Human Scale Living

Take control over your life by going small(er)

Lost in the Oceans of the World

Long ago (but still true today for millions of us) we lived small and local lives. Most of what we ate was grown locally, most of what we wore was grown regionally and processed locally. The objects that traveled farthest were the metals and ores and gemstones that appear rarely on the Earth, and for good reason: not every backyard can be mined for gold, but every backyard can grow some food.

This began to change for “advanced” cultures built by conquest such as the Roman empire. Rome fed itself on bread whose grain was grown in Egypt, the “breadbasket of Rome.” But it began its current exponential growth when industrialization was born in England some 300 years ago. Since then, industrialization has swept across Europe, the Americas, Asia and is now digging deeper into Africa. The triumph of industrialization seems inevitable.

But is that good for us?

A large textile mill must weave a great deal of fabric in order to drive its costs down from the high initial outlay to build the mill in the first place. This means that the mill must sell its fabrics outside its native town, across the county and region and perhaps even nation in which it is set. As mills are built that are bigger than in previous generations (the “more and more” philosophy) they must sell their fabric across borders, eventually globally — the stage we are currently growing into.

As a result each of us is lost. Lost in the sense that we may never know the weaver who made the cloth we wear, and he will never know us. We are anonymous consumers and he is a famous but alienated producer. In all likelihood “he” (the weaver) is a faceless mass of interchangeable employees at the corporation which is the true weaver, the unhuman producer of the cloth we wear.

This alienation means that we consumers can never know enough about the producers of the goods we consume, to be able to trust them. And the producers of the goods measure everything in terms of monetary gains and losses rather than the quality of the finished goods or the pleasure of satisfying a customer.

Control Through Downsizing

“Downsizing” is a corporate euphemism for firing massive numbers of low-ranking employees in order to lower costs so that high-ranking employees can be paid more. But here we use the term to mean:

shedding the distant producers in favor of more local producers for all the goods we consume

It makes good sense to consider that we as consumers can have greater influence over and knowledge of producers who are smaller in size and closer to us in location. An extreme example should make this clear:

Mrs Dalsworthy

Mrs Dalsworthy is a nice woman who lives up the street. She knits sweaters as a sideline. If you would like to buy a sweater from Mrs Dalsworthy, you ring her up or drop by for a chat. She serves you a cup of tea and you tell her you’d like a sweater. She asks what kind, and you tell her. She measures you, you give her a small down payment and leave. A few weeks later she rings you up and you go to pick up the sweater. You put it on and together you and Mrs Dalsworthy judge how good the sweater is.

But your neighbor goes to the mall to get his sweater. He buys it at a large retailer and must select the sweater out of their stock on hand, which is ample for sizes types and colors. Your neighbor gets his sweater on the same day, pays a lot less than you do, and his sweater is manufactured to a higher degree of uniform quality than Mrs Dalsworthy can achieve. On the other hand your neighbor’s sweater is also made to sell cheaply and its dyes and materials are cheaper and less sturdy than those Mrs Dalsworthy uses, and his sweater will not last so long as yours.

You dealt with the sole proprietress, knitter, materials orderer and saleslady. Your neighbor dealt with a low-wage clerk who could only act within the parameters of what his supervisor, another low-level employee, authorized.

Your order made a difference to Mrs Dalsworthy; your neighbor’s purchase amounted to a trivial, vanishingly-small item on the monster lists of sales of the retailer, whose further payments (rent to the mall owner, goods orders from the distributor, etc.) amounted to only small items on those companies’ revenues. Seen from the other point of view, Mrs Dalsworthy will experience a good deal of pleasure if you like the sweater she knits for you, and some pain if you don’t like it. But when your neighbor told the clerk at the large retail store, “I’ll take this,” it hardly made a difference to the clerk, or the clerk’s supervisor, or the store manager, or the CEO of the corporation that owns the chain of retail stores in question.

Go Small Be Happy

Moving to a smaller, more human scale gives us more power over our lives. It gives us more pleasure also. It increases our contact with our fellows, and the contact is more meaningful for both parties.

Go human, go local.

More About Philip Pullman and His Dark Materials

My first post on Philip Pullman’s tale His Dark Materials ran longer than I like, so here are the rest of the thoughts the tale gave rise to.

