Have you ever just stared into a mirror, and looked at yourself? An almost sublime sense of selfhood emerges. A realization that you are really you, bound to this body, and to no one else. It is both incredibly limiting, and incredibly freeing, at the same time. Truly, truly sublime. I couldn't help but smile as I did it. I seemed so... unfamiliar... as I looked at myself. Yet who could I be, but the person staring back?
...
Consciousness, the existence of such, has, I think, always been the main source of my inspiration. I am just truly fascinated by what it is, what it means. Everything I have been trying to unwrap has boiled down to this very specific question. What does it mean to experience the world subjectively?
...
I have been thinking about Father, off and on, lately. He always comes back, it seems in waves, ebbing and flowing. More intense and more intense, then less so. Well, lately, Raymond Frederick Raven has played heavily upon my mind. I have been thinking about the normal person, how their conception of a distant parent differs so drastically from mine. How they see their absentee parent as at fault in some way. That is not the case for me. It is strange. I feel that I am constantly inundated with people whose stories of parental disconnect are so much worse than mine, yet so much better. Everyone is still alive. Sometimes, it feels exceedingly, fatalistically cruel, that I should unabashedly love my father so much, and yet be denied him. Everyone else seems so unaware how lucky they are, yet I can't help but feel that, given their blindness, that it is I who should be grateful, for I knew, Before, just how lucky I was, to have both of them. And though I feel sometimes, a resentment , born of my own stagnation, I know, KNOW, that without them, specifically, I would have been dead long ago.
Thank you.
Showing posts with label no really I am not insane. Show all posts
Showing posts with label no really I am not insane. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Friday, July 24, 2009
The Stuff Stories Are Made Of, Part 1
When I decided to be an English major, one of the things I remember being disappointed by was when I learned that literary criticism didn't really concern itself with matters of what was good and bad. It was concerned with meaning. There would not really be an attempt to reason with what stories—novels or short stories—were good or bad. That was just subjective. And in the one and only creative writing class I took, we were told, when critiquing each others stories, not to suggest plot points to each other. Just tips on writing. There was one quite good reason for this, which is that if you told someone what should happen in a story, it stopped being their story, and started being your story. But on the other hand, often what was wrong with the stories was that the stories were just bad stories. Uninteresting. I didn't care what happened to the characters. By saying that the we couldn't critique the events in the story, the class was effectively saying, there are no bad stories, just badly told stories.
But I think there are such things as bad stories, and good stories, separate from the how they're conveyed to their audience. You can have a well made movie or a well written book, and they can still have good moments, well-cut action sequences or beautifully florid passages of description, but they still won't add up to much and most people won't enjoy seeing them or reading them.
So what makes for a good story? What elements make for stories that people want to read/watch? There are elements that people say they read things for, or go to movies, that are not related to form. Good characters. Lots of people talk about how important characters are. Or suspense. People read to see what happens next. Or conflict. Conflict is really important. Most plots center around some central conflict. People read on to see the conflict resolved. Mystery. Maybe there isn't some tension are work in the story any more—the killer has already killed, or something—but people want to know what actually happened. They want the unknown revealed. Little moments. Some stories ain't even all that great, but there are some moments in it that are really good. Little moments of quiet sadness, or uproarious comedy, or touching kindness, or shocking cruelty. Many comedies are comprised of really pointless plots that are just excuses to string along a series of funny bits on (Monty Python and the Holy Grail jumps to mind as a masterpiece of this format). And of course, in the big stories, they want some commentary, or insight, on the human condition, or life and the universe or something. In order for a story to be great, it usually needs to knock us around a bit and leave us thinking big thoughts.
But what makes these things interesting and meaningful. What makes for good characters? What makes something suspenseful? What makes us want to see a conflict concluded, or find out what we didn't know? What makes those little moments special? What makes comedy funny and tragedy cathartic. What makes a story great?
So this is what I thought about.
And the answer, I decided, is irony.
Now, when I say irony, I mean it in the broadest sense of the word. I don't mean it the way people mean it when they talk about people being ironic, or how they meant it when, after 9/11, everyone was talking about the Death of Irony. Usually when people use it in that sense they just mean either verbal irony, or base sarcasm, or something in between. And this misuse has lead to a lot of blather about how no one really knows what irony really means.
That's nonsense. Irony is a very simple concept; all it is the going against of expectations. And what stories need to be interesting is irony. In fact, I think you could say that stories are built out of ironies. Big ironies and little ironies.
Why irony? Well, any good story has to fulfill two somewhat contradictory things. They need to 1) justify why the story is unique enough to be told and 2) be relatable to the rest of human experience.
