Of Wands and Worlds: Recent Scuttle on Harry Potter and the Elder Wand

This is mainly a response on some things that have been coming out recently I guess in  J. K. Rowling's tweet about the elder wand as sentient. From what I can tell, the speculation is all surrounding whether the wand that Newt takes from Grindlewald in Fantastic Beasts 1 is the elder wand and who then actually owns it. Some have a theory that Jacob Kowalksi will become made the "owner" as a way to hide it, which would be an awesome neat little redemption of Peter Petigrew as a trop: short, rotund, and made the keep of a secret/power, but Jacob is virtuous and in love with magic simply for its beauty and will do honorably with what has been entrusted to him, whereas Peter was always trying to suck up to the most powerful bully in the room for saving his own skin and betrayed what was given him. And we know the wand has to be an issue based in the material in Deathly Hallows, and I an guessing she might do some things with it in the coming Fantastic Beasts movies that really impress me (same as I was really impressed with the potential for fluidity and wand-as-language interpretations in the material in Deathly Hallows on the "mutual quest for knowledge and experience ... the wand learning from the wizard, the wizard from the wand").

But now to the real content of this post. The tweet in question runs: "The secret of the elder wand is that it's more sentient than any other. It can identify the caster of any spell that touches it and keeps tally of which wizard has beaten which, giving its allegiance to the one it judges the victor. Physical possession is irrelevant."

I'll get it out of the way ... *yawn*.

I have to state out front that that yawn is playful and not meant to diss anybody. I honestly mean no ill will or derision on any of it. But I also really do have no real vested interest, and if she writes good stories for the remaining four movies of the Fantastic Beasts series, I'll like them and say I like them and analyze them for what I like in them. And if it seems like the remainder of them get all wrapped up in obsessive physics-of-magic mongering to the detriment of a good story, I'll probably say I think that and then move on. But, for the record, both this tweet and the sort of frenzy surrounding its content seem to me to be best described with a term very fitting for the original medium ... twitterpated. It's all aflutter, but I don't think about anything really substantial to interpreting the canonical Harry Potter story of the seven books.

Maybe it has value in conjecturing what she will do in the future, and as I said, if I think what she does in the future is a good human story and think it's interesting how she constructs that using, among other things, a physics-of-magic she's created in the world, then I'll write that. But as far as determining meaning in the closed canon of the seven-book HP series, I simply think it's a lot of needless twitterpation, probably in response to a lot of, well, to be honest, crankiness from a materialist perspective. As I have said on this blog and back in the Muggle Matters blog days, I have found some really valuable stuff in the work of Red Hen (Joyce Odelle). But I do also think she has been focused on the physics to a level of making it the defining thing of Harry Potter, and I think that that is a mistake in how to think about literature.

(By "crankiness," I mean that, in what I have read of Red Hen's material, particularly in John Granger's Who Killed Albus Dumbledore collection from 2006, she can be somewhat acerbic in making complaints against JKR of being inconsistent and so on ... and I hope that "cranky pants" is not too harsh of a characterization ... it really comes simply from always looking for a way to work the term into any and all conversations because the place where I heard it at the end of this video makes me laugh every time I hear it, just the way the girl says it ... I say it to myself at least several times a day about myself when I'm getting frustrated with something I am editing; "somebody's got his cranky pants on").

And I think that Rowling is a bit under the sway of it a bit (just as I think she is a bit under the sway of those who talk about writing "adult" fiction when she turns out what I thought to be very thin characters in Cuckoo's Calling, to the extant that I've had no motivation to read any of the books following it) and that it is leading her to do retrojection, toying with the world needlessly to try to get something "right." I think it's needless as far as the workings of the original story. I think the original story is fine as stands. There are explanations for all the material details within the already-published canon itself, explanations that are both adequate and internally consistent.

So, here is where I will give my basic explanation of what I think the question is that all these theories are twitterpated to answer and how I think it is already answered within the scope of the original closed-canon story. The question is: So, the elder wand just knows that Harry beat Draco, maybe through some, what, magic version of the cloud and big data mining?  Or the edler wand just knows who Harry is and the whole story of Harry and Voldy and is some sort of force of justice in the world that decides Harry should win over Voldy? The wand is sort of an NSA of the magical world, successfully tapping the deep-sea cables? ... And so, we get language from the author about the elder wand being "sentient" (and I am really hoping that this sort of thing doesn't lead to obsessive reworking of the remaining four movies that drags energy away from writing actually good stories, and that it doesn't shift from being good human literature to being the Wizarding World version of Dan Brown).

So, here is my answer to that riddle. The wand does not even really need to know who is on the other end of the hawthorn wand. I think that we can take the spells cast by the wands to be sort of an extension of the wands themselves in their power, and thus can take the meeting of the spells in the air to be a meeting of the wands themselves, just as we had in the graveyard duel in Goblet of Fire. In order for the elder wand to acquiesce to the hawthorn wand, it needs to know only a few facts, and none of them are who Harry is or who Voldy is or who Draco is etc.:

1. The hawthorn wand beat the elder wand when it's rightful master, which was Draco at the time, used it to disarm the rightful owner of the elder wand itself, which was on top of the tower in Halfblood Prince. If we take "sentient" in the way of this fact being "readable" by the elder wand in such a way that it can be held in "memory" and be decisive in further interactions, I don't really have a problem with it.

