, utterly weak villains. And there is no drama here.

Rand does create in Atlas Shrugged two tragic heroes after the model of Gail Wynand. Hank Reardon has made a fatal error in his thinking, even as Wynand had. Unlike Wynand, Reardon only has to be shown the error of his ways in order to start anew and be as impervious to pain as the ghostly Galt. Francisco d’Anconia is more exciting after the manner of the Romantic pulp tales of the late Victorians. His flaw is harder to pinpoint, except that he is not so perfect as Galt. Both Reardon and d’Anconia love Dagny Taggart, who sleeps with both of them on her way to finding Galt. In these twinned love triangles Rand approaches drama at last: what will happen when her titans clash? Then she backs away from the conflict, because inside the confines of her philosophical corner, Rand can only consider a man a hero to the extent that he is rational. The rational man (whatever his feelings) is convinced by logic. He will not turn away from the logical premises or deductions, and his feelings will follow swiftly and easily upon his rational conclusions. Both Reardon and Francisco acknowledge that Galt is the better man, so ‘of course’ Dagny must prefer him to them, and so after a brief hour of pain, Francisco and Reardon accept her choice. End of conflict. (With Reardon there is not so much as even that hour of pain, as I recall: he looks at Galt — at Dagny looking at Galt — and smiles and says, ‘Of course.’ Well, that was easy!)

We Don’t Really Like Our Tales to be Dull

What can we learn from this? That we like suspense in our tales is almost a given, and conflict is needed for us to feel suspense. The more evenly-balanced the forces in conflict are, the greater the suspense we will be likely to feel.

Therefore our talesmen can only make their heroes great, to the extent that they make their antagonists almost as great. This requires a philosophy, or an outlook on the affairs of the tale, that allows for strong antagonists as well as strong heroes.

(I think we can say also, though Rand’s tales don’t have the material to support it, that weak heroes fighting weak antagonists, weakens the suspense as well. But that is another tale for another day.)

(Composed on keyboard Saturday 26 January 2008)

Where Ralph Nader Went Wrong

You can’t rely on your government if you can’t rely on yourself. But if you can rely on yourself, you won’t need to rely on your government

A Hero

Ralph Nader is one of the most inspiring and heroic figures in American life in the past 50 years. As a private citizen, he exposed and publicized faults in American manufacturing, corruption in political office, and pollution in air and water. He showed us all how one man armed with the truth could defy the nation’s most powerful corporations and government bodies, and win. He exemplifies the core of the bourgeois, democratic republic: the independent individual who speaks the truth with neither fear nor favor. In this we should all applaud him and what is more, follow in his footsteps.

But he made one misstep.

And this has haunted and defeated all his hopes and dreams.

Us Not Them

What was Mr Nader’s mistake? It lay not in the problems that he found, but in the solutions that he sought.

He thought the government should (and would) address the problems he pointed out. He thought the government should be filled with just, wise, conscientious men. And he thought that we, the citizens, could be counted on to elect these just, wise, and conscientious rulers even though we were incapable or unwilling to learn the truth ourselves or govern our own lives well.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Mr Nader should have known it was wrong, too. There among his complaints you can find it: many of the changes he sought were already embodied in the law. ‘We don’t want the government to pass new laws,’ he said regarding one issue. ‘We just want the government to start enforcing the laws that are already on the books.’

But if the government was ignoring its own laws, then it was already full of fools and knaves; and we had already elected these fools and knaves.

No, the fault lay not in our leaders but in ourselves, and so in ourselves the answer must also lie.

The Answer

The correct (and only) answer to such problems, as Mr Nader pointed out, lies in publicity. Not to awaken the lawmakers and regulators, but to awaken us citizens. The truth must be shouted from the rooftops for all of us to hear. Then we must count on us, as citizens and buyers, to do the right thing and make the right choices. For if we cannot or will not do what is right in our own lives and in our home towns, then we can’t be expected to do what is right in voting for lawmakers either.

The main fault, you see, that lay under the problems Mr Nader found, was not with our government — it was with our press.

Ultimately of course the fault does lie with us citizens, each and every one of us and all of us as one body. For we choose the press we buy and read and watch even more than we choose our lawmakers.

Instead of talking to lawmakers, then, Mr Nader should have been running printing presses. Instead of publishing books, Mr Nader should have been publishing magazines, newsletters, and newspapers. And along with pointing to problems, defects, and corruption, Mr Nader in these periodicals should have been praising good companies, good products, and good ways for us to save money, invest wisely, and clean our environment.

Would we have listened? Maybe not. When Ronald Reagan became President, he succeeded in achieving a revolution in national amnesia. As H. L. Mencken once observed, people would rather believe a comfortable lie than a painful truth. The evidence of what Americans have done over the past quarter-century offers little hope that most of us would have been willing to turn off the mindless entertainment, drop the pizza beer and dope, and wake up and deal with the problems we faced then — and still face today, because we didn’t face them then.

But if we can’t rely on ourselves, who can we rely on?

Who Can You Trust?

Even if Mr Nader’s goals had been met, and we had by some miracle been granted wise and incorruptible lawmakers, what would we have won? A temporary relief from the problems of the day. But a worse evil would have crept upon us. It is the evil of dependence. For many of the bad things Mr Nader found and rightly condemned came about not in spite of the progressive laws Mr Nader championed. They came about because of those very laws.

Where the government acts to shield and protect its citizens from all evil, it trains us to rely upon it — and not rely on ourselves. We no longer need to check each product for safety, to research companies and what they do with their waste, to buy magazines that objectively evaluate the products. ‘The government wouldn’t let them sell it if it weren’t safe, or good, or healthy,’ we say. ‘They wouldn’t let them poison our air or water.’ And so we make choices in buying based entirely on taste and appeal, and on price. In this way we give companies a strong incentive to make flashy, appealing goods, and skimp on quality.