No one wants to hear a story where nothing interesting happens, like the last time you went grocery shopping. Nor do they want to hear a long string of pointlessly absurd events that have no relation or meaning to each other. Now, you could create art out of such situations. You could write a good poem about going to the supermarket, and the average episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus is basically an series of absurd and unrelated events. But that doesn't mean your poem about going to the supermarket is a good story, and no episode of Flying Circus has anything like a continuous plot (with the possible exception of the one about Scott of the Antarctic, but I think that one just has one really long sketch in it).
An ironic situation manages to fulfill both qualities. In fact, irony is inherent in the fulfillment of both qualities. Any ironic situation is more unique than most situations, since it goes against what is expected—that is, what usually happens. And of course, an implicit aspect of any ironic situation is that, though it goes against expectations, it's rooted in some logic, some sense that what doesn't seem to make sense actually does. Thus it's relatable. If the situation doesn't make sense, then it's just absurd, and absurdity isn't really interesting or relatable. (Although absurdities can be used quite well as a set up for ironies. They heighten the relevant factors by stripping out other, complicating factors, that would undermine the situation. Beckett and Python do this a lot.)
So in any ironic situation there is a kind of return. Let's call it the Ironic Return. The Return is the way in which the ironic moment offers some insight into the world, and thus makes some comment upon it.
More later.
But I think there are such things as bad stories, and good stories, separate from the how they're conveyed to their audience. You can have a well made movie or a well written book, and they can still have good moments, well-cut action sequences or beautifully florid passages of description, but they still won't add up to much and most people won't enjoy seeing them or reading them.
So what makes for a good story? What elements make for stories that people want to read/watch? There are elements that people say they read things for, or go to movies, that are not related to form. Good characters. Lots of people talk about how important characters are. Or suspense. People read to see what happens next. Or conflict. Conflict is really important. Most plots center around some central conflict. People read on to see the conflict resolved. Mystery. Maybe there isn't some tension are work in the story any more—the killer has already killed, or something—but people want to know what actually happened. They want the unknown revealed. Little moments. Some stories ain't even all that great, but there are some moments in it that are really good. Little moments of quiet sadness, or uproarious comedy, or touching kindness, or shocking cruelty. Many comedies are comprised of really pointless plots that are just excuses to string along a series of funny bits on (Monty Python and the Holy Grail jumps to mind as a masterpiece of this format). And of course, in the big stories, they want some commentary, or insight, on the human condition, or life and the universe or something. In order for a story to be great, it usually needs to knock us around a bit and leave us thinking big thoughts.
But what makes these things interesting and meaningful. What makes for good characters? What makes something suspenseful? What makes us want to see a conflict concluded, or find out what we didn't know? What makes those little moments special? What makes comedy funny and tragedy cathartic. What makes a story great?
So this is what I thought about.
And the answer, I decided, is irony.
Now, when I say irony, I mean it in the broadest sense of the word. I don't mean it the way people mean it when they talk about people being ironic, or how they meant it when, after 9/11, everyone was talking about the Death of Irony. Usually when people use it in that sense they just mean either verbal irony, or base sarcasm, or something in between. And this misuse has lead to a lot of blather about how no one really knows what irony really means.
That's nonsense. Irony is a very simple concept; all it is the going against of expectations. And what stories need to be interesting is irony. In fact, I think you could say that stories are built out of ironies. Big ironies and little ironies.
Why irony? Well, any good story has to fulfill two somewhat contradictory things. They need to 1) justify why the story is unique enough to be told and 2) be relatable to the rest of human experience.
No one wants to hear a story where nothing interesting happens, like the last time you went grocery shopping. Nor do they want to hear a long string of pointlessly absurd events that have no relation or meaning to each other. Now, you could create art out of such situations. You could write a good poem about going to the supermarket, and the average episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus is basically an series of absurd and unrelated events. But that doesn't mean your poem about going to the supermarket is a good story, and no episode of Flying Circus has anything like a continuous plot (with the possible exception of the one about Scott of the Antarctic, but I think that one just has one really long sketch in it).
An ironic situation manages to fulfill both qualities. In fact, irony is inherent in the fulfillment of both qualities. Any ironic situation is more unique than most situations, since it goes against what is expected—that is, what usually happens. And of course, an implicit aspect of any ironic situation is that, though it goes against expectations, it's rooted in some logic, some sense that what doesn't seem to make sense actually does. Thus it's relatable. If the situation doesn't make sense, then it's just absurd, and absurdity isn't really interesting or relatable. (Although absurdities can be used quite well as a set up for ironies. They heighten the relevant factors by stripping out other, complicating factors, that would undermine the situation. Beckett and Python do this a lot.)
