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Post by neil on May 5, 2021 15:29:09 GMT -5
Janiva Ellis Catchphrase Coping Mechanism, 2019 oil on linen - 86 × 70 in - 47canal.us
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Post by neil on May 15, 2021 9:14:15 GMT -5
2666 - Roberto Bolaño - Released in 2004, a year after Bolaño's death. It may be a thing worth knowing, which thing I certainly did not know at the outset, that 2666 is a date, not, as one might reasonably suppose a street address or a lock combination. This date, this 2666, is referenced nowhere in the text. In another of Bolaño's novels it is mentioned tangentially as having to do with an apocryphal graveyard. All I know is that Bolaño is a whale of a story teller and that 912 pages in English(1128 pages in Spanish), while at times a challenge, are not too much to ask. southwestreview.com/magazine/volume-104-number-1/roberto-bolanos-2666-a-mystery-solved/
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Post by neil on May 18, 2021 12:50:34 GMT -5
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Post by neil on May 18, 2021 13:02:33 GMT -5
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Post by neil on May 18, 2021 13:02:44 GMT -5
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Post by neil on May 18, 2021 13:02:58 GMT -5
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Post by neil on May 18, 2021 13:03:13 GMT -5
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Post by neil on May 18, 2021 13:03:28 GMT -5
PROJECT HAIL MARY - Andy Weir - 2021 Chapter 7 A flood of thoughts hit me all at the same time: We’re not alone. This is an alien. That ship is weird, how does the engineering of that work? Do they live here? Is this their star? Am I starting an interplanetary incident by wandering into alien territory?!
“Breathe,” I tell myself.
Okay, one thing at a time. What if this is another ship from Earth? One I don’t remember? Heck, it took me a few days to remember my name. Maybe Earth sent multiple ships with different designs? Like, for redundancy or to increase the odds that at least one of them works. Maybe that ship is the Praise Allah or the Blessings of Vishnu or something.
I look all around the control room. There are screens and controls for everything, but there’s nothing for a radio. The EVA panel has some radio controls, but that’s obviously just for talking to crewmates when they’re outside.
If they’d sent multiple ships, surely they would have had some radio system so we could talk to each other.
Also, that ship…it’s insane.
I cycle through the navigation console screens until I find the Radar panel. I’d noticed it earlier, but didn’t think much of it. I assume it’s there so I can get near asteroids or other objects and not collide with them.
After a few halting attempts, I manage to turn it on. It immediately spots the other ship and sounds an alarm. The shrill noise hurts my ears.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” I say. I frantically scan the panel until I see a button labeled “Mute Proximity Alert.” I press it and the noise stops.
I scan the rest of the screen. There’s a lot of data here, all in a window titled “BLIP-A.” I guess if there were multiple contacts I’d get multiple windows. Whatever. It’s all just raw numbers about the reading. Nothing useful like an isometric Star Trek scan or anything.
“Velocity” is zero. They have matched my velocity exactly. That can’t be a coincidence.
“Range” is 217 meters. I’m assuming that’s the distance to the closest part of the other ship. Or maybe the average. No, it would be the closest part. The point of this system is probably to avoid collisions.
Speaking of collisions—217 meters is a ridiculously small distance compared to the size of a solar system. There’s no way this is a coincidence. That ship positioned itself here on purpose because I’m here.
Another reading, “Angular width,” is 35.44 degrees. Okay, some basic math should handle this.
I bring up the Utility panel on the main screen and launch the calculator app. Something 217 meters away is occupying 35.44 degrees of the view. Presuming the radar can see in all 360 degrees (it would be a pretty cruddy radar if it couldn’t)…I type some numbers into the calculator to do an ARCTAN operation, and:
The ship is 139 meters long. Roughly.
I bring the Astrophage panel up on another screen. The little map there shows that the Hail Mary is just 47 meters long. So yeah. The alien ship is three times the size of mine. There’s just no way Earth sent something that big.
And the shape. What is up with that shape? I turn my attention back to the Petrovascope (which is now just acting as a camera).
The center of the ship is diamond-shaped—a rhombus. Well, I guess it’s an octahedron, really. Looks like it has eight faces, each triangular. That part alone is about the size of my ship.
The diamond is connected by three thick rods (I don’t know what else to call them) to a wide trapezoidal base. That looks like it might be the rear. And in front of the diamond is a narrow stalk (just making up terms at this point) that has four flat panels attached parallel to the main ship axis. Maybe solar panels? The stalk continues forward to a pyramid-shaped nose cone. Nose pyramid, I guess.
Every part of the hull is flat. Even the “rods” have flat faces.
Why would anyone do that? Flat panels are a terrible idea. I don’t know anything about who made this, but presumably they need some kind of atmosphere inside, right? Huge, flat panels are awful at that.
Maybe this is just a probe and not an actual ship. Maybe there’s no atmosphere inside because there’s nothing alive inside. I might be looking at an alien artifact instead of a ship.
Still the most exciting moment in human history.
So it’s Astrophage-powered. That was the steady Petrova-frequency glow I saw earlier. Interesting that they have the same propulsion tech as we do. But considering it’s the best energy-storage medium possible, that’s not a surprise. When European mariners first came across Asian mariners, no one was surprised they both used sails.
But the “why.” That’s what gets me. Some entity aboard (either a computer or a crew) decided to come to my ship. How did they even know I was here?
Same way I saw them, I guess. The massive IR light coming off my engines. And since the rear of my ship was pointed at Tau Ceti, that means I was shining a 540-trillion-watt flashlight in their direction. Depending on where they were at the time, I might have appeared even brighter than Tau Ceti itself. At least, in the Petrova frequency.
So they can see the Petrova frequency. And so can I.
I flip through the Spin Drive console screens until I find one labeled “Manual Control.” When I select it, a warning dialog pops up:
MANUAL CONTROL IS RECOMMENDED ONLY FOR EMERGENCIES. ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO ENTER MANUAL CONTROL MODE?
I tap “Yes.”
It brings up another dialog.
SECOND CONFIRMATION: TYPE “Y-E-S” TO ENTER MANUAL CONTROL MODE.
I groan and type Y-E-S.
The panel finally takes me to the Manual Control screen. It’s a bit scary. Not because it’s complex, but because it’s so simple.
There are three sliders labeled “Drive 1,” “Drive 2,” and “Drive 3,” each presently at zero. The top of each slider is labeled “107 N.” The N must mean “Newtons”—a unit of force. I guess if I threw all three drives to maximum, it would give me 30 million Newtons. That’s about sixty times the thrust a jumbo jet’s engines produce during takeoff.
Science teachers know a lot of random facts.
There are a bunch more little sliders. In groups labeled “Yaw,” “Pitch,” and “Roll.” There must be little spin drives on the sides of the ship to adjust its orientation. I can definitely see why it’s a bad idea to mess with this panel. One screw-up and I’ll put the ship into a spin that tears it apart.
But at least they thought of that. There’s a button in the middle of the screen labeled “Zero All Rotation.” Good.
I check the Petrovascope again. Blip-A hasn’t moved. It’s on my port side, and slightly forward.
I flick the Petrovascope back to Petrova-frequency mode, and the screen turns mostly black. As before, I can see the Petrova line in the background, occluded by Blip-A.
“Let’s see if you have anything to say…” I mumble. Spin drive 2 is in the center of the ship. Its thrust will be along my central axis and hopefully won’t introduce attitude change. We’ll see.
I set it to 0.1% power for one second, then back to 0.
Even with just one engine, at one one-thousandth power, for one second, the ship drifts a bit. The “Velocity” value for Blip-A on the Radar panel shows 0.086 m/s. That tiny thrust set my ship moving about 8 centimeters per second.
But I don’t care about that. I care about the other ship.
I watch the Petrovascope. A bead of sweat separates from my forehead and floats away. I feel like my heart is going to beat out of my chest.
Then, the rear of the ship lights up in the Petrova frequency for one second. Just like I did.
“Wow!”
I flick the drive on and off several times: three short bursts, a long one, and one more short one. There’s no message there. I just want to see what they do with it.
They were more prepared this time. Within seconds, the other ship repeats the pattern.
I gasp. And I smile. Then I wince. Then I smile again. This is a lot to take in.
That was too fast for any probe to respond. If it had remote control or something, the controllers would have to be at least a few light-minutes away—there’s just nothing around here that could be housing them.
There is an intelligent life-form aboard that ship. I am about 200 meters away from an honest-to-God alien!
I mean…my ship is powered by aliens. But this new one is intelligent!
Oh my gosh! This is it! First Contact! I’m the guy! I’m the guy who meets aliens for the first time!
The Blip-A (that’s what I’m calling their ship for now) fires up its engines again briefly. I watch closely to memorize the sequence, but it’s just a single low-intensity light. They’re not signaling. They’re maneuvering.
I check the Radar panel. Sure enough, the Blip-A brings itself alongside the Hail Mary and holds position at 217 meters.
I flick through the Scientific panel to bring the normal telescopic cameras back up. The Petrovascope’s normal-light camera is just to orient things for the main scope itself. The telescope has much better resolution and clarity. I guess I’m too excited to think clearly because it took me until now to think of it.
The image is far clearer through the main telescope. I guess it’s just an insanely high-resolution camera, because I can still zoom in and out with no loss of clarity. I have a very good view of the Blip-A now.
The ship’s hull is a mottled gray and tan. The pattern seems random and smooth, like someone started mixing paint but stopped way too early.
I spot motion in the corner of the screen. An irregular-shaped object slides along a track in the hull. It’s a stalk sticking up with five articulated “arms” coming out of the top. Each arm has a clamp-like “hand” on the end.
It’s only now that I notice a network of the tracks all along the hull.
It’s a robot. Something controlled from the inside. At least, I assume it is. It doesn’t look like a little green man, and it certainly doesn’t look like an alien EVA suit.