We end up with junk food that looks good, smells good, tastes good, and lacks nutrition and is bad for our health.

So we eat junk food, wear junk clothes, sit in junk furniture, drive junk cars, and live and work in junk buildings. And when we go to the polls, we elect junk lawmakers, governors, mayors, and presidents.

And when we buy the junk, we drive the good companies (and candidates) to compete on equal terms and offer only junk of their own. Or else they go out of business (or political life).

NOLA Blues

The heart-rending sight of the refugees of Hurricane Katrina starving in the Super Dome in New Orleans is a metaphor for all of us. Those people believed in their government. They counted on their government to help save them. They trusted so much that they endured those awful, worsening conditions rather than march across the bridge to freedom. Some did try to march, and were met by the armed representatives of their government forcing them back to horror and death. But too few marched to outface, shame, and overcome those armed government employees.

Here in America, are we condemning ourselves to huddle inside one giant Super Dome? Or will we turn our backs on our government leaders, count on them no longer, and march ourselves across the bridge to our own self-reliant welfare?

(Composed with pen on paper 25 January 2008)

Plans Gone Bad are Good

We like it when characters’ plans go wrong

Why Tell Us About Plans?

Men in tales make plans even as men do in their lives. Men in tales do many things that their talesmen don’t tell us. And when a talesman tells us about a character’s plans, he better have a reason. What reasons could he have? Take for example this:

John said, ‘Today I think I’ll cut down the elm tree and chop it up for firewood.’

Ezra smiled. ‘Well, if you do that, then I’ll get the cart and haul the wood to the shed and stack it there out of the rain.’

That morning John cut down the elm tree. He cut it to lengths and split it for firewood.

In the afternoon Ezra brought the cart around and took the cut wood to the shed, where he stacked it.

If I heard a talesman spin me this, I’d wonder, Why is he telling me this twice? It’s redundant. He wasted my time, once would’ve been enough, just tell me what they did, not what they meant to do and then what they did.

In fact there might be a reason why a talesman would do it this way. If John or Ezra never did what they said, here is one time they did, so it tells us something has changed. Or if the talesman meant by this for us to learn how John and Ezra do what they say, so that later on in the tale, when it comes about that they don’t do what they say, we will be surprised and know something must have changed.

John and Ezra is an example of when the plan gets carried out right after it gets made. But it could happen later:

John said, ‘When spring comes, I think I’ll cut down the elm and chop it up for firewood.’

That winter was dark and cold. There had never been so many storms. The snow piled up to the roof along the north wall of the house. The woodshed was buried under it. But at last the sun wheeled higher in the sky and the snow melted. The birds came back and it was spring...

John went out that morning and cut down the elm tree and chopped it into firewood.

Here the plan gets carried out long after John made it. Now when I hear the talesman tell this, I feel a connection between what went on in the fall when John laid his plan, and what went on in the spring when he carried through with it. The talesman has made me expect something to come. He tells me of other events in the meanwhile, but all the time I expect that I’ll hear how John went to cut up the elm tree once spring comes.

This is just as redundant, but I have the pleasure of anticipating and expecting the tree-cutting, and when it comes my anticipation is fulfilled.

My example doesn’t thrill me much, because I haven’t made the act of cutting the tree exciting, and I haven’t made us care about it. But say the tree is a cursed and evil influence over John’s life, and cutting it means future happiness? But others have tried to fell that elm, and something bad happened to them each time before they could do it. Will John be able to cut it down? And will things be any better if he does? Or say John fell in love with Debra under that tree, and cut their names on it, but later Debra died and John has mourned her for seven years, not to look at another woman, only at the tree, in grief. Then when he says he’ll cut it, we can imagine that maybe his heart is healing. But will he really bring himself to cut the elm? We must wait until spring comes — then he cuts down the elm and we know it means a fresh start for John.

Or if the planned-for event were one that, in and of itself, would please us. John tells Ezra, ‘When spring comes, I’ll propose marriage to Debra.’ We know Debra is secretly pining for John, and we want to see these two get together. So when we hear John tell Ezra his plan, we gain an expectation the proposal, acceptance, and engagement are on the way. We wait for this, anticipate it, desire it all the more because the talesman, in telling us of the plan for the event, has promised us the event will come. When it does come, we are doubly pleased to hear of it at last.

Wrong All Wrong

We get even more delight, though — a perverse and much-delayed delight, in spite of ourselves — when plans go wrong:

‘Come spring, I’ll cut down that elm for firewood,’ said John.

‘I’ll stack it in the shed if you do,’ said Ezra.

The winter was dark and bitter... At last spring came...

Ezra came round late in the spring with the cart, and found the elm still standing. The farmhouse was quiet, too, and no smoke showed at the chimney.

Ezra went soft to the door and tapped. ‘John?’ he called. ‘You in there all right?’

Here the talesman has to tell us about John’s plan, or else we’ll fell no trouble when Ezra finds the elm still standing in the spring. We looked for something to happen. When he told us about John making his plan, the talesman promised us that it would take place. But it didn’t. Now we want to know why. More (and this is above all true if the plan promises us an event that will please us in and of itself) because the talesman promised us that event, and we didn’t find it when he told us it would come, we feel cheated, and we won’t forgive him until we see the event come true.

Master of Plans Gone Bad

Edgar Rice Burroughs was a master at telling tales that make you want to read on, and one of his tricks was to strew his tales with characters’ plans. And they went bad almost every time.

Because the plans go bad so often in his tales, Burroughs gets us feeling uneasy every time a character makes a plan. ‘Oh, no,’ we think, ‘this can’t go right. What will go wrong this time?’

When a talesman gets us to feel like this, he's really got us hooked. Instead of a plan helping to anticipate what's going to take place, it only tells us what most likely won't take place. And Burroughs made sure that the events planned for were ones we wanted to see — an escape from captivity, or a reunion of two lovers. He promises us, and yet we know he won't keep the promise; so he tempts us with a foretaste of what we fear we won't be getting.

