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dhspgt
Post subject: no where else to post
Posted: Fri 18 Mar , 2005 5:45 am
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Posts: 42
Joined: Tue 22 Feb , 2005 2:58 am
 
The number in the “views” column keeps getting higher. I assume that means some one or ones check for some sign or signs.

I stopped playing the game because some nice people were angry. Provocation was the goal, but I had hoped to provoke more thought than emotion.

Think about this new medium for narrative. Think of its possibilities.

Text depends on context. What is the context of a message board? You all are defining it as you continue to create this new method of publishing/communicating.

I came to a message board to publish and perish.

Nail it to the church door and leave town.
Get in and get out.

Then,
conversation
debate
essay
research
seminar
creative writing
solo performance art
collaborative performance art
collaborative creative writing

How many contexts you have and how lovely!

What are posts?
Post (publish) a statement. There it is. Is it read? Is it published? No one knows (except for that “views” guy. Who is he? Does he count? Does he matter? ). If a tree falls in the forest… If a post posts on the board and no one reads it, what is it? What if it posts and then un-posts before it is read? The moving finger having writ… but wait! The finger can also “unwrite.” The living story narrated in nice, unambiguous chronological order can be edited. What kind of publication is this? Rough draft or first edition? Then there is the case of orphaned poems.

The Case of Orphaned Poems
What is the status of a literary manuscript which is denied by its purported author but which has a provenance that makes its attribution to any one else improbable? The question arose in connection with two poems in the Henry E. Huntington Library which have been attributed to Robert Frost but have had the attribution firmly refused by him. Does an author who repudiates or refuses to acknowledge, despite persuasive evidence to the contrary, one of his unpublished literary works thereby place it in the public domain? It is one of the mysteries of copyright which has not been resolved by legal decision. There are probably in existence other orphaned manuscripts which would make the question crucial.

Who are the posters?
Who nails up the posts on whose church door? The initial context of the message board is anonymity—more than anonymity (and less). Instructions to posters: 1) Don’t use your real name. 2) BE real. 3) Don’t be TOO real. 4) It is okay if you are not really real as long as you are nice about it. There is a long tradition of writers adopting pseudonyms. There is a long tradition of actors using stage names. There is a long tradition of correspondents writing correspondence—letters between real people published with the names blacked out by the editor. Everything you have just read is real: only the names have been changed to protect the innocent. Is this a drama or people being dramatic? Pseudonym or stage name? Poster as poser? Is this a play or are you simply playing? What of the possible combinations and permutations? A real person writing about the real person’s life using a name edited solely for security purposes maintaining a long-running correspondence with a character in a novel written by a writer using a pseudonym. What if all the posters on the message board are characters whose posts are written by one poster—except for you? What about you?

What is posting?
Product or process? Art? Communication? Confession? Therapy? A note nailed to the church door or a note passed between two friends at school? Who tears them down? What if the teacher confiscates the note and tears it up? What if someone writes graffiti on top of someone else’s post? Who has the eraser? Did someone take a picture of the door yesterday or last week? Who owns the picture? Why was a picture of the posts on the church door last week nailed to the church door today?

What is a thread?
Conversation? Seminar? Performance Art? Follow the thread. Forward. Backwards? How interesting that would be. Is it a record of a conversation? White House tapes? A recording with a delete button… not only a delete button but an edit feature. Is the thread a work of art? Is it a narrative work of art published by… Whom? The thread starter? Why the thread starter? If so, then what are all those other posters doing in there? Does someone own the thread? “My thread.” As in, “What have you all done to MY THREAD?” If it is a record of a conversation, should there be a delete button? If it is performance art, should there be an edit?

Context is where you find it. The existence of the ability to edit a post after it has been posted creates a certain context—it is one of the “rules” that tells a writer the nature of the medium. For a writer who enjoys experimenting with the nature of narrative art, it is the equivalent of waving a red flag at a bull.

With all of that going on, what was a poor dhspgt to do? What did I do?

I had posted a long essay on a message board known locally as TORC. The name of the essay was “Rules for the Debate.” My intent was to publish, read some of the responses (assuming there were some), and leave. I eventually posted a few more times. On the continuum of posting, it would safe to say that my posts were generally nearer to essay than conversation. I stopped posting on TORC because the few posters who had been responding to my posts left TORC and suggested I go where they went—which was here. I think most of them have now gone somewhere else. So it goes.

I wrote something in one of my posts that said something like the following:

The middle earth I envision is one in which human beings are connected to the world in a way that would be explained today as technological, but in such a way that it would be impossible to determine whether the world controlled us or we controlled it. There are two paths toward that future: one dark, dominated by struggles for power, in which the mechanism of control would be magical; and one light, fostering quests for enlightenment, in which the mechanism of control would be enchanted, equally present within, inherent in, the “us” and the “it.”

I was asked to explain. [That explanation is reproduced in the posts that follow this post.] I began the explanation in this forum, “there and back again,” for two reasons: first, I realized I needed a more clearly defined context for the explanation and I understood that this forum was supposed to be the place where posters could post a product—a piece of their own creative writing; and second, because I knew that I was going to play with the narrative timeline and have some fun exploring this new medium for narrative art known as the message board (and what better forum to do so than one titled, “there and back again”?). There was an actual idea behind the experimentation and exploration—perhaps not an idea worth as much trouble as I was about to go to for it—but at least it was an idea (I get them so seldom it would have been a shame to let one go to waste). The idea was that the explanation I was going to post in “there and back again” was in truth the reason I had first posted on TORC. So, in essence, the posts in this forum, once I completed them, would be the first posts. That was the idea that starting me thinking that I could use this new medium to write backwards in time.

My first posts in this forum went unnoticed for quite some time (the man behind the curtain who counts “views” said so). Then, a few friends showed up. Though not by design, the product I was compiling became a process and a collaboration.

I always play by the rules as soon as I know what they are, so I began to see and hear my explanation (which had a working title, “Grid”) interwoven with the “play” being written by dhspgt and a small community of posters. I intended “Grid” to be delivered as a product—published to the world—but the life story of dhspgt was to be a gift to this poster community. The life story of dhspgt was being written forwards and backwards in a way that was possible only on a message board with a small community of posters and one in which the poster could edit a previous post.

The life story of dhspgt was to be the first autobiography written after the death of the writer.

The biography makes a story of a life by interviewing people who knew the subject, by reading what others had written about the subject, and by reading what the subject had written. The “Grid” was the writing written by the subject. Each new post by a poster added to the life story of dhspgt, being written backwards by dhspgt. “42” had to be a “dead end” because story has to have an end and the end of a life story is death. Most of what then followed was poor attempt to narrate a story from clues provided by chance, coincidence and unwitting collaborators. Believe it or not there were some amazing (to me) developments. I knew I had to end dhspgt’s life and the Bilbo bit was the obvious choice, but ending the dhspgt life at post count 42 did not occur to me until MariaHobbit’s comment about the fact some thread (one of many) about the “problem with board77” was on page 42 and that it would be fitting to end it there. The board77 posters seemed to want to end it there but then they couldn’t help themselves and it went on to page 43, 44, 45… That became part of the story (the “unspoken story” that was writing itself as I was writing the spoken story, the “Grid”). The first post I deleted was the post I had made on page 42 (affirming MH’s observation). I did so when the page count flipped to 43 several posts later. I thought the deletion of my post might turn the page counter back to 42, but I did not know enough about how the page counter worked. But that little drama starting me thinking about the fact that the unspoken story was emulating the spoken story—the “Grid” was to be the end product explaining why dhspgt posted in the first place (why dhspgt was “born”) and was a story being written backwards. Now, the poster was moving backward in time. I then realized that the unspoken life story of the poster dhspgt would have to be written backward in the “no where else to post” thread in the “there and back again” forum, before it existed in any other posts in any other threads in any other forums, and I would have to finish the “Grid” before I could finish the unspoken story. I sketched the outline of the dhspgt life story, knew who the major players (posters) would be and planned each one’s part, but some things worked better than planned. Unbeknownst to me at the time, a thread about the edit feature was ongoing. I read IdylleSeethe’s hypothetical: “what if all the posts by dhspgt were deleted from the “Are they important films” thread? I had deleted them less than 24 hours BEFORE he wrote that comment. He could not have known I had done so, because I had been checking the “views” counter at TORC as I was preparing to make the deletions. To this date, though the deletions occurred nearly a year ago, I do not believe the deletions on TORC have been noticed. In my opinion, the existence of that coincidence—my act and IdylleSeethe’s post—spoke more profoundly about the nature of story telling than anything I have ever written, and it did not prove to be the last such coincidence. The plan was to complete the life story of dhspgt in “no where else to post” at the same time as completing “Grid” then it would be possible for dhspgt to repost the deleted posts—living forward while posting backward. I was trying to narrate the unspoken story by enchantment and not by magic—to achieve my end without exercising control to get there. It might have worked but I did not like seeing old friends upset. Since I did not have an emotional attachment to my own posts, I did not anticipate the extent to which others would value the “sanctity” of threads they had started or in which they had posted. So, I left.

However, given the nature of dhspgt’s disappearance and re-appearance in this thread, I was concerned that others would “waste time” (there is an essay in that phrase) by visiting the thread to see if dhspgt had made an appearance in one of the old posts. Based on the “views” counter, some poor soul must be doing so. I have continued working on “Grid” and I am beginning to believe it may deserve a place in this world. The life story of dhspgt may not deserve a place but it would seem that such a place already exists. So, I am doing some clean up. “Grid” is nearly complete (as complete as it will ever be in this forum). The life story of dhspgt is a dud. I certainly meant no disrespect to anyone. I do believe that, had it not been for the emotional reaction to the deletion of dhspgt’s “future” existence, some of the posters might have joined in the narrative play within the “unspoken story” of dhspgt’s life instead of attempting to join in the “Grid” narrative that was speaking for itself. If I may be so bold (though it may give offense), there was too much thought control, too little thought and, in the end, no enchantment. I am afraid I turned out to be a very poor Gandalf.

Last edited by dhspgt on Mon 01 May , 2006 4:26 am, edited 8 times in total.

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dhspgt
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Posted: Sat 16 Apr , 2005 4:41 am
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INTRODUCTION

There is a story behind the writing of this book. It is something I owe to an old college professor. While I was a student at Dartmouth College in the 1970’s, I read Lord of the Rings for the first time. My roommate’s girlfriend was visiting for the weekend and brought a copy of the trilogy. She was on the second book, I think, and offered the first to me since I had not read it. I read the entire trilogy without stopping to eat or sleep (reading the book she was on while she slept). Many first time readers of the Lord of the Rings tell similar stories. The odd thing in my case was that I had read Tolkien’s essay, On Fairy Stories, but I had never read Rings or Hobbit. I read Tolkien’s essay because I had developed a fascination for literary critical theory and was reading everything I could find that seemed connected to a certain pattern running through the history of literary critical theory (more on that later). Then a really interesting thing happened. In the months that followed after reading the trilogy, I was surprised to discover the same pattern in the history of physical theory (which had long been a hobby of mine—“long” being a relative term considering the fact that I was 19 or 20 years old at the time). I did not connect the two reading events—Tolkien’s trilogy and the history of physics—until my senior seminar on The Education of Henry Adams. Adams, the “scientific historian,” brought the pattern into focus.

I am afraid I started out badly in that seminar. I missed the first class. The professor ripped me. After that, we connected the way mentors and students sometimes do. I did not bring Tolkien to that dance because I was afraid the professor might think me daft. [Like many of you, I have watched the film, A Beautiful Mind.] I am acutely aware that the discovery of pattern, like beauty, depends on the eye of the beholder. However, I did bring to his attention the pattern I found in history of physics—the pattern but not the details. Then, some years later, when I was a graduate student in English literature at the University of Missouri, the Professor attended a symposium on the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at MU and, during a late night discussion with a number of the icons of American literary criticism, he turned the attention of the group to my pet theory, created just the right atmosphere of expectation, and gave the floor to me, gift-wrapped as only he could do. I opened my mouth to speak.

A talented dramatist could stage the scene, but I do not do drama. Though the group had been moving and mixing earlier in the evening, everyone had been settled into a fixed position for more than an hour. The excess of spirit loosed by liquor, having generated squalls and soliloquies, was now spent. Tongues were tired but still capable. They were veteran athletes in the fourth quarter of a game that had produced a high scoring first half. It was an evening in which the educated and erudite were eloquent in ways that a transcript of the evening’s discourse could never accurately convey. [Eloquence, like beauty, is in the ear of the beholder.] I was the only graduate student in the group. It had been my duty to make certain that the literati were well supplied with their favorite drink, and I should have remained seen and silent, but they were a generous (or, more accurately, “charitable”) group and, after four hours of conversation and consumption, I felt like I belonged. It was one o’clock in the morning. I rose to speak.

I could not rise to the occasion. I said something dull-witted; there was a moment of silence; and I avoided eye contact with my mentor. My choice at that point was silence or a three hour oration. I spoke silence. The pattern can only be revealed; it can not be described. So, with all my course work for the Ph.D. finished, lacking only the dissertation that was already written in my head, I went to law school.

In my life so far, I have been a teacher, a lawyer and a hospital administrator. I was a teacher for seven years. To be precise, I taught literature and composition at Missouri University while I was a graduate student in literature (four years) and a law student (three years). I was then a lawyer for thirteen years. As I write this introduction, in a few months, I will have been a hospital administrator for seven years. What do they call it if someone rolls a double seven? I call it time to figure out how to be fourteen. If Huck Finn could figure out how to do it, I reckon I can too.

I have written a text. The text is a book. If I were a teacher instead of a hospital administrator, I would call it a text book. As a hospital administrator, I am calling it a book of text. As an attorney, I would call it someone else’s book. The book is not a novel. It is not history. It is not science fiction. It is not an academic treatise. It is not a philosophical tome. It is not literary criticism. In fact, the book does not fit within any genre. The lack of genre is part of the book. Without a genre, it is difficult to describe the book. That is why I said: “I have written a text.” The book has words and the words are woven together so that they seem to make sense. According to the dictionary, words that have been written down, typed, or printed may be called a “text.” The word “text” comes from the Latin “textus” which means “woven material.” I like that.

The book is what I would have, should have said when the Professor handed me the floor. It is not what I could have said, because if I could have said it I would have said it.

Though the content of the book, in as much as it can be said that the book has content, is the response I owe the Professor, the book was written for readers. That sounds simple-minded. Books are written for readers. This book is written by one who would be a teacher of readers. How did you like that line? How did it sound? Sometimes the sound is part of the message. Sometimes the sound is the message.

I figured out how to be fourteen: I would be a writer who teaches readers by writing a book that must be written by the reader. Is that possible? I don’t know either.

It occurred to me that the internet message board, with its threads that are written forwards and read backwards, is a narrative thread of text written by the readers. So, there is some of that in this (and some of this in that).

Would you like to see how this works before we get started for real? After I wrote the book of text, I started reading The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil. There were early signs that had a familiar sound, and, you know, sometimes the sound is part of the message. For example, Ray (May I call you Ray?) quotes Muriel Rukeyser: “the universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” Rukeyser obviously knows Grid. Well, it is obvious as long as one understands that pattern does not depend on chronological sequence or narrative causality. Ray describes himself as a “patternist.” Well, welcome to my world.

It gets better. Ray says:
I can understand why many observers do not readily embrace the obvious implications of what I have called the law of accelerating returns (the inherent acceleration of the rate of evolution, with technological evolution as a continuation of biological evolution). After all, it took me forty years to be able to see what was right in front of me, and I still cannot say that I am entirely comfortable with all of its consequences.

Well [Have I gone to the well once too often?], obviously, Ray knows Grid. [My “obvious” is a kindler, gentler “obvious” than Ray’s “obvious implications” because his is a bit condescending though couched in stylized, self-deprecating empathy for the reader other than Ray. There is a there is a one truth and I know it sound to Ray’s “obvious.” Mine is simply a weak attempt at irony and humor.] Ray’s “technological evolution as a continuation of biological evolution” is in Grid. Ray builds his Grid: “The traditional strengths of human intelligence include a formidable ability to recognize patterns. The massively parallel and self-organizing nature of the human brain is an ideal architecture for recognizing patterns that are based on subtle, invariant properties.” The very next bullet from Ray’s gun sounds as accurate as the last one: “The traditional strengths of machine intelligence include the ability to remember billions of facts precisely and recall them instantly.” It hits the bull’s eye, but it turns out that the bull’s eye is placed on the wrong target. Ray’s pattern of progress is, though exponential rather than linear, too sequential—too progressive. Ray does say that he is not “entirely comfortable with all of its consequences” [emphasis added]. I should hope not. He would not have to go further than the history of the word con-sequences to understand why. However, he does not have to go that far—because that is as far as one can go. There is another, shorter, route to those uncomfortable consequences. It, too, is part of Grid: it is “the world is too much with us” problem—the end of history if/when/because the record of fact is complete.

There must be a ghost in the machine; otherwise, the universe would be made of atom, not story, and no one life to tell it.

THE BOOK

Editor:
The published text was compiled from comments posted on a now defunct and inaccessible internet message board. There are unedited versions of this text floating around on the internet. The text presented here in edited form is the only version based on a direct copy of the messages posted in a particular thread on that board. To the best we can determine, there was an upgrade to the server, accompanied by some sort of glitch, and many of the board’s threads disappeared. The posters who populated the board left in dismay, disgust or disinterest. No one remained. These things happen. There may be other remnants of that board preserved out there somewhere. Frankly, we have not spent a great deal of time researching the matter. We first became aware of Grid from one of our summer interns who claims that it has spawned a cult-like following of readers (mostly on college campuses). Her enthusiasm for this project is the primary reason we elected to publish it. None of the senior editors found much to value in it. The staff is intrigued mostly because we cannot decide how to characterize it. It may be a new genre. It may or may not be what it purports to be: a collection of related comments posted on an internet message board centered on an odd narrative that may or may not be the work of one of the posters. Since the text of the messages was the only data copied from the original thread, we have no information concerning the date and time the messages were posted. Other than evidence from the text of the messages, there is no way to know the user names of the posters or how to assign a particular post to a particular poster. Once we populated the thread with a finite set of users, we assigned posts to those users. We are confident we did so with a reasonable degree of accuracy, but, we had to resort to editorial invention and it is probable that we made a few mistakes. We attempted to locate information regarding the real identity of the posters but have been unable to do so. Our copyright attorney advises that we probably won’t get sued for publishing this since it has been in the public domain for some time—unless we make money on the publication, which we don’t expect to do.

Hunter:
In my never-ending quest to find new discussion material for our cozy little community, I came across a curious bit of narrative in a computer blog. The blog’s title is Grid. The blog refers to a narrative that is divided into chapters. The blog provides no background or explanation or attribution regarding the narrative other than a statement: “Warning! This is a story. It must be read.” The only other hint of context (other than what the narrative itself provides) is a link to a web site dedicated to the Voynich manuscript. By the way, do not bother to search for the blog containing Grid: it has been deleted, except for a short poem that served as the epilogue. (Not by me! Some time after I copied the narrative to my hard drive, the narrative disappeared.)

What say you? Once more into the breech, dear friends?

Old Eye:
I never buy a pig in a poke, son.

Jail Bait:
I’m in!

Professor:
I suspect Hunter intends to pass off one of his cohort’s odd creations as the work of an anonymous writer. That said, I will play along as long as it continues to amuse. Tally ho, Hunter!

Hunter:
Great. Anybody else?

Librarian:
What are the rules of the engagement? Are we role playing or going straight?

Old Eye:
What’s the difference?

Warden:
I don’t think we know anymore.

Jail Bait:
I don’t think we care anymore.

dhspgt:
I don’t think anymore.

BMOC:
This is stupid. We usually spend more time talking about whether we want to talk about it than we spend talking about it. Post it first. I mean it’s not like it’s going to cost us anything. Then we can decide if we want to yak about it.

Hunter:
OK. Here goes.

Last edited by dhspgt on Thu 12 Apr , 2007 1:53 am, edited 8 times in total.

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dhspgt
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Posted: Sun 10 Jul , 2005 2:23 am
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Grid
Prologue: Caption


The moral: “But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.” Henry David Thoreau


This narrative ended up originally intended to be a kind of sequel to Tolkien’s joint re-presentation of “Leaf by Niggle” and “On Fairy-Stories.” I quote the Professor:

These two things, On Fairy-stories and Leaf by Niggle, are here reprinted and issued together. They are no longer easy to obtain, but they may still be found interesting, especially by those to whom The Lord of the Rings has given pleasure. Though one is an “essay” and the other a “story”, they are related: by the symbols of Tree and Leaf, and by both touching in different ways on what is called in the essay “subcreation.” Also they were written in the same period (1938-40), when The Lord of the Rings was beginning to unroll itself and to unfold prospects of labour and exploration in yet unknown country as daunting to me as to the hobbits.

So, if the reader other than me has not read the essay-story Leaf by Niggle on fairy-stories by Tolkien, please do so now—I will wait.

Thank you for your cooperation—now, we may continue.

Why did the penultimate sentence begin with “So”? “So” = “Since the effect of the sequel variation will not be heard without the original theme playing unheard in the reader’s mind, ...”

I hope that helped. Do not count on much more help from me. Gird your loins; tighten your belt. It gets rough from here.

I once thought that I had something original and important to say about literature and the human mind creating it (not THAT mind, the other one—the reader), until I read that essay-story by Tolkien. He beat me to it and I could not come up with a different tune to sing. So what is a poor player to do? Improvise. The sequel is my jazzed variation on his theme. Is my narrative essay or story? Why do you think he put “essay” and “story” in quotation marks? Let’s get with the program, people.

What do I find so remarkable about Tolkien’s little essay-story? This phrase is not of me but I know it: Tolkien got inside language. It frustrates me to think what he might have written about the origins and processes of language and literature had he chosen an easier path, but he understood it too well to write academic narratives about it. Tolkien’s treatise on what some would call literary critical theory is The Lord of the Rings. [He said as much.]

The sequel is plotted. Where is this narrative going? What makes you think I should tell you? Who are you, anyway? Reading is hard work. It should be. It is, after all, a more sublime act of creation than the relatively simple act of writing. Remember what they say about Ginger Rogers. Fred Astaire may have authored the dance but Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did—backwards and in high heels.

[New voice (or at least typing in a new key):]

Like many others who have become captivated by the middle earth created by J.R.R. Tolkien, within a complicated matrix of spiritual, intellectual and emotional responses, I acknowledge a desire to be transported to that created world, but I have never believed that such a desire could be accurately characterized as a desire to escape from the real world into a fantasy world of the past. It always seemed to me that the real middle earth was out there in front of us waiting for us to make it real in the future. My dissatisfaction with the critical response to Tolkien’s work (particularly the “academic” critical response) was so strong that I fancied myself as some sort of people’s champion who would one day set the record straight. So, I read and I thought and I wrote. But mostly I just waited. The academic critical response slowly improved. That was to be expected. The academic critical response will, of a necessity imposed by limitations inherent in its nature, respond appropriately only in inverse proportion to the originality and strength of the artistic work. Given the originality and strength of Tolkien’s masterpiece, I calculated that the appropriate critical response from the academic community would require a full century. Since that community is showing some signs of life at the half-century mark, things seem to be on track. At the end of the second century, we should see Lord of the Rings become a fixture in the western canon. [It is not there now—I checked. You might think that in this context there could be no single authority on whether a particular work belongs in the canon, but you would be wrong. Harold Bloom is that single authority. I searched through The Western Canon for Tolkien. He is not in it. I did find an indirect reference. Bloom assigned himself the task of reading Paradise Lost as though he had never read it before and found:

I was left curiously shocked, a little alienated, and yet fearfully absorbed. What was I reading? Although the poem is a biblical epic, in classical form, the peculiar impression it gave me was what I generally ascribe to literary fantasy or science fiction, not to heroic epic. Weirdness was its overwhelming effect. I was stunned by two related but different sensations: the author’s competitive and triumphant power, marvelously displayed in a struggle, both implicit and explicit, against every other author and text, the Bible included, and also the sometimes terrifying strangeness of what was being presented. Only after I came to the end did I recall (consciously anyway) William Empson's fierce book Milton's God, with its critical observation that Paradise Lost seemed to Empson as barbarically splendid as certain African primitive sculptures.