2. When the wand meets another in this way (the spells meeting in midair), the elder wans can sense that this spell is being cast by the wand in "affinity," or "union," or "cooperation," or "obedience," or choose what term you like, with one who is it's rightful master, at this time (which is now Harry, but that is not decisive here).

(I'm going to take it for granted that a reader is observant enough on their own to remember that, for instance, Harry's wand recognizes even Voldy himself, who was the wielder of the yew wand, and so would even more so recognize the yew wand, and would not ask questions like "where is it established that wands can recognize each other individually at all?" ... that's built into the story by the author as a basic parameter: wands can recognize each other as distinct).

3. Therefore, in the "mind" of the elder wand: "the master of the hawthorn wand" now = "master of the elder wand."

4. The Expelliarmus cast by the hawthorn wand in the great hall is cast by the rightful master of the hawthorn wand. With "sentience" being accurate for connections and things in HP if it means things like "vibe," which is, as I have said, the way in which the term is accurate for that world, then the elder wand can get a vibe from the hawthorn wand that the person who cast the spell through the hawthorn wand is its rightful owner, much in the same was as the spider in the woods can "sense" a vibe from the blackthorn wand that the engorgio spell is not being cast by the true master of that wand because Harry was not the one to win it from the snatcher, Ron was. The elder wand can sense obedience, as it were. It may be "more sentient" than others in being able to "discern" finer shades of that, but it really doesn't need to be able to for the mechanics of the story to work, because even basic material can recognize basic affinity versus antipathy between wand and wizard in the form of the spider recognizing that Harry is not the rightful owner of the blackthorn wand, and that's definitely not a case of some special "intelligence" on the part of a wand being the source of the "sentience, not given the blackthorn wand's original owner, because that wand must be on the end of the spectrum better described as "stupid," if Olivander's description is accurate, "the wand learning from the wizard, the wizard from the wand" (not much that that wand could learn from the snatcher whom Ron describes as "part troll").

5. Ergo: the elder wand knows that the spell it is meeting is cast by its own true master, the master to whom the hawthorn wand is being obedient, the hawthorn wand that was being obedient in stripping the elder wand from its own master. It doesn't need to know the identity of any of these people, or even necessarily that they are different persons (Harry and Draco) between the two meetings. It just needs to be able to recognize the identity of the hawthorn wand as the wand that beat its (the elder wand) master (DD on top of the tower) and to sense the vibe of right obedience to the present spell caster.

There is this "question" being put forward of the duel in 1945 and how DD won the wand, and it sounds like the "the one it judges the victor ... physical possession is irrelevant" is maybe meant to be an answer to the question of how you beat somebody with an unbeatable wand. But if the wand is what DD himself surmises in Deathly Hallows, a very awesome creation by somebody very gifted and skilled, but still a creation by a human, then it has its limitations. And maybe DD himself really was quite simply pretty bad ass and could outmaneuver and outthink even somebody with that powerful of a weapon, at least when that person was a megalomaniac and with a weakness for monologuing (to borrow that wonderful term from The Incredibles) or other weaknesses; maybe DD really was a Sundance Kid who could nail the can three times in a row while moving (the old witch at OWLs said she saw him to things with a wand she had never seen before); maybe he really could float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. Maybe "your beatin' Grindlewald don't need explainin.'"

(I'm a fan of "talk nerdy to me" ... cracks me up ... fun fact: the sax line, from the original rap song, is really originally from the song "Hermetico" on Balkan Beat Box's album Nu Med, and I saw BBB 4 of 5 times in NYC while I lived there, one time on the outdoor stage at Lincoln Center and the rest of the times at Webster hall on 11th between 3rd and 4th, just down from Union Sq. ... AWESOME live.)

So, in some of what is out there, a theory by Red Hen was  brought up that involved Harry's path to ownership of the elder wand being by way of Death being the only true master and Harry "beating" death by submitting to death in the forbidden forest. I'm not sure if this is a recent writing in response to the new tweet or from back in the way back of the analysis frenzy immediately after Deathly Hallows hit in 2007. It has some potential in a thematic direction, but while I haven't read this particular piece by RH, I did read a fair bit by her back in those days, and I kind of doubt that she goes in that direction with it.

I can say that, in the very least, I don't favor a reading that says that Harry could not have beaten the elder wand with the hawthorn wand prior to submitting to death in the forest. One could, I suppose, argue that the elder wand does beat him in the forest when it kills him and that even the fact that he is not casting with the hawthorn wand is not a reason the elder wand could have missed his identity, since the holly wand recognizes Voldy without the yew wand. But then, the question would be that: if the wand is able to act as judge between characters connected to it, why did it kill Harry? Of course, maybe it was respecting a wish that it could read Harry as having, a wish to yield to death in the form of not raising the hawthorn wand to defend himself, and the elder wand could read this as a sort of transmission from the hawthorn wand simply by it being in close proximity. Or maybe the elder wand knowingly did not kill Harry; maybe it could read the horcrux situation and also that Harry was submitting to death and so it intentionally didn't kill him and did kill the portion of Voldy's soul ... OR MAYBE ... maybe a lot of things. There are simply a lot of very speculative questions here that really all point, for me, to one thing, which is that you're not going to be able to get "complete" material consistency any more in a fictional world than you are in the real world (we think that that should changed things, being one author and having more "control" ... but after years of editing even research writing and seeing the ways authors will change between plans of expression even mid-sentence ... I don't think so). And, at the end of the day, I don't think that the author going back in with the magic wand of "authorial intent" really solves anything. As I said, I think that the consistency is at a satisfactory enough level in the original as far as why Harry can beat the elder wand with the hawthorn wand in the great hall finale, and I think the going back in just mucks things up.