So in any ironic situation there is a kind of return. Let's call it the Ironic Return. The Return is the way in which the ironic moment offers some insight into the world, and thus makes some comment upon it.
More later.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Futurism
So one thing I was thinking about lately was electronic devices and the effect they would have on society, and really what approach we as humans would have to information, what tools we would use to access information.
It seems to me like there are maybe three sets of devices that aren't going way. There is the large of screen, such as your television or a really large computer monitor or set of monitors. Perhaps large projection mechanisms such as movie screens. We are always going to want screens to view certain bits of information in a very large format, because sometimes we will just want that type of immersion experience. So that's not going anywhere. Then there are laptop devices, basically small portable screens with access to a variety of functions. And then the small handheld device, which is increasing taking on a whole plethora of functions, from phones to music storage to accessing the Internet. In ways it's more functional than a laptop, just be virtue of being smaller, and it can provide for most of the functions of a laptop. But pressing small buttons on a tiny screen would get maddening for any long-term, serious work. I can't imagine someone writing a novel or short story or computer code or term paper for hours on end on a tiny handheld device, or even watching certain types of videos with any degree of comfort. A laptop device with always be a necessity for a certain type of professional, although I can actually see certain classes opting to go without them for only the iphone device. And of course there might be some type of desire for a midsized device, like a kindle, something for the reading of long-format works, but that might just be a stop-gap device until people get over their cultural attachment to the codex form, and I can't see anyone opting for such a size when the other options allow for a greater variety of function and ease, especially if the mid-size device, like the kindle, remains confined to only a narrow range of uses. (Computers could be turned into cellphones as easily as cellphones have been turned into computers.)
So I think that those devices will remain around for quite some time. What I am curious about, though, it what the further advances will be made in terms of information access. I saw some video somewhere about some kind of wearable device that would give access to a whole array of information through the use of a camera around the neck. And what would happen if we finally developed technology that would allow a direct electronic chip, brain interface, like the kind of technology we see Neuromancer or the Matrix? Would we be able to download information, surf the Internet, write documents, answer phone calls, all inside our heads? How would this change our culture, the way we interact with information?
This would obviously require some form of surgery. So would our culture split between those who have access to external devices and those who have direct mental access to electronic processors, creating an additional class, capable of affording the elective surgery, creating a third class of technology users. William Gibson has said that the future is here, it just isn't spread out evenly. Right now there are those with access to electronic devices, and those too destitute to afford them. Then of course there are those that are that live without access to any form of electronic technology at all, your present day hunter-gatherers. I wonder how long they are for this world. I wonder, perhaps, if technology developed that allowed for such electronic/organic interfaces, if such technology is even possible (does the nature of human consciousness really allow for such a thing?) there might be some type of socio-political movement to make it widespread available, maybe to enforce government subsidization of the surgical process, so that it's existence doesn't lead the creation of an impermeable overclass, and not of political/economic movers and shakers, your Bush's, Clinton's, Senators, World Leaders and Businessmen, but an actual, leisure class in possession of advanced wealth and capabilities, more like Metropolis than any cyberpunk setting. I suppose it depends on how far along in social democratization we are. And I don't just mean in terms of the U.S., although it's possible we could have such split occur here too, especially if the technology occurs in a setting without Single Payer Healthcare or strong unionization, but in First World/Third World terms, too. I mean, I could see us having a West hardwired into the Internet at all times, completely against an East and South America that exists without such trappings, and thus getting continually outpaced in technology by leaps and bounds. What would such distance in wealth and information bring about? Is such a thing not already, happening? Would we see the widespread rejection of materialism, a move towards spiritual concerns? Contentment of being left out? Surely there would be those who would see the injustice of the situation, if not wanting to be hardwired, at least in terms of the material comfort such technologies, allowed (I can also see a rejection of such elective surgeries occurring among religious conservatives and animal rights activists, environmentalist, and the anti-corporate movement on the left*) and would respond with violence and terrorism, perhaps causing some kind of environmental, biological or nuclear catastrophe. That would set up your post-apocalyptic setting right there.
*I think Gibson actually portrayed such characters in "Johnny Mnemonic." And Neuromancer features evangelicals as terrorists.
