There's a situation vacant

Book acquired: Shada (Doctor Who: The Lost Adventure by Douglas Adams), by Gareth Roberts.

It starts this way:

At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways — with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.

I had this revelation at the age of four. I was sitting in church, humming. I definitely felt relief, mostly because this meant it was merely parental authority compelling me to attend mass on a weekly basis, not anything higher. This was something I could work with.

The ultimate shiver running up the ultimate spine

Propagating at a significant fraction of the speed of light, a frisson of alarm travelled the length of the Atlantic Space Elevator, like the ultimate shiver running up the ultimate spine.

There's a lot going on in The Night Sessions, by Ken MacLeod. It's a police procedural. It's science fiction. It's an ecologically challenged future where religion has been eradicated from public discourse, the Faith Wars having culminated in the discharge of nuclear arms. There's a Third Covenant on the rise in Edinburgh.

And robots are attaining consciousness.

Detecting Hardcastle might or might not be difficult, but preventing that entity from accomplishing whatever it had planned was likely to be violent and, as far as Skulk2 was concerned, terminal. It had been thrown into this unenviable position by its original self, from which its sense of identity was diverging by the millisecond. Skulk2 was still Skulk, with all the original machine's emotions and loyalties, memories and reflections, but it found itself both baffled and despondent about the decision its past self had taken — that blithe disregard for a separate being that was, after all, as close to itself as it was possible to be. Some of that resentment begin to jaundice its feelings about Adam Ferguson. The man had been as casual as Skulk had been in sending his old friend on this probably suicidal mission.

Remembering their conversation just before the copying, Skulk2 made a cold assessment of how much separate existence it could experience before it drifted so far from its original that would find the switch to self-sacrifice mode painful. This projection of a future potential state of mind was an absorbing exercise, and in itself intensified its self-awareness. The time, it discovered could be reckoned in minutes.

I read this book earlier this summer while in Edinburgh. That made for spectacular reading: wandering the wynds of the Old Town by day, and settling into our hotel to read about those same paths by night. Plus I learned a little about the Covenanters along the way, which definitely added to my understanding of the issues in the novel.

About two-thirds of the way through my interest waned a bit, partly because of the distractions of vacation, but also the story gets a little chaotic — there are just so many weighty issues in this 260-page novel that they start to suffocate a little. That said, I'd like to come back to this book someday.

Reviews
Los Angeles Review of Books: Taking the Future on Faith

It's here that the capabilities of the robots and their superiority to mere humans becomes clear. It isn't just their speed and versatility, or their ability to toggle their minds from one state to another, from self-preservation to self-sacrifice. Two different characters ask two different robots whether they are saved ­— whether they have backed up their memories and mental states. On one level, it's a trite pun; on another, it's the kind of science-fictional sentence that creates a new reality by collapsing the gap between metaphor and literal act. Robots can save themselves, and can be resurrected by downloading a copy into a new body. They are, essentially, physically immortal. And it's here, too, that we begin to realize that the conspiracy Ferguson has been so doggedly unraveling cloaks the true meaning of the Third Covenant, that the real story has been happening elsewhere, and that MacLeod has ruthlessly followed the logic of his intelligent, ambitious novel to a conclusion that’s truly world-changing.

io9: Do Protestant Terrorist Robots Have Souls?

There is something brilliant in MacLeod's idea that when robots achieve human-style intelligence that they'll become as irrational as humans too.

Strange Horizons: The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod

See also the Complete Review for its comprehensive review round-up.

An abstract music of galactic desolation

Electronic music had just begun to appear at that time — Pierre Schaeffer, Klaus Schulze — an abstract music of galactic desolation that enraptured me. I wanted Karin to hear it too, but I should never have played that record. I explained that this was a new thing they were experimenting with. "Now just listen to this," I said. "It's like the pulsing of the spheres in space. Don't you think?"

"Quiet," said Karin. "I'm listening."

We listened together. The room seemed to throb electronically. Karin had gone pale and sat utterly motionless.

I jumped up to turn off the music but Karin yelled, "Don't! This is important to me!"

I should have remembered this was the moment when Dante descended into the Underworld and was met by the cries of the lost souls.

"I know," Karin said. "This is it. Now comes the voice of God."

And it came. How could she have known!? A deep, sorrowful bass that cut through the music with incomprehensible words and vanished into the galaxy amidst vibrations that finally lost themselves in silence.

"Forgive me..." I said. "You understand, this is a new kind of music they've just invented."

"No," said Karin calmly, "it has always existed. The lost souls are with us always, I know them. It's like a grey wave — any time, any place, on the street, on the train — obliterating everything. They cry for help and we sink in sin, theirs and our own. Can you play it again?"

But I didn't want to.

— from "My Friend Karin" in Letters from Klara, by Tove Jansson.



Sometime in the 80s, my brother discovered Klaus Schulze, and it was much like the times he discovered Kraftwerk and Beethoven. He rushed into the house, headed straight for the stereo, repositioned the speakers so the sound would roll over the dining table. Late for supper, again.

This was before trance music, before rave culture. This is how he would share with us his newest, his latest, religion. "Listen to this. Can you hear that? You can hear... Don't you get it?!"

The power of place

Skulk turned right onto the Mile, up for a couple of hundred metres and then left, onto the George IV Bridge above the dark chasm of the Cowgate. At this time tomorrow it would be crowded, rain or no rain, but tonight it was almost empty, Thursday's revellers mostly behind the doors of the clubs. The machine stalked between the two big libraries to the top of Candlemaker Row, into the alley of Greyfriars and up and over the gate into Greyfriars Kirkyard. It paced past the church towards the Flodden Wall, and paused at the corner where the path turned towards the Covenanters' Prison.

