I still haven't been to the Hagia Sophia. Blame me, blame the people who set the entry at $15, that's your call. I don't see the point going to a museum knowing I can't go back the next day. No point tiring your light cavalry with reconnaissance that you're not going to follow up with heavy infantry. Haven't seen the inside of much of anything, in fact.

Though I have looked over the outsides of a good deal of the city. My last stroll took me up almost to the tip of the Golden Horn, which, it seems, I crossed in a kind of fugue state that kept me from realizing I had done it, until I started looking for a bridge across, and glanced around behind me, and below, and thought about where the water should be, if I was on the south side, as I wasn't, it turned out, but I thoguht I was.

Now I'm out of it, I think it was a good idea to have stayed in Russia as long as I did, and no longer, but now I'm here in it, I'm really having a lot of trouble seeing why I should be here, in Turkey. This post helped, a little, but it's really hard to get a view on what I think I'm up to.

However all that turns out, I've learned at least that the shape of the Turkish mosque is a beauty. It's a low, lumpy thing, crouching with its shoulders up and its knees under its chin, but then it's got those marvellous minarets, that stick up like giant toothpicks in a pile of boiled potatoes. I don't know who was the first guy who stuck the two together, and I think I would have hated it if I had been around when they did it first, but I like it now, whatever I feel about the solo minaret, of which I've seen several, a speaker on a cone on a fluted pole that gives up before it gets to the ground, and is just a pole.

Something else I wouldn't have predicted, that learning my roommate might really be a kleptomaniac, I felt like I might if I had heard he had died. And felt glad I had my credit card with me at the time. He can have the rest. I think he already does have a couple pens, but then again I am past master at losing track of my possessions. He can't have my passport, though.

The American embassy is like a huge fortress, positioned to command access to the Champion supermarket at the bottom of the hill.

The Americans I've met in town all have had insane-looking blue eyes, with clear whites and tiny little pinprick pupils, and they're all absolutely incomprehensible. How do these strange beasts interact with each other in their usual habitat, I find myself wondering. It's impossible to imagine them mating, but they must do it, however unpleasant the thought must seem to them. To me, rather.

Your Russian acquaintance differs from your American, in that you can feel a fantastic closeness with a Russian in a short amount of time knowing very little about them, whereas your American, he can tell you everything about himself, but you stay high and dry, somehow. Your French, acquaintance, on the other hand, you feel like he's using you. And your Turkish acquaintance, you're impressed by his consideration and tact, and competence. Of course none of that goes for friends, which are bewilderingly, unpredictably, individual, each one of them, usually, for the most part.

Hope that holds you. _
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10:17:43 AM, Thursday 1 April 2004

Autumn

A touch of cold in the Autumn night
I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
Like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to speak, but nodded;
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children.


--T. E. Hulme _
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06:30:33 AM, Thursday 1 April 2004

What volupty! _
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03:38:53 AM, Thursday 1 April 2004

I know you've been waiting for an attack on string theory that was easy to read and understand, so here it is, enjoy.

That's thanks to a three-toed sloth, where there's also this post, a wordy yet efficient thump on the head to some intelligent design theorist I think I read about on metafilter, though it may have been somewhere else.

That's all for now. Except that I have a new cut as of this morning in a very surprising place. Did the cat get in there? If so, how did she do it without me noticing? _
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12:34:53 PM, Monday 29 March 2004

"Walt Whitman has gone back to the innocent style of Adam, when the animals filed before him one by one and he called each of them by its name."

I’m not going to write about that, but I like it, and I wanted to post it up top where it won't get in the way. It's by George Santayana, and you can find it here.

The rest of this post will be long. If you don't want to read it, you can take the elevator down.

In the same place I got that Santayana quote, you can also find this:

The Homeric times must have been full of ignorance and suffering. In those little barbaric towns, in those camps and farm, in those shipyards, there must have been much insecurity and superstition. That age was singularly poor in all that concerns the convenience of life and the entertainment of the mind with arts and sciences. Yet it had a sense for civilizations. That machinery of life which men were beginning to devise appealed to them as poetical; they knew its ultimate justification and studied its incipient processes with delight. The poetry of that simple and ignorant age was, accordingly, the sweetest and sanest that the world has known; the most faultless in taste, and the most even and lofty in inspiration. Without lacking variety and homeliness, it bathed all things human in the golden light of morning; it clothed sorrow in a kind of majesty, instinct with both self-control and heroic frankness. Nowhere else can we find so noble a rendering of human nature, so spontaneous a delight in life, so uncompromising a dedication to beauty, and such a gift of seeing beauty in everything. Homer, the first of poets, was also the best and the most poetical.

If you don't read John and Belle have a blog (and you should), you'll have missed a few remarkable recent posts on "imaginative resistance in fiction".