It seems to me like there are maybe three sets of devices that aren't going way. There is the large of screen, such as your television or a really large computer monitor or set of monitors. Perhaps large projection mechanisms such as movie screens. We are always going to want screens to view certain bits of information in a very large format, because sometimes we will just want that type of immersion experience. So that's not going anywhere. Then there are laptop devices, basically small portable screens with access to a variety of functions. And then the small handheld device, which is increasing taking on a whole plethora of functions, from phones to music storage to accessing the Internet. In ways it's more functional than a laptop, just be virtue of being smaller, and it can provide for most of the functions of a laptop. But pressing small buttons on a tiny screen would get maddening for any long-term, serious work. I can't imagine someone writing a novel or short story or computer code or term paper for hours on end on a tiny handheld device, or even watching certain types of videos with any degree of comfort. A laptop device with always be a necessity for a certain type of professional, although I can actually see certain classes opting to go without them for only the iphone device. And of course there might be some type of desire for a midsized device, like a kindle, something for the reading of long-format works, but that might just be a stop-gap device until people get over their cultural attachment to the codex form, and I can't see anyone opting for such a size when the other options allow for a greater variety of function and ease, especially if the mid-size device, like the kindle, remains confined to only a narrow range of uses. (Computers could be turned into cellphones as easily as cellphones have been turned into computers.)
So I think that those devices will remain around for quite some time. What I am curious about, though, it what the further advances will be made in terms of information access. I saw some video somewhere about some kind of wearable device that would give access to a whole array of information through the use of a camera around the neck. And what would happen if we finally developed technology that would allow a direct electronic chip, brain interface, like the kind of technology we see Neuromancer or the Matrix? Would we be able to download information, surf the Internet, write documents, answer phone calls, all inside our heads? How would this change our culture, the way we interact with information?
This would obviously require some form of surgery. So would our culture split between those who have access to external devices and those who have direct mental access to electronic processors, creating an additional class, capable of affording the elective surgery, creating a third class of technology users. William Gibson has said that the future is here, it just isn't spread out evenly. Right now there are those with access to electronic devices, and those too destitute to afford them. Then of course there are those that are that live without access to any form of electronic technology at all, your present day hunter-gatherers. I wonder how long they are for this world. I wonder, perhaps, if technology developed that allowed for such electronic/organic interfaces, if such technology is even possible (does the nature of human consciousness really allow for such a thing?) there might be some type of socio-political movement to make it widespread available, maybe to enforce government subsidization of the surgical process, so that it's existence doesn't lead the creation of an impermeable overclass, and not of political/economic movers and shakers, your Bush's, Clinton's, Senators, World Leaders and Businessmen, but an actual, leisure class in possession of advanced wealth and capabilities, more like Metropolis than any cyberpunk setting. I suppose it depends on how far along in social democratization we are. And I don't just mean in terms of the U.S., although it's possible we could have such split occur here too, especially if the technology occurs in a setting without Single Payer Healthcare or strong unionization, but in First World/Third World terms, too. I mean, I could see us having a West hardwired into the Internet at all times, completely against an East and South America that exists without such trappings, and thus getting continually outpaced in technology by leaps and bounds. What would such distance in wealth and information bring about? Is such a thing not already, happening? Would we see the widespread rejection of materialism, a move towards spiritual concerns? Contentment of being left out? Surely there would be those who would see the injustice of the situation, if not wanting to be hardwired, at least in terms of the material comfort such technologies, allowed (I can also see a rejection of such elective surgeries occurring among religious conservatives and animal rights activists, environmentalist, and the anti-corporate movement on the left*) and would respond with violence and terrorism, perhaps causing some kind of environmental, biological or nuclear catastrophe. That would set up your post-apocalyptic setting right there.
*I think Gibson actually portrayed such characters in "Johnny Mnemonic." And Neuromancer features evangelicals as terrorists.
Friday, September 19, 2008
The Other Player
I feel great. Last night, after feeling like I was getting nothing out of History of Magic, I set it aside and went back to Colin Wilson's old trust The Occult, which I had never finished, picking up right where I had left my bookmark, (by a description of the Tunguska incident). Later, in the middle of a section trying to explain a theory about the nature of precognition, I set the book down and sat at my computer. I booted up Word, and just sat there for a moment, clearing my mind and letting the story that I had been thinking about form into place. When it was there, when I knew what must happen, I began to write. I kept writing, until I was too tired to keep going. So I went to sleep. And when I woke up, I sat right down and started writing, and didn't stop until I finished the story. Now it is done, and printed off, and I am sitting here enjoying a glass of 1554 Enlightened Black Ale, and feeling good.
I won't read the story yet. I am going to sit on that a bit, and get a bit of a critical perspective on it, before I tackle the task of making changes. But right now it is good to know that I got to the end, and loved doing it.
It was easy. It was also hard, but it was easy. It was like, I realized that the point was not to worry about the words, but so "see" the story, to know it, and just let it flow out of you, onto the page. I knew what came next, because that is what had to come next. It was a wonderful feeling, akin to the descriptions of out-of-body experiences I had just been reading about. There was something truly occult about it. For a time, I felt that I had tapped into forces...not beyond me, but deeper inside me. Every so often, a part of me would correct something, reach in and say that was the wrong word, but for the most part he was just standing by, that editor of me, and let the other me take over the task. Like when I am playing the drums, and feel totally at peace with every beat and bang and clash that I make, and voice is yelling from somewhere, "isn't this wonderful?!" But it is my voice, and I am reveling from a distant, the person who is playing.