Somewhere at the back of the roofless mausoleum of Thomas Potter (Nuper Mercator Edinburgis) a pebble shifted. A long shape lifted itself from the ground.

— from The Night Sessions, by Ken MacLeod.

This may not strike you as a particularly powerful passage, but it chilled me to the bone.

Not hours beforehand I'd walked the same route, stopped for some takeaway, then turned down Candlemaker Row to loop round to my hotel on Cowgate. I lay there in that chasm, recalling the stories our ghoulish tour guide told us of the ghosts in the graveyard.

I am grateful, too, for the history lesson, as Covenanters are deeply relevant to MacLeod's novel.

This turned out to be a most fortuitous choice of reading material while visiting Edinburgh.

You get to make sense of your yesterdays

Here's a book that I wouldn't ordinarily read, that I had no desire to read, that I had no intention of reading. Not my kind of book, I said. But even while trying to dismiss my coworker's recommendation, I was reminding myself to keep an open mind. How could I judge it if I hadn't read it?

Well, I've read it now. The Five People You Meet in Heaven, by Mitch Albom, was entirely adequate as a way to kill time: an easy-to-read, serviceable story. Despite this, perhaps because of it, I found it wanting, in three main ways.

1. The cosmology.
For starters, the theology of it, the cosmology, the whole construct of heaven just doesn't work for me. You may say that this is subjective and unfair of me, a nonbeliever, to judge. But I do read a lot of SF, so suspension of disbelief is not really a problem for me. Until the internal logic breaks down.

This is the story of Eddie's life, told after his death, through his interactions with five characters who had a profound effect on his life, or vice versa. These people have a lesson to impart. Why five people? That seems entirely arbitrary. Given that people lead very different lives in quantity and quality, I don't understand how this number could be applied across the board. But it is, it's the rule. What happens if there are twenty-three people clamoring for the right to meet with you? And what if the people best suited to explaining your life to you are still alive?

Once you've met your five people, you in turn get to impart a lesson to someone. This is not that book, but I can't figure out how it works. You pick just one person, to teach them a lesson? How do you choose? By having listened to five lessons, you're now qualified to impart great wisdom to the newly deceased? What happens after that?

One person in heaven, the Blue Man, explains that this is not Eddie's heaven, it's his own heaven. So, heaven is telling someone a lesson about their life? Not hearing it? So is Eddie in heaven, or isn't he? Shouldn't it be "the five people you meet before heaven"?

This heaven is Eddie-centric, but it pretends to be an example of a universal principle. It's a little like It's a Wonderful Life, only imagine a whole choir of angels trying to pass their finals by running all the citizens of Bedford Falls through series of flashbacks and trials of what-ifs at the same time, but that would still work because there's an independent angel-passing body to ensure everything runs smoothly and everyone in Bedford Falls is being processed separately. But what if there were no angels, and all the citizens suddenly had to do 360-degree reviews of each other, but not everybody, just five random, erm, I mean significant people, you can see how the structure begins to break down. What five people would George Bailey meet in heaven?

By taking Eddie's singular story and trying to slot it into a universal schema, his experience begins to lose integrity and sense. Do we all have the same lessons to learn?

The second person Eddie meets, his commanding officer during WWII, tells him, "That's what heaven is. You get to make sense of your yesterdays." In my worldview, my heaven is right now — you get to make sense of your life before you die.

2. The subtlety (or lack thereof).
Eddie meets five people, and they tell him exactly what he's supposed to learn. I prefer lessons that are a bit more nuanced. I am, in fact, generally a smart enough cookie to figure out the moral of the story on my own. Eddie's lessons are all pretty obvious: everyone is interconnected, hatred can eat away at you, love doesn't have to end, blah, blah.

Compare this with, for example, Kate Atkinson, just because I happen to be reading her right now, but she's as fine an example as any. There are easily "lessons" in her books, about interconnectedness, sacrifice, purpose, etc. But she never sits you down to tell you, "Dear stupid reader, here is the lesson you must learn." She explores much the same territory as Albom — how seemingly random acts can hugely impact others — but it is that: an exploration, not a hand-held guided tour.

Maybe heaven is for dumb people. Or heaven is like school. Not sure I want to go. Albom's message is impossible to miss; there are no grey areas in heaven. But in my experience, life and the lessons to be had from it are much more complicated than Albom allows.

3. The details.
The Blue Man was christened Joseph Corvelzchik. Polish. For some reason I thought also Jewish, but I can find no evidence of that now, and then, why christened. But that name! Completely made up. It's just not plausibly Polish. Even assuming the immigration officials managed to mangle the records, why not simply give the name, the spelling, he was christened with. When transcribing from Cyrillic, for example, one may encounter spelling variations, but Polish uses a Latin alphabet, so it's not reasonable for an initial K to be transformed into an initial C (and trust me, a surname starting with C-o would be odd). But it's the l and the z — it's a phonetically unnatural combination. This surname reflects someone's mistaken idea of what Polish looks like. And it reflects poorly on the author and the editorial staff that it was not questioned.

Am I petty to harp on this detail? Perhaps. But when one detail is wrong, it gives cause to doubt the credibility of the rest of the experiences, whether in WWII Philippines or a mid-century fairground

God is in the details. Or the devil is. Take your pick.