Not that I have any idea what either of those things would look like.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s a hull-mounted robot. Space stations back at Earth have them. They’re a nice way to do stuff outside your ship without having to suit up.
The robot works its way along the hull until it reaches the spot closest to the Hail Mary. One of its little clamp hands holds a cylindrical object. I don’t really have a sense of scale, but the robot is tiny compared to the ship. I feel like it’s about my size or maybe smaller, but that’s a wild guess.
The robot stops, reaches toward my ship, and gently releases the cylinder into space.
The cylinder moves slowly toward me. It has a slight rotation, end-over-end. Not perfect, but still a very smooth release.
I check the Radar panel. The Blip-A is at velocity zero. And there’s a “Blip-B” screen now. It shows the much smaller cylinder approaching at 8.6 centimeters per second.
Interesting. That’s the exact same velocity I moved the Hail Mary a moment ago while flashing the engine to say hi. That can’t be a coincidence. They want me to have that cylinder, and they want to deliver it to me at a velocity they know I’m comfortable working with.
“Very considerate of you…” I say.
These are smart aliens.
I have to assume friendly intent at this point. I mean, they’re going out of their way to say hi and be accommodating. Besides, if there is hostile intent, what would I do about it? Die. That’s what I’d do. I’m a scientist, not Buck Rogers.
Well, I mean, I guess I could point the spin drives at their ship, fire them up to full, which would vaporize—you know what? I’m just not going to think along those lines right now.
Some quick math tells me the cylinder will take over forty minutes to reach me. I have that long to get in an EVA suit, go outside, and position myself on the hull for humanity’s first touchdown-pass reception with an alien quarterback.
I learned a lot about the airlock when I was giving my crewmates a burial in space and—
Ilyukhina would have loved this moment. She would have been absolutely bouncing around the cabin with excitement. Yáo would have been stoic and steady, but he would have cracked a smile when he thought we weren’t looking.
The tears ruin my vision. Lacking gravity, they coat my eyes. It’s like trying to see underwater. I wipe them off and fling them across the control room. They splatter onto the opposite wall. I don’t have time for this. I have an alien thingy to catch.
I unhook the belt on the chair and float over to the airlock. My mind is awhirl with ideas and questions. And I’m jumping to wild, unfounded conclusions left and right. Maybe this intelligent alien species invented Astrophage. Maybe they genetically engineered it specifically to “grow” spaceship fuel. The ultimate in solar power. Maybe once I explain what’s happening to Earth, they’ll have a solution.
Or maybe they’ll board my ship and lay eggs in my brain. You can never be sure.
I open the inner airlock door and pull out the EVA suit. So, do I have any idea how to get into this thing? Or how to safely use it?
I disable the chrysalis-lock of the Orlan-MKS2 EVA suit and open the rear hatch. I activate main power by flicking a switch on the belt. The suit boots up almost immediately and the status panel attached to the chest component reads all systems functional—what the heck? I know everything that’s going on in here.
We were probably trained on this thing extensively. I know it the same way I know physics. It’s there in my mind, but I don’t remember learning it.
The Russian-made suit is a single-pressure vessel. Unlike American models where you put the top and bottom on, then a bunch of complex stuff for the helmet and gloves, the Orlan series is basically a onesie with a hatch in the back. You step into it, close the hatch, and you’re done. It’s like an insect molting in reverse.
I open the back and wriggle into the suit. Zero g is a real boon here. I don’t have to fight with the suit nearly as much as I normally would. Weird. I know this is easier than other times I’ve done it, but don’t remember any other times I’ve done it. I think I have brain damage from that coma.
I’m functional enough for now. I press on.
I get my arms and legs into their respective holes. The jumpsuit is uncomfortable in the Orlan. I’m supposed to be wearing a special undergarment. I even know what it looks like, but it’s just for temperature regulation and bio-monitoring. I don’t have time to find it in the storage area. I have a date with a cylinder.
Now in the suit, I push steadily against the airlock wall with my legs to push the open rear flap to the wall. Once it gets to within a few inches (centimeters, I should say. This is Russian-made after all), a light turns green on the chest-mounted status panel. I reach up to the panel with my thickly gloved hand and press the Autoseal button.
The suit ratchets the opening closed with a series of loud clicks. With a final “clunk” the outer seal locks into place. My status board reads green and I have seven hours of life support available. Internal pressure is 400 hectopascals—about 40 percent of Earth’s atmosphere at sea level. That’s normal for spacesuits.
The whole process took only five minutes. I’m ready to go outside.
Interesting. I didn’t have to go through a decompression step. On space stations back home, astronauts have to spend hours in an airlock slowly acclimating to the low pressure needed for the EVA suit before they can go out. I don’t have that problem. Apparently, the entire Hail Mary is at that 40 percent pressure.
Good design. The only reason space stations around Earth have a full atmosphere of pressure is in case the astronauts have to abort and return to Earth in a hurry. But for the Hail Mary crew…where would we go? May as well use the low pressure all the time. Makes things easier on the hull and lets you do rapid EVAs.
I take a deep breath and let it out. A soft whir comes from somewhere behind me and cool air flows along my back and shoulders. Air conditioning. It feels nice.
I grab a handhold and spin myself around. I pull the inner airlock door closed and then rotate the primary lever to begin the cycling sequence. A pump fires up. It’s louder than I would have thought. It sounds like an idling motorcycle. I keep my hand on the lever. Pushing it back to the original position will cancel the cycle and repressurize. If I see even a hint of a red light on my suit panel, I’m going to throw that lever so fast it’ll make my head spin.
After a minute, the pump grows quieter. Then quieter still. It’s probably as loud as it ever was. But with the air leaving the chamber, there’s no way for the noise to get to me other than through my feet touching the Velcro pads on the floor.
Finally, the pump stops. I’m in total silence aside from the fans inside the suit. The airlock controls show that the pressure inside is zero, and a yellow light turns green. I’m clear to open the outer door.
I grab the hatch crank, then hesitate.
“What am I doing?” I say.
Is this really a good idea? I want that cylinder so badly I’m just plowing ahead without any sort of plan. Is this worth risking my life over?
Yes. Unequivocally.
Okay, but is it worth risking the lives of everyone on Earth over? Because if I mess up and die out there, then the whole Hail Mary Project will have been in vain.
Hmm.
Yes. It’s still worth it. I don’t know what these aliens are like, what they want, or what they’re planning to say. But they will have information. Any information, even stuff I’d rather not know, is better than none.
I spin the handle and open the door. The empty blackness of space lies beyond. The light of Tau Ceti glistens off the door. I peek my head out and see Tau Ceti with my own eyes. At this distance, it’s a little less bright than the sun as seen from Earth.
I double-check my tether to make darn sure I’m attached, then I step out into space.
— I’m good at this.
I must have practiced a lot. Maybe in a neutral-buoyancy tank or something. But it comes as second nature to me.
I exit the airlock and clamp one of my tethers to a rail on the outside hull. Always have two tethers. And always have at least one attached. That way you’re never at risk of floating away from the ship. The Orlan-MKS2 is possibly the best EVA suit ever made, but it doesn’t have a SAFER unit like NASA’s EMU suit. At least with a SAFER unit you have minimal thrust capability to return to the ship if you fall adrift.
All that information floods into my mind at once. I guess I’ve put a lot of time and thought into spacesuits. Maybe I’m our crew’s EVA specialist? I don’t know.
I flip up the sun visor and peer toward the Blip-A. I wish I could glean some special insight by seeing it in person, but it’s pretty far away. The Hail Mary’s telescope gave me a much better view. Still, there’s something…unique about staring directly at an alien spacecraft.
I catch a glint of the cylinder. Every now and then the flat ends of the gently tumbling cylinder reflect Taulight.
I’ve decided “Taulight” is a word, by the way. Light from Tau Ceti. It’s not “sunlight.” Tau Ceti isn’t the sun. So…Taulight.
I still have a good twenty minutes before the cylinder reaches the ship. I watch it for a while to guess where it’ll hit. It’d be nice to have a crewmate inside at the radar station.
It’d be nice to have a crewmate at all.
After five minutes, I have a good bead on the cylinder. It’s headed for roughly the center of the ship. It’s as good a place as any for aliens to aim for.
I make my way across the hull. The Hail Mary is pretty big. My little pressurized area is only half its length and the back half flares out to be three times as wide. Most of that will be empty now, I guess. It used to be full of Astrophage for my one-way trip here.
The hull is crisscrossed with rails and latch points for EVA tethering. Tether by tether, rail by rail, I make my way toward the center of the ship.
I have to step over a thick ring. It circles the crew compartment area of the ship. It’s a good 2 feet thick. I don’t know what it is, but it must be pretty heavy. Mass is everything when it comes to spaceship design, so it must be important. I’ll speculate about that later.
I continue along, one hull latch point at a time, until I’m roughly in the center of the hull. The cylinder creeps closer. I adjust my position a tad to keep up with it. After an excruciatingly long wait, it’s almost within reach.
I wait. No need to get greedy. If I paw at it too early, I might knock it off course and into space. I’d have no way of recovering it. I don’t want to look dumb in front of the aliens.
Because they’re surely watching me right now. Probably counting my limbs, noting my size, figuring out what part they should eat first, whatever.
I let the cylinder get closer and closer. It’s moving less than 1 mile per hour. Not exactly a bullet pass.
Now that it’s so close, I can estimate its size. It’s not big at all. About the size and shape of a coffee can. It’s a dull gray color with splotches of slightly darker gray randomly here and there. Similar to the Blip-A’s hull, kind of. Different color but same blotchiness. Maybe it’s a stylistic thing. Random splotches are “in” this season or something.
The cylinder floats into my arms and I grab it with both hands.
It has less mass than I expected. It’s probably hollow. It’s a container. There’s something inside they want me to see.
