Fatalistic Musings

“I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act, but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.” - G. K. Chesterton

“A man’s character is his fate.”  - Heraclitus

What is Fate?  Again, this is one of those rhetorical questions that I don’t feel I can afford to take rhetorically.  So, I’ve come up with an answer:  Fate is the force through which human narrative expectations enforce their projections on the ‘divine’.  Anyway.  If I am saying that gods - divine is a more inclusive term, but I don’t know that it is always applicable - that the gods are already a projection of some kind of psychic force of belief made real, then it makes sense that this same human psychic force can influence the actions of the divine (including the gods).

As for narrative expectations....  Christopher Booker says that there are only seven basic plots; that all others are in some way derivative of these.  I’m going to be honest here and say that with everything that’s been going on with me lately, and the rest of the stuff I’ve been looking in to, I haven’t had a chance to read this in detail.  If you want a quick and dirty version, have a look at this review by Chris Bateman.  But it is interesting if it is true.  At the very least, I am willing to accept that human expectations of stories are culturally framed.  We have expectations, and even if the order in which things happen isn’t completely formulaic, it is pretty rare that we are completely taken by surprise.  As an interesting aside, I think that in more modern.... or post modern?  Gah, lets just say contemporary fiction writing, the realization of this is something that writers have been actively fighting against, and if they are successful, I don’t know what impact it will have on the mass psychic shaping force (i.e. fate).  

But back to Booker’s idea.  The point is that we have expectations of how stories should go - we have ideas of how *characters should progress*.  These expectations are clearly encoded in our mythology.  Joseph Campbell (and again I’m only passingly familiar) boils the seven plots even further, positing that there is only *one* basic hero myth:

“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

So it is clear that humanity has expectations from the divine, and that these expectations conform to a narrative form.  This is fate.  Fate predetermines outcomes based on these culturally influenced (bounded is too strong) narrative expectations.  Of course, there are always different twists a story can take.  My friend C is an author, and form what I gather, sometimes characters just don’t behave the way you want them too.  Or expect them to.  You mean to write one thing, and then realize something better works.  And sometimes the whole ‘stories having a life of their own’ trope touches a little too close to home.  Maybe that’s why I’m caught up in this whole ‘authorship’ metaphor.  

So how strong is fate?  Who does it effect?  Everyone?  Or just potentially anyone?  The answer I am going to offer is that those who are more strongly defined by the narrative are those more strongly affected by it.  So the gods (at least the way I’ve been talking about them, and I’m being less inclusive on purpose)?  Yes, absolutely, their lives are very much defined by fate.  I think that it explains a lot really - it explains why prophecy becomes self-fulfilling for them.  Once a story enters the collective (un?)consciousness, the expectations of its fulfillment is reinforced by the prescriptive power of Fate.  I think there are gods that learned this too late, and now their best shot at survival is is to convince the world that they are somehow clever enough to find a loophole.  If it is acceptably ‘in character’ for them to cheat fate, and they can actually figure out a way to do it.....  Then maybe they’ll be able to pull it off at the last minute.  Well.  Good luck with that.

So if the gods are more constrained by fate, then lets say that those who are tied to them directly - tied by fate in some way, I don’t mean just your general worshipper or even necessarily a priest or whatever - are going to be affected by it in some way as well.  But to what degree?  If there is a human who is tied in this way, say....  caught up in the web of the divine...  does the fact that they are also human give them a channel into the collective unconscious that they can tap into or direct?  Do they lose that as they get more tied to the divine?  If you write yourself into the story, does that constrain your power as a author?  I don’t think we can be both in this context, especially because individual authors ultimately have so little power.  So, as I said to a friend of mine, the further into the story you go, the less control you have.  As you become a character, and become more a part of the mass subconscious that powers Fate (and are powered thus by more authors), expectations of who you are will develop, and you will become constrained by those expectations.  Maybe the only shot we have is to make ourselves out to be who we want to be, and less as who we are?

Now if only we could answer that one.