I didn't hate it.
It's mostly a sweet story about a mostly sweet man. It's not a demanding book. It's less sappy than I expected it to be. But I want my books to be more.

The book bears witness

"The book has survived the same human disaster over and over again. Think about it. You've got a society where people tolerate difference, like Spain in the Convivencia, and everything's humming along: creative, prosperous. Then somehow this fear, this hate, this need to demonize 'the other' — it just sort of rears up and smashes the whole society. Inquisition, Nazis, extremist Serb nationalists . . . same old, same old. It seems to me the book, at this point, bears witness to all that."

People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks, was a terrific palate cleanser of a book. A book lover's book. About book lovers. And one book in particular.

Why had an illuminator working in Spain, for a Jewish client, in the manner of a European Christian, have used an Iranian paintbrush?

The story concerns a book conservationist who's called in to work on a famous manuscript, the Sarajeveo Haggadah — an actual artifact, the history surrounding which inspired Brooks' novelization. It gets a bit meta, with the rare book expert explaining in an article about the conservation project:

I wanted to give a sense of the people of the book, the different hands that had made it, used it, protected it. I wanted it to be a gripping narrative, even suspenseful. So I wrote and rewrote certain sections of historical background to use as seasoning between the discussion of technical issues.

Because of course, that's exactly how the novel is structured. We follow a trail of forensic clues into the imagined past lives of the book.

This short PBS video summarizes the haggadah's history, including the forensic evidence that helps decipher its past, showcases the gorgeous illuminations, and features commentary from Geraldine Brooks.

The novel offers up a few other interesting things:

• A line from a poem — "As Kingfishers Catch Fire," by Gerard Manley Hopkins: "Whát I dó is me: for that I came." I'll be mulling over this poem for days to come.
• Some discussion of the nature of art, and the sinfulness of figurative depictions.
• The coexistence of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, though sadly usually fraught with tensions, and worse.

This to say it was a gently thought-provoking read, not too mentally taxing, thoroughly entertaining.

My ambiguous self

One of the most beautiful books I read this year was Azazeel, by Youssef Ziedan, an Egyptian scholar who specializes in Arabic and Islamic studies. It won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2009 and has been condemned by the Coptic Orthodox church.

In a wonderful review, "In Case of Doubt, Choose Doubt," Andreas Pflitsch says that this historical novel is a plea against religiously motivated violence.

Set in the 5th century AD, these are the memoirs of Hypa, a Coptic monk who journeyed from Upper Egypt to Alexandria and then Syria.

It's not a period in history that I know much about, but several aspects of it are fascinating. It covers a culture in transition between pantheism and Christianity. It shows the significance of the life and death of woman mathematician and philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria.

And it features Nestorius, Archbishop of Constantinople, condemned by the Council of Ephesus for his belief that Christ's human and divine natures could not be reconciled. (Lucky for me I read this novel while studying Kierkegaard, who didn't care so much about reconciling them, so I had ample opportunity to consider the absurdity of faith.)

Hypa meanwhile is consumed with the problem of reconciling, or accepting, his own human and divine natures, that is, satisfying both physical and spiritual yearnings. Azazeel, the devil, is the voice inside him, a daimon, who does not lead him to temptation so much as reflect it back to his conscience.

I sat up, filled with a fear the source of which I did not know. I asked myself: should I go to church now, to feel a little peace of mind? The night prayers must have started. Being in a group would relieve the anxiety, since nothing is more conducive to fear than being alone. Or should I go to Martha's cottage nearby and mend what was broken in our relationship, then sleep on the floor under her bed? Does Martha sleep in the bed where we made love two days ago? Or does she lie on the floor like me? I don't know much about her. I've never seen her from the inside. In fact I've never seen anything from the inside. I always skirt around the surface of things and never go deep. In fact I think I'm afraid of looking deep inside myself, yet I know the truth about my ambiguous self. Everything about me is ambiguous — my baptism, my being a monk, my faith, my poems, my medical knowledge, my love for Martha. I am one ambiguity after another, and ambiguity is the opposite of faith, just as Satan is the opposite of God.

Azazeel is by turns adventurous, sensuous, thrilling, and mysterious; it is laden with historical detail and religious intrigue. It shows great insight and sensitivity to matters of spirituality and faith (or lack thereof, as I have none), and lends itself to slow and contemplative reading.

Reviews
The Bookbag
The Guardian
Winston's Dad

There is also a sampling of international response to the novel on the book's website.

What makes The Black Spider so creepy

The Black Spider, by Jeremias Gotthelf, has an incredibly high creepiness factor. The exceedingly creepy cover should have fully primed my expectations, but the book's contents managed to work their way even deeper under my skin.

Jeremias Gotthelf was the penname of Albert Bitzius, a Swiss pastor and novelist, who is celebrated for his detailed depiction of rural life. He lived 1797 to 1854, which makes him a contemporary of Adalbert Stifter, which I mention because the opening of The Black Spider quite reminded me of the style of Rock Crystal, the lyrical way in which the pastoral scene is set.

The story goes something like this:

An attendee of a christening party draws attention to a rough old post beside a window in an otherwise attractive home. Grandfather tells its tale:

A few centuries beforehand, the Swabian Hans von Stoffeln ruled the land, and by grandfather's account, he was not a reasonable man. After building his castle, the peasants were ordered to line the walk with trees. Having neglected their own harvests for several years already, the villagers had reached the point of desperation. A red-bearded huntsman in green comes upon them and offers to help. In exchange for an unbaptized child. After some deliberation, the villagers agree. The huntsman seals the deal with a kiss upon the cheek of the strong-willed Christine.