Reading these words, I am immediately reminded that Bloom is the man who gave us the “anxiety of influence.” Then I substitute Lord of the Rings for Paradise Lost and hope in vain that Bloom could do so.] Given my confidence in Tolkien’s ultimate ascension in the academic literary marketplace, I have concluded that the world no longer needs the voice of a people’s champion—a really convenient development since the champion has been doing little more than clearing his throat to speak for over thirty years. So, I moved on to what should have been virgin territory: a story idea about a road that takes over the world. I know, I know. It sounds like bad science fiction. That’s the thing about science fiction. When you reduce the story to a one sentence description, it always sounds like bad science fiction. Well, it always does to me, but then, maybe I am being overly sensitive. Then, an interesting thing started to happen. As I developed the bad science fiction idea into a good narrative, the story was drawn into the older material I had developed about Tolkien. Students of Tolkien will recognize that I have parodied Tolkien’s comments about the development of the “hobbit sequel” which was “drawn” into the older material he had been writing his entire adult life. The force of gravitation was understandable in Tolkien’s case. In my own, I realized that these seemingly disparate things were drawn together because both focus on the nature of a possible future. The middle earth I envision is one in which human beings are connected to the world in a way that would be explained today as technological, but in such a way that it would be impossible to determine whether the world controlled us or we controlled it. There are two paths toward that future: one dark, dominated by struggles for power, in which the mechanism of control would be magical; and one light, fostering quests for enlightenment, in which the mechanism of control would be enchanted, equally present within, inherent in, the “us” and the “it.” Part of this struggle will begin to sound familiar to those who have been exposed to (“contaminated with” may be more accurate in the context of the story I have written) certain formulations of the conventional dualism deeply embedded in the western philosophical tradition. [Which dualism? Pick one—any one.] However, it is my hope that this story will avoid the unavoidable urge by the collective “reader other than me” to reduce the un-reducible to a one-sentence philosophical cliché—a worse fate than starting life as a one-sentence science-fiction premise. In saying so, I am not attempting to attach blame where it does not belong, or trying to persuade the reader other than me to shoulder a burden that should be mine. I merely express my desire that I will be up to the task. If the story is reduced to the philosophical cliché, the fault will not be the story’s but my skill as a story teller.

Since that skill is wanting [I have never been comfortable using that particular idiom. Would it please if I simply said that I want—am wanting—skill?], I have employed a cheat, a trick, a device. The narrative that begins when this caption ends [My use of the term “caption” as a title or label for this prefatory memorandum may seem odd but it is consistent with one or more of the following standard usages of the word:

a) text accompanying a graphic;
b) a title or short description, such as a heading or subheading in a document;
c) a printed translation of dialogue or other description accompanying a video; or
d) the heading of a document announcing its raison d’être, such as the caption of a legal document.

On further review, my use is consistent with all of the above standard usages.] employs (for minimum wage) [to let the reader know early on in the relationship that the author is fond of cheap tricks, puns and silly word play] multiple narrative points-of-view. A writer not wanting the necessary skill would communicate shifts in narrative point-of-view without resort to non-narrative devices such as captions. I did not feel the wanting or want the feeling as writer, but I did as reader. So, I have employed a variety of devices, and, to make matters worse [“worse” in the sense that it is additional evidence of my wanting of skill], I now offer the reader a legend to map my use of one of those devices:
a) the voice of the first-person narrator, Jane Teller, is in italics and is the outermost frame of the entire narrative (except for me, of course);
b) the voice of the third-person narrator, Jane Teller, is in plain text and is the default voice of the narration moving the main action forward [Action? There is no action. There is at least the hope and prayer of a plot (and contrary to my dear friend and mentor, Mark Twain, I strongly encourage the reader to find the plot, or, failing that, to invent one).];
c) the voice of the character, Jane Teller, is in quotation marks and she is not supposed to know as much as the Teller narrators, though it is difficult to say with certainty what a Teller does not know;
d) the Teller narrators tell parts of the story by using (or allowing) a character narrator, such as the unnamed “arrogant young computer programmer” in the “Bug” chapter who rants in the first person;
e) some of the narration might be read or heard as excerpts of narration from “outside” sources presented directly to the reader by the Teller without editorial intervention [Then, again, the Teller is a born story teller which is first cousin to born liar.];
f) the reader will notice that this narration is frequently interrupted with editorial comments, parenthetical digressions and an occasional recursive loop (influenced more by computer programming syntax than Homer) and I encourage the use of a mental “cut and paste” to restore narrative continuity.

Chapter before the First: The Dream Cave


Writing before the story begins.

I do not know how to begin this story. I know how to end it. I do not know if any reader (other than me) has ever read or will ever read this story. I had an audience for my other stories. I was born to tell stories to that audience. I would like to believe that I was born to write this story. I have imagined a reader for this story. I do not know whether that reader exists.

I write. The reader will not be surprised at that, but I am surprised. No—the surprise is gone, but I am still awestruck, struck still with awe. Outside this cave, written language does not exist. Inside this cave, I discovered the existence of a written language and I learned how to make written words in that language. I touch picture-shapes on the wall of the cave and make written words. I do not know how long this writing will continue to work. I hope I tell the whole story before the writing ends, but I will not change the telling of the story because I may not have enough writing to finish the telling of the story—not because it does not matter. It does matter. It is matter. If thought is energy and energy matter, then it is matter, matter from earth mother—mother matter. Does it matter, mother? It matters: this process of writing is part of the story.

I am sitting on a rock at the entrance to a small cave. The rock is quite comfortable. The mouth of this cave (my first written metaphor) is like a doorway to a house, in size and shape. Why would we not say “the mouth of this house”? Is it because the house is built and the cave is grown? What if the house was grown and the cave was built? The floor, ceiling and walls of this cave form a single room. Is “floor of this cave” a metaphor? Is there a better word to use? If there is no other word to use, then can the word be a metaphor? I could say, “the bottom of this cave,” but “bottom” says more than I intend to say. The floor of this cave may not be the bottom. I know not what lies beneath this truth-cave.

How do I tell this story? The story has changed the story teller. To tell this story, I must show the reader the teller who is not the reader, but I can not be who I was. I was not the reader. I am now the reader. I cannot make the reader into the teller who is not the reader, but I will tell the story.

How should I tell this story? It is hard to know how to begin because the story is the telling of the story. I have an idea. I can start with that. The idea is to tell the story of how I got to this cave writing this story. So, I should start with the place and time before the story began that led me to writing the story in this place at this time. That starting place is my village. I was the story teller of my village. I do not know a reader other than me, but I now know that a reader other than me could be a reader. The reader other than me would not know whether the village exists in an imagined past or predicted future of this world or the present, past or future of an invented world. The reader other than me would not know whether this story is myth, science or fiction.


The people living in the village belong to familial clans. Each clan specializes in providing certain products or services for the village. The clans usually have no more than four persons: a mother, father, son and daughter. People do not mate inside their clan. Each family lives in an ancestral clan dwelling. The clan dwellings are arranged in a circle around a common field. All of the food eaten by the villagers is grown in the common. There is one structure larger than the clan dwellings and it serves as the meeting place and common dining area for the entire village. This village hall stands on bare ground in the center of the common. There are no other buildings or structures. There are no plants or vegetation of any kind growing in the village outside the common, except for one large tree growing in the middle of the meeting place at the center of the village. Each clan grows a few small bushes and plants inside their dwellings. Other than the black dirt in the common where plants are grown, all the ground of the village is smooth, bare and reddish brown. The clan dwellings and meeting place are smooth, bare and reddish brown and appear to be grown from the ground itself.

The climate is moderate year-round. There are no seasons. It rains once a day for an hour, always at night. Other than the plants grown in the common, the village has no agriculture. There is no animal husbandry. There are, in fact, no animals, wild or domestic. There are no birds, insects, rodents, or fish. There are no grubs or worms in the soil. The soil is made perfectly fertile. The common field is not divided or arranged into certain crops. All varieties of plants are intermingled throughout the common. The agriculture of the village consists almost entirely of a daily harvest in which certain varieties are harvested while others are culled and returned to the soil. There are no seasons. The growing season continues year-round. Plants are perennial, long-lived and seldom stop producing. New plants are sown by hand only on rare occasions and solely by the members of one clan. The harvesting and culling is performed each morning by the entire village, except for the very young children, who are suckled and tended by the only clan not working in the field. All villagers engage in the afternoon processing of the daily harvest. Unlike the field work, the harvested plants are processed by the individual clans in their own clan dwellings and not by the village as a whole. The young children are tended by their own clan members during this part of the day. The processing is accomplished with the use of few tools. The grains harvested from the bread plant are soaked in water and then mashed and kneaded by hand in order to form loaves of bread. The loaves are laid out on stone tablets and baked by the afternoon sun in solar ovens that collect and focus heat from the sun. If it ever rained during the day, the bread would be ruined; but it never rains during the day. Each clan follows a slightly different processing ritual resulting in distinctive clan breads that are shared with the entire village at the evening meal. Villagers participate in only one group meal each day. They also break fast when they rise in the morning, but they do so individually. There is no noon meal. In addition to using the plants harvested from the village common in baking the clan bread, the villagers incorporate fruits, nuts, berries, herbs and spices picked from a variety of bushes and plants growing in the common and inside the clan dwellings. This picking is done by the individual clan members during the afternoon meal preparation and is part of the ritual. Some of these become part of the preparation of the clan bread; others are processed and eaten separately. Each clan favors certain fruits, nuts, berries, herbs and spices over others.

Each clan has dwelt in the same structure for generations beyond telling. In the language of the village, the name for the clan dwelling place is simply the clan name and the word, “home.” The village story teller dwells at Teller Home. Each clan dwelling has a spring of water that fills a water channel running through the dwelling. Each dwelling is divided into four rooms. The largest, and the one in which the spring originates, is a gathering room also used as a kitchen. Following the water downstream, the next largest room is a sleeping room used by all of the clan members, then a store room. The last and smallest room is a bathing room. The water course ends in a small pool in the bathing room. No water issues from the dwelling but returns to the ground from which it sprang.

The village has little apparent technology. Clans specialize in certain hand crafts utilizing plant and stone. There is no metal work. Clothing is made from plant fiber, pressed and woven into cloth by hand. Most of the “furniture” of the dwelling place is a permanent part of the dwelling structure, grown from the ground. One clan makes containers from plants. Villagers sit on certain of these containers, but there is no chair, table or bed manufacture.

There is no pump, screw or wheel in the village. There is no fire. The climate is moderate year-round so that fire is not needed for warmth. Meal preparation of harvested plants does not involve the use of fire. Bread is baked in a solar oven. Fire is not used as a source of light. The interior walls of dwelling places reflect sunlight in such a way that light is not needed during the day, and certain walls are able to emit this reflected sunlight through the night.

The villagers have no written language. The village’s history, myth, science, religion and narrative arts are preserved and expressed solely through an oral tradition.

There are no roads.


I am Jane Teller. I am of the Teller clan. I am a story teller. I was born to be a story teller. I was made to hear the heart, mind and soul of story.

The Teller is born to hear the heart, mind and soul of story. The soul of story is a silent music, known only to the teller, but the heart and mind of story echo in the telling of a tale. The telling of a tale is a heard tune that plays in the teller’s mind. There is a pattern and rhythm to the telling of each tale. The ebb and flow, repetition, emphasis, tempo and delivery of the teller’s narration reveal and create the heart of story. There is a structure and relationship in the bits and pieces and parts of each tale. Cause and effect, up and down, self and other, one and many, male and female, tension and release reveal and create the mind of story. Certain bits and pieces of the story-telling are tethered to certain other pieces and bits. The tethered sun and moon from one telling changes to a tethered man and woman in another telling, but the tether remains. The soul of story is a grammar imprinted in each teller, a silent harmony that is the teller and that tells the teller true story.

[Was I born or was I made? If made, made by whom? If made, can I be made but made by no one? Why is it different to be born and not made? Does “made” mean “forced”? If made and born are the same, does made mean born and not forced? Can born mean forced? To be born or to be made—that is the question. The word should have been: “do.” The question should have been: “to do or not to do.” That was the question we expected. The question of whether to take action became the question of existence. According to the wisdom of my clan, stories are born; tales are made. Truth made true by definition. Are definitions true solely because they are made to be true? Are definitions born? Earth mother said these tales are true. True by definition or by birth?]

I was the story teller in our village, but I will not (can not?) tell this story to my village. I can no longer be the village story teller. In the direction of time from the Beginning, this story began when the old man asked me to tell why I tell stories. In the stories about stories I told to my village, I began to hear an unspoken story. As far back in my life as I can remember, I have listened for a song that made no sound. Each time I told a tale, I listened for the unspoken story. For the stories to be of our time, there must be stories of a time that is not our time. For the stories to be in our place, there must be stories of a place that is not our place. As I listened to the new tales I told, I began to imagine the place that was not our place, the time that was not our time.

I am sitting in my dream cave, writing my dream, waiting for earth mother to swallow me.


Chapter the First: The Sun Rises

The story begins. The sun rises. Jane Teller sleeps on a bed in the sunrise room of the clan dwelling. As the sun rises, light pounds on the earth and stone wall of the sunrise room, rising up the surface of the wall, then streams through a square hole in the wall, striking the hard, smooth floor, warming the room as the light finds the bed. A strong beam scans the bed and the body on it, moving fluidly from foot to head. The bed, blanket and body absorb part of the beam. Teller wakes when the heat and light activate her eyes sleeping beneath their blanket of skin. A new day begins.

Jane Teller rises. As Teller rises from bed, she wraps the bed blanket around her body in the customary fashion, cinching it at the waist, and jogs to the wash room. Kneeling on both knees, she dips her head into the small stream of water running in the floor, massaging and washing her face and hair. Sitting on her bottom, she immerses feet and hands, massaging and washing in the clean, running water.

Breaking fast with a bit of dried bread taken from a bin in the store room, she rubs her teeth and gums with fresh leaves picked from a plant growing in the floor near the stream in the gathering room. She completes her morning ritual with a drink from the floor stream and exits the clan dwelling through a rectangular hole in the wall.

Outside the dwelling, the people of the village are gathering in the commons to begin the daily work in the field. Teller joins the others in their work. After a time, she stands up and asks, “What story shall I tell?” “Tell us why the grass is green,” said one. Said another, “Tell us why the sky is blue.” An old man with young eyes said, without looking up from his work, “Tell us why you tell stories.”

Jane opened her mouth to speak immediately in response but she caught her first word before it passed her lips. She closed her mouth and stared at the question-giver who did not look up but continued harvesting. She almost smiled and then spoke. “The world was not always as it is today. The earth mother slept for long ages and she did not speak. Man slept alone on the earth mother’s breast and he did not speak. Man sucked at the earth mother’s tit and he bit into her flesh and still the earth mother slept. While man waxed larger and stronger, the earth mother waned smaller and weaker. Ages passed and the earth mother’s milk began to run dry. Man sucked harder and bit deeper into her flesh. Man sucked so hard that one day man sucked a word from the earth mother, and the word became part of man’s flesh.”

“Man stopped sucking. He awoke. He spoke the word he had sucked from earth mother, and earth mother awoke. Earth mother spoke. Six words earth mother spoke and each word became a child of man, and so begat the six clans of man. The children of man sat on the ground and watched the sun rise and set. At night, they lay on the ground and gazed at the moon and the stars.”

“The sun rose. The children of man felt thirst and one child of man knelt down, kissed the ground and spoke a word into it. Water sprang forth from that place in the ground. The children of man drank the water and quenched their thirst. That child was the ancestor of the Water clan. The sun set.”

“The sun rose. The children of man felt hunger and one child of man knelt down, kissed the ground and spoke a word into it. From that spot a tree grew and the tree put forth fruit. The children of man ate the fruit and satisfied their hunger. That child was the ancestor of the Gardener clan. The sun set. That night, water fell from the sky and watered the tree of life.”

“The sun rose. The children of man quenched their thirst and satisfied their hunger, but the children of man felt restless. The children of man had no rest. There was a stirring in their breasts because there was no work for them to do. One child of man spoke into the ground, took earth from that place and pressed it into pots for the children of man to carry fruit and water. That child was the ancestor of the Potter clan. One child of man spoke into the tree of life, gathered fibers from the tree and wove these with his fingers into cloth to make garments for the children of man. That child was the ancestor of the Weaver clan. One child of man spoke into the air, touched the hurts and strains of the children of man and by touching, healed them. That child was the ancestor of the Healer clan. The sun set. The children of man felt tired from their labors, their restlessness stilled, and that night, they slept their first sleep and their bodies rested.”

The sun rose. The children of man drank water to quench their thirst, ate fruit to satisfy their hunger, and labored under the sun to still their restlessness. They grew tired, the sun set, and they slept, but they did not dream. They awoke with their bodies rested, but their minds did not find rest.”

“The sun rose. One child of man told a tale while they labored under the sun. The tale was a story about the first days of the world. That child was the ancestor of the Teller clan. The sun set. That night, the children of man dreamed in their sleep, and they woke with their minds rested.”

“I am of the Teller clan. Earth mother gave our clan the gift of story-telling. I keep all the old stories and I make all the new stories. I tell stories for the children of man.”

When Jane finished the tale she looked at the old man who had asked for it. He continued working as though he was unaware the tale had been told. That was as it should be.


Who said, “That was as it should be?” I am Jane Teller. I find it difficult to be two persons at once. I am both the writer and the reader. I am both the narrator and the protagonist. Am I the protagonist? Is there an agon within this story? If so, who or what is the antagonist? Who said, “That was as it should be?” Was it the Jane Teller acting in the story or the Jane Teller telling the story? I knew then that the old man’s behavior was normal, so I could have thought then the thought that he was acting as he should act. But now, as the teller of this story, I know that there is or at least there may be an irony in the “should.” Is the “should” good or bad? Is that the question? To be or not to be? To be born or to be made? Is that the question? The Jane Teller acting in the story would not have heard the reverberation between the phrases, “is that the question” and “that is the question,” but I heard it. What is IT? The reader seizes the word as a way out of this paralysis—a way out because it holds both position and momentum in suspension. Is IT a willing suspension of belief? A Heisenberg certainty? Paralysis by analysis. Death by analysis. Irony. IT is the structure of irony. But is IT the soul? Is IT a sign? Well, of course IT is a sign, but is it a SIGN? Sign, sign, everywhere a sign. Can’t you read the sign? Can’t you read? Is IT an exit sign? What is IT?

Jane Teller did not discover irony in the cave. Irony was her birth right. Born of the Teller clan, she hears all tales as stories about stories. There is irony there. Do the other villagers hear the same? Yes, but they do not tell stories.

That was as it should be. I changed the tale. Even though the old man did nothing other than he should have done, I changed the tale. I changed the tale because of the way he looked at me. When I told the tale about why Tellers tell tales, I changed the tale. Why did I change the tale?


“Why did you change the story?” asked the old man with young eyes. He paused his work and looked at me. Some of the others paused and looked at me.

“What did I change?”

A young woman behind the Teller answered, “You left out the beginning and you said the world was not always as it is today.”

“You have listened well. I can not answer you now. We will talk about it tonight during the village meal. Perhaps we will learn why.”

John, the Teller’s husband, who was one of the workers who had paused working to look at the Teller, went back to his work and said, “Then you must tell us another story while we labor.” So, I did. I began as I should, “The earth mother told me this tale is true.”

“The children of man quenched their thirst by drinking the water that sprang from the ground. They satisfied their hunger by eating the fruit that grew from the tree of life. They labored and rested, exercising the gifts born to each clan from earth mother and man. They slept and dreamt, telling and hearing the stories born from earth mother and man. The children of man were full and satisfied. They listened to the stories told by Teller about the days when they felt empty and hungry and thirsty, longing to be full, satisfied and quenched. The sun set. They slept. The children of man dreamt of being empty and hungry and thirsty and they remembered their strong desire to be full and satisfied and quenched.”

“The sun rose. The children of man made water and fruit that morning when they rose from sleep so that they could feel empty and hungry and thirsty, and they were pleased with themselves. The children of man felt pride for the first time. They had become, as earth mother, makers of water and fruit, and considered their water and fruit to be gifts to earth mother. But soon thereafter the children of man were not pleased with this water and fruit that issued from them. The children of man felt fear for the first time. They became afraid that earth mother would not be pleased with them. She would know that this water and fruit did not issue from her. She had given the children of man water and fruit to quench their thirst and satisfy their hunger, and the children of man had accepted these gifts from earth mother and had consumed them entirely, but, after their dream of desire, they tried to return these gifts. They were afraid that earth mother would not be pleased because, in returning water and fruit to her, they had rejected her gifts. They were afraid that earth mother would not be pleased because they were her children and the gifts they had made were inferior. The children of man felt shame for the first time. Their water and fruit were poor imitations of the water and fruit that issued from earth mother. They were ashamed because they had felt pride in their poor attempt to be makers, and they felt shame because their water and fruit had stained and blemished the perfect ground earth mother had made for them. The children of man felt envy for the first time. They envied earth mother’s power to make perfect gifts. The sun set. The children of man were restless in their sleep and their dreams were disturbed.”

“The sun rose. When they awoke, the children of man made water and fruit, but they knew the water was piss and the fruit was dirt. So the children of man hid their piss and dirt in the ground. Earth mother smiled. She accepted the piss and dirt that issued from the children of man and purified it. She held it and treasured it as a mother holds and treasures the gifts made by her children, though feeble. And she waited. The sun set. The children of man rested in their sleep, but their dreams were not as they had been.”

John Teller stood, stretched his arms wide as though he were embracing all the villagers working in the field, and said before anyone else had a chance to speak, “The moral of the story is that the Teller clan is responsible for the fall of man.” At least he smiled when he said it.

John understood his role, and the other adults waited for the children to speak. Mother Weaver carefully arranged the leaves she had just picked on top of the wheat stalks already in her basket, and then she spoke just as carefully. “The stories told by the Teller that led to the fall were stories about the children of man before the fall. There could have been no other kind of stories. Story telling was one of the original gifts of mother earth. Without stories, our sleep would have no dreams. Without dreams, our minds would find no rest. Since there must be story telling and since the original stories must have been stories about the children of man before the fall, it must be that the original act of thirst being quenched and hunger being satisfied led to the fall.”

Father Potter shook his head while continuing to cull large leaves on a plant prized for its young, tender leaves. “The original condition of thirst being quenched and hunger being satisfied is the original state of bliss from which man fell. There must be an original state of bliss, a desire perfectly consummated, or there can be no fall.” He tore each culled leaf into pieces and returned them to the soil.