Moving on...  There’s an academic theory that says that in a lot of mythologies, there are forces that represent either older, more primordial beliefs, when survival against the elements  was a prime concern.  Religion was developed at first to appease these forces, and eventually gods were created to give a face to them - to humanize them.  To create a buffer through which the chaotic elements could be controlled.  In Mythology this plays out through physical conflicts - the Greeks versus the Titans, the Norse versus the Giants, even the Irish have the Formori and the Tuatha de Danaan.  Now, these monsters show up in the stories, but as antagonists.  Are they also bound by Fate?  What if we take this theory a little further and say that the gods are the creation of the human collective unconsciousness, and that their role is to provide a buffer over forces which humans have no ability or expectation of control?  The stories, then, become the way to try and orchestrate that control, through the Gods.  We believe they can control the lightning, the storm, the sea, love, the harvest.  We give them that power, because we need something to have it.  So we create a psychic buffer against that chaos, and our belief guides it, and constrains it.

But its just a buffer - there are always new monsters.  And sometimes they’ve just been banished, and the stories promise us they will return.  So we keep needing the gods?  Except that there are a lot of dead religions out there, or effectively dead ones.  Sure there are a handful of neopagans who call on them, but real influence in the human subconscious?  They are still here because we still have the stories.  But there aren’t any *new* stories.  Maybe that’s the problem.  It doesn’t matter what they do now, because their time really has passed?  Maybe there is a connection here with Fate and Faith.  Maybe I need to think about this more, and have just been rambling on for far too long.

“The future was with Fate. The present was our own.” - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Weird Dream

"That which is dreamed can never be lost, can never be undreamed." 

— Neil Gaiman

I haven't written here in longer than I'd intended.  I'm still trying to figure out *how* to talk about some things.  Meanwhile, I'll entertain you with a dream.

Some context.  I have memories of being a kid, sitting out on the front porch in the evening with my grandfather.  Often I'd be reading, or sometimes just sitting.  We had one of those big porch swings, and he'd come out with his evening rye and ginger (he had one every night) and sit with me, quietly.  Sometimes I'd look up from my book, or just look over, and he'd have been watching me with this inscrutable look, but he never said anything.  Remembering now, it makes me wonder if he knew anything...  Or anything about me, I should specify.  He knew a lot of things.


The other night, I dreamed that I was a kid, sitting out on the porch swing reading, and my grandfather came out to sit with me, and we sat for a while.  Only when I looked up from my book, it wasn't my grandfather at all.  It was Odin - the one eyed Norse god.  He was looking at me with his one eye, drink in hand.  It could have been a rye and ginger, but I hear mead is more his thing.  He was smiling this crafty smile, a judging smile.  Like he did know things, or was planning them, or both.  And kid-me was really uncomfortable, and knew somethings was wrong, but not what. And he started laughing, or chuckling I suppose.

And that's all I remember, except I didn't sleep well the rest of the night either.

"Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly." 

— Neil Gaiman 

Option 2?

“If there were no God, it would have been necessary to invent him.”

 - Volaire

So, don’t mistake this as a purely metaphysical argument.

The question of what the gods are, where they come from, is from my admittedly peculiar perspective, a practical one.  It’s an important question, though I’m not going to elaborate on the reasons.

Someone gave me a different explanation from the one I was exploring last time, however, so, let’s explore that a bit.

How about, instead of some sort of non-linear time historical palimpsest model, we accept that all of that there is only one god, who made everything, and all the other pantheons are based on, at the best, misinformation.

Now, that said, there are beings that we *think* are gods.  They’re really more like… demons or fallen angels?  Or both?  I’m not clear on the details, but the point is that even if they aren’t what we think they are (or what humanity has historically thought of them), they exist and have some kind of power.  They want (more?) power (over us?) and worship (which, I guess, is the same thing they would want if they are ‘real’ gods?), but they lie, they don’t need to have experiences any of the history attributed to them.  I suppose in theory they don’t need to stick to a particular role, either?  “I’m, errr… Vishnu, yeah, that guy.”

Now I don’t think we can necessarily relate this creator god directly to the Christian “God”, because then we’re stuck with all the well known science-versus-religion debates.  Evolution, age of the earth, etc etc.  While I’m willing to accept that the Rules (science) don’t have to apply to gods (or whatever) in particular, I think they still need to apply to the physical world.  Other things can also be true, or true-ish, but I’m not really willing to junk all of science.  This has some implications about the special-snowflake status of humanity, and if someone really wants (Or, since I am sure no one else really reads this, if I ever feel inclined), I could elaborate, possibly.  However I will say that if you are going to create a world and set up rules for it to work by, why would you make them in a way that counter proof of your own existence?  And don’t give me that ‘the devil made dinosaur bones to lead us away from God’ crap.  The devil, or the demons, would have to have been really busy in the last 4000 years to successfully fake all the data that we’ve got now, and while there is missing data and different interpretations, there isn’t enough legitimate discrepancy for me to believe that this has been ongoing with no opposition.  Unless god sucks at science, or is incapable of countering the actions of the opposition, propositions which seem equally implausible.