I hold the cylinder under one arm and use the other to deal with tethers. I hurry back to the airlock. It’s a stupid thing to do. There’s no reason to hurry and it literally endangers my life. One slip-up and I’d be off in space. But I just can’t wait.
I get back into the ship, cycle the airlock, and float into the control room with my prize in hand. I open the Orlan suit, already thinking about what tests I’ll run on the cylinder. I have a whole lab to work with!
The smell hits me immediately. I gasp and cough. The cylinder is bad!
No, not bad. But it smells bad. I can barely breathe. The chemical smell is familiar. What is it? Cat pee?
Ammonia. It’s ammonia.
“Okay,” I wheeze. “Okay. Think.”
My gut instinct is to close the suit again. But that would just trap me in a small volume with the ammonia that’s already in here. Better to let the cylinder air out in the larger volume of the ship.
Ammonia isn’t toxic—at least, not in small quantities. And the fact that I can still breathe at all tells me it’s a small quantity. If it weren’t, my lungs would have caustic burns and I’d be unconscious or dead now.
As it is, there’s just a bad smell. I can handle a bad smell.
I climb out the back of the suit while the cylinder floats in the middle of the console room. Now that it’s not a shock anymore, I can handle the ammonia. It’s no worse than using a bunch of Windex in a small room. Unpleasant but not dangerous.
I grab the cylinder—and it’s hot as heck!
I yelp and pull my hands away. I blow on them for a moment and check for burns. It wasn’t too bad. Not stovetop hot. But hot.
Grabbing it with my bare hands was stupid. Flawed logic. I assumed that since I’d been holding it earlier it was okay to do now. But earlier I had very thick spacesuit gloves protecting my hands.
“You’ve been a bad alien cylinder,” I say to it. “You need a time-out.”
I pull my arm into my sleeve and wrap my hand in the cuff. I use my now-protected knuckles to nudge the cylinder into the airlock. Once it’s in, I close the door.
I’ll let it be for now. It’ll cool down to ambient air temperature eventually. And while it does, I don’t want it floating randomly around my ship. I don’t think there’s anything in the airlock that can get hurt by some heat.
How hot was it?
Well, I had both hands on it (like an idiot) for a fraction of a second. My own reaction time was enough to keep me from getting burned. So it’s probably less than 100 degrees Celsius.
I open and close my hands a few times. They don’t hurt anymore, but the memory of the pain lingers.
“Where’d the heat come from?” I mumbled.
The cylinder was out in space for a good forty minutes. Over that time it should have radiated heat via blackbody radiation. It should be cold, not hot. I’m about 1 AU from Tau Ceti, and Tau Ceti has half the luminosity of the sun. So I don’t think the Taulight could have heated the cylinder up much. Definitely not more than blackbody radiation would cool it down.
So either it has a heater inside or it was extremely hot when it started its trip. I guess I’ll find out soon enough. It’s not very heavy, so it’s probably thin. If there’s no internal heat source, it’ll cool off very fast in the air here.
The room still smells like ammonia. Yuck.
I float down to the lab. I don’t know where to begin. So many things I want to do. Maybe I should start by just identifying the material the cylinder is made of? Something harmless to the Blip-A’s crew might be incredibly toxic to me and neither of us would know it.
Maybe I should check for radiation.
I drift down to the lab table and put out a hand to steady myself. I’m getting better at the zero-g thing. I think I remember seeing an astronaut documentary saying some people handle it fine, while others really struggle. Looks like I’m one of the lucky ones.
I’m using “lucky” loosely here. I’m on a suicide mission. So…yeah.
The lab is a mystery. It has been for a while. It’s clearly set up with the idea that there’ll be gravity. It has tables, chairs, test-tube trays, et cetera. There’s none of the usual stuff you would expect to see in a weightless environment. No Velcro on the walls, no computer screens at all angles. No efficient use of space. Everything assumes there will be a “floor.”
The ship can accelerate just fine. For a good long time too. It had me at 1.5 g’s for probably a few years. But they can’t expect me to just leave the engines on and fly in circles to keep gravity in the lab, right?
I look around at each piece of lab equipment and try to relax my mind. There has to be a reason for this. And it’s in my memory somewhere. The trick is to think about what I want to know, but not stress about it too much. It’s like falling asleep. You can’t really do it if you concentrate on it too hard.
So many top-of-the-line pieces of equipment. I let my mind wander as I scan across them all….
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Post by neil on May 21, 2021 8:04:02 GMT -5
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Post by neil on Jun 3, 2021 16:53:30 GMT -5
a bomb thrower on a square wheeled tricycle
jussayin
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Post by neil on Jun 3, 2021 18:17:49 GMT -5
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Post by neil on Jun 6, 2021 12:05:59 GMT -5
White people like flags because you don't need to know how to read to understand them.
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Post by neil on Jun 13, 2021 12:38:24 GMT -5
Year’s Best Hardcore Horror Volume 1 copyright © 2016 by Randy Chandler and Cheryl Mullenax
AWAKENING
BY JEFF STRAND
from Splatterpunk Zine 7 (Oct 2015)
When I discovered that I was the Downtown Dixonville Dismemberer, I took that shit seriously. It was something I’d suspected for a couple of weeks. The blackout periods. The blood stains on my jeans. The dismembered body in my garage. It wasn’t until I found a live body in my shed, not yet fully dismembered, that I had to confront the truth.
“Who did this to you?” I asked the man with no legs.
“You did, you psycho son of a bitch!” he wailed.
I looked at the hacksaw in my hand. I tried to convince myself that the scraps of flesh dangling from the blade did not belong to this man’s leg. They could’ve come from somebody else’s leg. Maybe they weren’t even from a leg; it’s not like I was a forensics specialist.
I’m not saying that it wasn’t pretty damning evidence that I was holding a bloody hacksaw over a guy with recently sawn-off legs. It was. You’d have to be a fool to think otherwise. But, in the moment, I did try to brainstorm other possibilities.
Maybe I’d saved the legless guy. I could’ve stumbled upon a psycho killer, kicked his ass, dragged him to another room, taken his hacksaw with me to ensure that he wouldn’t have it handy if he regained consciousness, and was now standing over the victim to assure him that everything was going to be fine.
“Am I a hero?” I asked.
“No!” the legless guy screamed. “You’re a monster!”
“I’m not calling you a liar,” I said, “but clearly you’ve had a traumatic experience, and maybe you’re not remembering things accurately. Hell, it’s entirely possible that you’ve been hallucinating. I think I’d be hallucinating if I had that much gushing blood. Are you sure I’m the one who did this?”
“Yeah, I’m sure!”
“All right, I guess you’d have no reason to lie.”
So, yes, I was the Downtown Dixonville Dismemberer. What an awkward name. Hard to say out loud. When I was a child, dreaming of one day becoming a serial killer, I’d always thought that I’d end up with a really cool nickname. Slashy Jim or something.
“What are you going to do to me?” the man asked.
That was a good question. Lots of possibilities. I could, for example, just leave. The man would presumably bleed out, and I could go on pretending that there was some alternate explanation for what had happened. If I let him die, he wouldn’t talk to the police, unless the police propped him up and jiggled his head around and spoke for him in a high-pitched funny voice, which was unlikely.
Or I could saw off his arms. That would put me on low moral ground, obviously, but I never liked letting a job go unfinished. Like if a neighbor was mowing his lawn, and he stopped halfway through because it started to rain, I’d look through the window and think, “Dude! Finish your damn lawn!” I wouldn’t actually mow his the second half of his lawn for him, because mowing lawns sucks, especially in this heat.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked the man.
“Let me go!”
“But that’s kind of impractical, don’t you think? Where are you going to go?”
“Just stop hurting me!”
“I’ve already stopped. What you’re asking is for me not to resume hurting you. I understand that you’re under a lot of trauma, but communication skills are important.”
“Please, give me a phone!”
“If I give you a phone and let you call for help, they’ll be able to trace it back to me. That wouldn’t be very smart of me, now would it? It’s kind of disrespectful that you would suggest that I’d do something so stupid. Come on, man, I’m standing over you with a hacksaw; why would you insult me?”
“I’m sorry …”
“I don’t think you mean it.”
The man began to weep. “I’m really sorry.”
Now I felt bad, because it seemed like this conversation was turning into something where I was taunting a victim, but I swear I wasn’t. Everything I was saying was sincere. I didn’t have a wicked grin or anything. Nothing would’ve made me happier than if we could work this out in a civilized manner.
“You’re bleeding pretty bad,” I told him, even though I was sure he already knew.
He didn’t answer.
“Do you know how to make a tourniquet?”
He still didn’t answer.
“Are you dead?”
“No.”
“You were acting kind of dead. Please respond to my questions to avoid further confusion. You do not want to get buried alive. Goodness, no. It’s never happened to me, but you don’t need first-hand experience to know that it’s not pleasant. Now what were we talking about before I thought you were dead?”
“Tourniquet.”
“That’s right. Do you want one?”
The man shrugged.
“I’m going to have to look up how to make one online. Do you think you’ll live long enough? That pool of blood underneath you is pretty big.” I resisted the desire to splash my shoes around in it. That would be undignified.
The man closed his eyes.
That rude piece of crap. Well, we’d see if having me saw off one of his arms was motivation for him to pay attention to the conversation.
It wasn’t.
I checked to see if he was breathing. No breath. I checked his heartbeat. No heartbeat. I checked his pulse. No pulse. This lack of breath, heartbeat, and pulse, combined with the fact that several pints of his blood were no longer in his body, was a pretty clear indicator that he’d passed away.
To cut off the other arm of a man who was already dead was an extremely deranged thing to do. You couldn’t exactly stand in front of a jury and have them nod their heads and say, “Yeah, that’s probably what I would have done in similar circumstances.”
I really, really wanted to cut off that arm. I’d missed out on the legs because of the blackout period, so I was feeling kind of cheated. Getting to saw off his last remaining arm would go a long way toward resolving that feeling.