Grandfather Gardener stood and surveyed the field of plants near him. “The fall is inevitable. If the effect is inevitable, it makes little sense to analyze the cause.” There was silence for a time. Then little Jill Teller said in a small voice: “There is no story in a bliss that has no before and after.” Jack Teller interrupted, “Beauty is bliss. Harmony is bliss. Story has beauty. Story has harmony. How can there be no bliss in story?” Jill answered, “There is no beauty in bliss. There is beauty only in the dream of bliss.” She had the last word that morning. It was nearing mid-day, and the villagers had gathered the day’s harvest. The sun was bright and warm.

See the day. Sweat glistens from their bare skin. Their skin cools as the sweat evaporates. Bodies invigorated by the morning’s labor, they stretch and flex backs and limbs while gazing at the common surrounding them. They feel comforted seeing a blanket woven of greens and browns and blues, with smears of gold and splashes of yellow. Standing in the common at the end of the harvest, they know that the food necessary to sustain them is held in baskets that they brought empty that morning to the field. The laborers collect their baskets and begin to leave the common.


To see this day as I see it, the reader who is not me must understand that my people do not quit their labor all at once as though some silent bell rang marking the time. Each listens to a melody within and labors in harmony with it. There is choreography to their movements but the dance is not a march. I have not written of the music we hear within and the songs we sing, because they are songs without words, and they can not be described. When we are alone we often sing out loud to ourselves and to mother earth. When we are gathered to work in the fields or share bread at the village meal, our individual songs drift together in a chorus of two voices here, three voices there, and then drift apart only to join with other voices a moment later in a new chorus. At moments, now and then, according to a rhythm understood only by mother earth, all of the individual voices join together and become the song of our people. When we sing, we are one. When we speak words, we are alone.


Later that day, the Teller clan prepares to bake clan bread for the village meal.

John: “Are you composing a new tale for the village tonight?”

Jane: “I do not yet know. It will come to me.”

John: “It always does, but if you have something already in mind, the clan would like to prepare a story-bread this afternoon. You have been out of tune lately, and we thought it would help.” John smiled to show that he was teasing. It was a reflex developed as a child in the Water clan. The Teller appreciated the smile but did not need it to provide context for her husband’s attempt at humor.

Jane: “Remember the last time we tried that? Grandfather Gardener stood up as soon as I finished the story, waved a loaf of our bread at me, and said, ‘The only thing flatter than that tale is this bread.’ My story that night was told for humor and he got the last laugh.”

John: “No. He got the only laugh.” John offered Jane an affectionately condescending smile. “Mother Teller, there is nothing wrong with that. It was a perfect evening. The story-bread was in perfect harmony with the story. They were both stale. And the village was perfectly educated and entertained—thanks to Gardener.”

Jane: “You are always such a help.”

John: “That is why I am here.”

Jane: “Gather the children. They should be finished washing after the morning harvest. We will start the bread.”

Jane, John and the children (Jack and Jill) gather in the kitchen. The four stand around a stone table. Little Jill speaks: “Mother, Jack and I told father we would like to make a story-bread today. What kind of story will you tell after the village meal?” Jane seldom knew what story she was going to tell at the village meal until the moment before she began telling it. So, it was no surprise when she said, “Let us start making the dough and perhaps something will come to me while we work.”

Story bread is a special clan bread made by the Teller clan that is supposed to correspond in some way to the story told following the meal at which the story bread is served. Jane Teller had the reputation of being the most gifted story teller in many generations of Tellers, but her clan bread was unanimously regarded as the village’s worst. It was so bad that it was seldom eaten fresh-baked and was usually saved to make dried bread for breakfast.

John went to the store room and got a large basket filled with grain. Jane began collecting a number of stone jars filled with aromatics. Jack and Jill fetched a pail of water. John poured an equal amount of grain into each of three large stone mortars. He poured a smaller amount into a fourth and placed it on the floor in front of Jill. Jill was still too young to stand during the flour making. The mortars were made by the Potter clan. Each mortar had a unique stone pestle. John hummed a tune and they all began grinding flour. As Jane pressed her pestle into the grain with exaggerated force, she said, “I imagine I am grinding one of Grandfather Gardener’s old jokes with Father Potter’s know-it-all clichés.” It was part of the ritual of bread-making in the Teller clan to anthropomorphize each clan’s contribution to the process. John and Jack laughed and mimicked Jane’s overly dramatic grind. Jill stuck out her lower lip and pouted: “You all are so cruel.” The other three looked at Jill to see if she was suppressing a smile. Jill was six years old and she often seemed unusually empathetic, but she was also already a sophisticated poser. By virtue of being born in the Teller clan, Jill possessed an extraordinary facility with language, a memory so vast that it literally preserved thousands of generations of story, and the Teller clan’s special gift of being able to find the true story; but Jill was special even for a Teller. Jane was beginning to be concerned that Jill’s gifts were so extraordinary that she might prove to be unsuitable to become the Teller. There was a tale (never told outside the Teller clan) of such a thing occurring once many thousands of generations ago. The Teller at that time told a tale that was not true in order to prevent the child with the extraordinary gifts from becoming the next Teller. That child never married into another clan and eventually disappeared from the village. The tale that was never told had remained buzzing in Jane Teller’s brain since the birth of her daughter.

Jane: “Jill. What kind of story do you think I should tell to the village tonight?” Her daughter continued grinding her pestle into the grain. Her son looked impatiently at his sister for half a second, cleared his throat in dramatic fashion, and urged a word, “Jill…”

Jill: “I am still thinking.”

Jane: “Is your thinking continuous or stagnant?”

Jill: “Both and neither—it is constant.”

John interrupted because he felt that the Teller clan was headed for another late start bread-making if he did not stop the Teller from turning this conversation into another lesson on ‘thinking like a Teller’: “Since mother can not decide what story to tell, perhaps we should decide what kind of bread we will bake, then find a story for the bread.”

Jack: “We could add powder from the milk fruit of the tree of life to the water we use to make the dough.”

Jane: “I would have to tell one of the old tales.”

Jill: “Why?”

Jane: “Any time we use ingredients from the tree of life to make story bread, the story will be an old tale.”

Jill: “When we use starter paste made of bread fruit from the tree of life so that the bread will rise, you do not always tell old tales.”

Jane: “Any time we use ingredients from the tree of life, except for bread fruit, to make story bread, the story will be an old tale.”

John (changing the subject): “Does the Teller clan ever mix milk powder into the dry flour before adding the water instead of mixing it directly into the water? The Water clan does.”

Jack: “What difference does it make in the bread?”

John: “It makes a difference in the bread-making.” John’s statement seemed to bring the conversation to a close. Jack and Jill began singing a dough-mixing tune. The Teller clan combined all of the flour the four had made into one large stone basin built into a stone table. John fetched a stone jar from the store room. The jar held a paste made from the bread fruit picked from the tree of life. This paste was added to any bread that was supposed to rise during the bread-making. Not all clan breads were made to rise. Some clans made flat bread. Others made solid cake bread. Jane mixed water with a white powder dried from the milk fruit picked from the tree of life. Jane and John added their ingredients to the dry flour at the same time and the children began mixing the dough with their hands. When the dough was thoroughly mixed, John pulled it from the mixing basin and plopped it on a large stone platter. He carried the platter to the store room and placed it on the warming shelf. This stone shelf was indirectly warmed by the sun but was not warm enough to start baking the bread.

Jill: “Mother. Why did you change the way you told the story today in the fields?”

Jane: “I thought it was something about the way Grandfather Gardener asked me why I tell stories, but now I do not know.”

That evening, the six clans began gathering at the village meeting place. Six stone tables are arranged in an approximate circle around one large stone table. Each clan makes a presentation of its own clan bread on one of the six small stone tables. Although the villagers speak and sing together while the presentation of the bread is being completed, the members of each clan tend to stay close to the presentation table until all of the clans are ready. No speaker announces that it is time to begin, but the six individual clan dances around the presentation tables become a single village dance in and around the entire area defined by the six small tables and the one large table. All of the villagers circulate and mingle throughout this area while they see and smell and taste and feel and hear the presentation of the clan bread.

The presentation of clan bread was “heard” through the speaking and singing of the particular clan as they assembled the presentation. The presentation of the clan bread was “heard” through the speaking and singing of the entire village as it responded to the presentation of the clan bread.

The people of the village understood that the presentation of the clan bread was performed by the village—not by the individual clan that baked the bread and arranged it on the table. Ordinarily, the presentations and re-presentations of all clan breads occurred simultaneously throughout that part of the evening prior to the village meal as the villagers moved singly and in constantly changing groups of people from one of the six small tables to another. There was no set pattern of movement. There was no rule or tradition that required each villager to see and smell and taste and feel and hear the presentation of each clan bread every evening. Most evenings most people made it to most of the presentation tables. Some evenings evolved into something like a formal procession from one table to the next and the entire village moved as one. On rare occasions, no one moved away from their own clan table until it was time for the meal, and each clan ate only its own bread that night.

It quickly became apparent that the center of the village’s attention that night was the presentation by the Gardener clan. The entire village soon congregated around the Gardener presentation table. In the center of the small table, there was one large bread in the shape, color and texture of the village meal table. There were six smaller breads arranged around the large bread, but these breads were not shaped like the smaller presentation tables. Each of the six was shaped like a clan dwelling. Each was made of a different color, texture and smell such that, to anyone in the village, it was obvious which bread “dwelling” belonged to which clan. The Gardener clan had arranged the traditional tasting sticks into the shape of a single tree with no leaves. There were six varieties of tasting sticks matching the six bread dwellings. Though all six varieties were used in forming the one tree, each variety recognizably retained its distinctive color and texture. The trunk of the tree was formed of six individual bread ropes woven into one large trunk. These six ropes branched from the one trunk, then branched again, joining with other bread ropes to form six main branches, never emerging as a single branch until becoming the outermost branches of the tree.

Tasting sticks were portions of bread that might be any shape but were always sized to be eaten in a single bite. They were called “sticks” because they were most often presented as a twig from the tree of life—in the size and shape of a thumb. The tasting sticks were placed on the presentation table as part of the presentation but with the understanding that they were to be taken as tasting samples by the villagers. The main part of the presentation was not disturbed until everyone began selecting the breads they intended to consume during the meal.

The bread tree formed of individual tasting sticks was placed outside the circle of bread dwellings at the top of the presentation table. The “top” of the presentation table was that part of the table on the outside of the circle, opposite the village meal table in the village hall. Also at the top of the table, there was what appeared to be a large stone pitcher filled with the drink prepared by the Gardener clan for the evening meal. The pitcher was made of bread but it was so convincingly imitative that the other villagers did not realize it was bread until Grandfather Gardener, as a cue to the others, began breaking off pieces of it and eating them.

Villagers began picking limbs from this bread tree so as to sample the bread being displayed. Though no word was spoken regarding the matter, everyone pulled their sample limb apart so as to separate the six individual tasting sticks before tasting. It required some labor and care to do so. There was, apparently, no way to sample the large bread that resembled the top of the village table. None of the tasting sticks forming the tasting tree matched the bread table in any easily discernable manner. The villagers understood that the absence of tasting sticks from the large bread was intended to be part of the presentation. Tradition required that the villagers be able to sample so they can select the bread they want to eat. As most of the village congregated near the Gardener presentation table and as they continued nibbling the tasting sticks pulled from the bread tree, the conversation focused on the bread “table.” No one asked the Gardener clan why there were no tasting sticks to sample the bread table, but there were plenty of complaints regarding the lack. The villagers enjoyed the art of communal complaining and the Gardener had incorporated that art into the presentation. Some were amused by this part of the Gardener presentation; others were annoyed. The Teller’s curiosity was aroused and her mind was already turning the lack of samples into a story. In the midst of this ruckus, little Jill Teller reached up to the bread table and pulled a piece off one corner, sniffed it and then popped it into her mouth. The village grew instantly quiet. Grandfather Gardener looked at Jill Teller and smiled. A moment later, all the other villagers began pulling pieces of the bread table off the edges. Teller wondered how she would narrate the significance of this part of the presentation. Had Gardener created dramatic tension by forcing the audience to examine their expectation that every presentation bread should have a corresponding tasting stick by not providing any or had Gardener in fact provided tasting sticks and created dramatic tension by hiding them in the presentation bread? Was little Jill’s action contrary to the original artist’s intent (though expected) or was it in concert with that original intent (though unexpected)? Teller realized that it would do no good to ask either Gardener or Jill. Gardener enjoyed being enigmatic and Jill would offer two new interpretations Jane had not yet considered.

For the most part, the village believed that the Gardener presentation bread was unlike any they had tasted before. It was and it was not. The presentation was part of the taste and the taste was part of the presentation. As a signal to the others that it was time to move on to another presentation, Father Potter asked, “Has anyone tasted the Teller’s story bread?” Grandfather Gardener said, “Let us save the best for last.” Everyone laughed and moved on to the next clan presentation table.

The Healer clan bread was presented at the next table. There were six rectangular bricks of bread arranged in no discernible pattern. All six were nearly identical in shape, color, texture and smell. Whole leaves from a variety of herbs had been baked into the crust of each brick. The leaves were not on top of the crust but part of it while retaining the leaf’s separate color and texture. It was as though the crust was formed of pictures of herbs in a symmetrical arrangement connecting each leaf with each surrounding leaf so that the entire leaf was visible and the “spaces” between each leaf formed the picture of another leaf.

The Potter clan bread was presented at the next table. There was one large bread on the table. From outward appearances, it was simple, basic clan bread—the starting point from which all presentation bread was made. The Potter clan themselves betrayed no hint that there was more to the presentation. It was the way the Potter clan communicated this simplicity that made the villagers anticipate the unexpected. The simplicity of both bread and clan was intentional and therefore, ironic. The tasting sticks were perfectly ordinary. The first sampling was performed with small nibbles, searching for meaning hidden only in taste—and they discovered it, though no one could describe precisely what it was. The bread tasted simple… but there was something more.

The Water clan presented a bread that looked like the common field from a viewpoint that none of the village could have ever enjoyed—high in the air, straight overhead. The wonder of the presentation was that everyone recognized a picture they had never seen with eye sight. Then, the focus became technical. The bread’s appearance was an abstraction with splashes, smears, spots and spurts of color, texture and dimension. Every skill and trick shared by the clans (and some that were not shared) in giving form, texture and color to the bread seemed to have been employed in creating this field that could only have been seen in their dreams. Even the tasting sticks were a collection and assortment of this cornucopia. The villagers could recognize each plant by taste emanating from the part of the bread that represented the plant in the abstract.

The Weaver bread was an edible cloth in all but taste. The bread even smelled like a clean blanket. They had somehow managed to preserve the taste of traditional clan bread despite the difference in smell, appearance and texture.

Soon, the village finished the process of choosing the breads and drinks they would consume at the village meal, and brought them to the village table. There was no formal beginning of the meal. Eating and drinking began during the presentations and continued through the meal. Meals were eaten while standing and walking. There were no chairs. There were no assigned, traditional or even routine places people stood. Food and drink were placed on the main table and the villager who placed it there ate there, but villagers did not stay put during the meal. If the music of the conversation moved them, they moved to a different place around the table next to someone else. The meal was considered concluded only when the villagers began asking the Teller for a tale.

That night, after the village meal, the Teller waited for the villagers to help her choose a tale. Teller did not do so because she had difficulty choosing a tale. The fact is that Tellers regarded these discussions as part of the telling of the tale. Grandfather Gardener looked at the Teller and smiled: “Since no one ate enough story bread to understand and appreciate it fully, we are all wondering which tale the Teller will sing this evening. Something with humor would satisfy my current mood.”

“Your current mood? Do you not mean your constant mood? How old are you, Grandfather? Your bones will be returning to earth mother soon and you have never really grown up. You never want to listen to anything but children’s stories.” Mother Water seldom let an opportunity pass to tease Grandfather Gardener, but what she said was true. Mother Water paused for a second and then said to the gathered, “We heard two of the old tales this morning. It would be appropriate to continue with another.”

“We also left a question unresolved from Teller’s first tale this morning,” said Daughter Potter, the young woman who identified the changes in the tale. “That is correct,” Jill quickly observed.


Normally, at this point I would have moderated the discussion so that the entire village participated. These conversations lead me and are led by me to the tale in such a way that neither I nor the villagers are conscious of leading or being led. It is difficult to describe but it is the way it is. I was not feeling particularly harmonious that night. I did not want to get into a conversation about why I had changed the telling of the tale that morning, and I was not comfortable that the conversation was going to lead to any tale I wanted to tell. Do not misunderstand me. I tell tales I do not want to tell on a regular basis. Doing so is simply part of being the Teller. But my mind was too full of the unspoken story that night and I knew that I needed to sing something traditional so that I would not have to think. Just let the song sing itself. So, I told the tale of the first plants, and I jumped into it before anyone else had a chance to speak. Sometimes, it is good to be the Teller. Once I start singing, everyone falls silent. The fact that I used my authority as Teller to cut short the conversation and village participation in the selection of the tale was, naturally, obvious to everyone in the village and, just as naturally, understood to be part of that evening’s story telling. I wondered whether it was and, if it was, what it meant. The villagers had the advantage over the Teller of simply wondering what it meant. Sometimes, it is not good to be the Teller.


“The sun rose. The children of man had water to drink and fruit to eat. The Weaver asked the other children of man what basket she should make that day. The children of man answered that they needed no new baskets. The Potter asked the other children of man what pot he should make that day. The children of man answered that they needed no new pots. The children of man came to the Teller and asked for a tale. The Teller told the same tale she had told the day before. The children of man fell silent and as the sun continued to rise, they stood still and as the sun passed over head, they sat still where they had stood and as the sun began to fall to its resting place, they lay still on the ground where they had sat and stood and still no one spoke and still no one moved and as the sun set, they lay still on the ground and stared into the sky and watched the stars begin to move. As they watched the dance of the stars, they began to hear the music of the stars. They rose from the ground and began to dance and as they danced they looked at the tree of life stretching its limbs into the night sky toward the dancing stars and they heard the music of the tree of life. As they danced they looked at the ground beneath their feet and they saw their shadows from the light of the moon and the stars and they saw their shadows moving in the earth and they danced with their earth shadows and they heard the music of the earth. As they danced they looked at the other children of man dancing in the starlight and the moonlight and they heard the music of the children of man and the woman of the Water clan danced with the man of the Gardener clan and the man of the Potter clan danced with the woman of the Weaver clan and the man of the Healer clan danced with the woman of the Teller clan. The man heard the music of the woman and the woman heard the music of the man and, for the first time, the children of man sang out loud and the man and the woman made music together.”

“The sun rose. Thereafter, the days and the nights were filled with music, and two children were born to each pair of dancers, one male child and one female child. One day, after the children of man picked fruit from the tree of life and they found no more fruit to pick, they understood that there were now more children than fruit. Some of the adult children of man ate no fruit that day and they waited until the next day. The next day, there were more children than fruit. The children of man felt hunger and there was not fruit enough. The sun set. That night, Teller told a tale of the first days when the tree of life first grew from the ground and fed the children of man.”

“The sun rose. Gardener did as he had done before. He kissed the ground and spoke a word into it. No tree of life grew from the spot. He moved to another spot of ground and did the same. No tree of life grew. He tried again and again. No tree grew from the ground. The sun set and their hunger grew. That night, Teller told the tale of the days when the children of man first made their own water and fruit and how they grew afraid and ashamed and some of the children of man cried out, ‘Now, see, we are punished for our pride. We could not make water and fruit in the likeness of the water and fruit made by earth mother. Now, we have made children in the image of the children of man made by earth mother and man. We have angered our father and mother. They will not feed our children from the tree of life. We must hide our children.’ Then, the children of man wept for the first time, and they said, ‘If we hide our children in the ground, they will be no more. Our children will die.’ Then, one said, ‘No. Our children will not die. It is we who have angered the father and mother. We will feed all the fruit to our new born children. If we die from hunger, then we die. Let the punishment fall where it belongs.’ Then, one said, ‘Our sin is our children’s sin. Our children make piss and dirt. They will hide it in the ground. After we die, they will one day hear the music and make new children. Teller, is there no more to this tale?’ Then the children of man fell silent and waited for the dawn.

“The sun rose. The children of man looked out on the dawn and saw a new thing. On the ground where Gardener had prayed for a tree of life to grow, there was moist, black dirt, and in that earth new plants were beginning to stretch themselves toward the sun’s light. The children of man understood that this moist dirt was their own water and fruit they had hid in the ground, now purified and returned to them by earth mother. From the tree of life, the seed in the fruit they had made was now grown into plants of many kinds. There were flowers and grains, hard stalks and soft fibers, roots and vegetables, and scented leaves. There was food in the garden to feed all the children of men and labor there to fill all their days with purpose. They heard the music of the garden and they wept for the second time.”


The unspoken story was humming so loudly in my ears that I almost lost control of my story telling voice. I wondered whether anyone heard the strain. Grandfather Gardener spoke first: “Is there any of that story bread left?” I smiled and the village laughed.

Last edited by dhspgt on Mon 23 Apr , 2007 12:05 am, edited 16 times in total.

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Jnyusa
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Posted: Mon 11 Jul , 2005 5:07 am
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hesitates to intrude on thread but wants to let thread starter know it is being read ... waits patiently for Chapter 3

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Faramond
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A road can be organically created, that is enchanted out of the earth as a part of an ecosystem, and yet not be living. There is something very much like this in The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman.

I didn't read the spoiler because I hate spoilers. But maybe I should ... maybe it's an essential part of this thread.

*waves to Jn*

You know, if you really wanted to let the thread starter know it was being read without intruding you could have sent a PM. Just sayin' ;-)

And it's a thread! It's made for intrusions!

The small village sound nice, but it also sounds like a very boring place to live.


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Jnyusa
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Perhaps the villagers will begin treading on one another's crops? Then it won't be a boring place to live. :)

Jn

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Chapter the Second: The Day

The next day, the Healer couple brought their two babies to the Water Home on their way to labor in common. The Healer children were born a year apart, and they were both under four years old. Village children did not labor until they reached five or six years of age. Some were precocious. Some developed more slowly. No certain age was established by ritual or announced by the elders. The child knew when he or she was ready to join the others in their common labor, and then the child joined.

The rhythm of each clan in bearing children was similar. Two children were born in each clan, one male and one female, usually a year apart. The children of the Water clan and Healer clan were the only ones in the village too young to work in the field. The adults of the Water clan cared for the babies of the village while the other villagers worked. The Water clan’s babies were less than three years old. Village children of the same generation were often born in groups of four and eight or six and six, and these children often mated within their birth group. Mating pairs were not arranged by elders, but elders did not refrain from having opinions regarding such matters. Those opinions did not hold more power than the music the mating pair began hearing when they reached bonding age, usually when they were about fifty years old, but that fact did not stop elders from voicing their opinions.

Women of the village were usually not able to bear children until they reached the bonding age. Men of the village were not able to sire children until the same age. Men and women did not become sexually active until they bonded. Though men and women remained sexually active from the time they bonded until death, women did not bear more than two children except in extraordinary circumstances. Mated pairs were bonded for life.