Why I Analyze

Why do I look closely at tales? I don’t want to pick on Mr. Pullman — I want rather to understand how and why his tale affected me (and I presume other readers as well) the way it did. I want to understand this mostly in order to learn how to tell my own tales better. When I find a tale that works well I want to see why it was so good and use the same tactics in my tales. And when a tale annoys me I want to be warned ahead of time about tactics that don’t work well. I don’t aim at any deep or over-arching theory of narrative because honestly I’m not clever enough for that.

Strong Sequences

There were several stretches of the tale that riveted me. When Lyra escaped from Mrs. Coulter in London the tale grew very strong and remained so until Lyra found herself among the bears at Svalbard — a considerable stretch. And when Will and Lyra were in Oxford fleeing the Secret Police and trying to regain the alethiometer from Lord Boreal the tale grew gripping again. Pullman created strong suspense in these sequences in the first two volumes of his tale. He combined danger with mystery and revelation to achieve this. Danger and mystery are basic elements of a strong tale regardless of genre, but revelation holds a heightened importance in tales of wonder — Wonder Tales Hawthorne called them, though today we generally call them science-fiction or fantasy.

In tales of wonder we take a special delight in imagining strange lands and creatures and powers. The gyptians living on boats and barges in the fens, taking fighting polar bears and magic tools like the Knife that will cut through anything even from one world to another and the oracular alethiometer are fun to contemplate in and of themselves — so are the daemons, a cross between imaginary friends, pets, and one’s conscience.

One of the pitfalls of multi-volume Wonder Tales arises when the talesman loads up all his wonders in the first volume, recycling them in subsequent volumes. Pullman has more wonders in Northern Lights than either of the other two books, but he does introduce the Subtle Knife in book two. He brings in angels too. For book three, The Amber Spyglass, he tells us about the spyglass, a wish-driven flying saucer called the Intention Craft, and the mulefa, spineless diamond-framed quadrupeds. These are all minor wonders that didn’t interest us very much or were not developed well.

Had I read the tale in a single volume this would have been less of a problem though it would even so have made the beginning of the tale more interesting than the end. And this is one of the foremost laws of talesmanship:

Let the ending of your tale surpass its beginning in all ways.

This is true not only in producing more and better wonders towards the end, but also revealing new and wonderful aspects of wonders already introduced. So Pullman might have revealed new tricks for either the alethiometer or the knife. He promises us from early on that the knife can do more tricks than we are first told, but he reneges on this — a deadly sin.

Puppetry

I have already mentioned how Pullman too-conveniently brings in Balthamos to take care of the assassin stalking Lyra, and drops Mrs. Coulter in the Himalayas and the two daemons on the battlefield without a word of justification or explanation. These embody the talesman playing fast and loose with events. Pullman also seems to play fast and loose with the souls of his characters. Lyra he draws as a fierce leader but he makes her passive and submissive when it suits the needs of his story. Will cares for nothing so much as his sick mother, but he leaves her and never tries to see her again; at the tale’s end Will is back on his native Earth and still scarcely seems to care about how she is doing.

This manner of treating his characters as if they were puppets shows us a talesman who does not believe himself in his characters, or who is too lazy to deal honestly with the problems of his tale. We in the audience feel cheated by such treatment. Something of our faith in the tale and our trust in our talesman goes out of our hearts.

Plot-Theme

Ayn Rand introduced me to the notion of the plot-theme, the total integration of the sequence of events within the tale and the ideas that lie beneath it. When plot and theme are united the talesman with a message only needs to tell his tale as if he had no message — and we will find the message ourselves in the tale’s events. Sinclair Lewis and Victor Hugo mastered this art.

We see a sure sign of a talesman who has failed to integrate his story and his theme when he resorts to making his characters give speeches and talk about the theme. Pullman gives us a lot of this. What is worse is that his story denies his stated aims in writing it. That goes beyond our look into His Dark Materials as a tale alone. It does raise questions about the thinking abilities of those prominent critics who have hailed the work as some sort of high water mark of the literature of the fantastic.

Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials

A look at His Dark Materials and its talesmanship

Philip Pullman wrote a series of 3 books for young adults: Northern Lights (retitled in the USA as The Golden Compass), The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass. These books have proved immensely popular internationally and have sparked a great deal of controversy for their attacks upon the Christian Church and religion in general. But I want to look at them mainly as tales to see how well they work. I’ll only regard Pullman’s philosophy insofar as it affects the tales.