I won't read the story yet. I am going to sit on that a bit, and get a bit of a critical perspective on it, before I tackle the task of making changes. But right now it is good to know that I got to the end, and loved doing it.
It was easy. It was also hard, but it was easy. It was like, I realized that the point was not to worry about the words, but so "see" the story, to know it, and just let it flow out of you, onto the page. I knew what came next, because that is what had to come next. It was a wonderful feeling, akin to the descriptions of out-of-body experiences I had just been reading about. There was something truly occult about it. For a time, I felt that I had tapped into forces...not beyond me, but deeper inside me. Every so often, a part of me would correct something, reach in and say that was the wrong word, but for the most part he was just standing by, that editor of me, and let the other me take over the task. Like when I am playing the drums, and feel totally at peace with every beat and bang and clash that I make, and voice is yelling from somewhere, "isn't this wonderful?!" But it is my voice, and I am reveling from a distant, the person who is playing.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Who Watches the Watchers?
Though I have been reading The History of Magic for a around a week now, I have only gotten to page 168, and that's after starting in page 55, skipping Waite's preface and Lévi's introduction. (the last time I tried to read those they had scared me off the book, so I just wanted to skip to the good stuff.) The reason it's been taking me so long is that I keep getting distracted. Since starting it I have taken pages and pages of notes and ideas, trying to draw connections between ideas I am reading now and have read or had before. Also, Lévi's writing is very allusive, and often refers to ideas of concepts I am not really familiar with, and often I find myself getting lost in Wikipedia trying to catch up, or trying to get an idea about something else just because I have been thinking about it. The text has really sent my brain off in a bunch of different directions. Last night, I broke my vow of not reading other stuff and read started reading the bible. I got up through all the stuff concerning Abraham and Isaac, stopping before it started into Jacob (that's about half of Genesis). It's very hard to read a book grounded in a Judeo-Christian worldview without having read that stuff!* While most of it I knew, I had no idea how all those stories fit together. I didn't know, for example, the relation between Lot and Abraham, or that they were contemporaries.
One section that I found very interesting was a little blurb about beings coming down from heaven to mate with mortal women and creating giants.
...Okay, I just got back from a little breather, because what I am going to launch into is quite complex, and textual. It concerns a topic which has been bothering me ever since I started reading Lévi: the formation of early religious pantheons.
Here is the text beings mating from my dad's old bible, Genesis 6:1-4, translated by Theophile J. Meek.** This is right before the story of the Flood:
But who are these beings, then? Are they son's of gods? Sons of God? Angels? What's the deal with this story. So, I checked Wikipedia.
Now, according to the the section on the Book of Enoch, the beings that come down from heaven are the Watchers, or Grigori, angels "dispatched to earth simply to watch over people." The beings they father are called the Nephilim. This title is also accorded to them in some translations of the section from Genesis. The section on the Nephilim quotes this version of the same passage, from the New American Standard Bible:
Now, what's furtherly interesting, to me at least, is that in Canaanite mythology, El has many sons and children including Ba'al Hadad, Yam, and Mot, gods of storm, sea, and death, thus corresponding to Zeus, Poseidan and Hades, making El correspond to Cronus. And of course Ba'al, which means lord, pops up all over the bible as a false god. So it seems as if El is the future god of the Old Testament, and all these signs of the past religion litter the history of the Bible. And what seems especially ironic is, there seems to have been some type of war between Ba'al Hadad and his father, just like with Zeus and his father Cronus, but this time, the father won, not the son.
So were the sons of god in the original story the sons of El, Hadad and Yam and Mot? Or were the they fallen angels? In the book of Enoch, they are given names, none of them the names of Canaanite gods. The leader is Samyaza, whose name means "infamous rebellion" and might just be another name for Satan, and includes among their number Azazel, who is a pretty famous demon. Are the Watchers the first version of the story of the fallen angels, or are they another group of fallen angels? Are the watchers supposed to be the others gods in El's pantheon, who have been kicked out. What is going on here?
Who are the Watchers?
*In fact, one of the things that I have contention with in Lévi is his insistence on viewing occult phenomena from such a perspective. I mean, for argument's sake, a lot of the stories relating to evil, satanic spirits may simply be stories formerly involving pagan spirits. Those devils that aid St. Chaldean when he's a magician might have simply been tutelary gods, or nature spirits. I find it odd to talk about magic while leaving out all mention of the Celtic and Nordic mythic systems. Druids seem to me like they would be a pretty large portion of the occult, yet Levi doesn't really deal with how they relate to his system.