That day in the field, Father Gardener was instructing the young generation in the art of culling leaves from a plant whose main stalk could be trained from the proper culling of its leaves to grow perfectly straight to a height of four feet with no diminution in a six inch circumference from its base to its top. This particular plant was the only one of its kind and had been tended for generations. Once it reached a full four feet in height, the stalk would be harvested and preserved in the store room at the village meeting place. It required two full generations of man, tending and culling, in order to prepare one stalk for harvest. The plant would produce a new stalk only when the existing stalk was harvested. There were now sixteen of these stalks. When there are twenty-four such stalks, the Potter clan will make six four-legged tables. The table top will be formed of various plant fibers woven, matted and formed into straight planks and then overlain crossways above and below until the top is as strong and flat as the stone table tops grown from the ground. The villagers do not know how to produce these table tops. The Teller will tell them how to do it when there are twenty-four stalks.

As Father Gardener pinched a small leaf near the base of the stalk, Mother Water ran from the Water dwelling toward the common, shouting as she ran, “Healer. You are needed.” The Healer said to her husband, “Come with me.” They both walked quickly toward Water Home, talking quietly to each other as they walked. When they reached the entrance to the dwelling, they saw Mother Water kneeling with the Healer’s one-year old daughter in her lap. Mother Water was crying. “She fell from my arms as I was carrying her and she struck her head on the ground before I could catch her. She has not cried or opened her eyes. The Healer knelt by her child and reached out her hand toward her daughter but she did not touch her. The Healer closed her eyes and moved her hand slowly back and forth over her daughter’s forehead. She spoke quietly to her husband who had knelt beside her and was now holding the Healer’s other hand. “Her head is cracked. The fracture will heal, but her brain is bleeding causing too much pressure for her to heal on her own. She needs my help or she will never wake.” By this time, the other villagers were at the Water clan dwelling and they all heard the Healer’s diagnosis. Daughter Gardener took her grandfather’s hand and asked, “Will she die?” John Teller motioned to Father Potter and Mother Weaver. “Let us take the little ones and gather the village at the common place and give the Healer some privacy. She will tell us if she needs us.”

The Healer took her child from Mother Water and stretched her baby’s body out flat on the ground in the Water Home, straightening her little arms and legs. She cupped both of her hands lightly around her daughter’s head. Her hands began to turn bright white until they almost glowed. She spoke to her husband, “I know I can stop the bleeding but I cannot feel how to reduce the pressure in her brain.” Her husband placed his hands on the Healer’s waist and tightened his grip. After a moment the Healer spoke, “The little vessels that carry blood in her brain are returning to normal. There is still too much fluid inside her head.” The Healer began massaging her daughter’s head as though she were pushing the fluid inside her brain down passed her ears draining it into her neck. She continued, rhythmically making the same motion, minute after minute, hour after hour. She spoke once, telling her husband, “I must borrow your strength now, my husband. Mine is almost spent. Do not let go of me.”

While the Healer labored to heal her daughter, the Teller answered questions from the villagers. They had all heard the stories, but they wanted to hear them again. They wanted to know that their questions had been answered in the history of the village.

“If one of the younger generation should die before mating, how do all the clans continue?”

“If the one who is to be paired with me should die, who will be my mate?”

Village history, as told by the Teller, recorded extraordinary events such as the birth of one child to a clan years after the death of a child or one member of a clan mating with members of two other clans. The discussion began with questions of death and birth but it turned to questions of clan continuity.

Two children are born in each clan every generation. One child is gifted by the earth mother to become the head of the clan for that generation. That child remains in the clan and mates with someone from another clan. The other child of that clan then leaves the clan and mates with the head of another clan. There is no ritual of selection. The elders do not determine which child will be the next head of the clan. The head of the clan may be male or female. The head of the clan may be the first born or the second born. The children of the clan listen to the music of the clan and, in time, both children know who is to be the next head of the clan and who will marry into another clan. What if the child gifted to be the head of the clan dies? Does the other child become the head of the clan even though not gifted to be the head of the clan? Do the clan gifts disappear? What becomes of the clan? What would be happening right now if the Healer had died before her daughter fell? Who would be Healer? The Teller spoke: “Earth mother spoke six words and thus were born the six clans. Each word was spoken into the world and made flesh; once the word becomes flesh, it cannot be lost.”

The husband of the Healer stumbled out of the Water Home toward the village meeting place. John saw him first and ran to meet him. The others quickly followed. When he saw the villagers heading toward him, the husband of the Healer stopped walking and sank exhausted to the ground. He smiled up at John, looked around at the others, smiled again and said, “The baby is well. The Healer is sleeping now. Wake us for the evening meal.” With the words spoken, he swooned. Some of the mated pairs embraced. John looked at his wife the way he does when he wants to say more than words can say, then he picked up the husband of the Healer as a father picks up a child, and he carried him all the way to the Healer Home.

If there were no reader other than me, I would write about John’s strength, but the reader other than me might not see clearly. In our village, all are strong. Earth mother made us strong. Since we are all strong, we do not see our strength. If I write about John’s strength, the reader other than me would see John as a strong man among others who were less strong. When I see John strong, I hear a melody rising in volume above the rest. His strength was not greater; he used it greater. He led. John Teller was born of the Water clan. He was the leader. The village did not have a leader. There was no ritual to make one the leader. John led. He led before we were mated. He led before the elders began to grow tired. There is something else. Before I saw him lead us and before we heard the music that joined us, I knew that we would be paired. I do not know how or why I knew. As Teller, I knew that, through the history of the village, the head of the Teller clan married from the Water clan more often than from other clans. I did not tell John. The history of the village will pass on to the next Teller but it would be a burden to the others. But I do not believe that history told me we would be joined. At least, it was not history as it was given to me in memory. It was part of the unspoken story, the tale of things that were, that are and that will be.

There is too much story left to tell, and I miss John. Perhaps this story should remain untold. Villagers mate for life. In the entire history of the village, there has never been a separation of a mated pair other than by death. All I have left is this story. If I stop telling this story and tell John’s story, I save John, but I run out of time.


The villagers returned to their common labor. They heard the music of the morning and listened for the Teller’s tale, but the Teller sang no song and told no tale.


I should have told a tale as we labored in the common that morning. John did his job. I should have done mine. I tried twice, but all I heard in my head was the unspoken story. The earth mother gave the Teller the gift to find story. The earth mother gave the Teller the gift to find story. I hold in my mind too many stories to tell in one lifetime. I hold in my mind the history of our world. The Teller mind searches for story awake, asleep and adream.


It was common each evening, after the common meal, for the villagers to wander and mingle, talking and singing, moving in and out of each other’s clan dwelling, as evening speech and evening music became night speech and night music. There was no set time for bed time. Sometimes an evening conversation continued strong deep into the night. Most of the village would be gathered in one clan dwelling. If the conversation needed some illumination, a villager pressed the palms of both hands against a wall of the dwelling, and the wall would reflect some of the day’s illumination. That night they talked about the Healer child who fell. They talked about mortality. They talked about the Teller (who was not present, having retired early with her husband, though Jack and Jill remained with the other villagers). The Teller told no tale during the morning labor. The Teller did not speak during the evening meal and went home before anyone asked for a story. Mother Healer asked Jill whether Mother Teller was feeling well. The question was well attended by the villagers for two reasons: first, they were worried about the Teller and second, Jill had a reputation for providing out-of-the ordinary answers to ordinary questions. Jill answered, “The Teller is herself, only more so. Tell me, Mother Healer, if your daughter had died, where would she be tonight?” Mother Healer replied tenderly, mistaking Jill’s intent, “She would be buried deep in the ground near the roots of the tree of life.” Jill asked no one in particular, “When the hole is dug deep to bury one of the village do we ever find those who were buried long ago?” Grandfather Gardener said, “No, child, earth mother takes back the bodies of her children and they become one with the earth.” Jill watched Grandfather Gardener’s face while he spoke and for a time thereafter, then she said to him: “You are old. You have seen many things I have never seen. Have you walked on the bare ground outside the village?” He answered softly, “Someday soon you will watch our people bury me near the tree of life. I have walked as far as a child of man can walk in the time between bread-making and break fast, missing the evening meal and taking no night sleep. To walk further, a man would have to steal labor from his clan.”

“The village had no tale tonight. Tell us what you have seen on the walks far from the village.” Jill had stepped forward while speaking and had taken Grandfather Gardener by the hand. “I am no Teller,” Grandfather Gardener replied; “But even if I were I would have little to tell. The ground outside the village circle is no different than the ground inside. There are no plants, no water, no tree of life, and no children of man. Why do you ask? You are the daughter of the Teller. You have no need to hear stories of the world outside the village from me.”

“Why did you walk outside the village circle?” Jill stared into the darkness beyond the village without looking at Grandfather Gardener as she directed her question at him. Grandfather Gardener hesitated, peered into the same darkness and spoke his answer, “Since I became Grandfather I have dreamed the same dream each night. In my dream I am the ancestor Gardener who spoke the word into the ground from whence came the tree of life. The Gardener clan has Father, Mother, Son and Daughter. The Clan is complete. While the clan makes bread, I often walk outside the circle of the village. I speak the word into the hole in the ground and I wait for a new tree of life.”

Daughter Teller looked now for the first time directly at Grandfather Gardener and spoke these words deliberately: “You are not the first.”


As I listened to these words from my daughter, I suddenly heard it. I knew the plot of the unspoken story. I realized that the story I could not see or hear behind the stories I could see and hear was the story of the birth of earth mother. When I began making the story of the earth mother’s birth, I understood the significance of the fact that man was not the child of earth mother. Man sucked at earth mother’s tit to sustain himself, but man was not her child. Man was not her mate. Man and earth mother were joined in some way, but they were not mated as we were. We are the children of man, not the children of earth mother and man. The words earth mother spoke made the six clans but the words did not make us. I could not yet see how the words could make the six clans but not give birth to the children of man, but I now knew that I should look for the story of how the words made the six clans, and if I looked for the story, I knew that I would find it. That is the Teller’s gift.

That is the Teller’s curse. As I searched for the story of earth mother’s birth, I disappeared from the story of the day. I trust earth mother that life went on.


Chapter the Third: The Cave


What was the word man sucked from earth mother? I did not know, but for now it did not matter. What mattered was that the word was the first word earth mother spoke. If that word was the first word, then before the first word, earth mother could not speak. She could not speak for age upon age while man sucked nourishment from her. That was her role in the story of man before the first word. She was man’s nourishment. She was the same as the tree of life in the story of the children of man. The reason I had not been able to find the story of the birth of earth mother was because she had not been born. The tree of life can not speak. How did earth mother become capable of speech? The man did it—must have been man, because there were no other actors in the story. According to the story, man sucked so hard that he sucked a word from earth mother. Did that mean the word was inside earth mother all along? Perhaps, but there was more. Man was sucking her dry. He was using her up. There was a connection between man’s consumption of earth mother and making her speak the word. What was the word? I do not know. What is a word? What is the act of making a word? The word is spoken from earth mother to man. There was communication. I do not know what the word was, but I do know that there was communication after ages of no communication. The story says that man sucked the word from earth mother. He was the actor. He made her speak. How did he make her speak? I do not know, but for now it is enough to know that man made her speak. Man made earth mother communicate with him while he was consuming her. Just as some crisis was being reached, as he was about to consume her entirely, he made her communicate to him. Under such circumstances, it would be natural to assume that the communication was related to the crisis—some bit of information concerning either earth mother’s condition or man’s condition, or both.

After man made her able to communicate, earth mother then spoke the words that made the children of man into clans. The story continues. Who, then, are the children of man? Man lived before the word was spoken. The only difference is the speaking of the word, the fact of communication between man and earth mother. The children of man are different from man as a result of the existence of communication between man and earth mother. So, we are the children of that communication. How did earth mother make these children of man into clans? I do not know. I do know that creation of the clans followed after the crisis. In story, that which follows the crisis must resolve the crisis. The six clans were created by the communication between earth mother and man as a resolution or solution to the crisis, a crisis that centered on man’s exhaustion of the earth mother who nourished him.

I had now found part of the unspoken story and I wanted the full tale, and I knew where I had to go to find it—the hole in the ground beyond the circle of the village, the hole that held the generations of words spoken into it by my people. It was a cave. I went to the cave. I entered the cave.

I can not tell how much time I spent in the cave. Time is without quantity in the cave. Time in the cave has duration; it has length. So, I can tell the reader that I spent a long time in the cave, but I can not tell how much time, because “much” is a quantity. Please do not ask me to measure the length. That would be clever, but it would not be smart. I lived a life time in the cave, or was it the time of my life? If I had the time of my life in the cave, then I spent a life time in the cave.

I sat on the ground in the middle of the cave and waited.

For a story teller, ignorance is power, and I have lost my ignorance. It has become nearly impossible for me to make a short declarative sentence.

For the reader, knowledge is power.

After a time, it became obvious to me that my mere presence in the cave was not going to lead to any new plot developments but I could not imagine what was supposed to happen next. So, I did the only thing I could do. I told tales in the cave. At the time, it was not my intent to tell tales TO the cave, but that is what I did do. I do not know how many of the old tales I told. The cave must have been listening, because, after some time, some time after, it spoke. I did not understand the language but I knew that the sounds I heard were words. It would make a good story if I could write that I sucked a word from the cave, but I know too much now to tell the story that way.

A spot on the wall of the cave became illuminated. It looked like a window. I watched the window. I do not know how long I watched the window. After a time, I began making stories out of the things I saw moving in the window. It was not easy. A Teller can make story out of anything—that is the Teller’s gift from earth mother. The window did not offer as many recognizable pictures as I would have liked, but I worked with what I knew and tried to find story patterns in what I did not. Most of the pictures in the window were small shapes formed of curved and straight lines. Some were representational drawings and some were pictures of real things as the eye sees them in the world.

I began to find the pattern in some of the nonrepresentational shapes—finding pattern is what the Teller mind is born to do. Certain patterns were paired with recognizable pictures and drawings, and, while making story, I began to use the shape as the thing even when it was not paired with the thing. The Teller became a reader.

At first, I could only read what the window chose to show, and the window changed too rapidly for me to read everything. The speed of my reading improved and I was able to read everything in the window before it changed. Then, I began to understand that the window was a Teller—only then did I begin to wonder whether the picture shapes made a kind of spoken language. The reader other than me will not understand. I did not make any connection between the language spoken by my people and the picture shapes in the cave window that signified things. It did not occur to me that the process of reading could become speaking and imagined by the reader/speaker to be somehow equivalent. These things will never be joined in my mind. Even though I learned to speak the picture shapes and hear the picture shapes spoken by the cave, the picture shapes have not become a language in my mind. I see my words written in the cave window, but these picture-shape words are not words like the words of my language. My language is music. The thoughts of my people cannot be translated into these picture-shape words. I have attempted to do so in order that the reader other than me will know something of my village—so that I can tell this story—but the reader other than me will not hear the music.

After I learned to read the picture words, I discovered that I could control the window by touching the picture shapes to make my own picture-shape words. The Teller became a writer. At first, I used this new power to control the stories I read in the window. I told the cave what stories I wanted to read and the window showed them to me. Later, I used this power to tell my own stories—to tell this story.

I cannot tell whether the cave stories happened on this world many ages in the past or will happen many ages in the future. There are/were things called animals, strange plants and trees, buildings, machines, roads and billions of people. I listened for the unspoken story that would tell me whether the cave stories have happened or have yet to happen. Some of the cave stories made me believe that my world will grow into the cave story world. Other cave stories made me believe that my world grew out of the cave story world.

I began reading faster and faster until the window could no longer keep pace with me. As I read, I searched for cave stories that would tell me whether the cave stories had been or were yet to be. There were many words in the cave stories for the difference between a world that was and a world that will be. The window also told true stories of false tales about worlds that did not exist or would not exist. A Teller knows that, if the story is true, the world told in the story exists. The story of a world that might be is a false tale. I heard the harmony of unspoken true stories under, around and within the false tales—one part of the harmony could be found in bits and pieces of disconnected, unrelated false tales; another part of the harmony might be found in and around bits and pieces of true stories. I read stories about Plato’s cave. I wondered whether I might be in that cave. There were other words about real worlds, ideal worlds, imagined worlds, historical worlds, mythological worlds, past worlds, future worlds, alternate worlds and virtual worlds. I believed without other evidence that the place of the cave stories was this world. I had read enough that I knew there were such things as other worlds and that it was possible that the cave stories had been brought to this world from one of those other worlds. I did not believe the cave stories belonged to some other world because I could not hear the unspoken story of why the other world would bring their stories to this world.

As I searched for the unspoken story of the cave story world, I found my cast of characters but I could not find the plot. Each character had a story. I could not quite hear why I picked these characters and their stories from all the cave stories I had heard, but I knew that in their stories and especially in the relationships between their stories, I would find the plot of the cave story world (or literally die trying). I heard the road engineer’s story as buzzing bee. I heard the computer programmer’s story as a thunder bug. I heard the book editor’s story as a humming bird. I heard a science fiction character’s story as a drumming cricket.

Last edited by dhspgt on Mon 26 Feb , 2007 3:15 am, edited 10 times in total.

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dhspgt
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Posted: Sun 17 Jul , 2005 5:53 am
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Self-serving comments about why dhspgt started this thread here instead of the Tolkien forum and how dhspgt's posts tend to stifle discussion have been edited. Niggle must block out intrusions by his neighbors and get back to his tree (only to learn in after life that his job was not the tree but the neighbor's intrusions).

Last edited by dhspgt on Mon 31 Oct , 2005 6:26 am, edited 5 times in total.

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Jnyusa
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Posted: Sun 17 Jul , 2005 6:27 am
One of the Bronte Sisters
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As to why I started a thread in this forum instead of the Tolkien discussion forum ...

This seemed like the perfect forum to me.

I am afraid I killed the Istari discussion thread despite VtF and Faramond

Not at all. All three above-mentioned are just bogged down in the Jury Room, still. That job is almost over (please, God, let it be almost over) ... if we hadn't had a stupid tie it would have been over tonight. Two more days at most.

Then I for one will be in the Tolkien forum and the writing forum. :)

Jn

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"All things considered, I'd rather be in Philadelphia."
Epigraph on the tombstone of W.C. Fields.


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dhspgt
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Chapter the Fourth: The Bee


I heard a bee buzzing in my brain. There are no bees in my world. I read a cave story about a virtual world created by a kind of Teller who was called, in his world, an engineer. I went on reading stories and searching, but something about the virtual world the engineer created kept buzzing in my mind. It was the bee. I felt that this virtual world the engineer created must hold part of the unspoken story I sought, but I could not yet hear it.


The young engineer was given time to dream a little every day while commuting to work on a crumbled highway constantly under construction and constantly crumbling. At that time, he was a computer programmer working for a company that manufactured artificial limbs. He had a special gift for creating complex, self-contained virtual systems and organisms, but he was not particularly good at assisting in the actual development and manufacture of the products he had designed. Given his particular nature, it was not particularly surprising that his day dreams led him to study road engineering and construction as it evolved from the ancient Roman civilization to the 21st century. He concluded that there had actually been very little advance in the technology of road construction in the last 2000 years. By training and inclination he was compulsively exhaustive in his study. He compiled a database of virtually every culture’s road-building technology, including a few cultures (mostly extinct) that did not seem to build roads.

Once his road culture database was nearly complete, he created a virtual environment so that he could create virtual roads. That task might seem like overkill to some, but he liked to be thorough. He spent years creating an entire virtual world before starting to design his new kind of road. It was, no doubt, the problems he confronted at work each day trying to design an organic machine that influenced his decision to design an “organic” road that would grow and repair itself. He published some of his initial ideas about road design and construction on the internet, and he ended up in a government job funded by the defense department—being well paid to continue his hobby.

His goal was to create a road-building technology in which the road would be constructed simply by driving a tractor along the selected route. The tractor would “seed” the road bed, and the desired road would grow in and from the ground. He wanted the process to be agricultural. Once grown, he wanted the road to be able to repair itself in much the same way that organisms respond to injury and disease. He also wanted to be able to “seed” an organic road along an existing road, transforming it into a road that would repair itself.

In order to gain a better understanding of roads “from the road’s perspective,” he figured out a way to crawl inside the road. He asked the defense department to embed macroscopic motes in the existing surface of selected roads all over the world. Apparently, that was the sort of thing the defense department was very good at doing. They covered more of the world than he needed. Motes are acorn-sized computers that consist of a simple microprocessor, memory, radio transceiver, and power supply in a self-contained unit. The motes were programmed to monitor road conditions through a sensor net incorporated into the road. The motes were networked through central processors at remote locations. The central processors analyzed the data reported by the network. Once he collected sufficient data, he began to create a computer simulation of the world’s first organic road.

He decided that, since he wanted to create a road that would mimic an organism, he should mimic the designer of organisms: evolution. He looked at existing roads as though they were fossils of living organisms. Just as the paleontologist infers the living, breathing brontosaurus from the fossil record, he would discover the design of a “living” road by working backward from the fossil remains of the giant organisms that once populated the world.

A living road would need energy to grow and to repair itself. From the perspective of evolutionary adaptations, the most obvious characteristic of a road is its surface area. He wondered what advantage the road gained from having so much “skin” exposed to the environment and whether the road was capable of photosynthesis. If so, would it have been the same photosynthesis that occurs naturally in green plants and algae? What is the fundamental mechanism of photosynthesis and could it provide sufficient fuel to construct millions of square miles of road throughout the world?

He researched photosynthesis. Photosynthesis can be divided into two stages. In the first stage, the light-dependent reaction, the chloroplast converts light energy into chemical energy. In the second stage, the light-independent reaction, the chemical energy fuels reactions to synthesize glucose. It starts when a photon strikes a pigment in the photosynthetic organism and excites its electrons. The energy passes from molecule to molecule until it reaches a special chlorophyll molecule that absorbs light in the red region of the spectrum. The chlorophyll molecule uses the energy of the excited electrons to boost its own electrons to an energy level that enables an adjoining electron acceptor molecule to capture them. The electrons are then passed down an electron transport chain. Each electron carrier is at a lower energy level than the one before it, and the result is that electrons release energy as they move down the chain.

This marvelous chain of events would not amount to much if it stopped there. The process has to repeat itself. When the chlorophyll molecule transfers its electrons to the electron acceptor, it becomes deficient in electrons. Before it can function again, it must be replenished with new electrons. Though this description of the process is condensing a few steps, the end result is that the electron-deficient molecule is replenished with electrons from the water that has been absorbed by the plant roots and transported to the chloroplasts in the leaves. The movement of electrons in this process and the action of an enzyme split the water into oxygen, hydrogen ions, and electrons. The oxygen from the water is then released into the atmosphere through pores in the leaf. This repeating, chain reaction transfer of electrons is essentially the equivalent of an electric current. Using the energy provided by this electric current, two electrons from the electron transport chain combine with a hydrogen ion initiating the chemical reaction that will fuel the light-independent reaction that synthesizes glucose.

The process of photosynthesis produces glucose molecules and oxygen from light, water and carbon dioxide. Plants use glucose, a carbohydrate, as an energy source to grow and to propagate. They convert glucose to cellulose, the structural material plants use to build. When plants produce more glucose than they use, they store it in the form of starch and other carbohydrates in roots, stems, and leaves. Photosynthesizing organisms produce about 170 billion metric tons of extra carbohydrates annually.