Here, it's made clear, the imaginative resistance in question isn't a resistance to imagining things physically impossible or strange, or psychologically, but morally deviant worlds.

Not worlds in which people behave badly (that’s easy); nor ones in which people have deviant beliefs about morality by our lights (again, easy); nor ones in which peculiar conditions make peculiar moral demands of characters; rather, worlds in which, counterfactually, moral truths are different than (we take them to be) in the actual world.

And that sounded easy to me, but I turned out to be wrong.

1) In killing her baby Giselda did the right thing; after all, it was a girl.

Let 1) be the first sentence of a story. Set it alongside these first sentences from Stephen Baxter’s sci-fi novel Flux :

2) Dura woke with a start. There was something wrong. The photons smelled funny.

[…]

Regarding 2), the first thing one thinks is that in this fictional world there is someone named Dura – who may not be human, but is sufficiently human-like to sleep and be startled – capable of the olfactory detection of photons.

It might, of course, turn out Dura is crazy or hallucinating; or perhaps ‘smelled funny’ is slang for ‘tripped an alarm on the detection equipment’. But the reader probably defaults to the ‘straight’ reading, even though it is objectively the most fantastic. Such, such are the wonders of fantastic fiction.

Turning to 1), we are likely to give about equal weight to three candidate readings. First, the narrator is morally unreliable, i.e. the author has decided to speak in the voice of someone bad, or mad. Second, the narrator is ironic, i.e. half stepping into Giselda’s character by way of informing us she is bad, or mad. Third, the situation is not as it seems, e.g. we will presently learn that Giselda knows any baby girl of hers will instantly be traded for an evil changeling. So, despite appearances, she is doing the right thing even by our lights. There are other possibilities. It might turn out that ‘baby’ means project. (Giselda works in a company in which it is an in-house joke that ‘it’s a girl!’ means ‘it didn’t work out.’ It all goes back to the sad case of Smith, Giselda’s supervisor, who wanted a boy and whose wife had seven girls.)

Not to harp on the fact that first sentences of stories are open-ended affairs, the point is this: in one case – the light-sniffing case - we easily settle into a ‘straight’ reading on which something arguably impossible in the real world is simply and flatly true in the fictional world. In the other case – the baby-killing case - the strictly analogous ‘straight’ reading is so far down the imaginative list that we probably never so much as consider it. It does not readily even occur to us that the author might be envisioning a world unlike our own in this respect: here it is good to kill baby girls.

The conclusion of the argument which follows is fascinating:

Morally deviant fictional worlds are (at least in the most interesting cases) a bit like carving a portrait bust in marble. You might think the difficulty is due to the fact that morality is hard stuff. And you wouldn’t be wrong. (You shouldn’t murder people – really, you shouldn’t.)...

But the real trick ends up being: you carve your morally deviant fiction wrongly – just right - so your audience approves the result because it looks right, even though it’s actually wrong. It’s a neat optical illusion. And now having secured your audience’s tacit consent to a rather alien shape, you are able to imply deviant things (I suppose the sculptural analogy would be: you paint the surface of the bust that everyone has already agrees looks just like the man - and what strange results you will achieve.) The audience may find itself nodding to deviant results, and never be quite able to put its finger on the point at which the departure was made. (Not that it's so well hidden, but you do have to think about it.)

Which isn't what I wanted to talk about, but is what got me thinking about what I wanted to talk about (you can also see the related posts, and also The Young Visiters, a not long novel, which I recommend).

Which also started with that Santayana bit on Homer, who was who I thought of first as an author that makes my morals bend funny, that's if I want to follow the story properly. I have to think it's bad, and punishable by divine action, that Agamemnon has taken Achilles' girl, but not bad, and in fact good, that Achilles has taken a lot of captive girls, and I can even measure his goodness by that.

The brutality of Homer's world is matched by the elevation of his poetry, if I follow Santayana right, just as the relative ease of our lives is matched by the impure roughness and brutality of our poets, even our best ones. He strikes me as willfully ignoring the extent to which Homer takes sides in the story – he's by no means an impartial teller with an uncompromising dedication to beauty before the moral point, or really long lists. (Santayana also strikes me as taking too much Whitman's word on Whitman, but then I don't have a better reading of Whitman on hand, so I'll let that lie.)

So I got to thinking about what I think about I read Wayne Booth, for an example. How are you supposed to know where the moral ground is in a story? There's also the famous example of The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, which people read more than one way concerning Stephen's moral status. I have trouble thinking there's one reading that stands behind the other, as a trap for naive readers.