**That's one hell of a Christian name, no?
One section that I found very interesting was a little blurb about beings coming down from heaven to mate with mortal women and creating giants.
...Okay, I just got back from a little breather, because what I am going to launch into is quite complex, and textual. It concerns a topic which has been bothering me ever since I started reading Lévi: the formation of early religious pantheons.
Here is the text beings mating from my dad's old bible, Genesis 6:1-4, translated by Theophile J. Meek.** This is right before the story of the Flood:
Presently when men began to grow numerous over the earth, and had daughters born to them, the sons of the gods noticed that the daughter of men were attractive; so they married those whom they liked best. Then the LORD said,Pretty odd, huh? "Sons of the gods?" What's that doing in a the bible? It seemed like a clear example of some earlier version of the story getting left in the text and not edited out. In fact the entire section seems out of place stuck as it is between the ancestry list from Seth to Noah and the story of the flood. It has a lot of tropes in it that pop up in other religions, the existence of Giants before the flood, the existence of heroes who are the descendants of gods (Although usually the giants are separate from the heroes and the heroes live after the Deluge, not before it.) Then there was the fact that this passage is basically the same story that concerns the apocryphal Book of Enoch, which Lévi discusses in chapter one of The History of Magic: Basically, rogue angels leave heaven and mate with human women and then teach them the secrets of magic and technology. This corrupts men, and Gods casts those angels out of heaven and causes the flood to get rid of these pernicious influences. It seems to basically be a more fleshed out version of this story.
"My spirit must not remain in man forever, inasmuch as he is flesh. Accordingly, his lifetime shall be one hundred twenty years."
In those days, as well as afterward, there were giants on the earth, who were born to the sons of the gods whenever they had intercourse with the daughters of men; these were the heroes who were men of note in days of old.
But who are these beings, then? Are they son's of gods? Sons of God? Angels? What's the deal with this story. So, I checked Wikipedia.
Now, according to the the section on the Book of Enoch, the beings that come down from heaven are the Watchers, or Grigori, angels "dispatched to earth simply to watch over people." The beings they father are called the Nephilim. This title is also accorded to them in some translations of the section from Genesis. The section on the Nephilim quotes this version of the same passage, from the New American Standard Bible:
Now it came about, when men began to multiply on the face of the land, and daughters were born to them, that the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful; and they took wives for themselves, whomever they chose. Then the Lord said, "My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, because he also is flesh; nevertheless his days shall be one hundred and twenty years." The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men, and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown.Here we have sons of God and Nephilim being the two groups being mentioned, instead of "the sons of the gods" and giants. Obviusly Nephilim is the actual word coming from the bible, and giants is just an equivalence, the same describing the Jotun of norse myth as giants. Wikipedia actually has a page on the phrase "sons of God," which outlines some theories about what the phrase means, but also includes the detail that is is a translation of "b'nei elohim." Elohim might mean Children of El, who was the chief god of the Canaanite pantheon, and possibly is the source of the Judaic god. So this phrase means something like "the sons of the children of El." Elohim is also a term used only for God, which seems like a plural form meaning "The gods" that has been grandfathered in to mean only the one God, as if the one God is legion, or something. I think this explains why Meek translated the phrase as "sons of the gods," then.
Now, what's furtherly interesting, to me at least, is that in Canaanite mythology, El has many sons and children including Ba'al Hadad, Yam, and Mot, gods of storm, sea, and death, thus corresponding to Zeus, Poseidan and Hades, making El correspond to Cronus. And of course Ba'al, which means lord, pops up all over the bible as a false god. So it seems as if El is the future god of the Old Testament, and all these signs of the past religion litter the history of the Bible. And what seems especially ironic is, there seems to have been some type of war between Ba'al Hadad and his father, just like with Zeus and his father Cronus, but this time, the father won, not the son.
So were the sons of god in the original story the sons of El, Hadad and Yam and Mot? Or were the they fallen angels? In the book of Enoch, they are given names, none of them the names of Canaanite gods. The leader is Samyaza, whose name means "infamous rebellion" and might just be another name for Satan, and includes among their number Azazel, who is a pretty famous demon. Are the Watchers the first version of the story of the fallen angels, or are they another group of fallen angels? Are the watchers supposed to be the others gods in El's pantheon, who have been kicked out. What is going on here?
Who are the Watchers?