Only a sick person would do that.
But in contemporary slang, “sick” meant “cool,” and I wanted to be cool. So I’d do it. I’d saw off his arm.
I sawed off his arm.
It was kind of disappointing. Like when you have two slices of chocolate cake, and you eat the first one, and it’s sooooo delicious, and then you think about how great the second piece is going to be, but then you’re full after the first couple of bites, and you wish you’d saved it for later.
Then I cut off his head. Also disappointing. Not as disappointing as the second arm, but not nearly as fulfilling as I would have hoped.
I thought about cutting his head into several pieces, but, no, that would be going too far. I settled for just cutting off his ears. He had very soft earlobes.
I realized that somebody was watching me.
I turned around and glanced at the police officer. His arms were crossed over his chest and he looked quite stern.
“I, uh, didn’t know anybody was there,” I said.
“Obviously.”
“Am I under arrest?”
“I think you know the answer to that.”
“How long have you been watching?”
“Long enough.”
“But how long?”
“That is none of your business.”
“You would’ve had to open a door to come in here, and while I was cutting off his ears, I wasn’t absorbed enough in my work not to hear a door open. It would’ve had to happen while I was sawing off his head. And I started to lose interest while I was doing it, so it would’ve had to happen when I’d just started sawing off his head. You just stood there and watched me saw it off!”
“So?”
“So, why didn’t you stop me?”
“That, also, is none of your business.”
“I think you were getting some kind of deviant pleasure out of it. No officer of the law would stand there and just watch a decapitation if he wasn’t enthralled by the sight. You disgust me, sir.”
“Oh, is that how it is? A man who saws off the head of an innocent victim can judge the spectator? Maybe I feared for my life.”
“You’ve got a gun. I’ve only got a hacksaw.”
“You could also have a gun. I haven’t searched you.”
“All the more reason to diffuse the situation instead of watching it. If I’d seen you out of the corner of my eye, I could have taken out the gun—which I don’t have—and shot you.”
The police officer nodded. “Busted. I was watching because it made me tingle.”
“So now what do we do?”
“I don’t know. Suicide pact?”
I shrugged. “Yeah, all right.”
I let him go first. He blew his brains out, but instead of taking the gun and doing the same, I kicked it aside. Yes, it was a dick move. But by then I’d accepted that I was the kind of person who would back out of suicide pacts.
I cut up the police officer’s body. It felt great.
I was invulnerable.
I was God.
It turned out, I was not invulnerable and/or God. My next victim had a Tazer and two brothers who were unhappy with me for trying to kidnap her. I’m in their garage now. Ironic.
Anyway, I suppose these are the last words of the Downtown Dixonville Dismemberer, which they were kind enough to let me write down in my own blood. (Excuse the typos.) I probably won’t talk to you soon, so enjoy the rest of your evening.
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Post by neil on Jun 27, 2021 3:12:01 GMT -5
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Post by neil on Jul 4, 2021 19:26:36 GMT -5
Ankle deep in info-tainment Proxies cop it at arraignment Native wit sleeps in the basement Drive expires before attainment Knuckles dragging on the pavement Lost the plot through cheap explain-ment Keeping warm with blanket statements Can't use pennies for down payments
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Post by upfromsumdirt on Jul 15, 2021 0:52:20 GMT -5
thats not a sign... thats a bible!
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Post by neil on Jul 21, 2021 16:30:55 GMT -5
i stoalded L7 frum Roland Stephen Taylor
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Post by neil on Jul 21, 2021 16:33:16 GMT -5
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Post by neil on Jul 21, 2021 17:09:17 GMT -5
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Post by neil on Jul 21, 2021 17:16:28 GMT -5
Stagg Field - Rachel Taylor Brown
tritium, iridium elements that make a bomb he's taking his lithium and turning the reactor on only a brainiac would know what to do with this open a maniac and you can see on and on and on forever
heavy uranium under radiated grass feed the geranium and walk your unprotected ass to the gymnasium next to the football field dig a little hole and then you can see on and on and on forever
little sick guinea pig losing lunch, losing hair in a wig, guinea pig nothing growing under there only a brainiac would know what to do with this open a maniac and you can see on and on and on forever
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Post by neil on Jul 21, 2021 17:22:49 GMT -5
Oct 01, 2009 SCRAMBLED BLUES
i'm driving by the rearview, mirrors of my soul disused. no bold extensions, more pre-sold tensions past the "best before" date - pull that plug marked "deflate". won't look, don't know; safer just to lay low. black and white coffee cup, slosh it out and fill it up. trust the java for a jolt; getting weary losing rope. difficult to reconcile fight, flight and blurry-eyed. left alone to brave the rift; came adrift and surely missed the X mark on that barn side, all tractor-trailer truck wide. i shot an arrow into the air; it came back to part my hair. please don't stare at my secondhand freak with no means of support but his feet. hopes and plans are well shipwrecked; peaches rot, rats swarm the deck. well respected at one time; years slog on and welfare dries leaving desiccated senses in turn - a bitter pill to bide or discern. i have a level that's half a bubble off; took to the field and lost the coin toss. scored a touchdown for the opponent; given the game ball, but didn't want it. quitting seems so tempting, an open door and empty. fell down a lightless stairwell, courtesy of a wayward nail. tumbled, thumped and hit hard; ears ringing and molars jarred. find me tied to some railroad tracks; bad with knots - had a heart attack. don't think twice, the world might change, given endless time and a rearranged brain. my sunny side's stuck up a stiff climb; this scrambling mucks my states of mind.
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Post by neil on Jul 26, 2021 17:47:51 GMT -5
where i find the button to change the friday's verse of fire that has been the verse of fire for a couple hundred fridays by now
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Post by neil on Jul 27, 2021 17:20:18 GMT -5
this place is a museum
i just dropped in and found Feb 8, 2009 at 11:58am
there is REAL STUFF ovrr thrr
i goin back
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Post by neil on Jul 27, 2021 17:24:30 GMT -5
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Post by neil on Jul 28, 2021 8:44:15 GMT -5
all this stuff has been here forever and i never looked
tons and tons of pomes by 'dirt tons and tons
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Post by neil on Jul 28, 2021 8:47:38 GMT -5
Notes on reading this article and remembering Mom's suicide in February, 1972, when I was a senior in high school. The Undiscovered Country, By Will Stephenson | Harper's Magazine excerpt: It wasn’t only Shneidman who recognized a vacuum when he did. In the Fifties and Sixties, there emerged a small but dedicated band of rogue scholars who devoted themselves to the study of a subject that was then—and still largely remains—taboo. There was Eli Robins, who began knocking on doors and interviewing the surviving family members of suicides. And there was Aaron T. Beck, best known today as the inventor of cognitive behavioral therapy, who also developed early tools for clinical treatment, including the Beck Hopelessness Scale and the Beck Scale for Suicidal Ideation. What these men had in common was their patricidal repudiation of psychoanalysis. They had been steeped in the tradition, having undergone analysis themselves, and had found the project wanting. Beck claimed that he had set out to validate Freud’s theories in good faith, and was as surprised as anyone to discover that they were worthless. “As I pursued my investigations,” he wrote, “the various psychoanalytic concepts began to collapse like a stack of dominoes.” Robins had undergone a similar transformation. He was rumored to keep a photo of Freud over the urinal in his department’s bathroom.
my notes: prediction & prevention are tactics that must proceed from a strategic understanding of what you want to predict or prevent(in this case, suicide). understanding something tactically will not be as fulsome as strategic, holistic understanding. do you understand what it is, or do you only want to understand what you can do for or with it? positive and negative space. positive space = the epistemology of embracing life negative space = the epistemology of resisting life two sides, one coin. understand the coin and you understand both.
a book mentioned tangentially: The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci - Jonathan Spence
font size 4 font face courier new font color ffffff
The grand strategy from which an understanding of suicide will usefully grow provides both the epistemology of the maintenance of life and the epistemology of the rejection of life. One coin, two sides. Halving the coin is counterproductive and misapprehends the task.
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Post by neil on Jul 28, 2021 9:11:24 GMT -5
MING MNEMONICS THE MEMORY PALACE OF MATTEO RICCI
By Jonathan D. Spence. Illustrated. 350 pp. New York: Elisabeth Sifton Books/Viking. $19.95.
Jonathan D. Spence, the George Burton
Adams Professor of History at Yale University,
may have begun this book as a conventional biography of the 16th-century Jesuit missionary to China, Matteo Ricci. But what he has actually written, while still centered on Ricci, more nearly resembles the portrait of an age, and it is perhaps as remarkable for its form as its content. It is organized about a series of visual representations - four of them imaginary, four actual pictures - that create a richly layered and complex impression of Ricci's world, while also introducing us to a conception of memory that categorically sets that world apart from our own. It is an extraordinarily delicate achievement, in which artistry risks degenerating into mere artfulness. Mr. Spence's skill as a storyteller, his innocence of pretension, and his unwavering faithfulness to the plain style allay all our anxieties. His book is moving and strangely beautiful. Text:
The four imaginary representations are taken from Ricci's ''Treatise on Mnemonic Arts,'' composed in 1596. Ricci's purpose was to teach Western memory techniques to the Chinese, in the hope that, out of gratitude and admiration, they might be induced to take an interest in Western religious beliefs as well. The basic principle of his system - which had been the common property of European scholars for centuries - was to associate ideas with images, and to locate those images in fixed spatial relation to one another. Hence the ''Memory Palace'': a large compound of rooms that could be filled with various appointments, each representing an item to be remembered.