Babies are born and hastily baptized, cheating the devil out of his payment. Christine's cheek, meanwhile, burns and blackens and gives birth to a plague of spiders that infect the land, killing livestock and people. When Christine's attempt to kidnap a newborn to pay the debt is thwarted, the spider within bursts from her cheek — Christine shrinks into it and it fully consumes her. The spider is finally caught and imprisoned within a hole dug into that blackened post, which was plugged up.

Generations later, the people scoffed at the tale of the spider, and the spider came to be released. Again it was captured and imprisoned, and care was taken that it should not be released again. Thus the grandfather's tale serves to remind the villagers of their blessings, and that God is watching — and that the devil is, too.

A simple-enough pact-with-the-devil story, right?

The Swabian
The first creep factor to set me off was the mention of the "Swabian." It's a term I wasn't familiar with before reading Roberto Bolaño's 2666. and now every mention of Swabia, the region or its people, invokes for me the horror of 2666.

It turns out that there's a little something more to the connection. In the first section of 2666, The Part About the Critics, one of the critics has written a couple papers on Archimboldi, including one:

on the various guises of conscience and guilt in Lethaea, on the surface an erotic novel, and in Bitzius, a novel less than one hundred pages long, similar in some ways to Mitzi's Treasure, the book that Pelletier had found in an old Munich bookstore, and that told the story of the life of Albert Bitzius, pastor of Lützelflüh, in the canton of Bern, an author of sermons as well as a writer under the pseudonym Jeremiah Gotthelf.

Clearly Bolaño was familiar with Gotthelf, and that being the case, he was undoubtedly aware of (and likely read) the book considered to be his masterpiece: The Black Spider. Bolaño's influences were notoriously wide and varied, and I don't doubt Gotthelf (and specifically The Black Spider) was among them. (While it is fairly unknown among English readers, the story does seem to have cult following in German, and quite possibly other languages. Witness this rendering in Warcraft.)

It seems to me that The Black Spider and 2666 share a kind of insidious evil, that at times is embodied within an individual, sometimes pervades the collective social conscience, is part of the natural order of things, and at other times takes on cosmic proportions. It's Evil with a capital E, the likes of which not many novels can grapple with subtly and successfully (by which I mean they are not laughable allegories).

The contract
The second creep factor concerns the nature of the contract. The devil asks for an unbaptized child, and the villagers agree. It is not a contract concerning a particular child, or a particular mother-to-be. The child whose soul is at stake is not yet born, let alone consulted. The particular parents also are ignorant, though it may be argued that as villagers they have been complicit in the deal.

I read a commentary recently, I think it was in relation to the Rosemary's Baby (the movie, but I'm sure it applies to the book just the same), that the horror was not so much in the baby, or the devil, or the satanic cult even — it's in the fact that control is wrested from this poor woman, over her pregnancy and her child. I couldn't help but think of this while reading The Black Spider as one woman after another went into labour fearing for their babies. The women are forced to bear the consequences of not fulfilling a contract they had no part of.

So much of the horror has nothing to do with the spider or the huntsman who introduces it. It's to do with the fact that the villagers have decided someone else's fate.

The specific terms had not been set out in the contract. That is, there were no predefined rules. This is the horror.

The justice
Everybody ultimately gets theirs in this tale. What makes this justice uncomfortable is that it's not clear who is meting it out. The first wave of spiders killed indiscriminately, chaotically. But the Christine-spider strikes those villagers who were implicated in striking the bargain. She kills Hans von Stoffeln and his knights. But she spares those castle servants who had treated the peasants rightly. Is this Christine's justice, then? Or God's? If so, how could it come from what was implanted by the devil? And clearly it still sought an unbaptized child by which to fulfill the obligation. Is it God or the devil who demands a sacrifice?

Premonitions of a dreadful future rose before them, but not one had the courage to put a stop to things; their fear of the devil's plagues was stronger than their fear of God.

A story within a story
This novella has excellent pacing, making it feel much fuller than its 108 pages. When once I thought the story was coming to a head, it took another turn to keep me on the edge of my seat.

Also because the internal story has two parts within a frame story, it is enriched by the sense that it spans time. The frame story's present day seems to be in danger of falling into gluttony and sloth, thus making the hardships of the original peasants all the more poignant.

Unusually, this new edition from NYRB Classics translated by Susan Bernofsky has no introduction or afterword, no supplemental information of any kind. And if ever a story wanted some context, this Swiss horror classic from 1842 does.

Many walk their last roads without knowing it

Hans, the husband of the unfortunate woman, had kept his promise all too well. Slowly he had made his way, stopping to contemplate every field, gazing after every bird, watching as the fish in the brook leapt up to catch little flies before the storm. Then he would lurch forward and pick up his pace, at times even breaking into a run; there was something in him that drove him forward, that made his hair stand on end: It was his conscience telling him what a father deserved who betrayed his wife and child, it was the love he still bore for his wife and the fruit of his loins. But then something else held him back, something stronger than the first thing: his fear of men, his fear of the devil, and his love of all the devil could take from him. Then he walked more slowly again, slowly as a man walking his last road to the gallows. And perhaps he really was walking toward the place where his life would end; many walk their last roads without knowing it, and if they did, how differently they might walk there.

— from The Black Spider, by Jeremias Gotthelf.