And yet Burroughs, crowd pleaser that he was, always gave us the pleasure and the essence of the event, by the time he closed his tale. The hero would escape captivity, the lovers would meet again. It just wouldn’t happen in the promised way, and it would come later than he promised.

Breaking promises and making plans go bad is a prime way to build up suspense in the audience. Eventually fulfilling the promises lets us forgive the talesman for the cheat.

(Composed with pen on paper on 24 January 2008)

We Shall All be Farmers

Grow your own

Sunset

We have outgrown the capacity of the Earth to sustain us, luving as we do in the Western World, particularly in America. Several substances crucial to our current way of life will be used up within a century. Some will be gone in a few years. This onrushing crisis has been brought on by growth in population combined with technological advances.

When our civilization reaches its sunset (perhaps already upon us) and enters into twilight gloaming, we will all need to lead very different lives if we are to survive.

The prudent among us will begin to lead such lives now.

In this way, they will know how to survive, when the hour comes.

And if enough of us are prudent in this way, then we can hope to delay the coming night, and perhaps lessen its darkness. Maybe we will only need to endure a long twilight of adjustment and transition.

Needs

What are the changes the wise foresee? We will surely need the basics to support life.

We need shelter from the elements

This means buildings

And clothing: gloves, shoes, hats, coats, trousers, dresses

We need water

Water to drink

Water to clean

Water to grow food

We need energy

Energy to heat our homes

Energy to grow our food

We need food

Food to eat

Food to feed our livestock and other animals

Food

Today let’s look at food.

It’s possible for every one of us, whether we live in the country, exurbs, suburbs, or city, to grow some of our own food. We should all begin to do so, if we are not already, this year — 2008.

Every home with a plot of earth should have its garden. Every house should have its potted plants and sprouting bins. Every sunny window should have its bed of seedlings or herms.

For this year, it doesn’t matter what we grow, so long as it is edible food and can lead us to grow more food next year.

In any new habit or practice such as this, we must always start small. Don’t try to do so much that you fall far short of your goals, lose heart, give up. Even a pot or two of herbs, easy to grow and maintain, is a start.

Do what is easily within your reach, do it well, grow more bold and able, and do more next season.

FARMERS

We shall all be farmers. We shall all grow and eat of our crops. This will come sooner or later to us all by force. But if we choose it before it grows to hard necessity, we will be able to meet the crisis head-on, ready for its worst.

Plan this as though it were a college career (for most of us it will be) and make up your mind to give yourself four years, five, six, to learn what skills you will need and to make your soil grow your meals.

I promise you, I will start this year.

Join me.

(Composed with pen on paper Wednesday, 23 January 2008)

The Talesman on Poverty Row

Should we judge the tale while considering the circumstances of its telling?

The Spanish Schlockmeister

Over the past year or so I’ve been watching films directed by Jesús Franco. Franco, born in 1930, fell in love with movies in his native Spain in the late 1930s and early 1940s. He went on to a long career as director which began in the 1950s and continues today — he has directed hundreds of movies (under what seems like hundreds of pseudonyms). Here is his entry under the international movie database:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001238/

And here is his wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_Franco

Franco’s movies appeal to shock, horror, sadism, and violence, with liberal doses of sex (as much as he dared and international censors would allow). He is probably most famous for a series of low-budget European gore- and sex-fests from the 1970s, though he also directed some lurid exploitation films in the 1960s and 1970s with British producer-writer Harry Alan Towers:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0869935/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Alan_Towers

After working with Towers, Franco went on to write most of his scripts, and he favored a subjective, fragmented approach to the tales. This was an approach Franco had used already in Necronomicon – Geträumte Sünden or Succubus in 1967, the film that impressed Towers enough to propose working with Franco for their collaborations.

In this typical Franco film, the subject is a beautiful young woman possessed (maybe) by the demonic forces of her desires into a sexual predator. Often she will make her living, and find her victims, through live-sex cabaret or strip shows. She is bisexual, perhaps supernatural or possessed of supernatural forces, and certainly mad. Much of the film is told with pure cinema, without dialogue, and would make no more sense than a nightmare without recourse to extensive voiceover representing the heroine’s thoughts, demonic possessor, dreams, fantasies, or perhaps memories.

Criticism

The Franco film is typically tedious and slow-paced, though the set-piece scenes, orgies of sex and sadism, are jaggedly and quickly cut. Franco, a jazz aficionado and musician, probably approaches the pacing of his films with a jazz sensibility. But I find them hard to watch. The acting by the beautiful starlets is wooden, the acting by the famous guest stars (when Franco has them) tends to be histrionic, and with several actors speaking different languages to be dubbed into whatever the importing or co-producing country desires, I find a lack of drama, of real connection, and a lack of any extended, well-developed (or rational) scenes that allow me to connect with any of the characters. Thanks to the voiceover I can grasp what is happening, but it remains removed, distant, in part because I have to guess what is going on.

The cutting is discontinuous and jumpy. Shots within scenes don’t always cut together, and transitions between scenes are abrupt, and often defy (waking) logic. No effort is made to help us follow the story from scene to scene.

The shooting (some of it by Franco himself) is full of shots that are out of focus, abrupt, sometimes staggered, zooms, murky or under-lit. Sets (apart from the bigger budgets the Towers films afforded) are mostly whatever Franco can find. He dresses his sets and renders them more mysterious, with colored lights, often clashing colors for effect.

The ending of the film usually records the doom & destruction of the predatory heroine, often in a mysterious way that leaves me wondering if I’ve seen all the movie, or understood it.

Greater Appreciation

The DVDs I’ve seen, most produced by http://www.blue-underground.com include interviews with Franco, and his explanations and recollections increase my respect for him and appreciation for the movies. Often Franco found himself quite limited in what he could do, having to compromise the tale he would have told against the obstacles of low budgets, lightning shooting schedules, international censors, and ill-suited stars forced on him by the international nature of the productions.

