Metafun

Just a little blogging about the blog here. We just recently had our first 1000 visitor day, of which roughly 900 of them were folks glancing at the Mapplethorpe essay. I'm guessing that either Mapplethorpe or Lisa Lyon appears as subject matter in some art course somewhere, and we get a flash crowd whenever it shows up during the school year. None of them ever seem to click on the Google ad, though, so there's no money in it for me, yet. Dang, don't they understand that the Google ad will find them a better school, or something?

We also have another minor infestation of Randites in the Coda thread. I find the entire matter more than a bit interesting. In some circles, they're called "Randroids," which is clever, but implies a sort of robotic affect (the philosophical equivalent of Asperger's Syndrome, perhaps) that is diametrically opposed to the in-your-face nothing-but-personal-attack-and-insults style that we've all come to recognize. Also, most of the Rand traffic here should be for the John-Galt-is-a-Slan essay, since I did a little shilling for it recently. Yet they gravitate towards the Rand Contra Ayn Rand Institute essay and invariably miss the point (despite it being right there in the title) that I'm saying Rand would disagree with the Ayn Rand Institute, and that the Ayn Rand Institute is actually preaching collectivist guilt and nationalistic retalliation (in advocating deliberate, preemptory attacks on civilian populations). One might almost think that Randites believe in magic words or something.

There also used to be actual Randites, as I recall, people who at least took some effort to try to present arguments and logical constructions. This current crew doesn't even seem to know how to read, which makes the whole "This was the most important book I ever read" thing a bit problematic. Did they have it read to them, like my second grade teacher read us The Wizard of Oz? Which contains some fine philosophical speculation, incidentally.

I've also just posted what I think is the best chapter in Blood Relations over on the Serial Novel Sister to this blog. And that reminds me that I was in the middle of some more sophisticated philosophical speculations on Stochasticism and Parallel Universes, but I seem to have gotten…Oh, look! A Woman with a Snake!

The Atheist in Church

From Dark Underbelly/Blood Relations

"That sounds like a case of 'atheist in church,'" Lewis said when I was finished.

"Atheist in church?" I asked. "More wise sayings from the Founder?" Lewis was not above quoting from the writings of the Founder of Stochasticism, who is never referred to by name, mainly because he gave so many names, all of them false. Quite a Trickster was the Founder.

"The very same," Lewis said. "The Founder had a lot of things to say about religion and what place it has in society. 'The Atheist in Church' is one of his best essays. He says, look, there are a whole slew of reasons for having churches. They're a form of social organization, you meet people, get moral instruction helpful for living in society. They can be a store of wealth, a means of education, all that stuff. So even an atheist might wish to join a church, regardless of what his opinion of the theology might be.

"But an atheist makes the theists nervous. He can abide by all the same rules, profess the same moral code, and still the regular churchmen don't like his presence. He's not committed to the group, you see. He doesn't say the password. A secret password can't be something that you can figure out by just being reasonable, it has to be something arbitrary. So religions make their believers do things that just don't make sense. That's what really defines the group, the things they do that don't make sense."

"So what does that have to do with me?" I asked him.

"It's a matter of freedom," he said. "We like to think that freedom is a good thing, but joining society means giving up some freedoms. And society doesn't want it to be a conditional thing. It's not supposed to be a matter of choice. We much prefer to have people who can't rather than won't transgress. Which is the better husband, the man who couldn't beat his wife no matter how he feels, or the man who simply refrains?"

I opened my eyes to see how closely he was watching me when he said that. But he was staring out a view panel at the clouds. "I thought that the whole point of it was moral choices," I said. "You talk as if not having a choice is better."

"'Lead us not into temptation,'" he quoted. "Because we might succumb." He looked over at me and grinned. In my current exhausted state it looked a little like a grimace.

"There are a lot of things in life that we don't know about until they happen to us. It's a lot of potential rather than actual freedom. And the potential may be bogus. We might not be able to do it when push comes to shove. That's part of what dice living is about. To test the limits. But if you do it from the dice, the gods might not get so angry at the freedom. That's a clear thread in most mythology. The gods get very angry when confronted by a free man."

"So do you think that it's just the gods being angry with me?" I asked. I smiled again to show that I thought it was a joke.

His face got a bit more serious though. "That's all metaphor," he said. "'A man's reach must exceed his grasp, else what's a meta for?' The gods are stand-ins for human fate in human society. Stick your head up too far and the body politic will try to shear it off. You make people nervous, pardner. They don't know what motivates you. They don't know what you're capable of, but they're pretty sure you're capable of more than they want to know. If there's the choice of having dinner with someone who hated me and wished me dead -- but couldn't do me harm no matter what -- versus someone who liked me, but could kill me without a thought if he so chose, well, most people would go for the first guy, not the second."

I sat up and looked at him carefully, but he was back to watching the cloud patterns. I looked out at them, but I knew that he saw things in them that I'd never see. And vice versa.

"What about you?" I asked. "You said 'most people,' but you don't say about yourself."

He looked at me and grinned. "Oh, I'd probably go with the first guy also; at least I'd load the dice that way." He paused for a moment. That's the secret of the punchline: timing.

"Present company excepted, of course," he said.

Introduction to Blood Relations

I finished Dark Underbelly and gave it to the writer's group, Will Write for Food, and everyone read it and pretty much liked it, but I kept getting this one criticism. "Hey," someone would say. "Sure, you solved the main mystery in this story, but there's still the backstory, and we get nothing. What the hell happened to Honlin on the Moon to make him the way he is?" And I'd say, "Well, I'm not exactly sure. Uh, okay, I have a pretty good idea of what it was, but I can't just tell you. If I did, you wouldn't like him anymore."

Anyway, a couple of them kept at me about it. One of them pointed to various figures in fantasy and SF who were pretty monstrous, and he said, "So what could Honlin have done that was worse than that?" So I told him. And he said, "Okay, that's worse. You're going to have to tell the story though, one way or another."

So I began writing the next book, with the understanding that, somewhere in it, Honlin tells at least the bare bones of what happened, but it had to be to the right person, in the right circumstances, and I was really going to have to sweat to make it work out. Somewhere in the first few chapters, another of the writers group got me to give her something about what was coming, and she said, basically, "Yuck! I'm not sure I want to read any more of this." But she did, and eventually came to the opinion that I'd managed to pull it off.

Maybe the past ten years or so have coarsened our attitudes about some things, so maybe it won't be as much of a shock now. Some pretty horrible things have been done in our names in the past few years, after all, and some people seem quite comfortable with it. So maybe we were all just squeamish and now we're fuddy duddies. Still, it seems to me that there is a lot of effort being expended on rationalizations and excuses and all the other ways of avoiding the idea of personal responsibility for brutal behavior. But I'm interested in someone who did something without excuses, without trying to rationalize it as ultimately being "for the greater good," even if it were possible to make the case, even if there were people telling him all those things, to try to make it all okay. But he knows that it wasn't okay. There are some things beyond excuses; there are some things that may be even beyond redemption. However much one might yearn for it, and strive for it, eventually redemption fails. But one strives nonetheless.

So the story of Ed Honlin is about the striving, and the recognition that he will probably fail.

How's that for a teaser?

Begin Blood Relations