So rants aside, according to this theory there is one god.  We don’t know very much about it, or, possibly lots of things we know about it are wrong.  I don’t know if I am supposed to believe the same sorts of thing in this scenario – that humanity is somehow responsible for the gods who then exist retroactively.  It can’t be true, because then we surely would have come up with more than one (or, it *can* be true and we *have* come up with more than one, this paradigm is just better developed in a way to discredit opposition…  Which just returns us to the previous theory).  So if this god exists, it has to be responsible for doing a lot more, and yet at the same time has been terribly unsuccessful at making sure it gets proper credit.  Since you know, until the past…600 years, only a pretty small faction of people knew about this ‘one god’ theory, and those who knew have mostly been fighting with each other over who has got it right. 

So…  one God whose ability to interfere in the human world is quite limited, then?  And who somewhat ironically needs to rely on humans to spread word of its existence to the rest of the world that it created?  However we have already established that what we know about it is mostly wrong…  So maybe it doesn’t particularly care what is thought about it?  Or else the opposing ‘demons’ as a group have been more successful in their efforts to thwart it?  They are more powerful as a group, if not individually?  Hard for god to oppose so many enemies?  I stand by my observations re: science however. 

If any of that is true, then god certainly can’t be omnipotent.  And we don’t know anything about what it its interest are in humanity (if any), and what its relationship to us is.  My grammar is horrible, please forgive me.  It seems like it is more interested in opposing the actions of its rivals (demons) than doing anything for humanity specifically.  But I don’t know what the demons are doing to merit this particular attention, other than setting themselves up as ‘false’ gods.

If this is a fight over humans, then I don’t think that god, if it exists, has ever been fighting from a position of strength.  There have always, to my knowledge, been more people who believe in other religions than Christians (who can’t have it all right as regards their own God anyway).  Christianity, and even Judaism, is not the oldest known religion.  It seems off to me.  Honestly I’ve been an atheist for a while, and nothing I have learned recently has really got me thinking that this god is Right, or the only one.  It makes more sense to me that there are many gods, if there have to be any.  Apparently, there does.

Whatever the context, I don’t know anyone’s motives.  There is just fighting.  I’m really not much of a fighter, so it is hard to figure out where I should be fitting in to any of this. 

I have more semi coherent thoughts, but I’m running out of steam.  Is it time to sleep?  It just might be…

“I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.”

- Richard Dawkins

Post-Midnight Ramblings

[These are the sorts of questions that have been keeping me up at night lately.  Eventually, I did show them to N, who encouraged me to put them out here.  Hello, world, I swear, I'm not crazy.  At least, not yet.]

This must be what going mad feels like. 

– Simon Tam, Firefly

Let’s start with an assumption. Let’s assume the gods are real.

Which gods, friends and potential readers? 

For now, for the purpose of this speculation, let’s say… all of them. At least any of them who have been ever truly worshipped, to set aside those that (lets hope) live only in story. Just as an example, I am going to assume for the sake of my fleeting sanity that there is no real Cthulhu.

The rest are fair game.

It’s a real relativist, postmodern proposition, because they all come with their own origin stories, their own stories about how the world was made, and what the world even *is*. And, of course, these are all contradictory, or at least overlapping. And the gods have changed. Once, Aphrodite was an invasive eastern deity, and now she is generally accepted as a legitimate Olympian. She came from a shell, which is like the Levant, perhaps? Metaphor or truth? Is there even a difference? Can there be, if we stick to our assumption?

I don’t know, at this point. I wish my friend N was available. N is a philosopher, and I am not – not really. I’ve flirted with social theory (I admit I played it cool), but I don’t find myself especially well armed for thinking about these sorts of questions. Hypothetical as they may be. N is asleep, or ….otherwise occupied.

I have a tendency to distance myself from conflict. This is just one example. I am thinking about these big questions because it gives me some distance. I’ll cop to that. There are a lot of very specific things that I’m just not equipped to consider at the moment. That’s right, your author (narrator?) is taking refuge is metaphysics. That’s how you know things are rough, I think – when you delve into the real existential issues for comfort.