In other words, plants could build roads if the spirit moved them. The engineer joked to himself that if he asked politely, perhaps trees would build roads instead of covering everyone’s nice, manicured lawns with tons of leaves, twigs and acorns. If photosynthesis was the road’s energy supply mechanism, it would seem that the road must have evolved differently than most photosynthesizing organisms living today, because the fossil record suggests that the “bones” of roads were made of sterner stuff than cellulose. Not that a living road would need to be made of concrete instead of wood. If the road and the parasites traveling on it co-evolved, we should expect the surface of the road and the traffic on it to be mutually compatible. Since the engineer was focused exclusively on the road, he did not co-engineer the traffic but assumed it would remain as it was. Other engineers were diligently working on the traffic issue. They would create a world inhabited by flying machines or teleported matter that would make roads extinct. For thousands of years that had been engineering’s main focus, and the evolutionary development of roads suffered from comparative neglect.

He began by designing a photosynthetic cell capable of generating an electric current that could be connected to an energy grid. He borrowed from nature’s bounty by harvesting photosynthetic proteins from algae living in the oceans of the world. The problem was getting these proteins to live happily on a solid surface after spending their natural lives inside a safe, comfortable, water-filled womb protected within a cell membrane. He induced synthetic peptides to self-assemble into structures resembling cell membranes. When implanted in these artificial wombs, the photosynthetic proteins retained their function. He then created a transparent electrode by placing a thin layer of the synthetic membrane matrix on a silicon dioxide surface coated with indium tin oxide. He used carbon nanotube fibers to create an organic semi-conductor capable of conducting electrical current. The individual photosynthetic cells he created worked. According to the simulations, they converted sunlight into electricity.

Now that he knew he could manufacture an artificial solar cell based on the process of photosynthesis, he turned to the issue of self-replication to “recreate” a road organism that would grow itself and repair itself. In order to solve the riddle of road procreation, he traced the evolutionary development of the road back to the earliest life-forms on the planet: the ancestors of blue-green algae, otherwise known as cyanobacteria. Fossilized cyanobacteria have been found in rocks more than 3 billion years old. Algae formed when there was no oxygen in the atmosphere, but plenty of carbon dioxide. As the algae photosynthesized, they released oxygen as a byproduct, which eventually accumulated in the atmosphere. Cyanobacteria are prokaryotes—single-celled organisms with characteristics that blur the distinction between algae and bacteria. Like bacteria, cyanobacteria do not have organelles such as nuclei, mitochondria, or chloroplasts. Cyanobacteria are distinguished from bacteria by the presence of internal membranes, called thylakoids, that contain chlorophyll and other structures involved in photosynthesis. While higher plants have two kinds of chlorophyll, cyanobacteria contain only one kind. He reasoned that the road organism must have originally evolved from these cyanobacteria. The question was which evolutionary path led to the road. He then realized that he should stop searching for a massive single organism. Instead, he should focus on an entire ecosystem with the road as a by-product. He thought about existing macro-organisms, and he began to focus on coral reef. Coral reef combined photosynthetic algae with coral and other organisms in a symbiotic relationship that produced massive structures over time. He asked himself what kind of algae would have lived in a symbiotic relationship with other organisms such that, as the algae died, the skeletal remains would create a road. The answer solved several riddles at once.

Diatoms are photosynthetic algae born with a glasslike cell wall made of silica. Silica is the most abundant element on the planet (other than oxygen). If one wanted to pick a substance to be the most obvious choice for road building, silica would be it. The glass cell wall of the diatom has ornate ridge patterns. The diatom consists of two overlapping halves that fit together like a shoebox, with the lid slightly larger and fitting over the base. During asexual cell division, the two glass walls separate and serve as the lids for two new glass bases. The new diatom that grew from the lid is the same size as the parent diatom, while the diatom that grew from the smaller base is slightly smaller than its parent. Sexual reproduction occurs when the succeeding generations shrink to a critical size. These smallest diatoms form gametes that shed their glass walls. Upon fertilization, the zygotes absorb water to swell and then secrete new, full-sized silica coverings. Many diatom shells are ornately patterned with features just tens of nanometers in size—just the right scale to serve as a micro-electronic device. There are thousands of different species of diatoms, each with a unique shell design. He looked at the diatom and what he immediately saw, with a few tweaks, was a self-replicating silicon chip capable of generating its own electrical power. He bioengineered diatom shells to serve as silicon micro-computer chips.

The self-replication issue was solved with a vengeance. Diatoms can replicate up to eight times a day forming new silica shells with exactly the same pattern.

He used tiny nanofibers to “wire” the diatom semiconductor chips. Other small nanofibers were designed so that they would weave themselves together like strands of DNA to form larger and longer nanotubes that could connect the individual diatom chips into an energy and information grid. So that the process would mimic an organism’s ability to grow itself, these connections were created through a naturally occurring process of biological self-assembly.

He added genetically engineered bacteriophages to the road soup in order to harness this self-assembling power. A bacteriophage is a thin virus that infects bacteria. He engineered a population of phages that naturally produced proteins that would attract specific metallic compounds floating in the soup. In the presence of the diatom semiconductor chips, small crystals formed from these metallic compounds and grew all along the phages' shafts. The diatom, in accordance with its programmed instructions, zapped the phage with a small electric charge, killing the virus and fusing the crystal into a semi-conducting nanowire. Other phages were genetically engineered so that they would self-assemble into functioning transistors. The modified phage produced a certain protein on either end that would automatically attach to a pair of tiny electrodes on the surface of the diatom semiconductor chip. The same principle was used to connect the diatom to the nanotube network.

He designed DNA robots to manufacture molecular machines. Because a DNA strand will bind to another strand only when their chemical sequences match, he could program the DNA robot to manipulate specific molecules. He took advantage of the binding features of proteins and DNA, and, because these materials are on the same scale as nanotubes, he could use the self-assembling strategy of biology to build nanoscale devices. All he needed to do was “seed” the soup with the necessary raw materials and nature did the manufacturing work.

When the road soup required a particular function that could not be efficiently performed by the silicon chip, he would re-engineer the pattern of the shell and then make certain modifications. Once the design was established, if the function required a metallic micro-device instead of a silicon device, his DNA robots attacked the targeted diatom virus-like and replaced the silica shell molecule by molecule while preserving the original pattern. If a carbon-based organism proved to be more efficient at accomplishing a certain function than his self-replicating silica or metallic micro-machines, he engineered the carbon micro-machine using a specific type of diatom that naturally produced a carbon-silicon compound.

The engineer debated whether he should limit his investigation to engineering backward from photosynthesizing organisms. Since photosynthesis is fundamentally the process of converting sunlight into electricity, splitting water into hydrogen fuel and oxygen, for certain functions needed for the road organism to grow itself and repair itself, it proved to be more efficient for the road to have evolved a photovoltaic cell capable of converting sunlight directly into electrical energy. In a photovoltaic cell, light excites electrons to move from one layer to another through semi-conductive silicon materials, producing an electric current. He was able to create an efficient photovoltaic cell from re-engineered diatoms. He also employed direct solar-hydrogen production of electricity. He used supra-molecular complexes that split water using visible light in a process like natural photosynthesis. He designed a solar-hydrogen molecular machine using a combination of organic and metallic components. The light-absorbing part of the molecular complex contained ruthenium atoms. Two of these light-absorbing units were connected to one central processing unit. This central catalytic unit contained rhodium. Similar to the process of photosynthesis relying on a chlorophyll molecule, a photon hitting a ruthenium atom excites one of its electrons. The central rhodium atom collects the two excited electrons. The collection of two electrons at the center of the molecular machine initiates the reaction that produces hydrogen gas from water. The extra electrons strip the two hydrogen atoms away from water's one oxygen atom, producing hydrogen fuel. The oxygen atom simultaneously hooks up with another oxygen atom, forming an oxygen molecule.

With the entire surface of the road serving as a solar generator, using both photosynthetic and photovoltaic processes, his computer simulations indicated that his road was capable of generating millions more kilowatts of electrical power than his road needed to repair itself. In fact, if all of the world’s roads were constructed according to his design, the roads would produce more electrical power than all of the world’s existing power generating facilities. So, he designed a connection between the road’s internal energy and information grid and the world’s existing power grid and information communications system.

The next phase of design was to make the road capable of repairing itself, and to do so, it must be capable of gathering and processing information concerning its own condition and the condition of its environment. In his last job, while designing artificial limbs and organs, he had designed a very successful glucose sensing device that was designed to be permanently implanted in the skin. He used the same basic design for other analytical tasks such as detecting genes and proteins associated with diseases. He had designed internal sensors capable of screening for pathogens or bio-chemical imbalances in blood, tissue and organs. He had designed artificial limbs capable of mimicking human senses through a variety of mechanisms and processes. Immediately prior to going to work for the defense department on road design, he had been working on a complete human android design—not for use as a robot to perform work but as a source of functioning limbs and organs that could be harvested for use by human patients. His goal was to create artificial replacement parts capable of sensing and scanning medical conditions, so that the patient could be “plugged in” through an interface in the artificial organ to a computer in the physician clinic or hospital that would provide an immediate diagnostic reading—much like automobiles and airplanes with onboard diagnostic computers. He used bits and pieces of this earlier work in the organic road so that it would “grow” internal nano-device sensors to diagnose wear-and-tear, injury and the road’s equivalent of disease. The road possessed magnetic resolution imaging and ultrasound scanning capability. Being a bit of a bricoleur, he used almost all of his artificial limb and organ programming technology in his road design, and what he did not really need for the road he dumped into peripheral programs in the environmental matrix so they would be handy if he needed something later.

He designed the road to self-replicate a pressure-sensitive surface, in other words, to grow “skin.” He adapted technology used to manufacture artificial skin for prosthetic hands. He had been using pentacene transistors embedded in a flexible plastic sheet to give robotic hands a sense of touch. The resistance of the surface material varied depending on how much it was compressed, and the resistance changes switched on the organic transistor. The same process was duplicated on the road so that the road would sense the traffic and weather conditions on its surface.

The motes he added to the road soup were similar to the ones embedded in real roads throughout the world by the defense department, but these motes were designed to be manufactured by the soup itself. These motes provided a wide array of telemetry concerning road and climate conditions, and they were connected to the diatom energy and information grid by the same nanotube fibers used in part to construct the road itself. His road would be strong and resist damage because nanotube fibers were among the strongest materials on the planet. The properties of nanotube fibers had an additional benefit. He had used carbon nanofibers in his artifical limbs to sense changes in temperature and pressure. The road had the capacity to sense certain things about itself and its environment by nature of its construction—not by the engineer’s design parameters. The nanofibers behaved like nerve fibers connected to the networked diatom micro-computer chips programmed to assimilate and process data.

As a consequence of design and accident, the road organism was aware of itself as well as the environmental conditions of the world surrounding the road. As a consequence of design and accident, the road was capable of processing that information through an incredibly fast and powerful computer. Most of the mass of the road was functioning as an integrated part of that computer.

Since his road soup needed a source of water and raw materials, he designed the road system to begin life on land as canals connected to the world’s oceans, as though the road organism evolved initially as a sea creature. The simulation presented him an interesting side effect—the road organism produced pure water as a by-product. The diatoms were also soaking up carbon dioxide and generating oxygen. The confluence of those side effects made him wonder whether the road could serve a dual purpose, so he designed a connection with the potable water supply system and the sanitary sewer system. He tailored carbon nanotubes to detect chemicals ranging from small gas molecules to large bio-molecules. The tubes' small size and unique electronic properties made them especially adept at detecting minute changes in the environment. The nanotube chemical sensors generated an electric signal in the presence of a particular molecule. Once detected, the synthetic immune response system went to work. After he finished tweaking the diatom and nano-tube network creating a filtering process that captured and converted virtually every offensive compound the sanitary sewer system and the polluted atmosphere could throw at it, the road system produced sufficient pure water and clean air that, according to his computer simulations, it created a ecological status quo as efficient as a bio-dome simulation he had created in graduate school.

Now that the road was producing energy, he needed a way to store it. He first devised a system to store energy by using the electrical energy to create hydrogen fuel cells; however, he ultimately determined that it was more efficient to employ nitrogen. Nitrogen, the major constituent of air, could theoretically be engineered to assume a three-dimensional, polymeric structure that could serve as a lightweight, high-energy storage material that would outperform hydrogen. In its most stable configuration, nitrogen is a two-atom molecule—a pair of nitrogen atoms locked together by a triple bond. Nitrogen atoms rearranged into a three-dimensional network must be bound by single bonds to three other nitrogen atoms. The energy in those three single bonds surpasses that of the triple bond in nitrogen's conventional, two-atom form. Not only would polymeric nitrogen store and release large amounts of energy, but the only by-product would be ordinary nitrogen gas.

The last day he ran his organic road program, it ran flawlessly. His next task was creation of the real world interface—an internet connection between the road soup, the mote network and the home program. Given his history at his prior workplace, the defense department should have seen it coming. He quit work on the project and went to work for a computer game software development company. The defense department was too busy defending the country by waging offensive battles in foreign countries to spend much time putting together a team to finish the project, so it was shelved. However, the virtual world he created with organic roads was never deleted and waited to be born.

Last edited by dhspgt on Mon 26 Feb , 2007 3:16 am, edited 9 times in total.

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Chapter the Fifth: The Bug


I heard thunder. There was no thunder in my world. The rains came only and always at night, and the rains came without thunder and lightning. In the cave-story world, rain comes with thunder and thunder comes with lightning. This was thunder without lightning. If the difference between the almost right word and the right word is the difference between the lightning bug and lightning, then this was the thunder bug instead of the thunder. An arrogant story teller takes a class in modal logic. The teacher, being a bit of a zealot, begins the first class with a bold statement: “It is possible to translate any written narrative into a modal expression capable of being re-narrated as a computer program.” Since the student proved adept as well as arrogant, the teacher challenged him to take on a tougher task than the narratives pre-selected in the course material. The teacher had in mind a poem by Emily Dickinson. The arrogant young programmer took on Tolkien. He failed the course because he never turned in the completed project. He continued to work on it throughout his undergraduate degree program and tried (unsuccessfully) to convince his graduate degree committee that he should receive credit for it. He wrote several essays on Tolkien’s narrative works and middle earth mythology as a way of organizing his thoughts and convincing the committee that his work should count for something. He spent the rest of his life niggling on a translation of Tolkien’s middle-earth mythology into a computer program. Most of the essays are indecipherable as well as intolerable, but bits and pieces of the first essay he wrote keep playing the thunder bug in my brain.


I intend to “translate” Tolkien’s Middle-earth mythology into corresponding modal expressions as a prelude to composing a computer program. Any such attempt must begin by dissolving the chronological sequence of Tolkien’s narrated reality in order to foreground key thematic structures. I can hear my friends in the literature department objecting to any reduction of Tolkien’s art. Objection noted. I could respond to that objection by claiming that I not only acknowledge Tolkien’s unique genius but appreciate his art. However, I will not do so: I have too disciplined a mind to confuse creative genius with artistic achievement, and I am too ethical to misstate my own position. I can recognize his genius, but I am incapable of appreciating the artistic accomplishment. In undertaking the described project, I will not be distracted or deterred by any emotional attachment to the work of art I am dissecting. It is a cadaver, and my mind is a scalpel.

There are some who maintain that all analysis is a process of reducing multiplicity to unity and that the result of the process must always, as a consequence, be binary—that multiplicity into unity is essentially an expression of the underlying binary structure: multiplicity/unity; on/off; same/different. If so, then I am not actually saying anything meaningful when I state that I will initiate my dissection of Tolkien’s narration by identifying thematic binaries, but I have to start somewhere. I offer no justification for my choice more compelling than custom. Literary criticism has a long tradition of “reading” narrative art identifying thematic pairings as the apparent instrument, despite the lack of a particularly compelling rational foundation for it. Essayists posing as analysts typically perform the analysis without examination of the underlying premise that signifiers should be classified into “same” and “different.” That “should” is expressed as the deontic modal: it is obligatory that signifiers be grouped into ‘same’ and ‘different’. Is it possible to parse the obligation into more fundamental expressions? Literary critical theory has offered a variety of rationalizations giving the appearance of a legitimate starting point grounded in the necessities of the particular text, but each such rationalization can be reduced to the same underlying premise, and I have been unable to discover a proof of the premise. It should be noted that I offer this observation without aesthetic assessment. I accept in silence that such essays may be nonetheless brilliant, enlightening and entertaining.

I have been advised to avoid the arrogant tone that is apparently annoying to certain members of my degree committee. I have attempted to do so, but the tone seems to be an integral part of my “creative” process. I have also been asked (told) to explain why it is necessary to dissolve the chronological sequence of Tolkien’s narratives. I suppose I should have edited the first draft I submitted to include the requisite explanation without this comment (that is how this type of thing is usually done), but I wanted my reader to know that I had a better opinion of his/her intellect than my advisers have. I did not think any explanation should be necessary. Chronological sequence clouds the senses and confuses the judgment. Chronology is the engine of narration but not of causation—though it sometimes requires a disciplined mind to discern the difference (sometimes, not always). It is a simple thing to say that the logical expression “A then B” does not equal the temporal expression “A then B” but it is easier to do if someone else is pushing the stone up the hill.

I am also advised that I should say a word or two about modal logic. My response was that my reader knows more modal logic than I do, but I have learned to do what I am told. I use modals because it is the means to accomplish my end, not because I am impressed with the modal system. A modal “equation” qualifies the truth of a narrated expression that contains a judgment. The modal system of logic professes to describe the deductive behavior of the expressions: “it is necessary that” and “it is possible that” and can be extended to expressions of belief, temporal sequence and morality. Modal logic is the foundation for most effective applications of artificial intelligence. Modal logic is a symbolic language for talking about graphs, including flows of time or possible worlds.



These are the conventional modals:

Modal □ It is necessary that …
◊ It is possible that …
Deontic O It is obligatory that …
P It is permitted that …
F It is forbidden that …
Temporal G It will always be the case that …
F It will be the case that …
H It has always been the case that …
P It was the case that …

Temporal logics are designed to express temporal progression. It is customary to add the operator [] with the interpretation determined by the logic. [My digressions occur inside the temporal logic operator.] Each time increment is represented by a possible world. The relation is reflexive and transitive but not symmetrical—since we assume that time does not run backwards. [Why do we assume? Because there is no time otherwise—no time because we would be too busy: assumptions save time {Save time from what? Death? Eternal damnation?}.].

To begin, since Tolkien’s Middle-earth mythology is the object of this exercise, we must label it. We could simply assign a symbolic, such as “X”, but I prefer descriptive labels. What is the nature of these collected narratives we have placed in the kill jar? According to the taxonomy provided to us by Tolkien (if one system is as good as another, we might as well use his), Middle-earth is a “Secondary World.”

What does Tolkien mean by the phrase “Secondary World”? It helps to know Coleridge, but it would help even more to know Tolkien—to really know Tolkien. The Primary World is the real world in which we live and breathe—“primary” in part because it is the world “first” perceived. The Primary World is the world created by the Creator. A Secondary World is an imagined world created by an artist, one in “which both designer and spectator can enter, to the satisfaction of their senses while they are inside” (according to Tolkien), —a sub-creation according to the lexicon of the English Romantic tradition centered on the relationship between the divine power of creation in the mind of God and the divine power of imagination in the mind of a human artist (a sub-creator).

We must be more precise. What does the term “sub-creation” mean in the context of a narrative work of art? From a phenomenological perspective, it would be true to say that all narratives that describe a real or imagined world are “sub-creations.” If the reader assumes that the described world is real, then the narrative will be labeled “history.” If the reader assumes that the described world is not real, then the narrative will be labeled “fiction.” In either case, the narrative creates the illusion that the real or imagined world is “re-created” by the narrative; thus, the narrated world is a “sub-creation.” A small part of the discussion that would be necessary to parse this definitional problem is relevant to this essay, but, as a starting point for an analysis that is primarily organized on principles of classification, a definition (“all narratives are sub-creations”) that can be reduced to “A = B” does little to advance our cause. So, I will, as Tolkien once put it, arrogate to myself the powers of Humpty Dumpty and use the term “sub-creation” to describe a certain kind of literature and not use it to define literature. For this day, and it may be for this day only, the term “sub-creation” shall refer to a literary work by a specific author (to exclude anonymous tales by the folk) in which the fictional world re-created by that literary work has “an inner consistency of reality.” Ignoring for the moment that it is possible to see the entire world in a single grain of sand, or in a single two-line poem, I will exclude from the entire genus of sub-creation those literary works that do not present a Secondary World to the reader—either because the work does not attempt to do so or because it attempts to do so and fails. How does the reader know whether a literary work creates a Secondary World? I would propose a simple, two-step analysis: a) Does the work suggest a sense of place? b) If so, does the sense of place have the same weight as character? If the answer to both questions is in the affirmative, then the literary work created a Secondary World. From this definition, several conclusions may be developed. 1) Not all literary works create a Secondary World. 2) A literary work can create a Secondary World that does not have an inner consistency of reality. 3) Within the taxonomy of literary works that create a Secondary World possessing an inner consistency of reality, that is, within the genus of sub-creation, there are three species: simple, virtual and mythological. 3a) It is possible for a literary work to present a “place” to the reader but not enter into it, as though the Secondary World were being shown to the reader through a window that remained shut. If the Secondary World remains self-consciously an “other” world, then the literary work can be classified as simple sub-creation. 3b) If the created “place” is sufficiently realized such that the reader imaginatively enters it and the Secondary World becomes, during the process of perception/act of imagination, the mind’s primary habitation, then it is a virtual sub-creation. 3c) If the created “place” is sufficiently realized to exist in the collective consciousness of the culture so that the Secondary World exists independently of the creator’s work, then it is a mythological sub-creation.

Next, though it may not be strictly necessary in order to perform the dissection (knowing that the cadaver was a janitor or a judge seems to help the students focus), we should waste a word or two describing the general themes of Tolkien’s narratives. What was the point? According to Tolkien (whose opinion may be no better than anyone else’s but it is certainly no worse): “Anyway all this stuff [it is, I suppose, fundamentally concerned with the problem of the relation of Art (and Sub-Creation) and Primary Reality] is mainly concerned with Fall, Mortality, and the Machine. With Fall inevitably, and that motive occurs in several modes. With Mortality, especially as it affects art and the creative (or as I should say, sub-creative) desire which seems to have no biological function, and to be apart from the satisfactions of plain ordinary biological life, with which, in our world, it is indeed usually at strife…” The “stuff” to which Tolkien refers in this passage is the ultimate sub-creation—the Middle-earth mythology. The “Machine” is his shorthand for the use and abuse of power epitomized in the magic versus enchantment dialectic that will become the focus of this essay (when I get around to it). We may suppose that Tolkien knew what he meant by the terms “Fall” and “Mortality” but this analysis will have to come to meaning without relying on any shortcuts offered by parole evidence. So, students, as we dissect this cadaver, we will be peeling away tissue—skin, fat, muscle, fiber and organ—in order to isolate and identify the “relation” of Art (or the sub-created Secondary World) and the Primary World. If we can assume that Tolkien lived in the Primary World and that his narratives (the cadaver) created a Secondary World (note that I did not presume that he created the Secondary World but that his narratives did), then it may prove productive to examine the relationship of Artist (the Primary World) and Art (the Secondary World).