I’ll consider the tale as a single unified story rather than as three.

Warning: I’m going to reveal story twists and results in this, so if you haven’t read the story and want to, read no more.

The Beginning

In general the opening scenes of Northern Lights are strong. The first thing a Talesman wants to do is to let his audience know who the tale is about and something about the circumstances of the tale or its setting. Telling us about the setting is more important in any tale set in a place foreign to the audience. In this case Pullman has imagined a Jordan College in Oxford and an England on an Earth that is both familiar and unfamiliar to us, so telling us where we are is as important as telling us who the story is about.

Northern Lights begins strong with a scene of Lyra (our heroine) spying on a private meeting of the elders of Jordan College in Oxford England. We share her discomfort on the wardrobe floor and are encouraged to help decide with her whether to show herself to save her kinsman from poison. These are both good techniques Pullman uses to draw his audience into his tale and side with his heroine. But there is a problem.

We are not on Earth — at least not on any Earth we know. Pullman imagines an infinite number of Earths, all superimposed on top of one another and all different. So he tries to clue us in on this by using different terms such as “anbaric” instead of “electric” and “naphtha” instead of “gas.” This works well enough, but in addition Lyra witnesses a presentation of information new to her, centering on the mysterious little seen “Dust” photographed by special film in the Arctic.

It adds up to too much information all at once. The subtly-implied alternate world is one level of information, and the presentation on what lies in the Arctic (given as a series of allusions, names and hints at people and organizations unfamiliar to Lyra but not to the college scholars) is a second level of information. Added together it is too much information. We scratch our heads and sit back and try to put it all in order — if we were sitting at Pullman’s knee listening to him tell his tale aloud we would all be clamoring and interrupting him with questions. I confess that the first time I tried to read Northern Lights I put it down after only reaching the middle of the second chapter. My head, my poor head, was reeling!

Now, I think that a talesman ought to anticipate such questions.

Not that Pullman has to tell us everything, far from it — but the opening could have introduced us to Lyra first and her world before beginning to pile on the mysteries that will be her task to solve as the tale unfolds.

Indeed this is what I believe Pullman intended to do, because after the presentation scene he tells us all about Lyra and her life as it has been. He does this in Summary Mode, merely summarizing the typical events and outstanding occurrences of Lyra’s life. This is, I believe, where Pullman originally started his tale, and later moved the scene of the meeting of scholars to the beginning because it was so exciting and involving. But once begun in this way, the tale as it is seems to pull up lame and limp over this summation, which would have been perfectly acceptable as the very beginning of the tale.

QUESTIONS

No talesman need answer all possible mysteries his tale creates but there are some questions an audience will expect to find answered; other questions a talesman seems to promise he will answer. Any explicit mystery for example the talesman makes a bargain with his audience. “Ponder this and we’ll see if you can solve it. Fear not for I will reveal the answer before I end my tale.” When such questions are left unanswered we feel the talesman has cheated us. (Some talesmen seek to raise more questions than they answer and want us to confront mysteries and ambiguities for their own sake or for our own enlightenment. Is this Pullman’s goal? The rest of his tale makes us doubt it.) Other questions crop up as seeming lapses or contradictions and make us wonder about the competence of the talesman. All these questions lessen the pleasure we find in a tale. Here are some of the questions that bothered me while I was reading His Dark Materials:

1. How can Lyra fool bear after bear when bears are impossible to trick?
2. How does Mrs. Coulter take Lyra (who is presumably drugged as she is later on) through the worlds, across Eurasia and high into the Himalayas? How does she do this so fast?
3. What after all is Dust?
4. What is it that is controling the alethiometer? How do we (and Lyra) know it is trustworthy?
5. Why is Lyra suddenly unable to read the alethiometer?
6. What happened 33,000 years ago throughout the worlds? Dust and “consciousness” both came into being — but how and why?
7. What are daemons and how do they work?
8. What happened to the great white birds who are the natural enemies of the mulefa?
9. How did the climactic battle between the angels end? Who won and who lost? And what difference did that make?
10. Why do Lyra and Will’s daemons wander through so many of the infinite worlds, only to end up in the very place where they are in the greatest danger? What draws them there and what do they experience along the way?
11. Why does Lyra and Will falling in love make any difference at all to Dust and the universe?
12. Where does the Dust go when it escapes the universe? Why does it go there?
13. What are Specters?