The aura of places

In my first days in Jerusalem, I thought about the secret of pilgrimage and asked myself what drove me out of my native country and brought me to this holy spot. Could I not have touched the essence of holiness in my soul while secluded in the desert close to my homeland? If a place can reveal what is inside us, and travel can bring that to light from the depths of our being, is it not possible that humility, chastity, the monastic life, and constant prayer and glorification of the Lord can bring to light divine grace and the saintliness that is latent within us? Where then lies the aura places? Is the aura a secret inside us that pervades places when we reach them after travelling with impatient zeal? The awe I felt when I reached the walls of the Church of the Resurrection, did it arise from my sense of the imposing building, or was it from the meaning implicit in the event of the resurrection itself? Did Jesus really rise from the dead? As God, how could he die at the hands of men? Is man able to kill and torment God, and nail him to a cross?

— from Azazeel, by Youssef Ziedan.

I expect the coming weeks to be a time of slow reading, much needed; some reflection to still my mind. I have begun reading Azazeel, by Youssef Ziedan. It reads very fluidly, but it is packed with history and religious doctrine, neither of which I'm particularly well versed in.

The monks and priests who serve the Church of the Resurrection are good and simple, and most of them warmed to me when they learnt that I practise medicine and the art of healing. They were not interested that I was a poet.

I'm hoping that this slowdown in reading will afford me the mental space to catch up on some writing — I've read plenty of books recently and I've yet to discuss some of them here.

Also, the class I signed up for on Coursera — Søren Kierkegaard – Subjectivity, Irony and the Crisis of Modernity — starts next week. (You can sign up too!) The reading assignment for the first week consists of selections from Plato's Euthyphro and The Apology. No doubt I will be noting interesting passages here on this blog along with commentary as it occurs to me.

Looking for the amazing

METAPHYSICIANS OF TLÖN: Kircher is like them, he is not looking for the truth, nor even the probable, he's looking for the amazing. It never occurred to him that metaphysics is a branch of literature of the fantastic, but his work belongs entirely to fiction and therefore also to Jorge Luis Borges.

THE ESSENTIAL CLOSENESS to death, a fleeting insight from this homemade hell where my struggles take place.

— from Where Tigers Are at Home, by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès.

Returning to the bosom of obedience

"Do you know what word the Jesuits use to describe one of their order who has renounced his vows? They say he has become a 'satellite,' by which they mean that despite himself he remains in orbit around the Society, in a trajectory in which the forces of repulsion are in equilibrium with an attraction which he will never manage to eliminate. One doesn't leave the Society, one moves a greater or lesser distance away without ceasing, basically, to belong to it. And I have to admit that there is some truth in that way of looking at things. One can escape from slavery, although with difficulty, but never from several years of domestication; and that is what it is: training the body and the mind with one aim in view, obedience. So to 'disobey,' you know . . . Under those conditions the word doesn't have much sense. All it expresses is a mere temporary rejection of the law, a digression to be condemned, true, but that is remissible within the body of obedience itself. And if you think about it, you will have to admit that it's more or less the same for everyone. Breaking a rule, all the rules, always comes back to choosing new rules, that is, to returning to the bosom of obedience. You have the feeling you are liberating yourself, profoundly changing your being, when all you have done is to change your master. You know, the snake biting its own tail."

— from Where Tigers Are at Home, by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès.

I have been very much enjoying Where Tigers Are at Home, but it is a dense read, and I'm short on time and patience this month, so I still feel as if I've barely made a dent in this massive novel, and I'm not anywhere close to having any idea how to go about synthesizing its varied parts.

The above passage is part of a modern-day exchange involving Eléazard, who is editing a strange biography. Woven throughout the novel are sections of the manuscript, chronicling the life of Athanasius Kircher.

Imagine my delight to discover that he really existed. Kircher is a colourful character with esoteric knowledge. The novel has been alluding to his interest in Egyptology and Sinology. His research methods are a little unorthodox, or at least uncomfortable for some more bookish sorts, as evidenced in his study of volcanoes. Also, he appears to be rather lucky, or watched over by a guardian angel.

He has been written about by Umberto Eco, is cited in connection with the Voynich Manuscript, and seems to enjoy something like cult status around the web:

400 years after his birth there is a revival of interest in Kircher, perhaps because Kircher can be considered as the premodern root of postmodern thinking. With his labyrinthine mind, he was Jorge Luis Borges before Borges. In the years before Kircher's death and for 300 years afterward, he was derided as a dilettante and crackpot. The rationalism and specialization of Descartes had taken over. But at the start of the 21st century Kircher's taste for trivia, deception and wonder is back.

Kircher's postmodern qualities include his subversiveness, his celebrity, his technomania and his bizarre eclecticism. In an age of polymaths, Kircher was perhaps the most polymathic of them all. Like other Jesuits, Kircher was a religious man and a world scholar trying to prove that Aristotle and the Bible were right. He knew Hebrew, Aramaic Coptic, Persian, Latin and Greek. But Kircher was also a wild man, he got away with all-out heresy.

Kircher was, of course, a Jesuit, and his definition of "obedience" was broad, yet exacting, or so Blas de Roblès makes it out to be. I do not yet know to what degree he became a satellite.

See also: Kircher's Cosmos: On Athanasius Kircher

The soul is made of stories

"Hey, do you mind if I tell you a story? One you might not have heard? All the elements in your body were forged many, many millions of years ago in the heart of a faraway star that exploded and died. That explosion scattered those elements across the desolations of deep space. After so, so many millions of years these elements came together to form new stars and new planets, and on and on it went. The elements came together and burst apart, forming shoes and ships and sealing wax, cabbages and kings! Until, eventually, they came together to make you. You are unique in the universe."