[Note: as far as the elder wand not being binding on Harry because he did not defend himself, an argument might be made that he brings up this very point of "meaning to die" in relation to the wand's power. BUT, remember that, when he brings it up, he is talking about the wand's lack of power to hold the Hogwarts fighters in silence and that his explanation is that his willingness to die provided them protection ... not that it provided him protection from the wand. It's not that this is evidence for saying that Harry COULD be killed by the wand; it's just saying that the instance doesn't provide any real evidence one way or  the other on whether or not Harry's willingness to die in the woods was a factor in his own protection from the wand in the final showdown in the hall. All that's been stated is that his willingness to die in the woods afforded a protection of the Hogwarts fighters similar to that which his mother's death provided him].

On the most basic level, I think the "death as master" theory is reaching and inventing things needlessly. What's invented here is Death as a distinct character, as a singularity with interactive power (able to recognize willing submission and communicate it to a singular entity like the elder wand, able to be "master" of the wand, the stone, and the cloak, and so on). We've never had this before in Harry Potter; we've never had any anthropomorphic manifestations of universals etc. the way we do in Terry Pratchett's Death and Hogfather. What we do have is Dumbledore, who often functions as JKR's mouthpiece, saying that what is likely the case is that the three brothers were highly gifted and invented these three powerful things and that the death part (the tale) is the type of legend that naturally grows up around those types of happenings and powerful objects.

I suppose one could try to argue that, because DD says he doesn't think they are death's gifts without explaining that he doesn't think death is a personal entity, this means death IS a real person/anthropomorphic manifestation because, otherwise, DD would have clarified that death actually is not a person at all before discussing whether or not certain things personally belong to death ... but that's REALLY grasping at straws ... as if DD always sets out to establish metaphysical parameters or teach a course in ontology every time he said something.

In effect, the "death as the true master" theory is going into making one's own world out of raw Harry Potter material to meet the needs of one's own theories (even if it is the author constructing beyond what they already constructed in the closed canon). I suppose that one could say that they're not saying there is a concrete "personification," but rather just the universal death, or death "in general" ... but it seems really thin to me to talk of a "thing in general" or anything along those lines as being the "master" of specific objects. I think that the core way of putting it is that there is no evidence of a singularity of "death" in Harry Potter that is anywhere near concrete enough to take singular action, including "being" the master of unique physical objects like these. There are just individual deaths: the only singularity is the fact that everybody dies. From what I can remember, the only places we get talk of "death" in this way comes from sources, and only two instances even of that: the tale of the three brothers and the New Testament ("the last enemy to be conquered will be death" on the tombstone in Godric's Hollow).

I'm not trying to be negative on the theorists, I just decidedly disagree. And thus, it's a conversation to which I don't have really much to add except for this post.

The real thing is that the world is overtaking the human story. Red Hen has always been, as far as I can tell, about pinning out what I would call a "physics" of the magical world. That's all fine and good in and of itself, and I actually do think that the physics of magic can be a locus of meaning. I think, for instance, that there is a slight extension of soul through the wand that I think symbolizes extension of the self into the world of another person through language, an extension that can be communion or it can be invasion (and that the AK curse is the soul invading another so radically that [1] it kills the other soul and that [2] it renders the killing soul so unstable that, when the part of the soul that was extended in the invasion comes back through the wand, it can break off, making a horcrux possible). But I think the present frenzy of theory over the "sentience" of the wand is a matter of the world, the physics-of-magic-in-the-wziarding-world, overtaking the human telos of the story.

I think it is fine to be doing this kind of physics and concern with and work in material accuracy. As I have said before, I think that concern for it is an important part of an incarnational aspect of human literature. But there is also the possibility of going from being incarnational to being materialist, which is what I think happens here. And when the author herself buys the preoccupation and starts nervously pandering to it to try to win its approval (hope she's not reading this, because I probably deserve a right royal slap in the face for playing all Dr Freud on this, but it does seem to me that very probably there is some truth in it), you get revisionism that messes with a story that didn't need to be messed with because the cranky-pantsness was just simply that.

The thing is, I don't think any author is going to be able to come up with an alternate universe, or in this case, an alternate aspect (magic) of the real universe, that meets all criticism and analysis on the level of material consistency. I mean ... we can't even completely do it with REAL physics/science, where we have the ability to coordinate the findings of many objective experiments carried on by many parties, so I think it's a bit demanding to require it of a single author with only one subjective vantage point from which to do various tests of models and only limited time to do what can be done if they want to satisfy the hordes screaming for the next book.

I realize that, in hitting on the "human" meaning of the story, I am out of step with a lot that is going on in theory these days, with the last two books I have edited for one university press having a lot to say about the possibility of "machine identity" as "other-than-human agency" arising from the evolution of self-adapting algorithms in the computation of big data and breaking down the dichotomies between human and nonhuman, even between organic and inorganic (and I personally think that a lot of such theorization of "other-tan-human" comes from the painful experience of what humans can do to each other). But there will always be for me a core creedal commitment to a belief in the uniqueness of the human being as the image of God. It's a matter of faith, by its very nature (as based in the supernatural, in God) beyond the realm of verification as fact (beyond the tests in the system of determined causality we call "nature"). And coming out of Genesis 1, I believe that there is a hierarchy that has humans as the crown jewel and pinnacle of creation. I also believe that we have a responsibility to respect the rest of creation and work for its health in addition to our own, and that we have done a piss poor job of it at best. But that doesn't change the reality of the dichotomies and the hierarchy. I'm for human above "other-than-human agency" (although hopefully not despotically or to the detriment of it), and I am for human story above the independent "physics" of the wizarding world. I love that physics and love that she's able to construe meaning in it ... but the meaning still always has to be applicable in some way for a human theme embodied in a narrative.