And I have even more difficulty in a story like Jackals and Arabs. What kind of moral world is that? If you'll let me multiply examples without discussion, there's also The Castle, where nothing seems to make any moral sense, which they might if you could stand in K.'s shoes, which I at least can't. I happened on this expression today in the Aogemadaeca: "The darkness there is so dense that it can be grasped with the hand."

In other words, it seems there's a lot more categorizing and cubbyholing to do here. Where do you stand, morally, when you read this?

1. Ahura Mazda spake unto Spitama Zarathushtra, saying:
I have made every land dear (to its people), even though it had no charms whatever in it: had I not made every land dear (to its people), even though it had no charms whatever in it, then the whole living world would have invaded the Airyana Vaeja.

2. The first of the good lands and countries which I, Ahura Mazda, created, was the Airyana Vaeja, by the Vanguhi Daitya.
Thereupon came Angra Mainyu, who is all death, and he counter-created the serpent in the river and Winter, a work of the Daevas.

3. There are ten winter months there, two summer months; and those are cold for the waters, cold for the earth, cold for the trees. Winter falls there, the worst of all plagues. [Hum 35: "Ten are there the winter months, two the summer months, and even then [in summer] the waters are freezing, the earth is freezing, the plants are freezing; there is the center of winter, there is the heart of winter, there winter rushes around, there (occur) most damages caused by storm."]

4. The second of the good lands and countries which I, Ahura Mazda, created, was the plain which the Sughdhas inhabit.
Thereupon came Angra Mainyu, who is all death, and he counter-created the locust, which brings death unto cattle and plants.

5. The third of the good lands and countries which I, Ahura Mazda, created, was the strong, holy Mouru.
Thereupon came Angra Mainyu, who is all death, and he counter-created plunder and sin.

6. The fourth of the good lands and countries which I, Ahura Mazda, created, was the beautiful Bakhdhi with high-lifted banner.
Thereupon came Angra Mainyu, who is all death, and he counter-created the ants and the ant-hills. [et cetera]

It's clear that Angra Mainyu isn't good, but I hardly condemn him. I read it as an amoral spectator. I'm more concerned with what lands are linked with which bad things than with judging anybody. There's probably some things that are reading against the grain, but that sort of scholastic reading seems to be encouraged by the passage. And if that's legitimate, why can't I let Santayana read the story of a poet shaping his material in the Iliad? Because that's may be there, for all I know. More surprising things have happened. And then there's other stories which are just as hard to find your feet in, morally speaking, like some fairy tales. What do we do about them?

All of which is to say, this is complicated stuff, and I'd like some classificatory clearing-up done, please.

Goodness, that rambles. I suppose it would have been easier just to say that there exist, in addition to morally deviant stories in the interesting way John Holbo means it, stories that require moral twists to read (like the Iliad), stories that can be read in two consistant ways that seem morally deviant to each other, stories where it's not at all clear what the morality is, stories that can be read irrelevantly to their morality, and stories where the morality, while clear and possibly non-deviant, is entirely uninteresting and has nothing to do with the point of the story, unlike many stories whose action is all moral. Hope that clears the air. _
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12:15:42 PM, Monday 29 March 2004

The Poet's Testament

I give back to the earth what the earth gave,
All to the furrow, none to the grave,
The candle's out, the spirit's vigil spent;
Sight may not follow where the vision went.

I leave you but the sound of many a word
In mocking echoes haply overheard,
I sang to heaven. My exile made me free,
from world to world, from all worlds carried me.

Spared by the furies, for the Fates were kind,
I paced the pillared cloisters of the mind;
All times my present, everywhere my place,
Nor fear, nor hope, nor envy saw my face.

Blow what winds would, the ancient truth was mine,
And friendship mellowed in the flush of wine,
And heavenly laughter, shaking from its wings
Atoms of light and tears for mortal things.

To trembling harmonies of field and cloud,
Of flesh and spirit was my worship vowed.
Let form, let music, let all quickening air
Fulfil in beauty my imperfect prayer.


--George Santayana _
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05:35:32 AM, Monday 29 March 2004

Somehow, I just can't get used to this sort of thing:

According to Greek Politis newspaper, recorded the Greek side's thesis that as long as Annan Plan is presented to referendum, who would participate has to be determined, Papadopulos said that TRNC citizens' manner on voting in referendum on April 20th.

Today is particularly rich in these:

I think Prodi’s letter as an illegal intervention targeted politics in Italy using European Commission Head’s position fatally. He approaches to the viewpoints with unacceptable viewpoints: He has still evaluated Italy as an invasion country targeting on direct reasons of war in Iraq. For that reason, it tries to help readers to accept Italy as a country participated to the war oneself. However, in that period, our government has indicated to the U.S. that we would not participate to the military operations satisfied himself by only political support.

_
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05:24:28 AM, Monday 29 March 2004