— The Doctor in "The Rings of Akhaten"; Doctor Who.

Prompt editors to be always truthful

Today, January 31, is the feast day of Saint John Bosco, patron saint of illusionists, stage magicians, and editors.

Admirable apostle of youth, founder of religious Congregations, catechist, educator, writer, and a light that shone brightly in our time, you know that one of the greatest powers today is the power of the Press. Prompt editors to be always truthful and to work for the good of human beings, thus serving the greater glory of God. Amen.

God, death, and atheism

Brenner and God

I read Brenner and God, by Wolf Haas, earlier this summer and thoroughly enjoyed the story and the fresh manner of its telling (see my review).

A Q&A with the book's translator on the publisher's website offers some insight into the author's style:

What constitutes good style has been drummed into us to such an extent that, as good readers, we still bristle when a writer upsets those ingrained ideas. And what I see Wolf Haas doing is prying open this chasm between, on the one hand, how language behaves, and on the other, how language is enforced — and then letting his reader fall right in.

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Death in Breslau

I don't recall how I first came across the series of Eberhard Mock investigations by Marek Krajewski, but they're among the most curious mysteries I've ever read.

Melville House Publishing is set to release the first novel, Death in Breslau, in September.

The first three books in this series were previously released by Quercus Publishing — and I've written a bit about them here (Death in Breslau, The End of the World in Breslau, Phantoms in Breslau) — but I'm pleased that Melville House will be making (at least) the first book available to a whole new audience, even while I'm trying to get my hands on the fourth: The Minotaur's Head.

Set in interwar Breslau (now Wrocław), these books offer a weird view on a society that is a historical and cultural mix of German, Polish, and Jewish. Nostalgic for the past, that society is shown to be perverted and corrupted and completely hypocritical in its drive to be modern and free-thinking. I enjoyed the first book particularly for how the police investigation was shown to be conducted amid inquiries regarding internal affairs and with a hovering Gestapo presence. Dark and original.

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Shoes for atheists

At long last, atheists have their own shoes — atheists have soles too!

These shoes started off as a Kickstarter project. They look well-crafted and divinely comfortable. And they have a sense of humour — a black hole for a logo and a sole stamped with a message.

I haven't decided which colour I want, but I love the write-up for the literarily inspired "Nabokov cream":

Is there anything more beautiful in life than the pure, sweet, wondrous innocence of an unblemished, open and untainted soul?

Yes... the delightful process of getting that sole so fucking filthily dirty, and soiling its purity with so much titiliating sin and hedonistic whoredom that it can scarcely remember what colour it was to begin with.

This creamy, ivory, blank canvas of a shoeling is resplendent in her off-white milky maidenhood... but not for long, the little nymph, for you will introduce her to the real world... blemishing and sullying her with every step you take.

You're about to make a grown-up of this shoe.

The website as a whole is a cheeky bit of atheism-awareness, which maybe the world could use a little bit more of. And I could use some new shoes.

Infinity as a limit

Then he smiled into her eyes and asked, in the dry academic tones of an astronomer discussing a theoretical point with a colleague. "How long do you suppose I can go on loving you more every day?" And he devised for her a calculus of love, which approached infinity as a limit, and made her smile again.

The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell, is one of the most fantastic books I've read in some time — the kind where I spent much of my non-reading time not only wishing I were reading it, but talking about various concepts in it to anyone who would listen.

Such concepts include:

• A habitable planet in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri, a planet with three suns, and three distinct dawns and sun settings, and the visual this creates in my head (especially on the tail of having listened to poetic descriptions of a comparable setting in an audio version of Solaris) is mind-blowing.
• The privatization of orphanages and the common practice of a kind of indentured service, whereby orphans or other unfortunates could be educated and put to work, and in limited circumstances could buy out the rights to their life from the person or coporation who de facto owned them.
• Anthropological linguistics, and an alien grammar that voices a distinction between objects that are seen and objects that are not seen or nonvisual, this latter category including both things that are temporarily out of view as well abstract concepts.
  

  "The ability to speak a language perfectly does not necessarily confer any linguistic understanding of it," Sandoz said, "just as one may play billiards well without any formal understanding of Newtonian physics, yes? My advanced training is in anthropological linguistics, so my purpose in working with Askama was not merely to be able to ask someone to pass the salt, so to speak, but to gain insight into her people's underlying cultural assumptions and cognitive makeup."

  (One of the most common questions I had in response to telling people I studied linguistics was, So how many language do you know?. Aurgh. I wish I could've replied as succinctly as Sandoz.)
• A world economy in which Polish zloty are a valued currency.
• The whole Jesuit mystique, and that there be a religious order that might put academic pursuit before God. I feel compelled here to mention the time I met three Jesuits in a bar in Krakow, a couple of whom were visiting from Ireland and were working on translating Ulysses into Polish, and we proceeded to drink bottles of vodka together and talk about rescuing 20th-century Polish literature from obscurity, and they told stories about the Pope, among other things, and I decided, hey, Jesuits are cool.

The Sparrow is about first contact, but like all the best science fiction novels, it's deeply philosophical. While it fully realizes a completely believable yet wholly alien society, it's as much about our own cultural assumptions. It also envisions a future where religion and space travel are both going strong, and where the ideas of God and of alien life are not mutually exclusive.