Stuff and Nonsense

The theology of Pullman is not of interest to us, except insofar as it helps or hinders the tale. And at the heart of it all, the theology, because it makes no rational or common sense at all, hurts the tale.

The story of the Garden of Eden may not be entirely comprehensible to the adult rational mind (why, after all, is this one plant taboo?) but in its basics it is perfectly understandable to the child within us. We have all as children been told of taboos by our elders, and those taboos make no sense to us; and when children ask “Why not?” they more than likely are answered only, “Because I say so.” Of course the child is still likely to break the taboo, and then gets punished.

But Pullman offers us an incomprehensible (on any level) Dust which is conscious (or something) and out of a million million worlds this Dust takes interest in what this one girl and one boy do. Because Will and Lyra fall in love, the Dust stops “leaking” out of the worlds. Only it doesn’t really stop leaking out, it’s still happening. It stops, for unknown reasons, only it doesn’t really stop.

It makes no sense at all to me.

The Hand of God

Deus ex machina refers to miraculous escapes that are just too convenient; it seems as though the talesman has taken a shortcut through an obstacle in his way. Pullman gives us a few of these along the way, including what is a literal “god from the machine” when the angel Balthamos removes the assassin from Lyra’s path. This annoyed me particularly because Pullman had been following the assassin for many chapters as though he were important and not just a plot device to relieve the boredom of the last chapters (but that is all he is it seems, as Pullman goes so far as to treat the man’s corpse as trash).

Bad Shapes

The ending of the tale is badly shaped, as the great climax of the war takes place, and the climax between the principal characters comes later and is unrelated to the great battle, except that their two daemons have gone to the scene of the battle for no good reason at all. A good talesman will co-ordinate all his storylines so that they achieve climax as closely together as possible, and he will ensure that the audience is most enthralled by the main storyline, and he will resolve it last of all.

Young Love is Doomed

When tragic romance dooms the love of young lovers, the only appropriate resolution is the death of one or both of the lovers. To allow them both to survive is to do what Pullman does here: he has them choose to part even though they could remain together. And they will live on to find other loves, get married, have children apart from each other. This mutes the sadness and tragedy, and prevents the full flow of tears the audience who enjoys such tales wants to experience.

The Great War that Fizzled

Much of the tale shows the renewal of the “War in Heaven” that John Milton essayed in Paradise Lost. That war meant something to Milton, the Israelites, and later to Christians and Muslims alike. Pullman’s war on the other hand not only does not conclude even though the enemy commanders are both destroyed, but it turns out to make no difference. Not only are we not told who wins or loses this great battle that is the rebellion’s climax, but we are later told, in an offhand way, that oh yes, none of that made any difference at all and everything will continue just the way it always has.

Huh?

Asotir the Talesman

All about your humble host.

If you dislike blog posts that are all about their authors, you’d better skip this one. If on the other hand you love to delve deeply into the souls of writers, you’re likely to find this post unsatisfying.

Sorry about that. It’s not like I try to be annoying. It’s simply that I’m caught in a dilemma between modesty, the acknowledgment that most people like to know something about those who are telling them tales, and the deep conviction that who I am is less important than what I tell.

Let’s face it: although Homer and Shakespeare and other talesmen past and present are interesting topics of speculation, the reason we all read the Iliad and attend performances of Hamlet is to be thrilled and enchanted by the tales themselves, regardless who wrote them.

I chose those two examples advisedly, not that I believe I’m in any way comparable to those staggering giants of our craft, but rather because of the way those tales came to be. Both were “true tales” of real historical events, passed down in various versions by many talesmen, and in the end finalized, and fixed into the forms we know today. The “authors” of those final versions we call Shakespeare and Homer, but many other voices ring out in the background, like the voices in a chorus, all blending together and none essential, though the loss of any one would diminish the effect of the whole.

There is nothing original (in the sense of the Romantic genius) in the tales I sign as Asotir. All have come from other sources, other voices, other talesmen, to whom I am greatly indebted and grateful, and without whom I would have no tales to tell in the first place.