In reality, the four images Mr. Spence presents don't entirely fit this description, because they are not identified with specific artifacts that might be found in a palace. Rather, they remain purely mental, although they are given concrete spatial locations in the four corners of the Palace's reception hall. There is also a certain ambiguity as to what is being remembered and by whom: each image is linked to a particular Chinese ideograph, whose nuances and ambiguities it is meant to explicate; and, while the system would of course be valuable to Ricci himself in his efforts to learn Chinese, it is hard to see why the Chinese would need reminding about the meaning of their own language. Apparently, the four images were meant only to illustrate how the mnemonic system worked. Its attraction for the Chinese lay in the prospect of their using it to help memorize the Confucian classics they needed to know to pass examinations for the government bureaucracy.
Unlike the four memory images, Mr. Spence's four pictures have a clear role as part of Ricci's mission in China, although they have little obvious connection with the mnemonic system. They are four religious prints, which, along with his commentaries, Ricci had published in a collection of Chinese graphics by his friend Cheng Dayue. Each print illustrates a particular biblical teaching. Mr. Spence's decision to introduce them into his book rests, I suspect, on the happy coincidence that the last of them is virtually identical with the last of the four images he borrows from the ''Treatise on Mnemonic Arts.'' Any brief account of this apparatus is bound to make it seem inordinately complex and arbitrary. In fact, however, it functions with remarkable ease to guide us over the trajectory of Ricci's career. The journey is repeated several times, always with an altered focus. The book's movement is on three levels: chronological (from the 1570's to the first decade of the 17th century), geographical (from Europe via India to China) and conceptual (from the material, through the Paul Robinson is a professor of history at Stanford University and author of ''The Modernization of Sex.'' intellectual, to the moral, ending in the spiritual).
Ricci associates his first image with the Chinese ideograph for war ( wu ), and he suggests that the word be represented in the mind by two warriors, one of them about to strike the other with his spear, while the second tries to deflect the blow by grasping the first man's wrist. This duality of aggressor and victim is contained in the ideograph itself, which can be divided into halves, the one meaning ''spear,'' the other ''prevent.'' The first religious picture is of the apostle St. Peter floundering in the Sea of Galilee, into which he sank when his belief that he could walk on it failed him. According to Ricci's commentary, this illustrates the danger that awaits us when we lose our faith. Print and image introduce us to two pervasive and overwhelming physical realities of Ricci's world: violence and water.
The violence, which Mr. Spence conjures up powerfully, is concentrated in the Italy of Ricci's youth (the chapter stresses the years before his departure for the East in 1578), but it remains an ever-present reality in the life of the missionary. The image of the two warriors also suggest a curious ambiguity in the psychology of Ricci's Chinese hosts: they are, he notes, at once given to displays of might and to public beatings (he was himself permanently lamed by a gang of young rowdies), yet almost womanish in their readiness to flee danger and in their contempt for military valor. The water in which St. Peter flounders becomes, in Mr. Spence's account, the merciless ocean over which Ricci sailed from Lisbon to Goa and thence to Macao, but it is also the precarious (if generative) water of China's rivers and canals on which Ricci traveled for three decades and which, in a moment of harrowing disaster, almost took him to his watery grave as it claimed the life of one of his beloved Chinese novices. Very much in the spirit of the great French historian Fernand Braudel, Mr. Spence deploys his first image and picture to recreate the material life of Counter-Reformation Europe and Ming China.
The next image and picture concentrate our attention on Ricci's missionary work in the 1580's and 90's, as his techniques of persuasion developed. The second mnemonic image is by far the most elusive of the four: a Moslem woman from Western China, who, through a complex series of associations (which the modern reader will have trouble remembering!), is made to represent the idea of fundamental belief ( yao ). By way of contrast, the second print creates no such difficulties: it is of Christ, after his Resurrection, speaking to the two disciples who at first had difficulty recognizing Him on the road to Emmaus, and its theme, according to Ricci, is insight or understanding. Both image and picture might be taken as emblems of Ricci's sense of vocation - and they launch Mr. Spence on an exploration of Ricci's intellectual universe: his understanding of Christian doctrine and of other religious traditions in both China and the West, his knowledge of the classics and of modern science, and the manner in which he used the teachings of Western literature and science - just as he hoped to use his mnemonic system - as an inducement to conversion. These chapters culminate in his fantasy of converting the Ming Emperor Wanli, and with him the entire Chinese nation.
The third image and picture introduce us to Ricci's moral universe: both his inevitable compromises with the world and his commitment to sexual purity. The former is suggested by the ideograph for profit ( li ), which Ricci proposes to represent through the image of a farmer ready to cut his crops with a sickle, and the latter, perhaps all too obviously, by a print showing God's destruction of Sodom. From the image of profit Mr. Spence takes off on a brilliant discussion of the tensions and complicities between the universe of belief and that of commerce. Although there is never a hint of vulgar Marxism - no suggestion, for example, that Ricci was the ideological front man for Western imperialism - Mr. Spence shows us that conversion didn't occur in an economic vacuum and that Ricci was fully conscious of the worldly objectives of his European sponsors. Mr. Spence's discussion of Ricci's moralism - in particular, his abhorrence of Chinese homosexuality - is conducted without any anachronistic regrets. Ricci, he argues, was a representative figure of the Counter- Reformation, not to be scolded but only understood. The book's historical impartiality is uncompromising.
IMPARTIALITY, however, does
not prevent Mr. Spence from
developing great empathy for
Ricci whose authenticity and sense of mission we come to appreciate ever more fully as the book progresses. This process culminates in the final chapter, in which image and picture unite to suggest the inner world of conviction. Again, Ricci is seen as representative of his age, since at the heart of his spirituality, Mr. Spence argues, lies a deep Marian piety. The devotion to Mary urged by St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, was reinforced in Ricci's case by his experience among the Chinese, who found the Crucifixion horrifying but responded warmly to the Virgin. Appropriately, his last mnemonic image is of a maidservant holding a child, and his last print is of Mary with the Christ child in her arms. The image represents the ideograph for goodness ( hao ), which in turn can be divided into separate ideographs, one meaning ''woman,'' the other ''child.''
In this final instance, significantly, Ricci feels his print needs no commentary. Mary is at once the agent of his own solace and the mediator through which he expects to realize his goal of bringing Christianity to the Chinese. Thus, at the end of Mr. Spence's richly embroidered tale, which has taken us through wars, across oceans and into the intricacies of intellectual, economic and moral life, we find a spiritual pilgrimage such as might be celebrated in the lives of the saints.
Mr. Spence does not dwell on the differences between Ricci's world and our own, but they are strongly felt and lend his book much of its evocativeness. This is particularly true with regard to his central theme of memory. We moderns don't cultivate the mnemonic skills Ricci valued so highly. Indeed, in this matter Ricci was much closer to his Ming contemporaries than to us, since the Chinese already had an indigenous mnemonic tradition that deviated from Ricci's only in its exclusively literary uses. To a certain extent, memory palaces are no longer necessary because we have such easy access to books (which were rare and expensive in Ricci's day).
But more important, I believe, we have an entirely different conception of memory. We seek to remember things not in terms of visual and spatial representations but according to their logical - or, in some cases, psychological - connections. Where both Ricci and his Chinese colleagues set great store by their ability to remember things ''backwards and forwards,'' we find such flexibility pointless, indeed, frivolous. Today, for example, one looks in vain (outside of the movies) for a teacher who tells her students that they should concentrate on memorizing dates and facts. Instead, students are urged to ''learn how to think'' or to ''identify underlying patterns.''
It is thus symptomatic that the modern reader will absorb Ricci's mnemonic images in exactly the opposite fashion from the way they were intended. Our visual sense, as John Ruskin noted over a century ago, has become impoverished, and our attention to the inner world of the mind and the feelings correspondingly elaborate. Hence we have no trouble remembering the abstractions that are the subject of Ricci's images - war, belief, profit, goodness - but the images themselves quickly lose their specificity. To the extent that we retain them at all, it is because we have managed to associate them with their respective abstractions. Naturally, we pride ourselves on this shift from a mechanical to an organic conception of memory, but one of the benefits of Mr. Spence's book is to suggest that something has been lost in the process. Matteo Ricci's memory, as it is brought to life in these pages, boasts a sumptuousness and grandeur whose disappearance we have reason to regret. We may have too glibly abandoned his richly appointed and lavishly detailed palace for the sleek, efficient, but ultimately sterile world of conceptual condominiums.B
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Post by neil on Jul 28, 2021 11:21:58 GMT -5
CHARLES HILL Grand Strategies: Literature, Satecraft, and World Order 2010
ENLIGHTENMENT: CRITIQUE OF DIPLOMACY, STATE, AND SYSTEM
The Enlightenment drew a line across history. From then on, everything would be “modern.” This would require rethinking and rewriting the Westphalian system. If the international state system was born at Westphalia in 1648, a second transition came at the end of the eighteenth century with the Age of the Enlightenment in response to religion-driven conflicts like the Thirty Years’ War. Philosophy, rational inquiry, scientific standards of progress, toleration, and secular politics were to displace “superstition,” the primary cause of mankind’s self-imposed immaturity, as Kant put it. With this came “critique”—reason contesting against reason to challenge the foundations of Western civilization, making it the only civilization in history whose major artists and intellects have radically questioned or rejected its core values.1
The Enlightenment challenged three matters of significance:
Diplomacy: Would diplomacy be taken seriously as the legitimate mechanism for managing international disputes?
War and Peace: Is peace the overarching goal which the international system approaches, however imperfectly?
Religion: What, if anything, would be the role of religion in the international state system?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who declared the international realm beyond his comprehension, did more than any thinker to shape it: by legitimating the authoritarian state; by inciting revolution against established order; and by mocking diplomacy as a problem-solving method. Rousseau was at once the most consequential political force of modernity and a clever rascal who seemed to laugh at the institutions he played with even as his innovative thought influenced them in unforeseen ways.