Star Wars: Last Jedi

I think the same thing is happening with The Last Jedi: in the criticisms and disgruntled feelings of some, the world of "Star Wars" is taking over the human story. I think that it is more important for Luke to work as a character in a story (and I do think that he works as a tension character who shows the tension in human existence, now slightly crazy but still cogent, disillusioned with the possessive formality of the Jedi but not disillusioned with goodness, but also carrying wounds from when he momentarily lost his perspective on how to achieve the good, suffering from the world of fallout that
can come in a split second from a faltering like that) than it is for him to be "what a Skywalker is supposed to be" in the "Star Wars universe. "


Terry Pratchett

Thoughts about Terry Pratchett came to me while thinking about all this. I was mulling over the term "human meaning" and thinking what all that can mean: "symbolic" or "emblematic" etc. And I returned to the question of the imps in the cameras as animism, but in the service of human theme (in this case maybe human epistemology and the fact that any concept we have of any inanimate object is still a bit animated because it is a concept in the minds of us, who are animate) rather than actual animism.  The imps aren't truly "symbolic" or metaphorical. They're really kind of emblematic. They're not symbolic of a trait within humanity or a particular type of person; they are what humans make when looking at nature. And they are quite literal ... there have been real human beings who ascribe real events to real demons. And that started me thinking of the book I am just finishing editing on internet "daemons," the legion of small programs on routers and gateways that regulate flow in the internet. The early version of the internet, called ARPANET, had what were called "Interface Message Processors," of IMPs, for short. I Wonder if Pratchett knew of IMPs in ARPANET. It would totally not surprise me at all. Of course, that may drag interpretation of him away from my "human epistemology" reading of the camera imps, since IMPs in ARPANET are the beginning of new "other-than-human agency" theory, but I wonder if we would ever be able to have any idea that "other-than-human" "agency" is there if it is so completely other-than-human. They speak of the possibility that, at some point, daemons could, on their own, as the step into being true AI, develop communication protocols that humans cannot understand at all, but I wonder, if this does happen, how we would know. Wouldn't the fact that we can't understand what they communicate mean that we can't understand that they are communicative language at all? Lewis can talk about Ransom (in Out of the Silent Planet) being able to recognize something as language without knowing the content, but there is admittedly and undeniably anthropomorphication going on in the  story, and any language we have been able to recognize in the real world has been human language, something passing between humans and interpreted by humans as "communicative" in nature even if the content is unknown; if the divide between organic and inorganic were truly broached or the line between human and nonhuman, and if a machine developed a truly nonhuman language, would theorists in favor of such an evolutionary event even be able to discover it as such?

(I just watched Ex Machina: not my favorite kind of film, very depressing in the end [don't worry, I know the critics are raving about it, and it has some really strong points, but it also has pessimism-for-pessimism's sake points, and I choose to interpret my own way, and while there is some value in some things the critical establishment has to say, and while I know it may be a bit arrogant of me to challenge (or not?), it's not a magisterium for me] maybe along the same lines in tone and content as 2001, but not completely whacked out depressing like The Man Who Fell to Earth ... ANYWAY, there was this interesting thought for me: the AI passes the final TRUE Turing test of the film itself ... the ability to deceive and betray.)

Horror Films and Meaning in Stories`

So, this is the kind of thing that runs through my head at the gym (quarter after 6 this morning ... first time that early in years) while I'm listening to Imagine Dragons or Lacey Sturm and trying not to drop a bar on my throat before I've even really woken up.

As soon as I get off editing a book on internet daemons (a legion of background programs involved in packet routing in the internet, the internet as a possessed place, and the implications of the level of flow control assigned to daemons independently for net neutrality), maybe I will get around to finishing the first book and then reading the second by the author I playfully dub "Captain Anglo-but-Catholic," the first on Shakespeare's life as evidence he was Catholic (in a time when that was a bad idea in England) and the second on the plays as evidence. And even from the one instance of  material from the plays he has had in the first fifty pages of the biography book, I can see the point he is making and think there will probably be a decent level of validity in some of the individual observations, maybe even a majority of them (but I've already said that I think that his stated underpinning "authorialism" philosophy and his version of "incarnational literature" are dangerous bunk).

So, I'm at a point of seeing the serious criticism of Shakespeare from a Tolkien perspective but also thinking that there are some other things possibly of value in Shakespeare. So, as I have mentioned in some other posts, this has gotten me started on a string of thoughts of different ways in which meaning happens in stories. It's an ongoing project to think about different kinds of meaning and their instantiations in stories, such as Tolkien's "narrative art" as based in enplotment or Shakespeare's possible use of mouthpieces (which I don't mean pejoratively) or Rowling's use of literary alchemy and Dumbledore as a mouthpiece or As Above So Below using Dante and Alchemy in a found-footage horror piece.