Once, long ago, she'd allowed herself to think seriously about what human beings would do, confronted directly with a sign of God's presence in their lives. The Bible, that repository of Western wisdon, was isnstructive either as myth or as history, she'd decided. God was at Sinai and within weeks, people were dancing in front of a golden calf, God walked in Jerusalem and days later, folks nailed Him up and then went back to work. Faced with the Divine, people took refuge in the banal, as though answering a cosmic multiple choice question. If you saw a burning bush, would you (a) call 911, (b) get the hot dogs,or (c) recognize God? A vanishingly small number of people would recognize God, Anne had decided years before, and most of them had simply missed a dose of Thorazine.

Speaking as an open-minded atheist, albeit one raised Catholic, I was worried at times that the novel might end up siding with the existence of God. Although some characters do side with God, most of them maintain a healthy skepticism and some sway between belief and nonbelief, with the very reasonable attitude that "it's difficult to tell from the way people behave whether or not they believe in God." However, it is my one criticism of the novel that there is no affirmed atheist in the bunch.

So, yes, there's much discussion of faith in this book, and I hesitate to recommend it to some of my atheist friends, but I'm pretty sure I'll go ahead and recommend it anyway.

The characters in this novel are delightful — I want them all over for dinner next weekend. Despite most of them having had difficult upbringings, they're all very smart and energetic and lively, that it's only as I write this that I realize they may be a little too good to be true. But, boy, did I enjoy spending time with them. One thing that struck me, and I guess it ties in with the God question, whether life is random or by design, is that most of them had experienced an event in their life about which you could say they were picked up out of their life (by a person) and dropped somewhere else entirely. And I think this is awesome. To some degree I think it's true of all of us, that people nudge us onto paths that lead to vastly different places than we might otherwise have ended up in, and then there's something like love, which can transport you to a completely different life. (Well, how did I get here?)

Russell did write a sequel to The Sparrow, but I've heard from other fans that it is disappointing. I may pick it up someday, but I'm quite content for the time being to let The Sparrow stand alone in my head.

Highly recommended for sci-fi fans.

On the other hand, if you like your fiction realistic but are the least bit SF-curious, I think you'll find this group of characters so vivid and likeable, you'll willingly follow them to another planet.

One must seek to become human and to love the fact of one's humanity

Inspired by NPR's recent list of top 100 science fiction and fantasy books, a coworker and I have been comparing notes on our respective SF educations, and trying to help each other other close up some gaps. So I was scanning my shelves the other night, looking for a copy of something or other, and was delighted to find a beat-up old paperback, which I immediately set about rereading.

The War Hound and World's Pain, by Michael Moorcock, is not on NPR's list (though, his Elric saga is). My copy was printed in 1982, and it's likely I acquired and read it that same year, or the year after. The pages are severely yellowed, the spine cracked, with whole sections of pages breaking free of their gluey bonds, and the book smells intensely of that used-book-shop smell, though it's only ever been used by me, and a friend or two (the books on either side of it don't smell at all). I wrote my name inside it; I recognize my highschool penmanship.

The language of the book, quite deliberately, is stilted and somewhat formal, to mimic the style of a journal as written in 1680. I am surprised that my 13-year-old self would've got on with it. But it must've been hard to resist the callout on the back cover:

WITHIN A WITHERED FOREST, IN A PALACE RICH AND DESOLATE, A MAN LOVED A WOMAN — AND MADE A PACT WITH SATAN!

Now, at 13, I'm sure I knew about the holy grail, King Arthur, Monty Python, and all that, but I think I thought of it more as a treasure quest — the "holy" part of it eluded me.

Yet, I connected with this book. (I've held on to it for almost 30 years, and think of it as a favourite, but haven't really examined why until now.) I read it at a time when I no longer believed in God (hadn't done so since I was 4), I was mystified by the hold organized religion had over so many, and it was increasingly difficult to come up with excuses to get out of church on Sunday mornings (without resorting to the actual truth and devastating my mother). At the same time, this book opened my eyes to the curiosities of religious mythology — I realized I could be interested in and educated about religion and religious culture without actually being religious, without taking sides. (And so began a lifelong fascination with the story of Lilith.)

So in retrospect, I think this novel helped me to consolidate my atheism, to begin to glory in my humanness, to be true to myself.

"All I have learned, lady, is to accept the world's attributes as they are. I have learned, I suppose, an acceptance of my own self, an acceptance of Man's ability to create not sensations and marvels but cities and farms which order the world, which bring us justice and sanity."

"Aha," she said. "Is that all you learned, then, young man? Is that all?"

"I think so," I said. "The marvellous is of necessity a lie, a distortion. At best it is a metaphor which leads to the truth. I think that I know what causes the World's Pain, lady. Or at least I think I know what contributes to that Pain."

"And what would that be, Ulrich von Bek?"

"By telling a single lie to oneself or to another, by denying a single fact of the world as it has been created, one adds to the World's Pain. And pain, lady, creates pain. And one must not seek to become saint or sinner, God of Devil. One must seek to become human and to love the fact of one's humanity."

I became embarrassed. "That is all I have learned, lady."

"It is all that Heaven demands," she said.

I still don't believe in heaven, but I am glad to be reminded of von Bek's lesson in humility and humanity.

We're all of us muleteers travelling down the same road

This book is about Cain: "cain is the man who killed his brother, cain is the man born to witness the unspeakable, cain is the man who hates god."