The heavy use of voiceover and paucity of dialogue helps Franco in several ways:

• Shooting scenes without dialogue means the crew can concentrate wholly on getting the visuals right without worrying about ambient sounds or voice performances
• Voiceovers don’t need to be overdubbed and lip-sunk for international audiences
• Voiceovers allow us to see into the soul of a character who is portrayed by a pretty, sexy, but vapid actress
• Voiceovers can smooth over gaps in the tale where censors have removed scenes or so heavily cut them that we can’t tell what is happening.
• Voiceovers also allow Franco to describe acts that would be impossible to film, mostly out of concern for the heavy censorship of the day

Franco’s zooms let him adjust the compositions and seem to move the camera through space without having to take the time to lay dolly tracks and practice elaborate tracking shots. They also give him more flexibility in editing, since the wider framing might include material the censors would ban. His murky, under-lit, and out-of-focus shots allow Franco to include footage where it is unclear just what is happening, and we are left with suggestions only, to guess what’s going on. This is another ploy to get past the censors. The theory here is to give us enough footage to

• allow the running time of the censored movie to reach feature length
• give us enough time within the scene to construct in our imagination what’s really happening, and to enjoy this dream we ourselves create based on the clues Franco provides.

In short, Franco describes himself as an expert in making us see what he doesn’t show. The censors must let the footage pass, but we in the audience, with some work of our imaginations, fool ourselves into thinking we are watching the scene that Franco would have shot had he been free of censorship.

Many Films, Many Edits

Because Franco struggled against the censors, and different countries had different censorship limits (and changed those limits during Franco’s career), there is no one definitive version of any of Franco’s movies. This is not like the Hollywood director who completes his film only to find the distributor later has someone else recut it. In that case we have two versions, the director’s and the studio’s. But Franco knew in advance how many traps and taboos lay in his tale’s path, and he planned for them in advance. He knew there must be many versions of his movies, and he shot with an eye toward creating the footage he would need to assemble any and all of these versions.

These versions could be quite different. In Female Vampire (or Bare Breasted Countess, or La comtesse noire, or Erotikill or Les Avaleuses — multiple titles abound as well as versions), a 1973 French erotic horror film, Franco cast Lina Romay as a demonic, supernatural sort of sex-vampire, who extracts life-essence from her victims through oral sex. Well — Franco knew this very idea would get the film banned in many countries, so he shot alternate takes of the climactic scenes in which Romay bites her victims on the throat and drinks their blood in the traditional movie-vampire manner. Which version is the ‘true’ movie? Both, actually. Franco was making one movie for some markets and another movie for other markets, at the same time.

Censors

Because Franco’s taste runs towards the entertainment of shock, violence, and sex, he faced heavy censorship throughout his prime first decades. He felt the chains of censorship heavily; in one interview he heatedly describes his confrontation with the Spanish censor on the day he left Spain to work abroad.

Much of the technical criticism that I can aim at Franco turns out to mask elaborate, well-planned, ingenious tricks and techniques to evade and defeat the censors. The rest of the technical criticism I can put down to the low budgets Franco has always had to work within.

Different Judgments

Seeing them strictly by themselves, I don’t much care for Franco’s films, and I can’t rank him as highly as many critics do. But when I consider what Franco says in the interviews, I find myself appreciating his filmmaking and ingenuity much more.

But is it fair to judge a tale by the circumstances of its telling? We in the audience sit at the talesman’s feet like children. ‘Entertain us,’ we say. ‘Enchant us, delight us, astound us!’ And our first impulse is to judge tale and talesman simply and wholly by the effect the tale produces within us. We don’t care about the talesman or his problems, we look only to the feelings we experience as the tale unfolds for us.

If I then feel a higher regard for Franco’s films in considering the facts of how he made them, I wonder if I’m not apologizing for and making excuses for the talesman. Maybe because I am a talesman myself, and so try to stand alongside my colleague? Or maybe, being a talesman, I can tale joy in following alongside the tale the way in which the talesman tells it.

The questions of limitations upon how a tale is made is a big one for movies. It is also a big question for theatrical productions. Both plays and movies depend upon so much technical expertise and equipment. But even a tale told by a fire has its production limits — for example, if the talesman suffers a head cold or is losing his voice. And to consider Lord Dunsany’s writings as first drafts with no rewriting, published just as he scratched them on paper for the first and only time with his quill pen, as Lady Dunsany insisted he did with all his works, is to enjoy a special, added impression of respect and delight.

(Composed with pen on paper on Tuesday, January 22, 2008)

The Path of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Remembering Martin Luther King, Jr.

Today the USA is on holiday in recognition of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968). I know only a little of Dr King’s life and thought. But I wanted to take the occasion to meditate a little on his life — and death — and what it might mean to us today.

The Path

Dr King followed a path that paralleled the path other thinkers and activists in America have taken. The path begins with some awareness of an evil in the land — one particular injustice. In opposing this one injustice, the activist meets resistance by the authorities who have won wealth and power, some of them by profiting from the injustice, and fear lest any change in how things work will threaten their wealth and power. At this point the activist, in trying to right the injustice, can’t understand why this injustice is allowed to flourish when it is so clearly wrong. And they begin to see that they are struggling against not one injustice, but several, all inter-connected and inter-related. The activist then begins to speak out against those other injustices and he faces even stronger opposition. At this point he comes near the end of the path, and the yawning chasm, the frightening suspicion that injustice is deep-rooted and systemic in his society, and that the only sure way to right one wrong is to right all of the chronic wrongs. And the only way to right all the wrongs is to overturn the system itself.

(For a contemporary example of someone on this path, look at Professor Lawrence Lessig, the legal scholar. Prof. Lessig has for some years tried to reform the system of copyright, which is being extended and fortified by a handful of giant media companies. Last year, Prof Lessig reached the conclusion that trying to reform the copyright system to undo the abuses of these giant companies would be fruitless so long as the political system, which seems to represent the interests of these half-dozen companies against the interests of its 300 million citizens, remained tainted by corruption. So now he works to uncorrupt political systems.)