[ASIDE: Admittedly, there are some stories that might take a little bit more work to fit into any model even though I think they are good and I love them: I can fit Snatch into a "value of underdog" and Way of the Gun into "exposition of the natural order and the idea of not stepping out of it" (small time hoods reaching above their station and the Chiddicks using a surrogate rather than the natural way), but I'd probably be pressed to give a good exposition of how "proper f*ck*d?" (the coursing scene in Snatch) or "we're not asking for forgiveness, we're not asking for absolution ... but isn't that the way it is, every g*dd*mn time?" (closing line of Way of the Gun) fit into all that meaning finding method in the way that I love the lines and think they encapsulate something in the film (or how, even though Resident Evil: Apocalypse is mainly pumped up adrenaline and a predilection for noir on fire and appreciation that Jovovich has great form and persona for all these acrobatic kick-ass sequences like running down a building or jumping a Harley through a Gothic church window and killing the big bad with a double-barreled shotgun firing stacks of quarters, even though it's mainly that [which is why I have watched all six RE franchise movies, in addition to all five of the Underworld franchise, so often on my elliptical machine at home], I think that it also does capture something primal in human experience when Jill Valentine coughs out cigarette smoke and says "f*ck me" when she hears the yield of the nuke after having asked as a way to keep up her "we might still be able to last this situation out" tough spirit ... but I don't think I am getting that through the door as "meaning" for some types, types with whom I share some habits of thought, habits of thought for the sake of which I do these mental experiments of wondering how different types of meaning get into stories and how they are read there ... but I still try to see how they might fit together). END ASIDE]

So, one person I know has said they don't think there is really anything productive or positive added to the world by generating the emotional experience of fright or terror for its own sake, which is what this person mainly conceives the genre as being, in all instances. Admittedly, there is a lot of it that is that, especially slashers (and then you have the "sophisticated" stuff that the critics wet themselves over like Josh Whedon's Cabin in the Woods because it goes meta, to which my response is a bit the same as Robert Downy Jr's advice to Ben Stiller in Tropic Thunder, "never go full retard" (for the most part I had no use for that movie, and I apologize for any offense in the terminology, but the "never go full" does have transposition value here) ... I say "never go full meta"; when everything was meta, they had no place to go to do something with a metaphorical or symbolic or emblematic or any other type of referent outside the story without using some overblown image like these nebulous gods, and then the gods win because, well, they're gods, and you just got two protagonists sitting there going "I guess we lost" ... boring at best, but the critics all trip over each other to wet themselves because it's "sophisticated" ... it's what I call the "sophisticati," an adaption of all the conspiracy-theory connotations of the illuminati trope).

But I think there can be a point to horror and the emotional experience it gives rise to when done well. That's basically just saying that I think it has a particular type of meaning that can be put into it and brought back out of it in a way proper to the way it works, by the feelings of horror and fright. In As Above So Below, it's the heaviness and grit and fear of reconciliation, the way in which "digging in the dirt, find the place we got hurt [or did the hurting]," to quote Peter Gabriel, is horrific like digging into thousands of bones in a grave world under the ground and being attacked by them, and in Insidious: The Last Key, it is being aware of the horror of the realization of the times when violence was actually still going on right around one and not realizing and the social criticism of manipulation of abusers.

That's the main point of this post. Just a thought that occurred to me at the gym this morning of connecting the "types of meaning" thing I've been contemplating in regard to Tolkien and Shakespeare and my interest in horror of a certain kind. I've already written on As Above So Below and Insidious 4 individually; this is just a succinct statement of fitting that interest into my larger thought system about literature (or at least an attempt to fit it in).

P.S. If you're reading this from checking out my blog from hearing of it in the podcast on Mugglenet's "Reading, Writing, Rowling" and you've ever wondered what the Wyrd Sisters sound like ... I have always thought that Tom Waits is the secret model or epitome, so you should check out his whole body of work (except maybe Small Change and Heart Attack and Vine, I've never gotten hugely into them ... actually, the ones to which to listen especially are Closing Time and Nighthawks at the Diner and then the albums from 1983 on: Swordfish Trombones, Franks Wild Years, Rain Dogs, Bone Machine, Mule Variations [greatest line maybe ever about human experience: "I know you can't speak, and I know you can't sign, so just cry right here on the dotted line"], and Real Gone ... I haven't had a chance to check out Bad as Me yet ... well, with it being seven years, yes I have had the chance, but I haven't gotten around to it yet) ... that's what I'm listening to as I write this.

Mugglenet's Reading, Writing, Rowling Podcast series

Here is the link to the Reading, Writing, Rowling podcast on Mugglenet (you can listen streaming, don't have to download like in the old days of the original podcasts). Episode 7, just posted, is Katy McDaniel and John Granger having a 1.5 hour conversation with me about chiasm and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Weird to think about my physical voice being out there on the internet on a site with actual traffic/readership.

Tolkien, Rowling, and Pratchett briefly compared, and a not-so-breif thought on Discworld.