And it's about God, too:

Yes, I've been using my will rather too much, as have others in my name, that's why there is so much discontent, people turning their backs on me, some even denying my existence, Punish them, They're beyond my jurisdiction, out of my control, the life of a god isn't as easy as you all think, a god cannot, as people imagine, simply say I want, I can and I command, and he can't always get what he wants straight away, but has to go round in circles first, it's true that I placed that mark on the forehead of cain, whom you've never seen and don't even know, but what I can't understand is why I don't have the power to stop him going where his will takes him and doing whatever he wishes.

And about how they just don't understand each other. They squabble:

That mark on your forehead has grown bigger, it looks like a black sun rising up above the horizon of your eyes, Bravo, cried cain, applauding, I had no idea you went in for poetry, There, you see, you know absolutely nothing about me.

Cain is José Saramago's last novel, reimagining the life of the biblical character, first son of Adam and Eve, brother and murderer of Abel, condemned to wander the Earth.

It's a short novel, but I've been taking my sweet time with it. It is quite poetic, and it's a pleasure to read some things slowly, this is one of them. But it's also very thoughtful, asks some hard questions, like who is this god person anyway, and it demands thinking about them.

It is full of gentle humour, and compassion for all its characters, except maybe god, no, for him too. It is irreverent, but humane.

The thing is, I feel grossly inadequate to be discussing this book, cuz really, I know next to nothing about the bible, just, you know, some stories, and I'm pretty sure I don't have them right.

Cain ventures into some territory I'm rather unfamiliar with. He wanders the Earth, or biblical lands anyway, but he also travels through time (or alternate presents) to be present at the destruction of Sodom, the land of Uz (Job), Mount Sinai, the fall of Jericho, the tower of Babel, the land of Nod, the sacrifice of Isaac, the launching of Noah's ark. (The bible places Cain in the land of Nod, but so far as I know, he doesn't appear at these other sites or events, even though I recall that many characters lived for hundreds of years.)

Here's a review in The Scotsman, and one on the blog My Bread and Jam.

Cain opens in the garden of Eden, an idyllic time, before all the trouble starts, and god gives Adam and Eve the gift of language, or you might say thought, maybe even free will, now we're in trouble. And they're naked. Of Eve's smile:

The angel liked that smile. In heaven, people smiled a lot too, but always seraphically and with the slightly embarrassed look of someone apologising for being so contented, if you could call it contentment.

So, anyway, Cain, not his brother's keeper, he murdered him, and is exiled, land of Nod, Cain meets Lilith. Lilith! I love Lilith! Ever since I read The War Hound and the World's Pain when I was 13. Saramago is drawing on pseudepigrapha here (I learned a new word!). Apparently there's quite a mythology surrounding Lilith and Cain and their relationship ("she would remain bound to him by the body's sublime memory"), but you won't find this in your standard religious texts.

There are a few throwaway lines that make you go, wait a minute ("he had to do the rounds of the other paradises that exist in the heavens [p 16]," or "because we human beings were quadrupeds once [p 57]"), how can that be, and you wonder if there was anything like this in the bible, and then you think, well, maybe it's not inconsistent with all the stuff that's already packed in there, it's only natural some stuff would've been missed, and it makes sense so why discount it.

Is it blasphemous? Most probably, and I'm guessing it would offend a lot of people, religious types, as it offended the Vatican, and as is the way of the world, sadly, it may be these people who would benefit the most from this kind of sincere investigation, the train of Cain's thought that we follow, into what makes god tick, whether god can do evil, and why he would, or whether there is some tacit complicity between good and evil.

Mostly it drives home what a fucked up world we live in, and that it has always been this way, where so many innocents die, and where is the justice in this, where is god in this, where is he when you need him, what is he thinking.

As for lot's wife, she disobeyed the order not to look back and was transformed into a pillar of salt. No one has ever been able to understand why she was punished in that way, for it is only natural to want to know what is going on behind you. It's possible that the lord wanted to punish curiosity as if it were a mortal sin, but that doesn't say much for his intelligence either, just look at what happened with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, if eve hadn't given adam some of the fruit to eat, if she hadn't eaten it herself, they would still be in the garden of eden, and we know how boring that was.

So it's funny, at least I think that bit's funny, in a gentle way, the humour may be mildly barbed but it's not aggressive. It's hard to imagine Saramago actually hated god, if we can assume the character of Cain might've embodied some of Saramago's thoughts on the issue of god or religion, but he did get angry, and not even at god really but at the impossibility of understanding him, that it has always been this way and will go on forever.

While the false abel is walking towards the square where, according to the old man, his destiny awaits him, let us attend to the extremely pertinent observation made by a few of our more vigilant and attentive readers, who consider that the dialogue we have just set down would be historically and culturally impossible, that a farmer with little and now no land and an old man with no apparent means of support would never think of speak like that. They are quite right, of course, however, it's not so much a question of them having or not having the ideas and the necessary vocabulary to express those ideas, but of our own capacity to accept, even if only out of simple human empathy and intellectual generosity, that a peasant from the very earliest times and an old man leading two sheep along by a piece of rope, with only a limited knowledge and a language that it still only taking its first tentative steps, were driven by the need to try out ways of expressing premonitions and intuitions apparently beyond their reach. Obviously, they didn't say those actual words, but the doubts, suspicions, perplexities, argumentative advances and retreats were nevertheless there. All we did was put into a modern idiom the twofold and, for us, insoluble mystery of the language and thought of the time. If the result is coherent now, it would have been then, given that we're all of us muleteers travelling down the same road. All of us, both the learned and the ignorant.

A new era in the aesthetics of the human body
If milk is spilled, it's spilled