*In fact, one of the things that I have contention with in Lévi is his insistence on viewing occult phenomena from such a perspective. I mean, for argument's sake, a lot of the stories relating to evil, satanic spirits may simply be stories formerly involving pagan spirits. Those devils that aid St. Chaldean when he's a magician might have simply been tutelary gods, or nature spirits. I find it odd to talk about magic while leaving out all mention of the Celtic and Nordic mythic systems. Druids seem to me like they would be a pretty large portion of the occult, yet Levi doesn't really deal with how they relate to his system.
**That's one hell of a Christian name, no?
A History of Magic
So lately I have been feeling like I need to commit myself more firmly to reading and finishing books. So I have taken upon myself the slightly off-kilter choice of reading The History of Magic by Eliphas Lévi, translated into English and with footnotes by A.E. Waite (yep, as in the famous Rider-Waite Tarot Deck, that guy). What with all this talk about the death of David Foster Wallace, I have had to resist the urge to go out and read some of his stuff, or at least make another attempt at Pynchon's behemoth Against the Day. But it's okay. My will is good.
Lévi is really an Frenchman named Alphonse Louis Constant, writing in the mid-nineteenth century. He writing style bears a lot of the stylistic tics I associate with that period by way of Marx: a circumlocutory style that talked around a subject without through line or goal, that manages to encompass its topic without elucidating it, and totally bereft of conclusion, instead relying upon bald, unsubstantiated statement or opinion*. It's really an horrible, horrible approach to approaching a non-fiction topic.
About that non-fiction topic. Lévi believes vampires exist. Vampires, dude. Among other things. There is actually something quite exhilarating about reading an old book that believes thing nobody does today. It's like traveling back in time and finding yourself in a another universe as well. I suppose I could spend all my time trying to debate Lévi's worldview and form one of my own in opposition to it, but at the moment it's enough to simply enter that world and get a taste of it before returning to my own.
More troubling is dealing with Lévi's worldview. It's kind of weird, because one doesn't usually think of magicians in these terms, but Lévi is very "traditional," in a sense. He thinks that hierarchy in knowledge is necessary for a properly functioning society, that it is not possible for the people to all be fully informed, and metaphysical knowledge must be held by a select few. However, this doesn't mean that he thinks all hierarchy is good; he thinks it's easy for it to be corrupted, and has no real suggestions for how to make things function better (at least not yet), beyond believing that those in possession of have the necessary training to use it wisely. Constant was Catholic, and a failed priest, so this view is probably a mixture of the support for the priesthood as a source of divine knowledge and of Transcendental Magic's approach to magical initiation.
Lévi also seems to have a pretty old idea of the roles of the sexes. He talks much about how Goëtic, or Black Magic, is magic used outside the proper priestly initiation and thus most magicians and all witches really are trafficking with the devil. I was kind of expecting some kind of defense of people that had been persecuted as witches throughout history, but no, Lévi seems to really seem to think these are women who don't know their place. He also has a chapter, albeit a short one, devoted to the sacred power of virginity and chastity, and it seems to go without saying that men just be chaste, but women need to be virgins. There is also quite a bit on how evil spirits, incubi and succubi, are drawn to and created by repressed sexual energy and bodily emissions (that's some old-school terminology right there). Basically sexual energy is tied up a lot with bad things and evil and stuff, and there is definitely a gendered component to it all.
I am still trying to figure out what Lévi's basic view of things is, but there is a lot of talk of the Astral Light, which isn't precisely light but seems to be the building block of physical reality, and also the form of spirit (you can definitely see here the building blocks of the connections people draw between magical thinking and quantum theory). This Astral Light, however, is tied to the serpent from the Garden of Eden somehow, and is juxtaposition to some other force, with is the more "divine" force. And the Devil, in the section on him—well, Lévi isn't really clear on what the devil is, precisely, although he seems dismissive of the conception of the devil as an actual figure and seems knowledgeable of the origins of the character of Lucifer Morningstar. But the personage of Lucifer Morningstar is somehow connected to the idea of the Astral Light, the source of it, so the Light seems somehow tied to "evil," as, to a certain degree, magic itself, or Black Magic, which seems to be manipulation of Astral Light in such a way that it corrupts the soul and make it hard to communicate with God, somehow. (I wish he would spell this stuff out clearer, I feel more like I am hunting and pecking for little bits of information from a cloud of verbiage.) This seems to be basically consistent with Lévi's opinions of mediums, which is that they are people whose souls are so tied up in knots that they draws other spirits to them like a whirlpool, and thus should be avoided by the rest of us.
It's weird. Lévi was a magician, yet he seems to have a very low opinion of most magicians, and not in an egotistical sense. I suppose at some later point in the book Lévi will will give a fuller account of Transcendental Magic and how this relates to other occult phenomena; I'm only around halfway through, after all.