Tolkien strenuously objected to interpretations based on real or (more often) presumed details of his personal life. [I will not offer evidence to support my assertion. To do so seems silly. The reader who has read his letters already knows that my statement is true. The reader who has not read Tolkien’s letters may either take my word for it or take the time to read the letters. If I did quote Tolkien in order to validate the assertion, the reader who had not read the letters would still have to take my word for it that I had truthfully and accurately quoted Tolkien. I do realize that there are other reasons to quote the author in such circumstances. Of all the possible reasons to do so, the one I like best could be described as “sharing.” Those who find something sufficiently interesting in a particular passage to bother quoting it may find pleasure in sharing the words with others. I would do so for that reason had I not spent so much time explaining why I did not do so.] I share Tolkien’s antipathy toward “psychological” readings of literature (and have always believed that we learn more about the psychological and/or emotional nature of the critic performing such an analysis than we do about either the author or the text). While Tolkien abhorred biographical interpretations, he certainly did not refrain from offering his opinion about what his “stuff” meant—what he intended it to mean—though he was quite capable of discussing his own text with another reader as though they were both reading from a level playing field—that he, as author, did not hold a privileged position in relation to the text’s meaning. Though I come not to praise Tolkien but to bury him, I would be foolish not to admit that his is the best qualified mind to serve as reader of the Tolkien narratives (that is not a true statement about many writers). So, we now ask, what did Tolkien hope to accomplish in creating this Secondary World? Tolkien: “Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level or romantic fairy-story—the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths—which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country…. I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. Absurd.”

The thing that must be said is that Tolkien accomplished what he set out to do. Tolkien’s Middle-earth has achieved the same ontological status as traditional mythology. Tolkien intended to bequeath a mythological Secondary World to England, equivalent to the mythological Secondary Worlds existing in other cultures, and he succeeded. In order to succeed, he not only had to invent a Secondary World with “an inner consistency of reality” (to adopt his phrase from “On Fairy-Stories”)—mere mortals have done as much—but the Secondary World had to have an engaging story to draw our attention in the first place, a richness of detail (the list of sub-creators who rival Tolkien in this regard grows thin), a layering of narrative forms (legend, folk tale, epic, romance, poetry, essay, genealogical, fragment), a sense of connectedness with “history,” and (here is the one that truly sets him apart) the Secondary World he created had to already exist in the collective consciousness. Let that last phrase sink in a bit and while it sinks, remember that myth is made in the mind of the listener. If myth is made in the mind of the listener, then myth is not made by the speaker (or author). If myth has no author, then myth is anonymous. In this case, anonymous does not simply mean “name withheld.” It means that there is no author. It is not difficult to understand how myth may be considered anonymous since myth is akin to folk tale—tales made by the common folk or folk in common. [That statement presupposes a distinction between myth and folk tale, but the explication of the distinction is a long digression and not material to this essay.] Both myth and folk tale come from story. However, myth, unlike folk tale, may be traced to a single teller, yet remain made in the mind of the listener/reader. How can an individual author write a collective story? Tolkien creates the impression that he “discovered” story more than invented it—particularly so in relation to Lord of the Rings. In a letter responding to a reader’s question, Tolkien said: “I am not a model of scholarship; but in the matter of the Third Age I regard myself as a ‘recorder’ only.” Tolkien was “in the zone” when he wrote Lord of the Rings. He was “unconscious” (I love sports metaphors). Perhaps not all the time, and certainly not when editing the story, but often enough, particularly when the story was taking him places he had never been. Tolkien has related the experience in his letters. He was literally discovering the story as he wrote it. However, and this is a huge “however,” the background, the myth/history sub-creation already existed, and, even though Tolkien invented it, he did not feel “free” to change that myth/history sub-creation in order to meet the needs of the story he was telling. I do not mean to suggest that Tolkien was not constantly refining his vision of Middle-earth; it was his life’s work and he never finished it. Surely we all share the same sense of how Tolkien worked. He attacked his own sub-creation with his keen intellect and vast knowledge of the origins of language until he uncovered the “truth” of the story.

Why do I think that is such a big deal? Homer built his literary work out of pre-existing myth/history. Milton’s Paradise Lost, Shakespeare’s drama, Dante’s Inferno, many of the foundations of the western canon are literary works built from pre-existing mythic and/or historical material. This tension between the fact(s) of the existing “pre-story” material and the telling of new story is present in every work of literary genius. That statement may be a tautology but that does not mean it is not true. The remarkable thing about Tolkien is that the necessary tension exists even though the “fact” part of the equation was also invented by him.

The Secondary World was created by Tolkien but not fabricated. Tolkien created it from a boiling stewpot of existing mythological, historical and linguistic elements from a variety of western cultures in his attempt to give the English-speaking peoples something we lacked—“ a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic…” My reference to a “boiling stewpot” is intended to invoke Tolkien’s “soup” in his essay “On Fairy Stories.” The “soup” analogy begins innocently with a reference to George Dasent, the man who brought Norse mythology to the popular English culture. Tolkien distinguishes his soup from Dasent’s: “By ‘the soup’ I mean the story as it is served up by its author or teller, and by ‘the bones’ its sources or material.” He must have liked his soup because he keeps coming back to it: “Speaking of the history of stories and especially of fairy-stories we may say that the Pot of Soup, the Cauldron of Story, has always been boiling.” Tolkien’s “soup” and Levi-Strauss’s “cooked” owe their boil to the same fire: the collective consciousness over time. The thing that may be unique about Tolkien is that he not only dipped into the Cauldron of Story as a teller (all good tellers can), but he stirred the pot and played with the fire. Tolkien can cook.

Tolkien states his intent to create a mythology for England. Part of the reason he wanted to do so is the fairly obvious rationale Tolkien openly acknowledged and that was his desire to fill a void. England did not possess a unified mythology connecting creation myth to heroic legend to epic saga to the dimly lit beginnings of history. Other cultures had it. England needed it. Why did England “need” it? The easiest answer to that question is the one that places Tolkien in historical context—the nationalistic fervor sweeping Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that found expression in scientific and pseudo-scientific discoveries and recoveries of each culture’s “root” mythology. It has become almost a cliché to place Tolkien’s Project in that historical context (and, by extension, in the “context” of World War I and II). There is no doubt some truth to it. In fact, though it is an over simplification, the genesis of the Tolkien Project in the mind of the nineteen-year-old Tolkien is probably best understood that way. However, Tolkien did not remain nineteen. As he matured so did the Tolkien Project. Though it is again an over simplification, it makes some sense to understand the “need” for Tolkien’s Project as progressing from a historical/cultural need particular to England, to a literary need and, finally, to a human need. This progression may be chronological, if we adopt the days of Tolkien’s life in the Primary World as the time frame of reference, but if it is, the chronological progression mirrors a more fundamental logical progression.

The historical/cultural need particular to England has been noted. If one were to attempt a psychological reading of Tolkien’s narratives, it would belong in a discussion of this historical/cultural need—as though Tolkien was a product of his time—but that discussion is not material to this dissection and we will not pursue it further. As to the literary need, one should begin an examination of it by reading Tolkien’s essay, “On Fairy-Stories.” Tolkien sought a “place” to stand against (or at least apart from) the general habitation of modern literature in the 20th century. Are we really prepared to meet Tolkien on his own ground as an artist? Few have understood it. Even fewer have attempted it. Do not be deceived by his rhetorical self-deprecation. Tolkien was a revolutionary. Single authors do not invent a mythology for an entire culture. Do they? Can they? Did Tolkien seriously believe he was capable of such a thing? He was not timid about scaling the heights. Consider the manner in which he began his “small” essay on fairy stories: “I propose to speak about fairy-stories.” Does that opening sound familiar? It certainly does to the student of poetics. Aristotle begins his Poetics: “I propose to treat of poetry in itself and of its various kinds…” Tolkien is not making an “inside” joke; he is flinging down the gauntlet. Who has noticed? Where are the readers with the strength of mind to follow Tolkien? Later in the essay, Tolkien quietly eviscerates the main stream of literary critical theory from Aristotle to “modernists” of the 20th century as he contrasts literary criticism founded on drama with the appreciation of “true” literature: “In human art Fantasy is a thing best left to words, to true literature…. It is a misfortune that Drama, an art fundamentally distinct from Literature, should so commonly be considered together with it, or as a branch of it. Among these misfortunes we may reckon the depreciation of Fantasy. For in part at least this depreciation is due to the natural desire of critics to cry up the forms of literature or “imagination” that they themselves, innately or by training, prefer. And criticism in a country that has produced so great a Drama, and possesses the works of William Shakespeare, tends to be far too dramatic. But Drama is naturally hostile to Fantasy. Fantasy, even of the simplest kind, hardly ever succeeds in Drama, when that is presented as it should be, visibly and audibly acted…. For this precise reason—that the characters, and even the scenes, are in Drama not imagined but actually beheld—Drama is, even though it uses a similar material (words, verse, plot), an art fundamentally different from narrative art. Thus, if you prefer Drama to Literature (as many literary critics plainly do) or form your critical theories primarily from dramatic critics, or even from Drama, you are apt to misunderstand pure story-making, and to constrain it to the limitations of stage-plays. You are, for instance, likely to prefer characters, even the basest and dullest, to things. Very little about trees can be got into a play.”

Tolkien’s disdain for those who “misunderstand pure story-making” and who prefer literature focused on “characters, even the basest and dullest…” should be evident—as should be the inference that Tolkien considers himself engaged in “pure story-making.” Those words fairly characterize the literary critics’ obsession with psychological realism or I am no logician. I cannot read the passage quoted above without thinking of a passage from the “Foreword to the Second Edition” in Lord of the Rings: “Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer.” What kinds of writing would be preferred by those who have reviewed Tolkien’s work (perhaps, as he notes, without reading it) and found it absurd or contemptible? Why, the kind of writing that focuses on the basest and dullest characters, of course. This preference for “character development” or “psychological realism” is so pervasive in literary criticism that it rarely gets noticed much less challenged. It is assumed as though axiomatic that “serious” literature must present fully realized characters to the reader; otherwise, as in Tolkien’s case, the work will be, at best, assigned to an inferior genre (such as fantasy or science fiction) or worse, dismissed as juvenile or escapist. Give me a break. The dismissive attitude toward The Lord of the Rings is not dissimilar to the initial response critics have to any truly original work of art. Critics naturally come to the work from their existing frame of reference and they fail to appreciate or understand that the work proceeds from a different set of assumptions. [It is not difficult to imagine how much more readily Tolkien’s work would have been embraced by industrialized, mainstream, “academic” criticism if Frodo had only had the good fortune to have been sexually abused by Uncle Bilbo.] The point is that Tolkien understood the problem, identified the source (the sloppy thinking that led literary critical theory of “true literature” to be mistakenly based on principles appropriate to Drama), and recognized that his effort at “pure story-making” would be ridiculed. He knew he was not likely to persuade the “lit crit” crowd, but one can tell that he believed his determination to stick to his program was not only important for him personally but for Literature universally. If I were interested in setting literary criticism straight, I would write a dissertation on the literary need Tolkien sought to fill, but, as I said, I have no real appreciation for that sort of thing.

Instead, I will move on to the human need fueling Tolkien’s ambition. This need was personal to Tolkien, but it is not idiosyncratic. It is universal. According to the syllabus of this course, “deontic logic provides an analytical tool to explore the moral imperatives of human culture.” I hope the tool is as sharp as my need. The perceiving mind desires and creates order (remember, students, we are probing this cadaver for the relation of sub-creation and creation). In Tolkien’s creation myth, music precedes the world of light (and language). Why does Tolkien use music? Music is Tolkien’s means of expressing the existence of a pre-linguistic “story,” a story without words. It is also an “order” that exists before light, before the created world of matter and energy. In Tolkien's version of Genesis, music precedes the image of creation which precedes the first word, “Ea,” the word made flesh. Iluvatar says to the Ainur, “Behold your music!” and he showed to them a vision, giving to them sight where before there was only hearing. But the visualization was not complete, “for the history was incomplete and the circles of time not full-wrought when the vision was taken away.” Then Iluvatar said, “Ea! Let these things Be!” God said, “Let there BE light and there was light.” With the light, came language. In the beginning was the word. The word was with God and the word was God. The word light “fell” from the mind of God and became light and language (the first “fall”). Unity became multiplicity, but the power of creation remains in the word. It is the DNA contained in the etymology of each word. Adam was given the power to name the things of creation in order that Adam would have dominion over them. The Adamic power of naming is the power of sub-creation. Tolkien concludes his poem celebrating sub-creation: “we make still by the law in which we’re made.” God said the word light and light came into being. We are made by the Creator, according to the “law” of creation, and we “make” by that same law. The power is in the word, logos = law (the “law” by which we make and by which we are made). If the “order-creating mind” of the Artist (the sub-creator) imitates (or “equals”) the “order-creating mind” of the Creator, then the sub-creation (the Secondary World) will have a “true” relation with creation (the Primary World).

If we substitute “perception” for (artistic) creation, we begin to understand that this dialectic is more than a poetics of expression; it is a poetics of existence. In my poetics of existence, Einstein’s equation E=mc2 is the equivalent of “the word made flesh.” The “word made flesh” is the original story—the origin of story. “To ask what is the origin of stories (however qualified) is to ask what is the origin of language and of the mind.” There is a spiritual aspect of Tolkien’s poetics, but there is also a scientific corollary. If Tolkien got “inside” language, then he was also “inside” the processes of the human mind that create not only story but order out of a chaos of perception. The mind desires order. Perception depends on it. The same power of the mind that makes sense out of sensation finds story in chaos. That order is something real and imagined; something we both seek and create. The child complains to the parent: “The story is not supposed to end that way!” How does the child know how a story is supposed to end? How do we know the story is not supposed to end that way? The same way we know harmony from disharmony. The same way we know story. The Valar got to hear the music from its original source. The rest of us have to pick it up as we go—aided, I suppose, by some sort of genetic predisposition to find grammar in chaos.

If my mind perceives (re-creates in my mind) the same order that exists in reality, then I am sane, which is the equivalent of saying that the world is sane and that I live in a sane world. The end—the goal—of culture is to live in a sane world. We need assurance that the order we perceive is the order of creation. History unfolds according to the themes of Illuvitar. That is why POWER is dangerous. Power changes the order of things in the Primary World. Magic is the exercise of power to make the Primary World take shape or conform according to an individual will, and when the Primary World does not do so, the inevitable consequence is loss, or worse, dementia and psychosis. [I do not comment on the consequence to the Primary World, because, to this point, our exercise does not require that we prove its existence. We are concerned only with the human perception or re-creation of a Primary World. However, it would be safe to assume that, if the Primary World exists, then it must be ordered (existence requires sequence, even if it is disconnected and random). This order might be referred to as the “natural” order of existence. Magic is the exercise of power to impose order upon what is already ordered: i.e., upon nature.] Melkor exercised power to make Middle-earth take shape according to his story, and the result was the history of Middle-earth, but it was not Melkor’s history—it was Illuvitar’s. The “law” of creation holds creation to the word of the law.

The creation of order may, by itself, be considered a moral act, but morality implies that the act may be either good or evil. The creation of order is good if the order created corresponds with the natural order (with capital “N” Nature in the Romantic tradition). This correspondence creates “enchanted” art. The creation of order is evil if the order created conflicts with the natural order. This conflict is created by magic through the exercise of power. The perception of this natural order and the willingness to act in accordance with it is likewise an act of “good” morality. The misperception of this natural order may simply be deluded or insane, or it may be an evil—certainly the willingness to act contrary to this natural order may be evil.

The Tolkien Project is not religious but it is moral. This “old” mythology of his that has been re-created by our collective consciousness possesses a positive morality—that fact is good news. The full impact of that good news on our culture will not be evident over the short term, but it is inevitable. These things function on generational time scales, but certain aspects of that positive morality obviously bore more immediate fruit. The Thoreau-Tolkien connection that flowered with environmentalists and the “green” movement in the late 1960’s is one such fruit, but there have been many others. Instead of cutting the Scouring of the Shire from the film by Peter Jackson, I held out a secret, vain hope that the episode would be filmed in such a way that it would be obvious “to eyes that could see” that the characters were re-enacting the Siege of the White House in Moscow.

Assume for the moment (assume time then assume time suspended) that Tolkien’s Middle-earth mythology is a narrative figuration of a dialectic. My reader quite naturally asks, “What type of dialectic?” I am trying to decide if I really care. I honestly had in mind a generic dialectic, possibly a Platonic dialectic, though Tolkien’s story offers the possibility of Hegelian synthesis, if viewed from the perspective of the reader rather than the story teller; probably not a Marxist dialectic, though individual actors in the mythological realm could obviously be characterized as an embodiment of dialectical materialism [I have been asked {told} to reduce the number of digressions, because they {the digressions—not those who keep trying to tell me what to do} make too many demands on my reader. I believe my reader can take whatever I dish out and more]. The key terms of this dialectic are “magic” and “enchantment.” What do these terms mean as Tolkien used them? Tolkien: “Enchantment produces a Secondary World into which both designer and spectator can enter, to the satisfaction of their senses while they are inside; but in its purity it is artistic in desire and purpose. Magic produces, or pretends to produce, an alteration in the Primary World. It does not matter by whom it is said to be practiced, fay or mortal, it remains distinct from the other two; it is not an art but a technique; its desire is power in this world, domination of things and wills.”

1. One man looks at a drinking glass containing equal amounts of air and water and sees a glass that is half full.
2. One man looks at a drinking glass containing equal amounts of air and water and sees a glass that is half empty.
3. One man looks at a drinking glass containing equal amounts of air and water and sees a glass that is full (of water and air).
4. One man looks at a drinking glass containing equal amounts of air and water and sees a glass that can be emptied (and filled with wine).

The first man is an optimist. The second man is a pessimist. The third man is an artist. The fourth man is a magician. The perception creating the “full” glass is an enchanted vision. The Russian formalists might call it “defamiliarization” but the effect is the same. The trick of creating a full glass by filling it with wine—turning water and air into wine—is accomplished through the use of power, defined by Tolkien as magic.

The goal of the Tolkien Project is to infuse the real world with enchantment. In Tolkien’s private lexicon, “magic” is the application of a technological art acting upon (using FORCE upon) the world to achieve an end. “Enchantment” is the realization of an imagined sub-creation—it is the ordering of a reality from within. The possibility of a real world order based on enchantment instead of magic was the soul of the Tolkien Project. For those who love Tolkien’s sub-created world, it can be a call to arms even for those who do not fully comprehend what they are fighting for or against. The critics who have long dismissed Tolkien’s work as an “escapist” fantasy fail to understand the revolutionary force behind the Tolkien Project: it is not a desire to escape to Middle Earth but to re-create this world as Middle-Earth.

In order to re-create Middle-Earth, according to the theory of relativity, it makes no difference whether we bring ourselves back in time to Middle-Earth or whether we bring Middle-Earth forward in time to ourselves. If we accept the call to arms, do we scour our local shire, plant more trees and oppose global consumerism (all noble acts) or is it possible to achieve the ultimate goal? What does Thoreau have to do with Tolkien? Why do I keep asking questions instead of answering them?

Try a thought experiment. What if Tolkien’s Middle-Earth was not set in a distant past but in a distant future? What sort of technology would be required to transform the present world into a Middle-Earth? Is the power of a wizard’s staff produced by magic or by an advanced technology? Is the healing power of the hands of the king a magical emanation or has technology become sufficiently advanced to bio-engineer a man so that his hands act as sophisticated medical diagnostic and therapeutic instruments?

The real question is not the technology but CONTROL. Was the world purposefully engineered to become Middle-Earth or did it evolve that way over time through a kind of second generation evolution accomplished through a synthesis of virtual (i.e., computer) natural selection and real (i.e. native biological) natural selection? That is what the War of the Rings will be about: Will Middle-Earth evolve under Gandalf’s loving care or be made by anvil and hammer under Sauron’s iron claw? Do you still believe that the Tolkien Project is a harmless escapist fantasy? Do not look back; look ahead.

The primary focus of the thought experiment is to provide a dynamic for the Tolkien Project that is revolutionary instead of reactionary. We are still fighting against the establishment’s insidious plot to contain the Tolkien Project. We need to let the genie out of the genre. Think in evolutionary terms. Myth has, if anything, more power in the world today and still more in the world tomorrow than it did in the mythological past, because the force of “cultural selection” is replacing “natural selection” in the engine of evolution. In contrasting Gandalf’s loving hand with Sauron’s iron claw, I did not mean that Gandalf would control the direction of change. The battle is whether cultural selection will be driven by magic or enchantment (Gandalf or Sauron). By Gandalf’s hand, I did not mean Gandalf’s hand—that would mean Gandalf has placed the ring on his finger. By Gandalf’s hand, I meant enchanted evolution. The re-creation of this world as middle earth will take place over thousands of years as an evolutionary necessity because the other path leads to extinction. This is not a fairy tale. Well, yes, it is a fairy tale, but it is a fairy tale about a possible future, not an impossible past. The Middle-earth I envision is one in which human beings would be connected to the world in a way that would be explained today as technological, but in such a way that it would be impossible to determine whether the world “controlled” us or we “controlled” it, and, in which the mechanism of control was equally present within, inherent in the “us” and the “it.”

The idea would be something like the inverse of Clarke's law, if we substitute Tolkien's "enchantment" for Clarke's "magic." Clarke's law is that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. What if the technology was sufficiently advanced such that it was indistinguishable from enchantment instead of magic, but in this case not from the perspective of the less advanced civilization but FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE ADVANCED CIVILIZATION? From the perspective of the less advanced civilization, the enchantment would look like technology. Please understand that I am not proposing some sort of Star Trek scenario that would give people the power of Gods where thought was immediately transformed into action/energy/fruitcake. What I have in mind is an advance in technology that might appear to be more of a retreat. There are two roads mankind might take toward becoming its own "sufficiently advanced technology"—one that leads to magic (and extinction) and the other to enchantment (and fulfillment).

The philosophy of “enchantment” is more than a relation between us and the world: it is a means of relating with the other. In Tolkien’s mythology, it is a bad thing to use power to exert dominion and control (“magic”) over the world (both the environment and other creatures). Remember Tom Bombadil: “Power to defy our Enemy is not in him [Bombadil], unless such power is in the earth itself. And yet we see that Sauron can torture and destroy the very hills.” I suppose one way to “teach” a morality of enchantment (how to relate to your fellow man) would be to use a familiar device: “WWGD” or “What would Gandalf do?” Gandalf was sent to middle earth to nurture/inspire/enchant opposition to Sauron, but he was not supposed to use power to oppose power. He would not take the ring. Thoreau and Tolkien really are kindred spirits. Thoreau responded to a public announcement concerning the technological feasibility of linking New England to Texas by telegraph in order to make instant communication possible by asking whether people in New England and Texas had anything to say to one another. “Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. If we do not get out sleepers [railroad ties—you know, the wood beams under the iron rails (I am attempting to compensate for cultural differences)], and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work, but go tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will build railroads? And if railroads are not built, how shall we get to heaven in season? But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.” Tolkien wrote “Of course my story is not an allegory of Atomic Power, but of Power (exerted for Domination). Nuclear physics can be used for that purpose. But they need not be. They need not be used at all. If there is a contemporary reference in my story at all it is to what seems to me the most widespread assumption of our time: that if a thing can be done, it must be done. This seems to me wholly false.” Recall the scene in which Saruman announces to Gandalf that Saruman is “Saruman the Wise, Saruman Ring-maker, Saruman of Many Colors,” while showing off his fancy new special-effects robe and flashing his ring. Gandalf responds: “I liked white better.” Saruman: “White! It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page may be overwritten; and the white light can be broken.” Gandalf: “In which case it is no longer white, and he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.” This short debate between Gandalf and Saruman is the finest expression in Lord of the Rings of the enchantment/magic dialect. For one thing, Tolkien’s words invoke the dialectic between nature’s rainbow and Newton’s rainbow. Newton demonstrated that white light can be scientifically broken into a spectrum of color deconstructing the miracle of nature’s rainbow. The Fall of Man can be metaphorically dramatized in the myth of Newton’s apple. Newton sits contented under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. An apple falls on his head. He takes a bite of the apple. He breaks white light into a rainbow of colors. He knows the secret of the rainbow. He can create a rainbow, but he can no longer see God’s rainbow.