Is it working?

Of course it isn’t working. There isn’t any comfort to be had from answering this one. But let’s play along.

Apparently, gods evolve. They’re like people that way, but they are also like, apparently, the Justice League. This is not my analogy, but I’ll run with it. The composition of the Justice League has changed over time, although there are some constant core members. Their pasts have been represented in multiple ways. Some of them have been, at times, completely reimagined. They have multiple alternate pasts, and alternate futures, and sometimes they exist in wholly alternate universes, or parallel ones, or both. But the characters are still essentially the same, and they’re generally recognizable. But what make them who they are – the stories? Their general origin? Their powers? Their names? Some shifting, contextual, combination of these things? Most people (well, okay, most ‘western’ people, maybe?) have some idea about what the Justice League is, even if they don’t read the comics or seen the cartoons, or haven’t for some time. They might know that it involves superheroes, or be able to name a few key members. 

I think I’m losing the thread of where I was intending to go, but I’m not at my most rational. Let’s leave off how people relate to the gods (the hypothetically real ones) as a parallel for how people relate to the Justice League, and get back to the story issue. How they’re written. Because, as fun (and distracting!) as it might be to follow the analogy down different paths, it’s in the context of writers that the analogy was first made to me. They change over time, and they’ve got different writers, and the writers want to tell different stories – stories that are relevant to them. Even in comics, it isn’t just about escapism... I know there is some guy (or some girl maybe? Honestly, probably some guy) who said something about how we can’t ever really escape through fiction, because our thoughts and imaginations are shaped by our own personal experiences within the context of the world we live in that gives us those experiences…. Yeah, circular, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true, in some sense. It’s like… why African Bushmen don’t write science fiction. I’m losing it again. Its slippery, and it probably doesn’t really matter.

So, if all the gods are real, and we can accept that they (like the Justice League), have been conceived (by people – think of us as the writers) different times and in different contexts, then by extension, the past is, or has been, not a solid fixed thing. It has changed. Does that mean we can change it? Can we – current writers we – arbitrarily change things that have already been written? Is reality some sort of palimpsest (I had to look for that word – I heard it in an undergrad class once. Monks reusing paper, cleaning off the old ink, but the impression being left behind, new words over top but the old ones bleeding through…)? Maybe that makes sense, as much as anything does at this point. I wish N was awake – maybe I would show N this. Or C. Maybe not. Maybe I’ll delete it in the morning. Maybe not. Maybe I’ll put it on the web. I’ve already thought of a domain. I don’t know. People would probably lock me up if this ever got associated with me. Or I’d just get written off as some wacko and never get a real job. Or… worse. I don’t even know anymore. Sensing a theme yet?

I can’t even think about what this means for science right now, but that’s big too. Like… So we have a world tree, and seven different levels of the world (I was just looking at that so it is fresh in my head), but also gravity fixing us to one little planet spinning around one little start out of millions… Well, gravity has more of an impact (ha) on our everyday lives, but is it more important? How does this work wth the palimpsest thing?

I don’t know where I’m going with this any more. I don’t like to write things this messy, but everything is a mess, so maybe it’s just more appropriate. I don’t know how much I care, if the gods are real, or whatever it means. I want my family (my real family – the ones who raised me, in case there is any question on that account) to be okay, I want my friends to be okay, and I want, well, me, to be okay.

I’m still too worked up to sleep, so I’m going to try and put this all out of my mind with some healthy simulated violence. Hello, Left For Dead, good bye real world.

Introduction

Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?

-Morpheus, The Matrix

Welcome, internet readers.

I am starting this because it seems like as good a place as any to sort through some, well, questions and issues that I have about some fairly bizarre things that are affecting my life at the moment.

I'm not going to tell you I'm not crazy, because all I've got is my word to give you on that front.  But I hope you'll bear with me - I'm sure it will at least be an interesting trip.

Just keep in mind, I'm not starting this for you.  I'm starting this for me.  It's a test to see if I can make this weirdness palatable for public consumption.  Anonymity is my safety net in case of failure.

I also know I'm not alone.  For one thing, There are people who know me who will likely read this.  In a broader sense....  I just know, I'm not the only one whose found themself embroiled in this particular wacky situation.  Maybe someone out there will have some advice.

At this point, I'm willing to keep an open mind.  I haven't got much else to go on.

This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.

-Morpheus, The Matrix