This post comes indirectly courtesy of the friend's college-aged son who came up with the competing topography of Patema Inverted. Over Christmas, somebody had gotten him Shepherd's Crown, the fifth Tiffany Aching book in Terry Pratchett's discworld series, and the last of the whole series, actually published posthumously from the rough-needing-editing/tightening-but-still-done manuscript he had done at the time of his death in March 2015. So, I was asking what the college-aged son had read up to that point, and he's done all the City Watch / Vimes books, including Snuff, and all the first four Tiffany Aching books, but only Going Postal, not Making Money or Raising Steam, and I don't think really any of the Rincewind/Wizards or the Witches, or at least not many. He was asking me what I thought of Shepherd's Crown and I was saying that I think that it and Raising Steam are kind of two halves of a single ending to the series, not just that they are the last two books because he died, but that they actually make a complete arc of the series, so he should probably read Raising Steam, but then I thought of details in Raising Steam that you sort of need to know where they come from in Making Money unless you want to just gloss them, which is definitely possible to do and still get the more substantial content in Raising Steam, but it's nice to know them if you can. So I lent him Making Money and Raising Steam and told him it was entirely fine to take them back to school with him and read them as he got time (hope I didn't write anything too crazy in the margins; I tend to have a lot of marginalia in some books ... you should see my copy of Barfield's Saving the Appearances ... that's not to say it's all brilliant, some of it is just tags to remember where topics are addressed, and other of it is probably loco theories, but there certainly is a lot of it either way).

But then I was thinking, "hmmm, once he reads them, what do I say in a conversation to explain what I mean about them being two halves of a single ending, should probably think a more structured something up so it's not just 'mumbly stumbly, stumbly mumbly, something about, um, mumble something.'" So, this post is in part covering formulating that response.

But there is something beyond that, which is actually what I am going to do first.

As I was sitting outside just musing on the response, it made something pop into my head about when people ask the question of which author you think is best, which is usually a fanboy/fangirl question. Probably the two most common places I have heard it is Tolkien "loyalists" who think Harry Potter is evil or sucks or something and Marvel "loyalists" who enjoy sitting around home ripping on DC comics and especially DC fans probably more, could they be honest about it, than they actually enjoy the Marvel movies themselves (which is not all self-identifying Marvel fans, let alone me; I don't self identify as particularly a marvel "fan," but I am very much interested to see Black Panther and Infinity War ... but I also really liked the chemistry between Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman and Ben Affleck as Batman in Justice League and think the male/female combined with the below human [Batman as not only simply human, but as the human subconscious] / child of a god has a lot of potential for analysis [paired respectively: male-underhuman / female-overhuman (woman as super ego?)], but I also admit that, yeah, overall, the actual product put out of Justice League was not a great movie by any stretch of the imagination and really didn't capitalize on any of that potential [just as Batman vs Superman didn't really capitalize on potentials of underman and overman tension], whereas Age of Ultron was really strong and Civil War was even stronger ... but I still think that Wonder Woman is the all time best film to come out of the super hero genre of films ... so where does that put me on the spectrum of "Marvel fans versus DC fans"? The real question is "Who cares?").

Anyway, my thoughts on Tolkien, Rowling, and Pratchett (and there is no pecking order there; that's simply the order in which I was introduced to them in my life), is that it is cool that we have three such popular fantasy writers who are actually really good at fantasy (there is a lot out there under the name "adult high fantasy" that is not so great *cough ... Game of Thrones*) but so diverse, having such a variety. I'm going to give my synopsis/categorization of them before I go on to my separate thing about the discworld series, and after I give my little synopsis of the three, I go into the specifics of saying more about discworld.

J.R.R. Tolkien:
Magic is about love/charity: the elves say that the cloaks blend so well with their natural surroundings because they put into them all their love of nature; Sauron and Saruman's machinery is the opposite of love: control, manipulation, and exploitation (and I have this pet theory, sort of as part of a grouping with my thoughts on literature as "incarnational," that Sauron's sin and his undoing was to incarnate himself, as it says that he poured so much of his strength and his power, and really himself, into the ring, which is conquest of nature in middle earth rather than love of it) ...

[SIDE NOTE: I think this criticism of perverse incarnation applies also to the thinking of the author to whom I have referred as "Captain Anglo-but-Catholic" (or at least will refer whenever I finish reading his books and write my "baked on Shake" post, in which I will actually probably find some value in the captain's findings of Catholicism in Shakespeare, although not his underlying "philosophy" of where he takes them, and then try to synthesize the valid critique from a Tolkien perspective and probably wind up with "Shakespeare is a mixed bag"), who also uses the term "incarnational," in particular about Shakespeare, but he uses it in a very different way and I think it is bullshit at best and possibly dangerously close to idolatry: I talk of narrative art as incarnating truths of theme and theology and anthropology and philosophy etc.; he speaks of literature as incarnating the author (or at least one particular author), and he slides VERY VERY easily between big A "Author" (God) and little a "author" (Shakespeare) in presenting his philosophy of "authorialism," which I think is dangerous, because, as a Catholic, I believe there has only ever been one person WORTH incarnating (only one worthy of it), the one who claimed to be the Truth ... and it isn't Sauron, and it isn't William Shakespeare. END SIDE NOTE]