The Empire of Venice, stretching across the eastern Mediterranean, had been a commercial, naval, and diplomatic power. The Republic of Venice played an important part in Imperial Hapsburg diplomacy. With its imperial power in decline, challenged by Islam, Venetian statecraft sought to define the social, economic, and political boundaries of the state and to strengthen those boundaries against outsiders. Ultimately, Venice failed to become a modern state because of its inability to define and defend the first principle of sovereign statehood: clear borders.2 By the eighteenth century, Venice’s power was long gone and its glory had given way to decadence. Nonetheless, Venice remained a place of diplomatic significance, not least owing to its strategic position between central Europe and Italy, and between western Europe and the Middle East.
The decline of Venetian influence left a power vacuum in northern Italy in which major outside powers—Austria, Spain, and France—made high-handed use of Italy for their diplomatic intrigues and military maneuvers, without ever dealing an adversary a mortal blow. It became an endless, fluctuating game in the balance of power. This was the political backdrop for Rousseau’s Confessions (1782).
Rousseau, rather improbably, was employed as a secretary to the French embassy in Venice. As he tells us in his Confessions, his days and nights at the Venetian embassy were filled with petty strivings for the recognition of rank: his titles, his dinner invitations, the incessant squabbles and insults between him and his incompetent ambassador, the comte de Montaigu. Rousseau portrays diplomacy as a farcical game. His prose is light and frothy, corresponding to his critical aim of delegitimizing the state, the international system, and the civilization they serve.
There is a great, silent tradition of statecraft behind Rousseau’s tale of his Venetian embassy. Venice, first as an outpost of Byzantium, from which the art of “Byzantine” diplomacy is learned, then as an empire and great power in its own right, set a pattern of diplomacy other governments would studiously emulate. Venice produced the first systematized diplomatic service in history, and its style of conducting international relations spread through all of Europe. Venetian diplomats were highly trained, professionally fixated on the interests of the state, bound to collect and register every detail of international transactions, and held to the strictest rules of personal conduct and discipline, to the point of austerity. During his tour of duty a Venetian envoy was not permitted a single day’s absence from his post. In Venice diplomacy was staged as a grand spectacle, “impressing all foreign envoys and their retinue with its dignity, munificence, and decorum.”3
Rousseau does not take diplomacy seriously; for him it is a playground for dolts and debauchers. A diplomatic bagatelle might affect the course of war or peace, but if it did, it was only because clever Jean-Jacques happened to be on the spot. Without him, anything might have happened.
Rousseau describes Ambassador Montaigu doing what many weak diplomats do: reporting his task to be well in hand when in fact it was not. Rousseau writes that his ambassador’s only important duty was to persuade the Venetians to maintain their neutrality in the War of the Austrian Succession. The Venetians, well aware of this, never failed to protest their fidelity to neutrality, while openly supplying the Austrian troops with munitions and recruits.
Montaigu dealt with this by insisting, over Rousseau’s protestations, that his secretary “state in all his dispatches Venice would never violate her neutrality.” Rousseau notes: “In such a position as I then filled, the slightest of mistakes are not without their consequences. I devoted my whole attention, therefore, to avoiding errors that might have been detrimental to my services. I was till the last most orderly and most punctilious in every detail of my essential duties.” Rousseau’s self-serving tale comes as the War of the Austrian Succession is spreading into northern Italy and Austrian Prince Lobkowitz plans to march on the Bourbon kingdom of Naples. As the crisis is building, Rousseau is working diligently, he says, to see that embassy business is conducted despite the flaws and lapses of Ambassador Montaigu. One Saturday, the day that, as diplomats say, “the bag closes,” when couriers leave with the dispatches, Rousseau is alone at his desk in the embassy, the ambassador as usual having gone on some inconsequential errand.
An important note arrives from the French chargé d’affaires in Vienna, M. Vincent, with an intelligence report that “a man whose signature M. Vincent enclosed, was leaving Vienna and was to pass by way of Venice on a secret journey into the Abruzzi for the purpose of promoting a popular uprising” in support of the approaching Austrians.
Ambassador Montaigu being absent, Rousseau decides to take action himself. He sends the intelligence report to the French ambassador in Naples, the Marquis de l’Höpital, “and so timely was it that it is perhaps thanks to the much abused Jean-Jacques that the Bourbons owe the preservation of the Kingdom of Naples.”4 For his decisiveness, Rousseau is “mentioned in dispatches.” When l’Höpital sends a message of appreciation to Montaigu, noting the service of his secretary Rousseau, Montaigu takes it in ill humor.
This episode, Rousseau claims, was disparaged and discredited ever since the publication of his Confessions. Rousseau’s forwarding of the intelligence report would have been virtually meaningless, it was said, because many such rumors would have been available in Naples. Others pointed to discrepancies in the diplomatic documentary record.5
The placement and handling of this episode in The Confessions indicate its importance to Rousseau. The record does show that Montaigu was sorely vexed by l’Höpital’s notice of Rousseau’s services, and this perhaps led Montaigu to destroy some documents and decide to replace Rousseau as his secretary. The warning Rousseau forwarded may well have been the first intelligence Naples had of Austrian efforts to foment an uprising in the Abruzzi.
Who cares about the War of the Austrian Succession? Very few. But out of the war, Prussia emerged as a great power, and Austria turned eastward thereafter in seeking allies. Seeds of the First World War may have been sown then. Rousseau seems intuitively to have perceived that he had been close to a potentially great event, and may have tried to elaborate the importance of his part. But his approach to diplomacy was above all frivolous, a mark of his larger political philosophy.
Rousseau’s days at the Venice embassy were only partly spent carping at his ambassador and delivering such “brilliant” strokes as saving the kingdom of Naples. Jean-Jacques reveled in the society, the theater, the music, and the ladies of the decadent city-state, for Venetian courtesans had a recognized diplomatic liaison role in the city’s foreign relations.6In high spirits, Jean-Jacques loved to combine diplomatic business with personal pleasure:
It was carnival time. I took a domino and a mask, and set off for the Palazzo Giustiniani. Everyone who saw my gondola arrive with the ambassador’s livery was impressed: Venice had never witnessed such a thing. I entered and had myself announced as una siora maschera. But once inside, I took off my mask and gave my name. The senator turned pale, and stood dumbfounded. “Sir,” I said to him in the Venetian dialect, “I am sorry to trouble your Excellency by my visit; but you have in your Teatro di San Luce a man called Veronese, who is now under contract to the King. He has been claimed from you, but without success. I have come to ask for him in His Majesty’s name.” My short speech was effective.
Thus did Rousseau settle yet another international dispute. He relished his official duties as a kind of grand joke.
He did not remain long as a diplomat in Venice, and returned to his own city-state of Geneva, but his experience there may have had larger unforeseen consequences. Within a few years, Rousseau entered the essay contests set by the Academy of Dijon and wrote the “Discourses” in the same insouciant spirit. In his “Discourse on the Origins of Inequality,” Rousseau declares that there never has been, nor is there now, a legitimate government. Nor will there ever be a legitimate polity on earth until Rousseau’s guidelines are followed. Rousseau elaborates on these in his Social Contract. Each must “give all to all.” Only then will “The People” be created (before this there were “people,” but not “The People”). And The People’s attribute would be The General Will, which would be all-determinative, although initially it would need to be guided by an exceptional genius—The Legislator, that is —someone as brilliant and unconstrained as Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Here were the foundations for the idea, later developed not in witty insouciance but all grim earnestness, that all of Western civilization is an oppressive fraud and that some “Maximum Leader” or “Great Helmsman” will be needed to steer The People toward utopia on earth. And those who disagree? Well, as Rousseau writes in his Social Contract, they “will be forced to be free.” Humanity has been plagued by this version of the grand strategy idea ever since Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote it down, in all his charmingly lighthearted, smiling, and cynical self-satisfaction.7
Like Defoe’s Cavalier, the Scotsman Richard Cant fought with the army of Gustavus Adolphus in the Thirty Years’ War. His great-grandson, Immanuel Kant of Königsberg in East Prussia, adored Rousseau and was thrilled by the French Revolution, yet ultimately gave the international system the substantive project for peace that it had lacked. The system posited the state as the basic component of international life, and added elements like diplomacy to facilitate state-to-state interaction. Beyond that it did not go. The state was a vessel into which any manner of governance might be poured. If governance produced a toxic, dangerous state, then other states could only try to shift “the balance of power” against the noxious party.
Kant’s brief essay “What Is Enlightenment?” explained that through Enlightenment, mankind would leave its “self-imposed immaturity”; that is, give up any and all “foundations”—religion, tradition, and the like—that previously gave moral and intellectual guidance. With the mind liberated in this way, old problems could be thought through anew. Observation and reason would suffice to work out every issue from the ground up, ab initio. Kant’s famous part in this effort was his “categorical imperative,” a thinking-through of what might qualify as rightful human action without reference to outside authority.
Kant, admirably, took up the challenge of doing the same for international life. Political philosophers had previously devoted themselves to the quest for justice and good governance inside the borders of the political entity—polis, city-state, nation. The space beyond the borders of sovereign states was ungoverned and unphilosophized about; Grotius’s vision was as yet unrealized. The vast external realm was anarchic and could be survived only through the accumulation and wielding of power.
Hobbes regarded the international arena as ruled by the “law of nature”—nasty and brutish—and like Rousseau, he declared that his philosophy could not extend so far. Hobbes and Rousseau provided links in what Peter Gay called the great chain of treatises in political theory that began with Plato’s Republic8 All were attempts to provide a modern basis for governance within the boundaries of a political community; international affairs were beyond them.