From Racial Justice to Economic Justice

In the case of Dr King, from the little I know of it, he began by opposing legal segregation against nonwhites. He went on to oppose discrimination, a more basic, insidious and widespread variant. He then began to oppose the imperialism of US foreign policy, much of it directed against non-European, non-white peoples — not only in the war in Viet Nam but also in Sough America, where US foreign policy sustained wealthy landowners in oppressing and dispossessing the poor multitudes.

From opposing racial injustice at home and abroad, Dr King began to speak out against economic injustice, and look for economic restitution, in the form of higher wages and better working conditions for black and poor white workers alike. And he began to express a belief that the abuse of slavery, murder, and oppression in America’s past needed to be redressed by monetary restitution in the present.

Dr King found, when he spoke out against these other injustices, that many powerful people in government and press — the white ‘liberal’ men who had supported the struggle to end segregation — began to criticize and oppose him.

And in his turn, Dr King began to wonder if there could be any justice at all in his country so long as it was run under capitalism.

From the surface to the root, where does the evil lie, and how can we best strike it out? ‘Radicalism’ is the bent of mind that the only sure cure is to dig the evil out at its root.

Honored, But for What?

America today honors Dr King almost with one voice, outside the conservative camp, many of whom revile him. But even those of us who praise and honor Dr King do so in the name of only two concerns, so far as I can see:

1. for his non-violent approach
2. for his struggle against segregation

Segregation is today considered to lie in the past, an injustice revealed, undone, and put to rest. It is quite safe and bland today to decry segregation, if all you mean by segregation is a series of laws that have been overturned and stricken out. And I wonder if, in praising Dr King for embracing the non-violence of Thoreau and Gandhi, many white Americans do not mean less to honor Dr King and more to condemn Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, and others who would not rule out violence, if violence was what it took to end injustice.

And people, most of white America, do not choose to recall Dr King’s work on behalf of unions, the poor generally, or his speculations on what money ought to be paid to compensate for slavery and oppression — let alone his growing unease with and distrust of free market capitalism itself.

The Last?

What saddens me in remembering Dr King is that in many ways he and his colleagues in the struggles 40 years ago were the last generation to fight for, and win, the redress of social injustices in America. The generations that followed either failed in their goals or gained what they gained, and it was not trivial, by working within the political and economic system as they found it.

But when you work within the system you become yourself a part of it, and you cannot work to upend the system, and often cannot even imagine that the system itself might need to be upended.

For those who dwell upon the stalk dare not tear out the root of the plant that upholds them.

Dr King in his last years seemed to be looking down at that root, and wondering. He was condemned himself, by Malcolm X and others in black America, for being too close to the system as it was, and trying to work from within it too deeply, and not reaching or daring far enough.

Then he was murdered. And we’ll never know, had he lived, how far he would have followed that path, or what he would have thought and said and done when faced with the yawning chasm at its end.

(Composed with pen on paper on Monday, January 21, 2008)

We Walk in Many Worlds

Here’s why the War for the Ring of Sauron is just as real as the War in Iraq

How do We Know Where our Feet Fall?

Our brains don’t work like mechanical insturments. Our brains never touch the ‘physical reality’ we believe we inhabit. Instead (in current scientific models) our brains only respond to eletrochemical signals sent inside our skulls, ultimately from our senses. Our brains interpret those signals in the light of our past and imaginary ‘knowledge’ that we possess. In light of this, many scientists today are reaching the conclusion that they cannot refute the model of the universe proposed thousands of years ago by Indian sages, that the world is an illusion.

So what is fantasy and what is real, and how do the great talesmen work their magic?

Imaginative Intensity & Wholeness

What I’ve come to believe in studying hypnotism, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy (as well as watching my own reactions with the world) is this:

Whatever we experience intensely and wholly, is more real than anything else.

What counts, then, about an experience is

• how intense it is
• how whole it is

What does this mean?

How Intense

We experience most of our routine lives in a sort of fog or anesthetized trance. Very few of us are strongly awre of everything we do and everything we feel and sense around us. It’s too much to take in and experience. And we grow soon bored with what is usually there before us. ‘Same-old, same-old,’ the saying goes.

But some events we experience more vividly, more sharply. Moments of terror and fear when we believe our lives are threatened. Moments of great pain. Moments of delight. Sexual ecstasy. Times when we are in strange new surroundings and take special care to note how we experience those places (as, for instance, when we travel to foreign lands). And in our dreams.

How Whole

There are many acts we can do all at the same time. We can stir a pot of soup, talk on the telephone, keep an eye on a small child playing on the floor, listen to a song playing in the background. Each activity tugs on a different part of our awareness. None claims all of our awareness.

But to some acts we devote all our attention, feelings, conscious and bodily awareness. These acts usually accompany a heightened intensity of feeling, but the difference lies between the prick of a single thorn while smelling a rose, and the pain of the freezing water when we fall through the ice into a lake.

Fantasy or Reality?

When we read a fictional narrative (or let it be a ‘true’ one, or let it be a movie or videogame) we can enter into a sort of imaginative trance that lies not far from dreaming.

Those of us with more highly developed and more acute imaginations are able to enter into this ‘fictive dream’ more wholly and more intensely than others. We can lose our ‘real’ surroundings almost totally. We can eat, smell, breathe and move with the characters within the tale. It is as if we walked in a strange and foreign land alongside those characters, paying particular attention to all we sense around us.

And for those of us who can achieve this, the fictional tale is as ‘real’ as the ‘real life’ we have sleep-walked through since birth. And we not only experience the events alongside the characters as reality, we care for those characters as much as our kith and kin.