And Tolkien writes in the biblical mode. This isn't a matter of "genre" or of doing an allegory of the Bible, but of a shape and mode that could be applied to different genres, although it works best probably in an alternate universe, and it's fairly unique to Tolkien. In short: two major installments, the first (Silmarillion) being like a tapestry of peoples (much like Genesis's string of "generations," which is the specific Hebrew word toledoth, stretching from the twelve tribes back to creation [Gen 2:4 = "these are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were made"], then the deteriorating story of the twelve tribes in the land in Judges and the histories of the kings of the two kingdoms in 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings) with no one single character's arc spanning the whole narrative except Melkor, and the second (Lord of the Rings) being more like morality tales, maybe somewhat like the parables in the Gospels, but not allegorical (that's a whole discussion unto itself, how to define allegory: I say it is when you copy the plot over wholesale, that that's a long discussion), but most like the Gospels themselves in contrast to the Old Testament (not like the Gospels in being inspired or having the Incarnation of the Word as their subject), with characters whose own arcs span the whole of the narrative arc; and the most central element of the "biblical mode" is that the connection between the two installments is typological fulfillment (three pairings of elf and mortal: Beren and Luthien are the original model and they simply get one of the Silmarils back; Tuor and Idril have a child, Earendil, who takes that Silmaril to the Valar to get their help in defeating Melkor; Aragorn, and Arwen are the full-fill-ment, the full measure, beginning a line of kings that rules a world at peace after the final major influence of Melkor has been rooted out in the downfall of his chief lieutenant, Sauron; I have written more on it here, but what I just gave is may be my most succinct yet complete statement of the core theory to date [but def check out the other post .. cool stuff about the similarities between the silmarils and the ark, etc.]).

J. K. Rowling:
Magic is about imagination. At least that is what it is about on a metaphorical level. But I also think that, on a "physics" level, it is extension of self/soul through the wand or focusing element (Jim Butcher does more direct exposition of "focusing" in the Dresden files with the idea of using focus items like the staff and blasting rod [I've never heard him say anything about it, but I don't doubt there is an allusion in the "rod and the staff"] versus raw mojo slinging than does JKR in HP, where it is simply you have a wand or you don't, and if you have one and you're a wizard, you can do magic, but if you don't, you can't, although we also do see examples of magic happening without a focus object in kids doing magic without meaning to, Harry blowing up Marge etc., and she definitely develops the wand as an image heavily, she just doesn't do it defining a concept of the wand as a "focus" on the mechanical level of magic the way Butcher does), and I think the symbolism wraps back around to the wand being symbolic of language ... and if you accept that the line between metaphor and literal is thinner and more fluid than many moderns like to think, and you allow these two to combine, then, like Fred and George's mating fireworks, you get imagination (magic) as the extension of self/soul through language (wand).

But I will stick with describing the imagination part for here. John Granger's Hidden Key to Parry Potter, which came out between books 4 and 5, was the first thing I read on delving into Harry Potter on an analytical level like this. He has a great observation on the symbolizing of imagination in the series: Diagon Alley is an imaginative adaptation of "diagonally" into a place ... and magic/imagination is about looking at the world diagonally, not straight on, or "scientifically." But you have to say it as the imaginary place because, once you start to say it in the "scientifically correct" way and describe it as "viewing aslant" or something along those lines, once you start talking about the actual workings of its referent in a literal way, speaking of it by its literal scientific name, "diagonally," you step out of Diagon Alley into someplace else. And if you try to pronounce it as "diagonally" instead of "Diagon alley," like Harry in the flu network, that someplace else might be getting shunted to Nocturn Alley: If you try to hold on to the magic of the place but make it the scientific, you get the real world version of "magic is might," which is "science is power" ... you get mustard gas and World War I.

Where Tolkien has (I argue) the biblical mode in an entirely alternate universe with a form of interaction called by some "magic," Rowling's construct is the real-world manners and mores boarding school genre, borrowed from Jane Austen (along with the third-person limited-omniscience narrative perspective for narrative misdirection, according to Granger), in the base structure of the seven years of Hogwarts. The story is so much more, but the basic material layout is the education plan, including of course the larger entities that bear on that, like the Ministry etc. But I should put it too that these larger things of Gringott's and the Ministry and the international confederation are also more central to the construct than simply being props for the school: they're a society served by the school, so it's a two-way street between the school and the society. The real story, the real plot, is Harry versus Voldemort and love versus power mongering, but every story has a context, and the context of this story is the wizarding world in England as focused through the lens of education of the young for participation in the structures of that society.


Sir Terry Pratchett:
 Where do you start when talking about Pratchett. There is so much there in forty-one books. Let's start by establishing the setting: Tolkien has the alternate world, and Rowling has the real-world-but-magical school and society. What Pratchett has is a fully alternate universe in which "magic" as such has a more pronounced presence than in Tolkien (in LotR, magic could almost be stated as simply "power" ... the term "magic" is even questioned by Galadriel and other elves with her when they note "but you use the same word to describe the arts of the enemy" ... so maybe "arts" is a better word in LotR, which gets very close to what I think magic really is across all of these great writers .... but in discworld, "magic" is everywhere and everywhere known by that name) but not as codified and structured as in Harry Potter (sure, there is a University, but outside of the fact that it does "magic," it is much more straight up a parody of the social dimensions of real-world academia ... no tensions between the professors of divination and transfiguration, no tensions between two approaches to divination [Trelwaney and Firenze], no concerns about approaches to Defense Against the Dark Arts ... the wizards of Unseen University as a social grouping may be the original jumping off point for exploring the magical disworld and they may play real roles as people in developments of it, but the education institution and its curriculum are not really a huge locus of regimented magical theory or training).

Pratchett is most well-known for his satire and parody, and he is a master at it: Lord Vetinari and Sam Vimes are amazing characters, and Granny Weatherwax's handling of real delicate situations such as Tiffany's coming of age, and even more so Granny as standing on the line between the light and the dark, protecting the real world light (families and the young) from the real world dark (pettiness and an overgrown smallness of spirit, not to get too paradoxical about it), are incredible ... and more interesting than Mustrum Ridcully's whizbangs (although his cheeseboard has wonderful parody and satire potential).