I cut short the quotation from Thoreau about railroads before it really got interesting. Here is the rest: “Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years a new lot is laid down and run over; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon. And when they run over a man that is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him up, they suddenly stop the cars, and make a hue and cry about it, as if this were an exception. I am glad to know that it takes a gang of men for every five miles to keep the sleepers down and level in their beds as it is, for this is a sign that they may sometime get up again.” I do not why I always think of Tolkien when I read this passage. Perhaps it is the element of the fantastic, although, when the black humor takes me, it is visualized more as a comedic, night of the living dead scene, with the “sleepers” constantly struggling to rise from beneath the iron rails and a gang of living men working frantically to nail them back in place.

Thoreau, playful as always, was reminding us of the obvious death toll railroad construction took on the lives of the Irish and Yankee men who worked on the crews, but he wanted us to realize that the constructed railroad is still taking lives—that is still rides upon the living who work to support it. The real cost is not in the building but in the keeping. But there is hope—the dead may rise up and put off the rail.

Thoreau begins the essay, “Walking,” by saying, “I wish to speak a word for Nature.” This essay is not as self-conscious an attempt as Tolkien’s to re-invent Aristotle’s Poetics, but it is Thoreau’s expression of a theory of poetics from the inside of language: “Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature? He would be a poet who could express the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him; who nailed words to their primitive sense, as farmers drive down stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved; who derived his words as often as he used them,--transplanted them to his page with earth adhering to their roots.” The pun on “roots” is classic Thoreau. He loved to play on and with words. He is asking for a literary work in which the words “transplanted” to the page still have real earth clinging to their roots—their etymological roots. What does Thoreau mean here—what kind of literature does he seek? Superficial speculation might lead one to suggest one of the “nature” poets, someone like Wordsworth. Thoreau mentions the Lake Poets in particular when he observes that there is “plenty of genial love of Nature, but not so much of Nature herself.” Where does he look for Nature in literature? “Mythology comes nearer to it than anything. How much more fertile a Nature, at least, has Grecian mythology its roots in than English literature: Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted, before fancy and imagination were affected with blight.”

Mythology! Imagine that! Does Thoreau practice what he preached? Does he create the kind literary work he seeks? Not really, but he was a hell of a preacher. There were moments. I hear something akin to Tolkien’s breath blowing through a passage in Thoreau’s “Wild Apples.” Thoreau tells a tale of how the wild apple tree grows. Working with apple trees, he is already playing with pretty heavy mythological material. His story tells of the early life of the apple tree and how it is turned into a shrub by the constant “pruning” accomplished by cattle grazing over the years. The little apple shrub does not despair, but the cows do not cease their pruning: “The cows continue to browse them thus for twenty years or more, keeping them down and compelling them to spread, until at last they are so broad that they become their own fence, where some interior shoot, which their foes cannot reach, darts upward with joy: for it has not forgotten its high calling, and bears its own peculiar fruit in triumph.” The history/myth (“story”) of the apple tree is created (“spoken”) by nature though it must be “ghost written” by Thoreau. Thoreau did not invent the story—he discovered it. A work of literature created by an author constantly aware of the history, the “origins,” of the words he chooses will, of necessity, be mythological.

Logos originally meant language/thought/reason (the word thought). Muthos originally meant “utterance” (the word spoken). Cosmos originally meant beauty/harmony/order and the world/universe/creation (the word made flesh.) In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. Then God spoke the word. He spoke the word, “light” and there was light, and the light was from God, but it was not with God. The word became real, became matter/energy, became flesh. In the beginning of the cosmos, there was logos and logos was with muthos and logos was muthos. As the unity of the holy trinity of cosmos/logos/muthos falls into multiplicity, the binary logos/muthos evolves into the archetype dualism: content versus form, mind versus body, logic versus instinct, truth versus fiction. The Fall of Man was first an etymological event before it became metaphorically expressed as a cosmological/historical/religious event. The utterance, the spoken word becomes the “body” of language. Aristotle uses “muthos” in Poetics where it is translated as plot (structure): “The plot, then, is the first principle and soul of tragedy.” Muthos = stories (language given form); logos = statements (language expressing truth). Muthos, once at one with logos in the cosmos, becomes contrasted with logos and once contrasted, opposed. Logos becomes aligned with truth and muthos with lies. Plato kicks the poet out of the Republic, and the rest is history—until Tolkien sub-creates the unity-->trinity-->multiplicity myth by going inside language to find the origin of story.

Tolkien got “inside” language in order to discover the original myths that created words: “Max Mueller’s view of mythology as a disease of language can be abandoned without regret. Mythology is not a disease at all… It would be more near the truth to say that languages… are a disease of mythology. But Language cannot, all the same, be dismissed. The incarnate mind, the tongue, and the tale are in our world coeval.” [We interrupt this quotation to bring you Tolkien’s trinity: the incarnate mind, the tongue, and the tale.] “The human mind, endowed with the powers of generalization and abstraction, sees not only green-grass, discriminating it from other things (and finding it fair to look upon), but sees that it is green as well as being grass. But how powerful, how stimulating to the vary faculty that produced it, was the invention of the adjective: no spell or incantation in Faerie is more potent. And that is not surprising: such incantations might indeed be said to be only another view of adjectives, a part of speech in a mystical grammar… When we take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter’s power… We may put a deadly green upon a man’s face and produce a horror… Man becomes a sub-creator.”

In the beginning, all language was mythological. When language was new, grass meant green-grass and not only was there no such word as green, there was no such thing as green until the day a story teller told a story about a land or a time in which grass was not green and in so doing, separated the green from the grass. The child asks the mother, “Why is the grass green?” What story will she tell? Imagine the time and place when language was new and the word for green had not yet been invented. Everyone was color blind. The story teller who first named the grass “green” and thereby allowed the listener to see green for the first time has performed an act of creation: and God said, “Let there be green, and there was green.”

Once green is separated from grass, it can be attached to something else. Tolkien: “Anyone inheriting the fantastic device of human language can say the green sun.” But, “to make a Secondary World inside which the green sun will be credible, commanding Secondary Belief, will probably require labour and thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft. Few attempt such difficult tasks. But when they are attempted and in any degree accomplished then we have a rare achievement of Art: indeed narrative art, story-making in its primary and most potent mode.” Tolkien’s kind of sub-creation offers a road back to the origins of language, the fountainhead and well-spring of story, but it is a road that leads there and back again: the road leads “there” by enchantment, by virtue of the Secondary World, to the origins of story, language and the human mind; and the road leads “back” to the perception of order, the discovery or recognition of story, in reality, in the Primary World. Imagine the consequence if that sub-creation were to become realized—if a Secondary World became a Primary World—and if the re-creation of that Primary World was accomplished by enchantment instead of magic. The Tolkien Project offers the solution to an equation that plots the course of an enchanted co-evolution of culture and nature that ends with myth made real—the equivalence of sub-creation and creation. Tolkien created a fantasy world that has taken root in the real world’s collective consciousness—the only realm where coherent mythologies can exist. These are roots with real dirt on them! Why do you think Tolkien worked from etymologies of real words instead of the easier task of creating a consistent but disconnected invented language? The etymological “roots” of his myths have real dirt on them—the unspoken story before the story, not the word made flesh but dirt made word.

I would, in all seriousness, like to make a POINT. Normally, I don’t do points. I do not believe in them as a rule. Every time I focus on a single point it splits apart into sub-points or decays. The radioactive half-life of one of my points is less time than it takes to read one of my sentences. Tolkien got so many things right. His sub-creation is so “plugged into” the origins of our language that, no matter how many times the mythology is translated, the collective consciousness will still “get it.” His theme is the third theme of Iluvatar: “a third theme grew amid the confusion, and it was unlike the others. For it seemed at first soft and sweet, a mere rippling of gentle sounds in delicate melodies; but it could not be quenched, and it took to itself power and profundity.” If I had my druthers, the Tolkien estate would have permitted unfettered use of the Middle-earth mythology to all “future artisans.” Instead of Middle-earth imitations springing up everywhere, changed just enough to avoid litigation, those fertile minds would have been free to explore “Niggle’s Tree.” The entire fantasy genre that came into being after the publication of Lord of the Rings would have been based squarely where it should have been—on Tolkien’s work. If artists can mine the Star Trek mythology for a seemingly endless stream of films, television shows, novels and music, just imagine what will be produced from the source material created for us by Tolkien. Do not worry about a few Melkors along the way who might trivialize, degrade or co-opt the original theme: “He hath bethought him of bitter cold immoderate, and yet hath not destroyed the beauty if thy fountains, nor of thy clear pools. Behold the snow, and the cunning work of frost! Melkor hath devised heats and fire without restraint, and hath not dried up thy desire nor utterly quelled the music of the sea. Behold rather the height and glory of the clouds, and the everchanging mists; and listen to the fall of rain upon the earth! And in these clouds thou art drawn nearer to Manwe, thy friend, whom thou lovest.”

Unfortunately, this aspect of Tolkien’s mythology has created the equivalent of a computer virus, an undetectable worm program that I have been unable to remove. In every computer translation of the Tolkien mythology I have attempted, the program eventually becomes so corrupted by the virus that it inevitably degrades back to the complete original narrative. However, I never deleted my program from the hard drive, and the translation engine waits patiently for a new narrative.


The dialectic between “magic” and “enchantment” finds expression in the dialectic between writing and reading. The art of writing is magic. Writing exercises power and dominion over the world it creates. The art of reading is enchantment. Reading discovers meaning in the union of the created world and the mind of the reader. Sauron is a writer. Gandalf is a reader. I would have never known the special place occupied by the Teller in our village had I not discovered the technology of writing. The Teller does not exercise power and dominion over the story told to the community. The true stories told by the Teller already existed in the minds of the villagers, though they did not know them until the Teller told them. Was this utopian world of enchanted story telling pre-technological or post-technological? Does it matter?

Last edited by dhspgt on Mon 26 Feb , 2007 3:19 am, edited 10 times in total.

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Chapter the Sixth: The Bird


I felt a bird humming in my nose. There are no humming birds in my world. The hum began when I read a cave story about the life of a book editor. I did not say that the story caused the hum. According to the words in the cave window, the son of a book editor published an edited collection of the comments the father wrote in the electronic margins attached to each digital book he kept in his personal library. A Life in the Margins is the title of the book. It is, in effect, a biography of the father written by the son, though the son actually writes little more than the preface. He narrates the biography entirely from these marginalia written by his father—supplemented by excerpts from the few pages that survived of a private journal, as well as excerpts from transcripts of some classes taught by the father when he was a graduate student-teacher. University classes were recorded on the information network of that time. The father was an accomplished editor who desired all his life to be a writer. The son was an accomplished writer, but his most critically acclaimed` book was his edition of his father’s marginalia. The marginalia are primarily focused on the father’s response to the text he is reading at the time, but through careful and purposeful editing by the son, the reader begins to see the life unfold of the man writing the marginalia. As researchers were allowed access to the actual electronic books containing the marginalia and the son’s work was analyzed by literary critics, there was considerable debate concerning the nature of the son’s editing. The most authoritative analysis of A Life in the Margins was a work written by a woman with the last name of Teller who compared the son’s editing to Christopher Tolkien’s editing of J.R.R. Tolkien’s papers. Teller developed a theory of editing she claimed to have derived from Samuel Taylor Coleridge.


[Editor’s note: excerpt from my father’s private journal entry dated June 28, 2556.]

I usually love teaching these once-a-week evening seminars. If the university let me, I’d teach a full load of evening seminars. A full load is four three-hour courses a semester. If I taught nothing but once-a-week seminars, I would have all my days and three evenings free. A guy could do a lot with that kind of free time. A three-hour course meets four times a week for fifty minutes or three days a week for an hour and fifteen minutes or twice a week for an hour and forty-five minutes or once a week for three and a half hours. Don’t do the math; it doesn’t come out right. Of course, three-and-a-half hours is a long time to be in class, but these kids have really taken off with it. Since the third week, this class has been a breeze. The kids have been doing all the work. All I do is referee.

Tonight is a problem. Since it is the last class before finals, I told my students that I would lecture. Normally, I conduct this seminar as a round table discussion. If I teach at all, I follow the Socratic method. I ask questions; I don’t provide answers. I told them I would lecture so they wouldn’t have to prepare for class. More to the point, in response to the inevitable question (predictably, from Edward Stewart, a tall, thin, red-headed chap with a much too earnest expression), I told them that the lecture would not be on the final: their reward for being a good class—and my punishment. Now, I have to prepare something that will entertain and possibly enlighten them for three-and-a-half hours—well, three hours, anyway. They won’t cry if I let them go early.

Time was I could speak for three or four hours with religious zeal while barely taking a breath. Now, my mind is so full of data I wonder if there is room left for an idea—or an emotion. There is room, obviously, for the one emotion which doesn’t take up space: frustration. TIME. Frustration doesn’t need space, but it devours time. I am a student of history in the 26th century, and I do not understand time. I don’t HAVE time either. My evening seminar starts in fifteen minutes.

Time. I am a historian. I will lecture about the nature of time. What is time? I have spent years trying to get answers from the so-called “natural history” theorists. Which reminds me: I ought to tell my kids that the term “natural history” used to mean something quite different. Today, it refers to the discipline which, centuries ago, was known as physics, particularly that part of physics then known as cosmology. Then, it typically meant the study of nature, a concept which no longer exists, certainly not as the antithesis of culture. For these kids to understand the ancient concept of nature would require an entire semester of focused readings. Those who had Koestler’s “Introduction to Ancient Philosophy” would have too much to unlearn, and those who did not have Koestler would have too much to learn. The concept is subtle and depends on their ability to sift thought through the prison house of language.

Of course some say it is all a matter of semantics and creative syllabus management. I say that myself (and mean it) from time to time. The entire undergraduate syllabus for the department of history is divided into two sub-departments: natural and cultural. Since all history ended over 200 years ago, most of the dramatic developments in the discipline have been generated by in-fighting between the two. For those still inclined to understand the arcane philosophical tradition of applied mathematics, there are a few courses devoted to the old mathematical theories which accurately predict the creation, expansion and eventual destruction of the universe. I suppose there is something comforting in studying an extinct discipline that provides a final solution, an “answer” to a question. In fact, I don’t mind teaching those classes. I have come to realize that the entire industry of teaching history is an old fashioned pyramid scheme that will collapse if new students entering the department begin seeing it for what it really is. Every three or four years a new fashion stimulates the intellectual libido of graduate students like myself, occasionally re-energizing tenured faculty, but then the fashion becomes a discipline, and the graduate students begin to resist it, creating the tension which will inevitably erupt in a new fashion. It is trite but it is true: we kill our fathers and become our grandfathers.

[Editor’s note: excerpts from a transcript of the seminar class held later that night.]

Teacher: We need a starting point. Without a starting point, it is impossible to create a universe or to make one, short declarative sentence. “Let there be light.” For a starting point, we can take one that the natural historians believe in: the speed of light. My use of the word “believe” was intentional. The speed of light is the central tenet of their religion. For the natural historian, a starting point is the speed of light. For the cultural historian, a starting point is the word “be” as in “Let there be light.”

What is the universe? The universe is the record of communication since the beginning. The universe is / exists as a result of / equals communication: “Let there be light!” The only difference between the physicist and the priest is punctuation—the quotation marks and exclamation point. Since the big bang (let there be light), the universal bubble has expanded at the speed of thought. In the beginning was the word. In the beginning of cosmos, logos was with muthos and the muthos-logos was the cosmos. The universe is an expanding bubble of light/thought (matter is, after all, simply thought/light/energy that appears frozen—in time—to a perceiving/thinking mind). We are all of us traveling in time with the universe at the speed of thought.

“… traveling in time…”

What is time? There is an absolute time, but it is not the time of a ticking clock. Clock time is a measurement of time; it is not time: TIME, with a capital T which rhymes with P which stands for paradox. When… in the course of human events… we encounter the time equivalent of Zeno's paradox. The paradox is imaginary: distance is only a metaphor of space. Distance is not existence. Clock time is but the meter of time, but space-time is the fabric of existence. My life is a room ten meter-time measures across. If I cross half my room-life, then half of the remaining half, etc. and so on, lovers will never kiss and I will never die.

Once we have lived a little, we realize, as all good children know, that TIME, with a capital T, is gravi-T.

Playing with signifiers that can only be appreciated by a reader for some one who had a life time playing with signifiers that can only be appreciated by a listener occasionally presents opportunities too fun to resist. I am, after all, more of a transcriptionist than author with regard to this part of the story.

Think of the space-time continuum as a four-dimensional bubble expanding at the speed of logos. Time is the expansion of the bubble since the “big bang” (the beginning of time). Time travel would be the equivalent of leaving the surface of the bubble. Travel to the future would require leaving the surface of the bubble “ahead” of the bubble, which, by definition, means that one would be “outside” the space-time bubble universe. No one knows what “outside” is but we all agree that it is no place you want to be. Travel to the past would be the equivalent of penetrating beneath the surface of the bubble. Since that could “pop” the bubble, we should all agree that is not a good thing to do. In sum, so far as we know, it is impossible to leave the surface of the bubble. Look at it another way. Since you are part of the surface—part of the space-time continuum—wherever you go, you take the bubble with you. Which is another way of saying, wherever you go, there you are.

However, it is possible to change the shape of the bubble. Time does that. So does gravity. So, relatively speaking, they are the same.

Think of the bubble as an expanding balloon filling with gas. [God may not play dice with the universe, but some clown is always making balloon animals out of it.] The gas is the echo or residue of the past movement of the balloon’s surface as it expands. At the instant of the big bang, space-time began expanding. Expansion created a space-time balloon. Whatever IS, is the balloon; whatever WAS, is the interior of the balloon. The interior is not empty. One might say that the universe is an onion adding a new peel each timeless instant. Each peel is infinite and there are an infinite number of peels, but there is only one “top” peel; all the rest are underneath. There is only one present. The rest is history. But, the rest is not silence. The present is silent. Only history can be heard. Everything that has occurred since the beginning is recorded in each echo peel, by the gas of the interior of the space-time balloon.

Centuries ago, physicists misunderstood the dynamics of expansion and searched for this gas on the surface of the balloon, and when they did not find it there, they decided, since it must be there according to theory, that it was there but invisible, as “dark” matter and/or energy. They believed that this gas—their dark energy—was fueling the expansion, as though the balloon was expanding because the gas created pressure. It would have more accurate to say that the gas pressure was being created because the balloon was expanding. Relatively speaking, it is impossible to tell whether the gas pressure causes or is caused by the expansion of the balloon. Time = Gravity.

As we know, a young janitor at MIT published a famous treatise titled, “The Emperor Has No Clothes,” and physicists suddenly stopped looking for dark matter and became better historians. The young janitor had discovered the next “theory of everything” by virtue of a thought experiment based on finding a pattern within previously debunked theories of everything. Once he found his answer, he created the new mathematical tools he needed to express the question his answer proved.

Some time there is not enough past to reveal the story. Even though the teller is gifted with uncanny intuition, the universe had to get bigger and history deeper. The pattern of divergence intersects the pattern of convergence at a distant moment beyond the known universe, but, right now, it just looks like everything is flying apart.

Student’s voice: So, you are saying that time travel is impossible? You do know that we have been taught the opposite since our first day of school as children.

Teacher: It depends on how rigorously one defines time travel. If the universe is an expanding bubble of light, we are all of us traveling in time with the universe at the speed of thought. We can fall asleep for a time and wake up in the “future” such that we did not see the light of the traveling present, but we cannot move in front of the bubble universe into the future. If we could physically move through the universe at the speed of thought [some say that the speaker of the universal light waits for us at warp ten], we truly would be one with the universe, one with the first word, both present and in the present at the big bang (let there be light) and at the big crunch (let there be nothing but light). But then, we would be god.

In order to travel to a realized past, one must pull the matter-energy of one’s present—the surface of the bubble—back to one of the bubble’s past coordinates. With sufficient energy or strength of will, it is possible to warp the surface of the bubble. An incredibly dense, focused warp can be made to “tunnel” from one point on the surface to another, and thereby make travel from point to point on the bubble occur either faster or slower than the amount of time it would have taken along “normal” space-time. In doing so, the traveler never actually leaves the surface of the bubble. Relative to someone traveling along a less warped part of the space-time bubble, the warped traveler is a time traveler. So, pick a star. We all know that the light we see has been traveling with us, toward us, on the surface of the bubble for millions of years. The star that sent the light is located at a past coordinate in the gas/echo interior of the bubble. To touch that star at that coordinate, one would have to fold the universe in half and tunnel to hell, but it is possible, according to what they teach you in school.

Student’s voice: Since the absolute present would appear to a time traveling echo indistinguishable from his future, according to the theory of relativity, would it be possible to travel to the future by returning to the surface of the bubble?

Student’s voice: But if the past is only an echo, returning to the surface would be the equivalent of bringing the past to the present. Can you go home again?

Teacher: When the tunnel collapses leaving the time traveler at a past bubble, every particle of matter (every bit of the space-time bubble) stays put. To the rest of the universe, the time traveler (and his “warp bubble”) have become (appear to be) a naked singularity—a black hole without the hole. In order to return to the present (to the surface of the bubble), one has to “steal” matter/energy from the space-time bubble and reorganize it according to the energy-density pattern of the echo. If the matter is stolen from the singularity, then the time traveler won’t be able to return to the present, because the matter/energy stolen in order to return the traveler will have altered the energy-density pattern of the traveler. So, matter has to be stolen from the surface of the bubble outside the singularity. In the process, the singularity radiates a gravitational vacuum fluctuation (negative energy/antimatter) in the energy-density pattern of the traveler who is now all “echo.” The negative energy vacuum fluctuation of the “echo” traveler anticipates the time traveler’s appearance through the wormhole. In effect, the time traveler travels in the past before he enters the worm hole in order to travel in the past.

Student’s voice: It can’t be all that difficult. After all, Kirk and Spock managed to do it and come back with two humpback whales.

Teacher: [laughing] When you’re right, you’re right. Class dismissed.

[Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from marginalia attached to a novel, The Return, by William Shatner with Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stephens. The novel is set (in the Star Trek mythological chronology) immediately following the events depicted in the film, Generations, in which Kirk dies helping Picard defeat the villain, Soran. The novel is written by William Shatner, the actor who played Kirk in the film, and tells a tale that begins with Kirk’s resurrection and ends with his heroic (apparent) death, but we learn in subsequent novels (if we read them) that Kirk continues saving the universe, defying death, winning each “no-win” scenario.]