To us, the fantasy is more real than the events of a ‘real’ war taking place 3,000 miles away, of which we can find at best only a few scattered isolated accounts, none of them trustworthy.

To invoke this ‘fictive dream,’ to transport us readers into such rapturous realms, is the highest achievement of the greatest of the talesmen.

I suspect that only those of us who can as audience enter into such dreams intensely and wholly, can go on to join the ranks of those great talesmen.

(Composed by pen on paper and first posted Sunday, January 20, 2008)

Basic Schooling

Thoughts on what I’d like to see in tomorrow’s schools.

Introduction

The primary education system in America was designed at the end of the 19th century to create good mill-workers among the lower classes, by stressing two traits above all: obedience and conformity. Such characteristics have never been uppermost among good citizens in a democracy. More active and creative traits are needed.

In the past, it was taken for granted that children learned the practical lessons of life at home. This is no longer a given, so I propose real-life education be added to the more intellectual pursuits of traditional liberal arts education upon which the mill-worker’s school model was built.

When addressing the needs of growing human children, we must acknowledge their true nature in all its facets, and consider what will best prepare them for life in the real world as neighbors and citizens of their community.

What follows is a number of thoughts on ways to improve today’s schools. The list is by no means comprehensive, nor do I offer the items in any particular order.

Same Sex Schools

After the children are 10 years old, they attend different schools. Boys are taught by men. Girls are taught by women. In this way boys learn what is is to be a man and girls learn what it is to be a woman. The children are not distracted or intimidated by members of the other sex.

Running Sitting Jumping Reading

Each hour of the school day is divided into two parts, a major part and a minor. In the major part the students sit and take instruction, practice reading and writing, take tests, and so on. In the minor part the students enjoy physical activities such as running, stretching, sports in lightning games, and so on.

Children need to move about and rest their brains between lessons, so the instruction can sink in. The calm glow that follows exercise heightens the concentration in the next learning session. Increased oxygen in the students’ brains also helps them learn.

Non-intellectual skill training can also fill the minor part of the hour. Musical practice, for example.

As a guide, say out of every 60 minutes the students have 40 minutes of traditional inactive learning, 15 minutes of physical activity, and 5 minutes for a break to go to the toilet, have a cup of water or juice, and eat a piece of fruit or vegetable.

Practical Lessons

Students learn skills beyond the traditional intellectual skills of reading, writing, thinking. They should school capable of building a house, carpentry, masonry, electrics and plumbing. They know how to clean and maintain the houses they build. They know how to grow their own food and cook it. They know how to make their own clothes, work metal and tools.

Most of these skills require mastery of basic mathematics and so afford the chance for the students to apply their math lessons in real world situations. These activities also require co-operation and help to teach the students about community. The application and practice of these skills are also physical and can serve for the 15 minutes of physical activities in the hour.

Each school is built as a small model of the community, so as to afford the students an opportunity of practicing all these skills. The students help to build and maintain the school buildings. They clean the halls, classrooms, and offices. They grow food in green houses and outdoor plots, they harvest, store, and cook the food they grow. They help to construct and maintain energy-harvesiting systems. In all ways possible the school becomes a self-sufficient community, a model of the adult community the children will enter as citizens when they graduate.

As the children themselves build, maintain, and clean the school buildings, they gain a sense of ownership and responsibility for them.

Some children are better-suited to sitting quietly and obediently all day, and are quicker at learning abstract concepts. As a result, these students today are regarded as the ‘best’ and the future leaders of their community. But it is a sorry old story that book-learning is not all there is to life, and the brilliant scholar who can’t take care of himself, and does not achieve brilliant success in real life, is alas too well known to us. In the school as I would propose it, where practical lessons are taught alongside the traditional liberal arts, and are given equal weight with them, the scholarly students will find that they are not necessarily brilliant at all things. And the students who are better-suited to working with their hands in practical matters will be rewarded and honored for this, even though their achievements in the more-intellectual classes don’t shine.

Common Sense

Logic, skepticism, and justice are of the highest value in community. Students learn them as well as common sense. They learn that authority in and of itself has no value unless it speaks the truth and upholds justice and sustainable values of living in human society. Students are taught at all times to distrust authority, be skeptical of the claims of their elders, leaders, masters and teachers. Students are rewarded when they demand their teachers prove the rightness of the lessons they teach. Students are doubly rewarded when they prove their teachers are wrong.

This demands a different kind of teacher than the one who thrives in the current ‘obey and conform’ school. But the student who does well in the kind of school I propose will also make an excellent teacher of it when he is an adult.

Each student before he graduates is able to listen to a Presidential address or campaign speech and say, ‘That’s bullshit!’ — and explain why.

The only way I can see how to shape such skeptical, common sense minds is to build skepticism into every class. Those who are presently called the ‘worst’ students — the most rebellious, those who lead the gangs, want to grow up too fast and engage in criminal activities are, if properly taught, among the best citizens and the leaders of their communities. These are the students who are put in positions of Doubters, Skeptics, and Challengers constantly defying their teachers to support what they claim in their lessons.

Meditation

Along with intellectual lessons and physical activity, students learn to meditate. Meditation serves various functions. It helps the students learn how to focus their thoughts and concentrate. It helps rest their minds between periods of intense learning. It helps them combat stress of all kinds. It helps them become more aware of their bodies at the deeper levels. It helps free them from fear, craving, cowardice, doubt.

Religion

Meditation verges upon prayer, which raises the question of spirituality and religion. In any school founded by a religious order, religion will naturally have its place in the curriculum. No school founded by and supported by the community as a whole ought to include any religious teachings except in the study of history or society and how religions have influenced societies past and present.

I also don’t see any way to combine the teaching of religion (which is founded upon faith in an authority which never does or need justify its claims) and a scholarly attitude of Skepticism and Doubt. The religious school forms a harmonious part of an authoritarian, despotic society, but it can never harmonize with a democratic society in which all claims must be justified and proven, and men meet on the common ground of material reality.