*Though the work is translated by Waite, the style seems to carry through the specific level of word choices; it's more a matter of construction than diction. However, it probably exists on the level of word choice as well. Waite's various footnotes, incredibly useful, as they often correct Lévi's errors—and yes it is a bit annoying reading a book knowing you might be getting the wrong information—are much more direct and concise than his translation of Lévi's French, leading me to believe that his diction in translation is more a manner of capturing Lévi's tone than exchanging it for his own.
Lévi is really an Frenchman named Alphonse Louis Constant, writing in the mid-nineteenth century. He writing style bears a lot of the stylistic tics I associate with that period by way of Marx: a circumlocutory style that talked around a subject without through line or goal, that manages to encompass its topic without elucidating it, and totally bereft of conclusion, instead relying upon bald, unsubstantiated statement or opinion*. It's really an horrible, horrible approach to approaching a non-fiction topic.
About that non-fiction topic. Lévi believes vampires exist. Vampires, dude. Among other things. There is actually something quite exhilarating about reading an old book that believes thing nobody does today. It's like traveling back in time and finding yourself in a another universe as well. I suppose I could spend all my time trying to debate Lévi's worldview and form one of my own in opposition to it, but at the moment it's enough to simply enter that world and get a taste of it before returning to my own.
More troubling is dealing with Lévi's worldview. It's kind of weird, because one doesn't usually think of magicians in these terms, but Lévi is very "traditional," in a sense. He thinks that hierarchy in knowledge is necessary for a properly functioning society, that it is not possible for the people to all be fully informed, and metaphysical knowledge must be held by a select few. However, this doesn't mean that he thinks all hierarchy is good; he thinks it's easy for it to be corrupted, and has no real suggestions for how to make things function better (at least not yet), beyond believing that those in possession of have the necessary training to use it wisely. Constant was Catholic, and a failed priest, so this view is probably a mixture of the support for the priesthood as a source of divine knowledge and of Transcendental Magic's approach to magical initiation.
Lévi also seems to have a pretty old idea of the roles of the sexes. He talks much about how Goëtic, or Black Magic, is magic used outside the proper priestly initiation and thus most magicians and all witches really are trafficking with the devil. I was kind of expecting some kind of defense of people that had been persecuted as witches throughout history, but no, Lévi seems to really seem to think these are women who don't know their place. He also has a chapter, albeit a short one, devoted to the sacred power of virginity and chastity, and it seems to go without saying that men just be chaste, but women need to be virgins. There is also quite a bit on how evil spirits, incubi and succubi, are drawn to and created by repressed sexual energy and bodily emissions (that's some old-school terminology right there). Basically sexual energy is tied up a lot with bad things and evil and stuff, and there is definitely a gendered component to it all.
I am still trying to figure out what Lévi's basic view of things is, but there is a lot of talk of the Astral Light, which isn't precisely light but seems to be the building block of physical reality, and also the form of spirit (you can definitely see here the building blocks of the connections people draw between magical thinking and quantum theory). This Astral Light, however, is tied to the serpent from the Garden of Eden somehow, and is juxtaposition to some other force, with is the more "divine" force. And the Devil, in the section on him—well, Lévi isn't really clear on what the devil is, precisely, although he seems dismissive of the conception of the devil as an actual figure and seems knowledgeable of the origins of the character of Lucifer Morningstar. But the personage of Lucifer Morningstar is somehow connected to the idea of the Astral Light, the source of it, so the Light seems somehow tied to "evil," as, to a certain degree, magic itself, or Black Magic, which seems to be manipulation of Astral Light in such a way that it corrupts the soul and make it hard to communicate with God, somehow. (I wish he would spell this stuff out clearer, I feel more like I am hunting and pecking for little bits of information from a cloud of verbiage.) This seems to be basically consistent with Lévi's opinions of mediums, which is that they are people whose souls are so tied up in knots that they draws other spirits to them like a whirlpool, and thus should be avoided by the rest of us.
It's weird. Lévi was a magician, yet he seems to have a very low opinion of most magicians, and not in an egotistical sense. I suppose at some later point in the book Lévi will will give a fuller account of Transcendental Magic and how this relates to other occult phenomena; I'm only around halfway through, after all.
*Though the work is translated by Waite, the style seems to carry through the specific level of word choices; it's more a matter of construction than diction. However, it probably exists on the level of word choice as well. Waite's various footnotes, incredibly useful, as they often correct Lévi's errors—and yes it is a bit annoying reading a book knowing you might be getting the wrong information—are much more direct and concise than his translation of Lévi's French, leading me to believe that his diction in translation is more a manner of capturing Lévi's tone than exchanging it for his own.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)