What Hobbes and Rousseau turned away from, Kant met head-on, and did so as Enlightenment precepts dictated: from the ground up, without reference to past authorities or intellectual foundations. In Perpetual Peace, Kant thinks through the questions of international order without any reference to the Treaty of Westphalia or any other supposedly foundational principle supplied by the past, concluding by reasoning alone that yes, the state is the basic unit of the international system. He then adds a new element as structurally essential: government by consent of the governed. The argument is presented through an imaginative story. Outside a Dutch tavern a sign is creaking in the wind. Zum Ewigen Frieden is the name on the sign: “At the sign of Perpetual Peace.” It’s a joke; the picture on the sign is a graveyard. Kant looked back on a time of seemingly perpetual war: the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), the wars of Louis XIV, the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-1714), the English-Dutch wars, Russia’s destruction of Poland’s independence, the wars with the Turks, and the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), the first truly global war.
Kant’s writing is convoluted and difficult. Perpetual Peace also has a misleading structure. The first part, called “Preliminary Articles,” contains specific requirements such as “no secret treaties.” Next comes “Definitive Articles,” which call for republican government and a federation of free republics. Then come two “Supplements,” which deal with questions raised in the first two parts. If read straight through from start to finish, Kant’s arguments are hard to grasp and unpersuasive. But when we read them backward, or almost backward, a coherent line of thought emerges.9The argument actually starts in the first Supplement, with reindeer.10 “It is in itself wonderful that moss can still grow in the cold wastes around the Arctic Ocean; the reindeer can scrape it out from beneath the snow, and can thus itself serve as nourishment or as a draft animal for the Ostiaks or Samoyeds.”11 Nature, and animals such as the reindeer, thus make it possible for human beings to live in extremely inhospitable parts of the world. War is a basic part of the human condition, and wars have driven people into every part of the world. The differences of resources, climate, and other conditions vary greatly, so that many different products result, and this leads to trade relations among peoples. While trade is conducive to peaceful relations, wars continue, because war “is grafted onto human nature.”
Kant, the archetypal Enlightenment thinker, is here presenting an Enlightenment argument. He is not turning to any established, foundational source of authority, whether religious, moral, metaphysical, traditional, or otherwise, but is instead thinking through the problem of war and peace from the ground up, unaided by anything but his observation and his reason.
In his second Supplement, Kant observes that wars have forced people to form themselves into different states, entities of governance, each for its particular part of the world. Ideally, it would seem that one universal, cosmopolitan government should arise for all the world, but politically that wouldn’t work, because peoples and their lands vary so widely. There is no realistic possibility of global governance.
But the idealistic and the realistic, and the moral and the political, factors can yield an agreement on something. All human beings desire justice. For people to obtain justice, Kant says, there needs to be “publicity.” Today it is called “transparency.” The governed need to know what the government is doing. This means that the best form of government is a republic: a state in which sovereignty belongs to the people and which is administered by officials who in some real way are representative of, and answerable to, the people.
Then we turn to Kant’s arguments in his “Definitive Articles,” in which the points made in the Supplements are translated into political recommendations. A republic is the best form of government not only because it is best able to ensure justice for its citizens but also because it will act against inclinations to go to war. A king, Kant says, can simply order his army to march against a rival kingdom. But a republic’s citizens will have a say in any such decision. And because it is they who will provide the soldiers, they will have a braking effect on the implementation of war plans.
If this is so, then the more republics, the better. An association of republics would be better still, because then the trend would be stronger for peace than for war.
States also will be connected by mutual self-interest. Kant makes a utilitarian argument: “The spirit of commerce sooner or later takes hold of every people, and it cannot exist side by side with war…. Thus states find themselves compelled to promote the noble cause of peace, though not exactly from motives of morality.”12 Put this together with the peaceful propensities of the individual republics and the world might be pointed toward the goal of “perpetual peace.”
Kant’s concepts amount to a form of grand strategy for an international system seeking world order, peace, justice, and progress. When placed alongside the international state system brought into being with the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, this “Kantian Project” became the way the world’s nations have come to work with each other. International law, universal human rights, and the United Nations and other established international organizations all are in some way colored by the arguments set out by Kant in Perpetual Peace.
The United Nations is not, it is important to note, Kant’s federation of republics. Whatever merits it may have, the UN has sought to admit all states no matter what their form of government. Kant’s concept would include NATO and the European Union, because these associations require a republican form of government as a condition for membership. From a Kantian point of view, the international state system will make progress toward peace to the extent that it increases the number of republics—democracies—within it.
Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1776-1788, a work as much about the Enlightenment as about the vicissitudes of imperial Rome, was in significant ways an anti-Christian manifesto. The Westphalian system was designed for differing religions to flourish without serving as sources of conflict. Could that system withstand the rejection of its own foundational faith?13
When I was a schoolboy, I was obviously nearsighted, so I was sent to the school optometrist for an eye examination and was issued glasses. After a few regular eye checkups, I realized that every eye chart used the same text for that top line of minuscule print. So I memorized that line, which was the first sentence of Decline and Fall:
In the second century of the Christian era, the empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth and the most civilized portion of mankind.
Gibbon goes on to praise Rome for “the gentle but powerful influence of laws and manners…. The image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence…. The Roman Senate appeared to possess the sovereign authority, and devolved on the emperors all the executive powers of government.” The fall of Rome, which brought an end to such good governance, Gibbon wrote, was an immense catastrophe that “will ever be remembered, and still felt by the nations of the earth.”
Why did Rome fall? What were the crucial factors? Overextension of military commitments? The centralization of decision making? Luxury and corruption? The replacement of the antique virtues of manliness, sacrifice, frugality, civility, patriotism, and loyalty with meliorism, sentimentality, a yearning for peace and fellow feeling? All these factors can be found in Gibbon’s pages.
Gibbon’s paragraphs, chapters, and volumes demonstrate his ability to master vast amounts of material over great expanses of space and time. As one astute reader noted of Gibbon, “However far his eye may range, the clue is always firmly in his fingers, and the conclusion of the third volume was in draft before the first volume was written.”14 This is the mark of an epic. An epic, it has been said, is a work of high seriousness, amplitude (that’s a Gibbonian word), and inclusiveness, an exercise of willpower over material, and an expression of the sense of an entire period or culture. If Virgil is the epic of Rome, if Dante is the epic of Christendom, if Milton is the epic of the Renaissance and Reformation, Gibbon is the epic of the Enlightenment.15 His work is universal, secular, skeptical, rational, and ironic—and eager to reveal the errors, misdeeds, failures, and deceptions of the past.
Gibbon’s most distinctive quality is irony. He does not mention Christians until he has described the conversion of Constantine in 312. Then the two chapters—15 and 16—hit like a thunderclap. The Christians are described in an ironic tone that cannot mask Gibbon’s genuinely devastating views on their errors, corruption, and self-satisfaction. He sees them smitten by pride and seduced by a love of power that, under artful disguises, insinuates itself into even the hearts of saints.
Chapter 15 is a rhetorical masterpiece, with every example of early Christianity marshaled to discredit believers. In it, Sir Leslie Stephen said, Gibbon struck Christianity “by far the heaviest blow which it had yet received from any single hand.”16 Gibbon proceeds “to relate the progress, the persecutions, the establishment, the divisions, the final triumph, and the gradual corruption, of Christianity.” He delays, until chapter 37, his treatment of the monastic life: the wait has only heightened Gibbon’s delight in his own exquisite irony:
The Ascetics, who obeyed and abused the rigid precepts of the gospel, were inspired by the savage enthusiasm which represents man as a criminal, and God as a tyrant. They seriously renounced the business, and the pleasures of the age; abjured the use of wine, of flesh, and of marriage; chastised their body, mortified their affections, and embraced a life of misery, as the price of eternal happiness…. They soon acquired the respect of the world, which they despised; and the loudest applause was bestowed on this divine philosophy, which surpassed, without the aid of science or reason, the laborious virtues of the Grecian schools.
Decline and Fall is an answer to City of God, Saint Augustine’s attempt to refute charges in his time that Christianity, with its soft virtues of faith, hope, and charity, had so undermined the antique, manly Roman virtues that the city was rendered helpless in the face of the assault by Alaric’s Goths in 410, and that the pagan gods had taken their revenge on a Christian Rome that suppressed pagan sacrifices.
Augustine retells and reinterprets stories of ancient Rome. He transforms the story of Regulus, the Roman held hostage by Carthage and then sent on oath to Rome to negotiate. It is no longer a story about the old Roman virtue of upholding one’s oath; now Regulus is a worshiper of pagan gods who failed to preserve him. The story of Lucretia, who killed herself for Roman honor, becomes a way for Augustine to assert that a Christian woman would have been chaste in the sight of God, caring nothing for the opinions of this world and taking comfort in the prospect of her reception into the next.
For Gibbon, Christianity’s perversion of ancient Roman virtues led to the collapse of the empire. Antique paganism, for Gibbon, was eclectic, tolerant, flexible, moderate, and practical. Christianity erupted as an alien, corrosive force, intolerant, dogmatic, zealous, contemptuous of the world around it. The Christian church grew rapidly as a result of the inflexible zeal that Christians derived from Judaism, the doctrine of a future life, the miraculous powers ascribed to the Christian faith, the pure and austere morals of the Christians, and Christian unity and discipline, which formed an independent state in the heart of the Roman Empire. Each of these points corroded the core of the antique Roman character: instead of flexibility, intolerance; instead of practicality, otherworldliness; instead of reason, belief in miracles; instead of manly virtue, pious rectitude; and instead of the City of Man, the City of God.
And once in power, Gibbon says, Christianity’s bigotry turned inward, splintering the Christian world into irreconcilable antagonistic sects. For Gibbon, society, nature, and humanity, the love of pleasure and of action, tempered by reason and moderation, are the sources of happiness and virtue. But it was not in this world that the Christians wanted to make themselves useful or agreeable. Gibbon professed, ironically, to be surprised when his chapters on Christianity caused an uproar. He had thought, he declared, “that an age of light and liberty would receive, without scandal, an inquiry into the human causes of the process and establishment of Christianity.”