And also, though I blush to say it, there is in the end nothing very interesting about me or my life. But you might want to know a little about the history of Asotir the Talesman, so here it is.

When I was very very young, my Mother and my Grandmother read to me. I learned to read relatively early, and being a sickly child soon became a voracious reader. I also fell in love with old movies which were still aired on local television stations at all hours of the day. When I was 11, I also fell in love with comic books, especially the Marvel hero tales created by Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko with brilliant dialogue by Stan Lee. (I wish manga had been available to me then, as I loved the Astro Boy dubs that also aired on local telly.) I loved Edgar Rice Burroughs for his Barsoom and Tarzan novels, and happily watched the mid-1930s Universal serials of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, starring Buster Crabbe, that one very-enlightened local telly station aired instead of local news shows, at 6 pm. each weeknight.

I loved Thomas Hardy and his Return of the Native when I was 11, and the following year discovered JRR Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings. Within a year I was also gorging my brain with paperback editions of Robert E. Howard’s Conan, Michael Moorcock’s Runestaff series, Isaac Asimov (Lucky Starr, Foundation, the Robots series) and Robert A Heinlein. Then there was the heady space opera of E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman series. Another great favorite of mine was Eric Rucker Eddison and his Worm Ouroboros and Zimiamvian tales. That led me to his historical saga of Styrbiorn the Strong and his translation of the medieval Icelandic Egil’s Saga. From there, with a tip of the hat to Jack Kirby’s wonderful adaptations of Norse myths in the back pages of Journey Into Mystery (later retitled The Mighty Thor) it was only a step to reading translations of the other Icelandic sagas and about a dozen different translations of Beowulf.

Those are the roots of Asotir.

How to Improve Your Community

A Recipe for a Just Democracy

In any discussion of what makes a society “good” or “just” the basic truth is:

educated, enlightened, compassionate and involved rulers bring justice to their societies.

A Democracy is ruled (at least in theory) by its citizens as a whole either directly through plebiscites or indirectly by electing representatives periodically whose outlook, philosophy, and values are chosen by the citizens as best mirroring their own.

So, just as a kingdom is just when its king is educated, enlightened, compassionate and involved, a democracy is just when its citizens are educated, enlightened, compassionate and involved.

Educated

In order to make the best choices for their community, people must know what those choices are. They must know what is the current state of affairs, they must know what are the options going forward, and they must know with some confidence what the results of those options would be.

Education involves two main branches: general knowledge of the world and how it works, and specific knowledge of what are the circumstances of the world right now.

General knowledge

This is where schools come play a fundamental role in supporting the community. But adults who have “graduated” from their formal schools must continue to refresh and renew their general knowledge to prevent it from falling out of date and reflecting old, superseded views as well as to keep from forgetting what they learned.

Specific knowledge

This is where the press plays its role. But the governmental offices also have a duty to keep the citizens informed, and this is why everything the office-holders, diplomats, lawmakers, soldiers, and regulators do must be made public knowledge as soon as possible. Ideally within 24 hours.

Enlightened

Merely having some basic knowledge of subjects is not enough, however. The citizens need to be able to judge and analyze new information (the specific knowledge of current affairs) without undue emotion, cooly, reasonably, “without fear or favor.” The citizens must not succumb to superstition or wishful thinking when considering what is going on.

Compassionate

Cold analysis, however, cannot be all of the citizen’s response. They also need to be able to empathize with their fellow-citizens as well as with foreigners of other lands. This compassion should cross sexual, religious, age, and class lines. It should embody the awareness that we are all human, we are all animals, we are all dwellers upon a common world with more in common than anything that sets us apart.

Involved

Finally, the citizens need to be involved. Not only do they need to be informed as to what their world is like in general and specifically what is going on today, not only do they need to consider this knowledge rationally and with the moderating influence of compassion, but they must also want to. They have to care about what is going on enough to spend the energy and the time necessary to learn and act upon their knowledge.

You

As with all projects to improve your community, “the journey of a thousand souls begins with only one — yourself.”

Ads That Do Not Sell

When an ad won’t sell its product it embodies a failure of storytelling

A televised commercial represents a beautifully condensed form of storytelling or talesmanship as I call it. In a mere 30 seconds all the bits of a full story must be gathered together, put into an effective order and presented to the audience in a powerful manner.