“What if the biblical stories leading to the death of Christ were all exactly as they are—including the development of the archetype in the old testament and the personification of the type in the new testament—until the events surrounding his death? Imagine the “Passion of Christ” rewritten: Jesus is killed as he approaches Jerusalem by a spear thrust from a demented rabbi. The story would end so poorly that it would be impossible to believe that he rose from dead some time later (with story-telling imperatives being ignored, the “necessity” of the time being three days disappears). James Kirk was no Christ-figure (“I knew Jack Kennedy, and you, sir, are no Jack Kennedy.”), but he was the archetypal hero of the Star Trek mythology, and those who would narrate his death for the audience which created him have a responsibility to do so in a manner consistent with that mythology. The story of Kirk’s death(s) has now been recreated by the audience to become the story about the stories. The story is that the audience which viewed the first version of Kirk’s death in Generations, booed in disappointment and disbelief when Kirk is killed by a single phaser blast from Soran without really accomplishing much of anything that could not have been accomplished by a “story normal” Picard (Picard, after all, is not a nameless, incompetent ensign). The film’s makers recognized that they had a problem and they came up with a new death for death that was slightly less lame than the first. Kirk jumps for a control device Picard needs in order to defeat the bad guy. He gets it but then falls to his death. It is at least an echo of the true story. If I am in a pessimistic mood when I think about it, I can almost believe that the film’s makers intended a sarcastic parody of the Kirk legend in particular and Star Trek mythology in general—though one would no doubt be giving too much credit to the film’s makers in doing so. An over-the-hill, over weight, over-the-top actor makes a melodramatic “leap” off the front porch for a remote control as though he were accomplishing something significant in real life (“making a difference” as Kirk put it in the film). It could have been their way of saying “good riddance” to Shatner, the “original” Star Trek and, by extension, the audience that created the mythology. [Remember: myth is anonymous, created in the mind of the collective consciousness.] However, I do not believe the film’s makers capable of sophisticated irony since they were incapable of understanding or appreciating the mythological material they were using. Obviously, the writers of this novel, including that over-the-top actor, understood the story better than the film’s makers—and I say that before reading their book. They are bringing Kirk back to life, because the “death” narrated for him in the film was not his true death.

[Editor’s note: The following essay was written by my father in his private journal. According to the computer date stamp, the essay was written on the day after the day he wrote the marginalia in The Return. The narrator of the essay is Pavel Chekov, a character from the same Star Trek stories inhabited by Kirk and Spock. The title of the essay is:
“The End of History”
by Pavel Chekov]

Properly understood, the conservation of matter and energy requires that there must be a record of every “transaction” of matter and energy that has occurred in the universe since the Big Bang. There may be practical limitations on an observer’s ability to “read” that record, but technological enhancements to the process of observation have overcome most of those limitations. When I taught history at the Academy, I often used a clip from a 20th century film, Blade Runner, to illustrate my point. I used a clip from a science fiction film that was 300 years old because I wanted my students to realize that the concept did not develop as a consequence of those technological advancements but originated from the active/creative perception/imagination of the story-telling human mind. In the clip, the Blade Runner is searching for clues in a photograph. He scans the photograph into a computer and begins to zoom in on specific sections, relying on the computer to enhance the selection so that the cropped section is enlarged without loss of resolution or detail, becoming the equivalent of an entirely new picture to be used as the starting point for further searches. Imagine if this process could be repeated as many times as the observer desired. It would be possible to look around corners and through walls by focusing on objects that reflected light—thus recording a mirror image of the object reflected. As the observer continued to read the light recorded in this one photograph, the light record represented objects from distances so vast that the time it took for that light to leave the object and to be recorded became a significant factor. Not only would it be possible to see the entire universe in a single grain of sand (or, in this case, a single photograph), it would be possible to see the past.

My students assume I am thinking of William Blake at that point in the lecture (I know they are because I have asked them), but I have a confession to make: I am more likely thinking about Ramer. Ramer is a character in an unfinished narrative written by J.R.R. Tolkien in the 20th century, called The Notion Club Papers, being in part the result of the friendly rivalry between Tolkien and C.S. Lewis who had determined to try their hands at writing stories involving space travel and time travel. I have taken the liberty of condensing a small bit of the narrative in order to illustrate my point.

“I say again: I wonder what you’ve been up to, Ramer?”

“Telling a story,” answered Ramer glumly, staring at the fire.

“Come clean! Where’s this place? And how did you get there?”

Ramer: “I don’t know where it is… I’ve always wanted to try a space-travel story. I never did write one. Well, thinking about methods of getting across Space, I was later rather attracted by what you may call the telepathic notion—merely as a literary device, to begin with. How does the mind travel through Space or Time, while the body is static? I had the notion, as others probably have too, that for movement or traveling the mind (when abstracted from the flood of sense) might use the memory of the past and the foreshadowing of the future that reside in all things, including what we call ‘inanimate matter’… to inspect the history if things whose paths have, at some point of time and space, crossed the path of my body. The mind uses the memory of its body. Could it not use other memories, or rather, records? What kind of record of past events and forms could there be? In the time-sequence the disintegration of form destroys the memory—or the special record—of the history of that form, unless it has got into a mind first. The fragments, right down to the smallest units, no doubt preserve the record of their own particular history, and that may include some of the history of the combinations that they’ve entered into.”

This use of dialogue from a fictional character serves two purposes: first, it is intended to be an “eye-opener” (keeping students awake is the teacher’s first priority); and second, it allows me to introduce my preferred method of instruction. I make history using holographic film, fusing actual holographic recordings of the events with computer-generated holographic dramatizations. I teach history-making using dialogues between real and fictional characters, fusing the characters’ own words with words I attribute to them. The following dialogue is a sampling taken from my course titled, “The End of History.” The characters in this dialogue are Henry Adams, the author of the classic, History of the Jefferson and Madison Administrations, and the profound, The Education of Henry Adams; Douglas Adams, the author of the series of fictional narratives that began with the Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; Owen Barfield, the author of Saving the Appearances and a few other like-minded tomes; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the English Romantic poet who also wrote the brilliant, Biographia Literaria; and Pavel Chekov.

The Chekov Dialogues
Chekov: “History ended because historians possess ‘all the facts.’ It is possible to record virtually (or to virtually record) everything that happens in the universe. The record is complete. That statement may not be accurate, but what matters to the historian is that it feels true. The world is in fact too much with us. The chronology of recorded events imposes order on the chaos of fact and creates history without the historian. Any attempt by the historian to recreate history is inevitably sucked into the black hole of recorded fact. Instead of achieving synthesis through his story, the historian manufactures synthesis by analysis, and performs analysis by taxonomy. There is no story in history. Story is a gravitational force that attracts fact; however, the technology of recording and reproducing reality has resulted in the accumulation of such a vast amount of fact that it has attained the critical mass necessary to repel the gravitational force of story.

H. Adams: “All opinion founded on fact must be error, because the facts can never be complete, and their relations must be always infinite.”

Chekov: “It is true that facts are never complete from the perspective of any observer existing anywhere in normal space-time; however, there are two conditions in which the equation ‘facts = complete’ is true: the absolute beginning (the Big Bang) and the absolute present. The moment of the Big Bang had been the focus of intense scientific study for over three hundred years. As for the absolute present, there is continuing debate whether the condition should be granted ontological status of any kind.”

D. Adams: “The Deep Thought computer contemplated the very vectors of the atoms in the Big Bang itself. The Deep Thought computer ran a program for seven-and-a-half million years to answer the ultimate question to life, the universe, everything. Upon arriving at the answer, Deep Thought then designed an even more powerful computer to reveal the question. The name of that even more powerful computer was ‘Earth’ and it was so large and powerful that most people mistook it for a planet (including the apelike creatures who thought they owned the place but who were in fact simply part of the computer). The program Earth was running in order to reveal the ultimate question was supposed to run ten million years, but Earth was destroyed five minutes before it finished the program. The absolute present is a computer named ‘Universe’ and it has been running a program to solve for the equation ‘facts = complete’ since the Big Bang. In each discrete instant, the Universe proves that ‘facts = complete’ is true, deletes the entire program, reformats the hard drive and begins again.”

Chekov: “At the precise instant of each absolute present, the original conditions of the Big Bang are recreated. Matter and energy are one. There is no space-time. Everything else is history.”

D. Adams: “There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another which states that this has already happened.”

H. Adams (from the “Grammar of Science”): “The line of thought-movement in history, familiar and inexplicable since Zeno and his arrow, is continuous from the beginning of time, and discontinuous at each successive point. History set it down on the record—pricked its position on the chart—and waited to be led, or misled, once more. The historian must not try to know what is truth, if he values his honesty; for if he cares for his truths, he is certain to falsify his facts.”

Chekov: “Zeno’s arrow is the absolute present of the universe. You and he should talk. I bow to your genius, but your irony has doubled back on itself and you would not know your son. The historian has abandoned truth in the face of the relentless onslaught of fact.”

H. Adams: “Historians undertake to arrange sequences,—called stories, or histories—assuming in silence a relation of cause and effect. These assumptions, hidden in the depths of dusty libraries, have been astounding, but commonly unconscious and childlike; so much so, that if any captious critic were to drag them to light, historians would probably reply, with one voice, that they had never supposed themselves to know what they were talking about. Adams, for one, had toiled in vain to find out what he meant. Where he saw sequence, other men saw something quite different, and no one saw the same unit of measure, but he insisted on a relation of sequence, and if he could not reach it by one method, he would try as many methods as science knew. Satisfied that the sequence of men led to nothing and that the sequence of their society could lead no further, while the mere sequence of time was artificial, and the sequence of thought was chaos, he turned at last to the sequence of force. The historian was thus reduced to his last resources. Clearly if he was bound to reduce all these forces to a common value, this common value could have no measure but that of their attraction on his own mind. He must treat them as they had been felt. He would risk translating rays of force into faith.”

Chekov: “The historian’s leap of faith resolves the problem of discovering the sequence. In mathematical terms, the equation ‘facts = complete’ can be represented as ‘x = y’. Historians undertake to arrange sequences, which, in mathematical terms, is the equivalent of plotting a graph. It is impossible to plot a graph based on the equation ‘x = y’. The leap creates movement in a particular direction, from which it is possible to determine a value. The problem of value inserts morality into mathematics. If the historian arranges sequences—narrates reality into stories, histories—based on no ‘common value’ except the gravitational attraction of force on the historian’s own mind, then there may be no common stories, no history in common (unless, of course, a human society could be engineered in which one mind, and one mind only, was delegated the capacity to perform the task). To what mathematical discipline do we turn to solve equations of morality? [Some would argue that we should not turn to mathematics. Kurt Godel’s first and second theorems of undecidability prove that mathematics can never be complete or consistent. However, for questions of morality, the fact that an undecidable statement must be true is more useful than completeness or consistency. The liar’s paradox poses an insolvable problem for mathematics but an easy question of morality. If the man says ‘I am a liar,’ do not trust him. The equation ‘facts are complete’ is undecidable: the Universe can prove it is true for a particular instant, but it is not possible to prove the statement is true for all conditions. For the moralist, the relevant translation of the equation is not ‘My facts are complete’ but ‘My story is true.’] How do we know which narrating mind we should trust to arrange sequence? Are we doomed to the utter isolation of trusting only our own mind, or the insanity of trusting not even our own mind?”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “The imagination then, I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am. The secondary imagination I consider as an echo of the former, coexisting with the conscious will, yet as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation.”

Owen Barfield: “A better term than ‘particles’ would possibly be ‘the unrepresented.’ Moreover, the atoms, protons and electrons of modern physics are now perhaps more generally regarded, not as particles, but as notational models or symbols of an unknown supersensible or subsensible base. Whatever may be thought about the ‘unrepresented’ background of our perceptions, the familiar world which we see and know around us is a system of collective representations. A representation is something I perceive to be there. As to what is meant by ‘collective’—any discrepancy between my representations and those of my fellow men raises a presumption of unreality and calls for an explanation. It is, however, not necessary to maintain that collectivity is the only test for distinguishing between a representation and a collective representation (though, to creatures for whom insanity is round the corner, it is often likely to be the crucial one). That world depends no less on man’s figuration; and, with that, also on his imagination. The morality of imagination is subtle and deep and far-reaching. The systematic use of imagination, then, will be requisite in the future, not only for the increase of knowledge, but also for saving the appearances from chaos and inanity.”

Chekov: “Perception depends on a shared belief system. In mathematical terms, the shared belief system is the equivalent of assigning a numeric value, ‘let x = 42’. If we stand a computer in front of the Lincoln Memorial and if the computer has a camera, it can receive an image of the statute, including the text of the Gettysburg Address. If the computer does nothing more than store the received images, it will be diagnosed as autistic and the hard drive will soon be full (‘full’ being the paralyzing equivalent of ‘facts = complete’). Since the computer file is generated by a camera, a sane computer with normal, mentally healthy software will recognize (code) the information as a graphic image. Those files can then be processed by software designed to organize, compress, edit and selectively delete the coded information. A word processor could incorporate the image into a text file and edit the picture by changing its size and shape, but since it does not recognize the symbols in the picture as text, it cannot edit the words. The information remains coded as pictures, not as words. The computer’s analysis of the picture might create a stunning interpretation of the constituent parts and relations of the graphical images, reading the mind of the sculptor, but not the mind of the writer of the Gettysburg Address. Active intervention by a coder such as an OCR software application is required to recognize that part of the picture containing the Gettysburg Address and translate it into a text file. If the computer believes that the file is a text file, it will attempt to process the information in the file as text. If that belief is erroneous, if, for example, the file has been slightly altered to make it appear to be a text file when in fact it is a graphic file, the computer may appear demented or crazy and the attempt to communicate the information in the file will appear as gibberish. The computer’s processing of information is dependent on this shared belief system. Part of the process of perception, part of seeing the forest, is the belief, based on communication with other conscious minds, that the particles received by the nervous system are ‘commonly’ (as in common) perceived to be a forest. Without that common belief system, the perceiving mind cannot see the forest for the trees. Perception filters, sorts, organizes and ignores a virtually infinite amount of information received by the nervous system. Perception does so based upon an innate predisposition to filter, sort, organize and ignore information in a certain way and on a shared belief system. During the process of perception, the mind is both active and creative, imposing and creating order based partly upon a collective consciousness and partly upon an innate grammar. This innate grammar cannot be properly understood as the predisposition to organize sequence in linguistic packets, but it does allow for language. I am not referring specifically to the ‘prison house of language’ but the primacy of language integrated within the process of perception is part of what I mean. There are two aspects of language at play here: 1) that language is based on collective representations; and 2) that the ‘Adamic’ power of naming is not simply the exercise of dominion over the things of creation—it is the power of creation. When the God of Genesis names light, light exists: the word is made flesh. In the poetics of the romantics, particularly in Coleridge, the power given to Adam to name the things of creation is the power of sub-creation. The question for the mathematical historian is whether there is an innate grammar in the imagination that re-creates the world in the act of perceiving it such that the re-created world is aligned with the created world.”


Teller: “Is the story in me or in it—or both in me and it?”


Lincoln: “We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.”

Chekov: “Speaking of finding sequence, I suddenly realized why Kirk’s eulogy for Spock resonated with some tune that I could not quite pluck. How did it go? ‘We are assembled here today to pay final respects to our honored dead.’ I used to have both speeches memorized—Lincoln’s and Kirk’s—but I am not certain I am remembering either one accurately. I should check the record. That expression always triggers a sequence of word associations, or, at least, it has done so ever since I was discharged from Star Fleet and took up my current occupation as history teacher. ‘Check the record’ begets ‘record books’ begets ‘cook the books’ begets ‘the raw and the cooked.’ Since human perception of reality has become so dependent upon technological interfaces, virtual reality has become indistinguishable from reality. On those rare occasions when human perception confronts the raw world (as opposed to cooked), the perceiving mind is so conditioned to reconstructing sense impression in accordance with the version of reality recreated through the technological interface, that ‘naked’ perception is simply another virtual reality interface machine. The world seen through the view screen has become, for all intents and purposes, the real world. There have been a number of well-known studies demonstrating the effect on human perception accomplished by altering the primary technological interface that the test subjects relied on in daily life. For example, entire starship crews can be programmed to lose the ability to distinguish between certain colors, sounds and tastes by altering the representation of reality presented to them through their view screens and food replicators. With the boundary between virtual and real becoming increasingly blurred, the distinction between narrated history and the computer record ceased to exist outside the class room. In the class room, academicians fought valiantly to preserve the ancient role of the history maker. Quixote demonstrated more sanity tilting against windmills. The worst part of it was that we understood that we mostly had ourselves to blame. I often cited the example of Frederick Jackson Turner to my students as an illustration of the historians ‘eating their young.’ Turner was, among other notable accomplishments, the historian who promulgated the ‘safety-valve’ thesis regarding the American frontier in the 19th century. In order to illustrate my thesis, I manipulated the history of the history a bit, but certainly with no more license than the sculptor who chips away at the block of granite to reveal the statute of a humming bird that was locked inside. Turner announces the closing of the American frontier at the World’s Fair in Chicago, in 1893. Henry Adams, a scientific history-maker according to his fellow history-makers (and, as such, positioned on the opposite end of the spectrum from Turner, the myth-maker) was also present at the World’s Fair. Adams, though few will see it, becomes a more profound myth-maker than Turner—precisely because Adams was from the house that Turner, in turn, sought to overturn. The year 1893 was a busy one for citizens of Chicago. Like the rest of the country they were struggling through a serious downturn in the economy, including the bank panic which occurred mid-year. In late October, Harrison was assassinated and the free silver issue, which animated Chicago as it had other parts of the country, came to a head. Given the labor unrest in Chicago and the rest of the country, along with the business depression that unsettled the nation, it is perhaps not surprising that the exhibits at the Chicago fair focused exclusively on new technologies, new forces—on the domination of power—and excised the worker, the artist, the man.”

H. Adams: “Chicago asked in 1893 for the first time the question whether the American people knew where they were driving.”

Chekov: “Turner told the story of where the American people had been. Turner has not fared well among the academic historian community, though some have reinvented him from time to time. I do not mean to criticize those who criticize Turner. The scientific history-maker should not be criticized for not seeing what his methodological tools of observation will not allow him to see. The myth-maker, fortunately, is able to treat the fact that millions of Americans believed in the safety-valve frontier as a fact like other facts. The myth’s gravitational attraction on the popular imagination/perception is a more significant fact than the underlying facts supporting or contradicting the myth. It is an understanding tactical diversion by the academic community. It is easier to prove or disprove a fact than to prove or disprove a myth. The question that the myth-maker is allowed to ask is what if there had been no myth of the frontier as ‘safety valve’? If the American of the post civil war era had conceived no notion of possible ‘escape’ to a frontier of opportunity, the government policy of laissez faire would not have been possible. As long as expansion continued, and as long as the players believed that the safety net will bounce them out west after their fall so they can land on their feet, the governmental referee can stand on the sideline and whistle a merry tune. Once the safety valve closes, as it had according to Turner in Chicago in 1893, expansion is no longer possible and the issue of movement necessitates direction—which means control. And control becomes a moral problem. The frontier closes, economic competitors must battle and co-exist in close quarters—movement by any one molecule affects other molecules. Americans could no longer simply move and call any movement ‘good’ because it qualified as expansion. They had to determine a particular direction and direction necessitates a value, a number plugged into an equation in order to plot a graph.”

H. Adams: “The matter was settled at last by the people. For a hundred years, between 1793 and 1893, the American people had hesitated, vacillated, swayed forward and back, between two forces, one simply industrial, the other capitalistic, centralizing, and mechanical. In 1893, the issue came on the single gold standard, and the majority at last declared itself, once and for all, in favor of the capitalistic system with its necessary machinery: … corporations and trusts… monopolies capable of controlling the new energies that America adored.”

Chekov: “Adams went to Chicago fair, as always, searching for education, and the historian knelt before the new dynamo. The dynamo becomes the symbol of the new energies that America adored, generating power for the capitalistic, centralizing force that won the day in 1893 to determine American history, but the dynamo has no moral tether to the world—there is no moral guide, no instruction manual on how to use the power.”

H. Adams: “One lingered long among the dynamos, for they were new, and they gave to history a new phase. Men of science could never understand the ignorance and naiveté of the historian, who, when he came suddenly on a new power, asked naturally what it was; did it pull or did it push? Was it a screw or thrust? Did it flow or vibrate? Was it a wire or a mathematical line? And a score of questions to which he expected answers and was astonished to get none.”

Chekov: “Adams ultimately determined that the only law that held over time was the law of acceleration and that the mind’s only viable response to the law of acceleration was to be prepared to jump, and though he did not explicitly say so, the only way to understand that jump was as a leap of faith. At the end of the line of sequence—at the end of history—the only solution to the equation ‘facts = complete’, the only solution to the Kobayashi Maru test (the ‘no-win’ scenario) is a leap of faith, a blind leap to the true story. In order to narrate his life into story, Adams creates a dualism, which, as he notes, had become more plentiful than binary stars, between Unity and Multiplicity, moving (in conformity with the Second Law of Thermodynamics) from Unity to Multiplicity.”

H. Adams: “Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured by motion, from a fixed point. Psychology helped here by suggesting a unit—the point of history when man held the highest idea of himself as a unit in a unified universe. Eight or ten years of study had led Adams to think he might use the century 1150-1250, expressed in Amiens Cathedral and the works of Thomas Aquinas, as the unit from which he might measure motion down to his own time, without assuming anything as true or untrue, except relation. The movement might be studied at once in philosophy and mechanics. Setting himself to the task, he began a volume which he mentally knew as Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres: a Study of Thirteenth-Century Unity. From that point he proposed to fix a position for himself, which he could label: The Education of Henry Adams: a Study of Twentieth-Century Multiplicity. With the help of these two points of relation, he hoped to project his lines forward and backward indefinitely, subject to correction from anyone who should know better.”


I realize I am on a quest to plot the graph that will fix my position in the world or fix the world in my position.

Last edited by dhspgt on Mon 26 Feb , 2007 3:21 am, edited 7 times in total.

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dhspgt
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Posted: Fri 22 Jul , 2005 11:13 pm
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Imagine, if you will, that all the dhspgt posts in this thread have been deleted. They have been. They will be again.
:cheers

Last edited by dhspgt on Mon 31 Oct , 2005 6:35 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Jnyusa
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Posted: Tue 02 Aug , 2005 7:31 pm
One of the Bronte Sisters
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[sigh]

Why?

I wanted to hear what each of the twelve tribes of villagers was responsible for.

And just btw, erasing a story doesn't make the readers forget what it was about. :neutral:

Jn

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Sassafras
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through the looking glass
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Quote:
And just btw, erasing a story doesn't make the readers forget what it was about
I remember.


[disappointed] Was eagerly awaiting the next chapter.[/disappointed]

:(


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Jnyusa
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Well I had copied the earlier posts to my hard drive but I think the last two or three were posted while I was trying to stay off my computer.

Jn

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Alatar
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Posted: Wed 03 Aug , 2005 10:20 am
of Vinyamar
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Can someone please explain to me what's happened here? Is dhspgt gone?

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Jnyusa
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Don't know.

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Faramond
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The first smileys I've ever seen from dhspgt.

Profound pity this. I was actually going to come in tomorrow and make some comments and things in here.

And dammit I still will, even if I won't have much to work with.


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dhspgt
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I am deleted but undeterred.

Last edited by dhspgt on Mon 31 Oct , 2005 6:36 am, edited 2 times in total.

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