Conclusion

These random thoughts only partly represent the ways I’d like to see public education change. The overall goal is to address the child in body as well as mind, in the life of the hands as well as scholasticism, and prepare him to play a useful role in an egalitarian, democratic society of free men.

(Composed by pen on paper and first posted Saturday, January 19, 2008)

By Key By Pen and By Tongue

The means by which the talesman tells his tale affects the tale he tells

By Key

Most writing today is composed on a computer using a keyboard. The talesman moves his fingers, depresses keys, and the corresponding letters appear on a rewritable screen. Those talesmen who type by touch look mainly upon this screen where the letters appear as if by magic. The letters are formed in fonts chosen in whatever computer program the talesman uses to interpret the keystrokes, draw the letters on the screen, and save the tale in an electronic file.

Before talesmen adopted computers, they were widely using typewriters, also entering their tales one letter at a time through a keyboard.

To compose a tale by key involves what seems like two separate parts of the talesman’s being. There is first the imaginative part advancing through the tale word by word within his head, and seeing the tale unfurl behindward on the screen. Then there is the mechanical part which jerks fingers down upon the keys, usually out of sight.

By Pen

Before keyboards, most talesmen composed their tales using a writing implement (pen, pencil, stylus) upon a sheet of some smooth material which held the marks of the words. The talesman watched the sheet and drew upon it with the pen, making continuous marks, each one representing a whole word.

Since the calligraphy of drawing a whole word is more complex than a series of finger-jerks on different keys, the physical act of telling a tale by pen comes close to drawing. Since the pen records the words directly upon the sheet of paper, the talesman looks at the point where the pen touches the paper. As a result, the imaginative/seeing part of composition is more intimately married to the mechanical/recording part. The process feels more unified and intimate. And the record of the tale, in its hand-drawn scribbles of words, more intimately represents the talesman’s heart as he composes. Finally, because the pen is free to wander where it will across the broad or narrow field of the paper, the right-brain spatial awareness comes more into play, in a more natural, easy manner.

By Tongue

Before writing, talesmen composed their tales either silently, learning the words by rote before telling or performing them to an audience, or they composed even in the act of performing the tale. Since there is no objective, external record of the tale, each tale must be performed anew for each new audience, and in the process may be, in retelling, re-composed.

Composing a tale by tongue brings the imaginative part of the talesman’s mind to almost complete predominance over the act. More, he does not use his eyes to see what he tells. Instead he uses his ears alone, although in performing the tale, the talesman can see how the tale affects his audience, and adjust his composition accordingly.

What was Lost

Long ago, when the first men created writing, they added eyes and hands to the act of composing tales. Now talesmen have almost completely lost their ears in composing. They write only to be read.

And yet studies show that most of us, when we read, sound out the words in our heads. They call this ‘sub-vocalizing.’ If you pay heed, you can begin to feel the slight tugs and tremors at the root of your tongue and back of your throat, when you sub-vocalize what you read. And this triggers an imaginary hearing of the ‘sounds’ the words would make if you spoke them. No doubt talesmen also do something like sub-vocalizing when they compose, even though they compose by key.

Sounds of Silence

Certain passages in tales seem to make more ‘sound’ than others. Dialogue, above all when it is surrounded by quotation marks and is not interrupted by attributions, stage directions, or description, ‘sounds’ louder than description. And those parts of description that appeal to or mimic sounds make more ‘noise’ than the others. The content of signs seems to make no ‘sound’ at all.

When talesmen composed and told their tales by tongue alone, the tales approached what we call music. The best-remembered tales were poems, chanted or sung. (When a talesman chants, he concentrates on the rhythms of the words and phrases, and when he sings, he also pays heed to the notes of the individual syllables in the phrases.)

Understanding by Eye or Ear

When talesmen told their tales by tongue, the audience learned the tales by ear. These performing talesmen also controlled the time and pace of the telling, and the audience could not ‘skip back’ or ‘look ahead’ or ‘skim quickly on’ through the tale. But when writing (by pen or key) came to predominate talespinning, the talesmen lost the control over the unfurling of their tales, and gave its control over to their readers instead.

Differences

The act of composing a tale differs according to the means by which it is done. Keyboarding, handwriting, and speaking a tale, are three very different means to express what the heart imagines. It makes sense to assume that these different means of composing tales will influence the shape and skin of the tales. There will probably also be a difference between tales composed by writing with the left hand vs. the right, since the left hand communicates directly with the right hemisphere of the talesman’s brain, which is the symbolical, nonverbal, more imaginative part of the human mind.

For example, a few months ago I listened to the audiobook reading of Carl Hiaasen’s Skinny Dip. The first page of that book was written to be read and I trust Hiaasen would never have composed that opening the way he did, had he told it or composed it by tongue.

Best, Worst

I believe that composing by pen must be more intimate and natural than composing by key, and that composing by tongue must be the most intimate and natural of the three. Therefore, if my goal is to resurrect the most ancient art of talesmanship, I should compose by tongue.

It is possible to compose on computers by pen with handwriting recognition. This is built in to MicroSoft Windows XP Tablet Edition and to MicroSoft Windows Vista operating systems, but I have not tried either and I have my doubts that the software could recognize whole words. So we would need to key in what we have written out beforehand by pen. It is also possible to compose directly on computer by tongue with voice recognition software. This has long been an aspiration of mine but I’ve never trained the software or my voice to get along. (Even with enough training, speaking into a microphone and paying careful heed to what letters are drawn on the screen to check them for accuracy, will never recapture fully performing a tale to a human audience.)

(Composed by pen on paper)

(First posted Friday 18 January 2008)

Unfree Will

How to control yourself when you can’t control yourself

Who Decides?

We all feel that we are the masters of our actions. It seems to each of us, at least most of the time, that we consciously do the things that we do.

Oftentimes this is an illusion. Scientists have conducted studies in which subjects’ actions were controlled by the researchers, and yet those subjects insisted that they had chosen their actions.