Gibbon sought to bequeath a book for the guidance of statesmen. The Decline and Tall is a warning. Here in the desolation of a thousand years of history lies proof of the destiny of states that depart from the maxims of the Roman republic.17
Cicero gave Gibbon a glimpse of what politics should strive to create: a republic. When he read Cicero, “I breathed the spirit of freedom, and I imbibed from his precepts and examples the public and private sense of a man.” There is a parallel between Gibbon’s portrait of the perfection of human nature and the standard set forth in Cicero’s De Officiis (On Duties). Cicero sets out an ideal of excellence and insists that the ideal can be realized through a self-imposed discipline in which the passions are subjected to the control of reason. At one extreme is the oppression of tyranny; at the other is the anarchy of perfect equality. The best lies in the balance of freedom and justice in conditions of order.18 So Gibbon arrived at the same conclusion as Kant, but from a different angle: a republic is the best form of government for a state.
Following Cicero, Gibbon believed that the essence of civilization consists in the control of passions and instincts by the law of nature and nations which reason has inscribed: “the different characteristics which distinguish the civilized nations of the globe may be ascribed to the use and abuse of reason,” and reason, he insists, can function only under conditions of liberty. The vices of the corrupted Romans of the empire, unworthy successors of the republic, constituted a betrayal of the rule of right reason inscribed on the virtuous mind—and thus a betrayal of civilization.
The narrative carries the story to Rome’s subjection by barbarians in the fifth century, then from Justinian’s Constantinople to the final split between the eastern and western empires in 800, and on to the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453. The larger, underlying theme is the migration of the empire from Rome to Constantinople, to the East, leaving “the ghosts of the deceased Roman Empire sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.” This is, of course, going the wrong way. The translatio imperil, the transfer of imperial power, is supposed to go from east to west. For Gibbon, the conversion to Christianity of the Emperor Constantine in 312 pulled the cultural and political center of gravity of Rome eastward toward the luxurious civilizations of Asia.
Christianity was an oriental religion in the process of becoming an oriental monarchy. “The simplicity of Roman manners was insensibly corrupted by the stately affectation of the courts of Asia.” Byzantium was an oriental despotism at the other end of the political spectrum from the mixed constitution of Republican Rome. The empire sickens and shrinks until, at the end, the Byzantine empire has contracted to the limits of one city—Constantinople, threatened by the armies of Islam.
Enlightenment philosophes expressed their anticlericalism by presenting the Prophet Muhammad as a great legislator (recall Rousseau’s Social Contract) whose objectives had been liberty, tolerance, social justice, and enlightened statecraft.19 Gibbon’s chapter 50, on the life of Muhammad,20 is written in such elegant and inspiring prose that it might itself serve as a sacred text of the faith. His praise for the character of Islam and the Prophet serves as an oblique attack on Christian belief and practice, although much of this praise would not be accepted by Muslims.21
If any religion can be admired by an Enlightenment savant, Gibbon seems to say, it is Islam, which is rooted in reason:
The creed of Mahomet is free from suspicion or ambiguity; and the Koran is a glorious testimony to the unity of God. The prophet of Mecca rejected the worship of idols and men, of stars and planets, on the rational principle that whatever rises must set, that whatever is born must die, that whatever is corruptible must decay and perish. In the Author of the universe his rational enthusiasm confessed and adored an infinite and eternal being, without form or place, without issue or similitude, present to our most secret thoughts, existing by the necessity of his own nature, and deriving from himself all moral and intellectual perfection. These sublime truths, thus announced in the language of the prophet, are firmly held by his disciples, and defined with metaphysical precision by the interpreters of the Koran. A philosophic theist might subscribe to the popular creed of the Mohammedans: a creed too sublime perhaps for our present faculties.22
Islam is the admirable counterexample to Gibbon’s indictment of Christianity, and he uses “Mahomet” to represent the Muslim state. Here was a religion with a human founder, without monks or priests, that demanded simplicity and resisted complication, organizationally loose, so that human progress would not be obstructed as the Christian church had done. Islam was to Gibbon “a model of that judicious blend between rationally demonstrable verity and socially useful prejudice which is the best that can be hoped for in a religion.”
Gibbon’s appreciation of Muhammad and Islam is praiseworthy at a time when Catholics and Protestants were vying to demonize Christianity’s nearest alternative faith. But Gibbon’s exalted prose masks his use of Islam merely as a foil in his anti-Christian polemic. He certainly had great success in debunking Christianity in the Europe of today, but his picture of a non-“priest-ridden” Islam is no longer recognizable in the Imam-, Mullah-, and Ayatollah-ruled Muslim world. Something in the practices of that world has turned out to “obstruct human progress” more effectively than Gibbon ever accused Christianity of doing.
Like Thucydides, Gibbon considers his epic “a possession for all time.” To Gibbon, his project is greater because it takes on the two great Western intellectual traditions: classical and biblical. Gibbon tries to outstrip his classical model by engaging the empire greatest in power and extent—Rome—and to supersede his foremost religious model, Milton’s Paradise Lost. If the First Fall was that of Lucifer and the Second that of Adam and Eve, Gibbon is writing of the Third Fall. The Fall of Rome, yes, but the Fall of Christianity as well.
The cause of both biblical falls was pride. Gibbon makes it clear that the fall of the Roman Empire was likewise caused by pride—Christian pride. Religion left society unable to defend itself, weakening the empire and allowing barbarism to triumph. As Gibbon put it, “the clergy successfully preached the doctrine of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister.”
A literary wave following Gibbon’s admiration for Muhammad would transform the West’s view of Islam. As Gibbon praised its rationality, Goethe romanticized it in his 1819 collection of lyric poems West-östlicher Diwan.23 Thomas Carlyle, in his Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History of 1841, lectured on “The Hero as Prophet-Mahomet,” a lecture described as the definitive reversal of the medieval world’s picture of Islam as the great enemy.24
Washington Irving, attached to the American legation in Madrid, became fascinated by the life of the Prophet. Irving was the first American to win an international literary reputation (“Rip van Winkle,” “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” and Knickerbocker’s History of New York). In 1832 Irving published what would become his most internationally famous book, Tales of the Alhambra, romantic sketches of the long-departed Arab caliphate and its fairy-tale palace on a rocky spur above Granada.
In 1842 Irving was appointed American minister to Spain (the United States at the time refused to name ambassadors as a means of keeping the international state system at arm’s length). There he read Europe’s first serious and sympathetic study of the Prophet, by the German scholar Gustav Weil.25 Irving then began work on the book project he claimed to have had on his mind for decades. His two-volume Mahomet and His Successors was published in 1849 and sold well for years.26 Irving wanted to depict Muhammad as both a God-inspired prophet and a world-historical figure, consciously rejecting the antipathy of the pre-Enlightenment West. He turned the record over and over, examining each disparaging accusation and refuting each in turn as if he were Muhammad’s lawyer. As a good Christian, Irving concludes that Muhammad was an inspired genius, but a literary—although illiterate—rather than a religious genius: “All the parts of the Koran supposed to have been promulgated by him at this time, incoherently as they have come down to us, and marred as their pristine beauty must be in passing through various hands, are of a pure and elevated character, and breathe poetical, if not religious, inspiration.”
A signal change took place, Irving writes, after Muhammad’s flight to Medina, when he finds himself revered as the Prophet: “From this time worldly passions and worldly schemes too often give the impulse to his actions, instead of that visionary enthusiasm which, even if mistaken, threw a glow of piety on his earlier deeds.” Here were the seeds, Irving found, of Islam’s swift transformation of the world, but also the sources of its downfall, when the Arab empire pressed too far and, counterattacked, the Caliphate of Cordoba was lost in 1031. Little territory was left in Muslim hands except Granada, which fell to the Catholic Reconquista in 1492.
At the end of his book, however, Irving’s admiration for Muhammad seems even greater, not from vainglory over the Prophet’s victories or admiration of the mere wealth that poured in as spoils of war, but because Muhammad never altered his simplicity of manner and appearance but used his wealth to promote the faith and to relieve the poor. Throughout it all, “Prayer, that vital duty of Islamism and that infallible purifier of the soul, was his constant practice.”27
Irving depicts the launch of a rising and seemingly irresistible universal, monotheist system of world order within the caliphate under the leadership of the Prophet, then its overreaching, recession, and decline. Irving singles out Jesus, not the Prophet, as the divinely inspired figure in his biography, yet regards Muhammad as worthy of praise. Pledged as an American diplomat to the separation of church and state, Irving nevertheless fully appreciated the power of religion, and Islam, in world affairs.
The End of History, Francis Fukuyama’s influential work of political theory based on Hegel’s idea of the state and human freedom, depicts the end of the Cold War as the clarifying moment in history when the great question of the human condition, “What form of governance is best?” had been answered definitively. No alternative to liberal democracy could be found. The title brought the author scorn; every time trouble erupted anywhere in the world, Fukuyama’s critics would gleefully point out that history had not come to an end. In reply, Fukuyama quite correctly said: “To refute my thesis it is not enough to suggest that the future holds in store momentous events. One has to show that these events were driven by a systematic idea of political and social justice that claimed to supersede liberalism.”28 Communism had been just such a systematic idea, and it had been defeated. Now Islamism was coming forward as a systemic alternative, something glimpsed in the years of the European and American Enlightenment by Edward Gibbon and Washington Irving.
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Post by neil on Jul 29, 2021 16:53:39 GMT -5
Hey, guess what? What, what, GrowlyBear? I've never read THE WASTELAND. No! Yes, no! Tut and Tisk. And you know what else? Yes, No! I have no intention of ever reading it. OoooH! Why not, GrowlyBear? Why? I read HOWL. Just because I write poetry doesn't mean I want to read it ...
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Post by neil on Jul 29, 2021 16:59:24 GMT -5
... also I read somewhere that Ezra Pound edited THE WASTELAND so comprehensively that he may as well be recognized as co-author. this may not be true, but it fits my contrarian cast of mind.
wow, that's pitiful.
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