The ad also presents us with a sort of tale that has a very simple intention or aim. An ad means to get its audience to buy the featured product.

There are a few ways the talesman telling the ad’s tale can use to prod his audience to buy. The way this is usually done is by making the audience want that product — appealing to their emotions. The most straightforward way is by informing the audience about the superior virtues of the product — appealing to their intellect. He can also make the audience fear or doubt themselves or their lives should they fail to buy the product — appealing to their fear.

Whatever the means or strategy the talesman uses, he can measure the success of the ad simply by tracking sales for the product before and after the ads run.

Over the past few years I’ve seen an increasing number of ads that take a very strange angle on selling. These ads make it difficult for their audience to grasp why they should buy the product — it often becomes hard to understand even what the product is at all.

This sorry state of affairs shows us some of the basics of talesmanship: in order to succeed the talesman must—

1. Know his tale
2. Know his audience
3. Know how he intends his tale to affect his audience
4. Know how to tell his tale so that it does affect his audience in the way that he intends

These are the Four Legs of Talesmanship. The talesman must balance all four under his workbench whenever he takes up his tale. Without them we are lost, or groping blindly in a strange land. And yet at the same time the master talesman will hold these four legs so snugly in his heart that he seems not to know them at all; but he does; he does.

And the best way for us apprentice talesmen to balance upon these four legs is to act out both parts at once, and be both the teller and the audience of our own tale as we tells it.

How to Boost Your Self Esteem

How To Boost Your Self Esteem

Self esteem is the feeling that you are able to accomplish your goals and that you are worthy of enjoying the benefits of those accomplishments.

Often people will tell us that since self esteem is a feeling, we should work on our feelings in order to boost our self esteem (self esteem is good to have to a large extent, and so most efforts have gone into trying to boost self esteem among those of us who feel we don’t have enough of it; too much self esteem is not generally called self esteem but rather pride, arrogance, or hubris).

The problem in trying to boost self esteem by addressing our feelings directly is that we feel self esteem only as a result of our actions and behavior — so when we try to boost self esteem directly we find ourselves doing no more than repeating pleasing mantras of self-affirmation in the manner of Emile Coué, and though this can help marginally, it doesn’t get at the root of our problem.

The way to do it

Here’s the way to boost our self esteem:

Accomplish something that we find both challenging and worthwhile.

So…

1. it must be something that we do
2. it must be something that we find challenging or difficult
3. it must be something that we believe is worthwhile

Something that we do

This part actually makes it easier to approach. A feeling is hard to measure but we can see an action and measure it; we can see its results and judge how effective we have been. Doing something easy will not increase our sense confidence that we can cope with life and its difficulties, or that we are able to achieve our goals — so our sense of self esteem won’t rise. Every time we accomplish something challenging, on the contrary, we find ourselves feeling that we are able to do other things that seem difficult. But also when we do something many times we lose our sense that the thing is a challenge for us personally — and this will lead us to face even greater challenges in the future if we want to go on boosting our sense of self esteem.

Something challenging

This part is relative to our own individual and particular abilities as we see them. So we can start wherever we find ourselves and we can follow it as far as we can grow and improve ourselves.

Something worthwhile

This part is relative to our own individual and particular notions of what is moral and good. And so it will change as our notions change of what is the good. Doing something we feel ashamed of will not boost our feelings of being worthy of enjoying the fruits and benefits of our accomplshment. But when we do something that we feel proud of, we feel it is proper and right that we should enjoy whatever good things flow from our accomplshment as a result.

Clarifications

I should note that our sense of what is “moral and good” is never wholly relative. We all evolve our individual sense of what is proper and good out of the larger context of what those around us have seemed to believe when we were growing up and forming our first beliefs. And what our family and elders believed grew in turn out of what their foregoers believed. And in the end all mankind’s beliefs over the hundred or so millennia since modern man first walked the face of Africa must (we have to assume) have been fitted to the realities of life on Earth — so that in general we could say that “absolute morality” refers to all that is good and sustainable for us to survive and prosper on our Earth.

But that’s another tale for another day.

Have a better year in front of you than the year you leave behind.