Sometimes we’re even aware of being out of control. We get up in the morning still half-asleep and stumble through our morning routine and later have no memory of doing some of the little actions of this routine. We walk into a room and suddenly it strikes us, ‘Why did I come in here?’ — and find no answer.

And sometimes we can frankly see even while performing an act, that we are not choosing to do it, we don’t even want to do it, we want to do something else; and we watch, in seeming helplessness, ourselves do that very thing. Many addicts experience this, and dieters too.

We know we ought not to have a slice of cake, and yet we take the knife and set it over the cake. We tell ourselves we will take only a small piece, and watch as our hand guides the knife to slice at a much fatter angle than we had imagined. We tell ourselves we will only eat some of it, and find ourselves scraping the last crumbs off the plate.

So if ‘we’ are not deciding these actions, who is?

Brains: Upper & Lower, Right & Left, Super- & Sub

There are plenty of theories about the ‘other self’ that sometimes seems to control our actions. There are philosophical notions from thousands of years ago of ‘little men’ who inhabit us and sometimes dictate our actions. More recently psychological theorists have written of the ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’ or ‘subconscious’ or ‘preconscious’ minds we all have. Neuroscientist have studied the two hemispheres of the brain, assigning different general interests and tasks of each.

Here I’ll give one model that I read about some years ago in a book on the Right Brain. (I forget the title, but it was something like, The Right Brain and the Subconscious Mind.)

Our Unconscious Self

In this model, which the author claimed to have developed from many studies of the mind conducted in the end of the 20th century, the right hemisphere and the ‘subconscious mind’ are roughly the same. The right side of the brain matures much earlier than the left side, which does not begin to assert itself until we are about 7 years old, and does not fully mature until we are in our mid-20s.

The right brain is more closely connected with our physical bodies and our emotions. It has no clear sense of ‘there’ or ‘future’ or ‘past.’ It knows only ‘here’ and ‘now.’ It does not work with words or what we consider logic, but rather with images (pictures and other sensory impressions such as sounds and tastes) and patterns. To the right brain, what comes next is a necessary consequence of what came before, a ‘logical fallacy’ known as post hoc, ergo propter hoc.

The right brain is also more primitive in the sense that it more closely resembles in its thinking how other animals consider the world. The right brain also is more visually oriented (a consequence of working with images and patterns) in the way it understands the world. And it remembers its lessons much better than the left or ‘logical’ brain does.

Because the right brain works with sensory impressions, and the left brain works with words, the two do not communicate well. In general we consider ‘ourself’ to be the left brain, the conscious, thinking, reasoning brain, and so the messages of the right brain seem to come from ‘deep inside’ or from ‘another place.’ The messages of the right brain often need to be unscrambled before we can comprehend them with our left brain. Often the right brain signals our left brain through sensations in the body or in dreams.

Finally, because the right brain comes into its own when we are very young, years before the left brain begins to assert itself, the right brain learns lessons in our first seven years of life, that affect our character, our tastes, our fears, our desires, and our sense of ourselves. But because ‘we’ the left-brain understands the right brain so poorly and incompletely, speaking a different language as it were, we find it quite hard to correct or amend those lessons, and they usually continue to shape our character until the day we die.

And it is the right brain that is in command when we seem to act outside ourselves, lacking control.

Freedom

Regardless of notions of the right or unconscious brain, however, there are many philosophers and scientists who have reached the conclusion that we never are in control of our actions — at least not in the sense we commonly hold. The philosophers hold this position because they are materialists. The scientists hold this position because of studies and experiments they have performed.

‘A man can do whatever he wants, but he can’t want whatever he wants’ is one way to put it.

We are conditioned by our environment, which acts upon our (rather malleable) nature. Through our environment, therefore, our actions can be controlled.

If we can control our environment, we can control our actions.

In this way, even though we may be unable directly to choose what we do, we can, by indirect means, affect what we do.

It is a paradox: even though we may believe we cannot control our actions, we must act as if we can. (Perhaps we are conditioned to believe in this sense of self-control and free will.)

Master Your Environment

So the way to control what we do is to alter our surroundings. A simple, hoary example gives us the model:

When you want to remind yourself of something, tie a string around your finger.

Here the action we want to do is to remember something. Remembering is one of those acts that feel outside our conscious control, and men have developed several means of indirectly helping themselves remember. The string around the finger is an external adjustment to your environment that helps you to remember.

Set Yourself Free and Speak to Your Other Self

Another way to increase your mastery over your actions lies in meditation and foresight, or setting deliberate plans and commandments for yourself. These two general approaches both involve entering into a state of mind divorced from the immediate, sensory world the right brain knows; from this state the left brain sends signals that the right brain accepts. (At least that is as close as I have come in understand just what might be going on.)

In meditation, you have awareness of your self (those who are advanced in meditation claim to gain awareness of their Self as well, that universal Self of which we all partake) but lose awareness of your body. You leave behind, in other words, your right brain — it no longer affects you. In this ‘idealized’ state you can feel your cravings and fears subside, drift away, ebb to low points. Your ideal self, which we can only connect to the left brain in neurological terms, now takes full control and command. Some sort of adjustment takes place, hard to describe. But when we emerge from the meditative state, we are able, for a time at least, to hold the right brain at bay, or tamed.

In states of foresight we set ourselves apart from our right brain selves in time. Before we go to dinner, before the cake is not yet before our eyes, before we have the dinner table, plates, and other details of the eating place surrounding us, before we smell the cake, we tell ourselves:

No cake tonight.

If we can do this in such a way as to impress it upon our right brains, and if our right brains do not clamor too much for its desire, we will find ourselves acting in the way we (the ‘we’ of our left brains) choose.

More to Come

This essay is a good deal longer than I’d like, so I’ll save more specific techniques for another time. This should be enough to start on.

(First posted Wednesday, January 16, 2008)