All the parody could lead one to think that the magic is not really important, that all that is really important for meaning is the character interaction and the real-world referent of anything in the novels. But the series begins with Rincewind and the imagined dragons (who are, by the way, great live ... saw them at Barclay's in Brooklyn last fall on the Evolve tour), and as much as Granny Weatherwax does social commentary and management (like Granny Aching), she also does magic ... she borrows and takes the pain away, she defends against the fully and dangerously magical realm of fairies and against the hiver.

There are many kinds of magic in the discworld. There is the natural happenings of mythical embodiment like our young friend who becomes something more than human in Pyramids. There the loud flashbang spells of the Wizards. There is the sympathy with nature magic of Granny's borrowing.There is the power of mythological personification, like Death and Hogfather, as well as Teatime's way to kill the latter through killing belief in him by controlling the belief by controlling the believers through their childhood teeth in the tooth fairy tower (I think that's called thaumaturgy, at least in some traditions, like the whole voodoo thing of making a simulacrum with something of another person, like hair or blood, or in this case, teeth, and controlling them with the simulacrum ... Butcher uses it a lot in the Dresden novels). There is an ant farm that is basically a computer, but with its own twists, and there are other magics that parody real world technology, like the imps, who embody a sort of method Pratchett has of using animism not as actual animism but as a way to get to the idea that there is a lot more of the "animal" than we think in "inanimate" objects simply because they are objects as understood by us, the "rational animal."

The base concept of magic IN the discworld is, I think, mystical (which is where you have the monks of history and so on) and about imagination, and the latter (imagination) is stated even more directly and on the page in The Colour of Magic than it even is in Harry Potter: ". . . the King Color, of which all the lesser colors are merely partial and wishy-washy reflections. It [is] octarine, the color of magic. It [is] alive and glowing and vibrant and it [is] the undisputed pigment of the imagination, because wherever it appeared it was a sign that mere matter was a servant of the powers of the magical mind. It [is] enchantment itself."

I would say "magic IN the disc world" is tied to but not exactly the same thing as the magic OF the discworld, what the whole thing is as a magical construct in Pratchett's head. Magic OF the discworld is really Pratchett's artistry and it is tied to something like "mystery/mythical " in the sense of a  mysterious connection between the magic IN the discworld, on the one hand,  and the comedy and commentary and characterization in his parody and satire, on the other. It is in instances like the question of how something can be so deep and so funny at the same time, like "write only memory": it is a concept brought in by a "thinking machine" that is the collective working of an ant farm, so it is part of the magic IN discworld, but it is also a funny AND profound wordplay (a parody of "read only memory," or ROM) that expresses the paradox that we think about "memory" as being about the past, but memory always has something to do with sense of self, and sense of self is about futural expectation as much as, and probably more than, it is about the past; it's about who we want to become, who we believe we can and should become, since HEX brings in the concept as a way to get the concept of "belief" that Death is trying to explain to it in Hogfather (and having Death fill in for the discworld version of Father Christmas is in itself an ingenious thought with a wealth of philosophical possibilities).

The last thing that I will add here is that Pratchett is the reason I put this comparison up before the specific material on discworld. I said in that post on Patema Inverted that there needs to be a what to do the saving (of the appearances) for, that all discussions of topographies and other literary methods needs to be in the service of something larger (and will be, one way or the other: if an author isn't consciously choosing, somebody might likely choose for them; somebody like Pratchett may have a humanitarian enough of a core for it to work subconsciously, but not all do). I wanted to go into this broader characterization of Pratchett before getting into specific narratological details of the series as an attempt to give that what as a grounds for the how and not be just discussing technique for technique's sake, practicing erudition for erudition's sake, like four-year-old Danny Saunders in The Chosen by Chaim Potok (to bring in a VERY different genre), who could only see and take joy in the prowess in his own being able to read, not see and sympathize with the suffering in the story he read (and so Reb Saunders must teach him to sympathize with suffering the only way he can see to do it, by making him suffer through raising him in silence: he never talks to him except about Torah and Talmud when specifically studying them ... the scene in which he explains this to Danny when Danny is on the verge of manhood by explaining it to Reuben Malter while Danny is sitting right there simply tears your heart out, throws it on the ground, kicks it violently in the dirt, and then shoves it back in your chest to try to survive ... the only scene I've ever read that has a stronger impact is the painting of the second Brooklyn Crucifixion in Potok's My Name is Asher Lev, although the breakthrough moment with Michael at the end of his The Promise hits pretty hard too).

A good example of the cross between magic and morals via characterization is Tiffany's "see me" spell in A Hat Full of Sky. There is sympathy intended from the audience: all her clothes are handed down from her sisters, and they are not rich to begin with; wanting to see what she looks like all around in the nice dress is understandable. But there are things in the world that prey on the understandable, and I think that part of the moral is to take the horror we feel in the sudden shocking revelation of the hijacking of her identity by the hiver (at least there was for me ... I still get chills from that end-position-accented line, "we see you; we ARE you!") and turn it into an impetus for protecting children in the real world from manipulation. And the power of magic stands in for that power of manipulation in the real world: there are people who can use the imagination to control and enthrall others.

The Ending of Discworld
The series is magical from start to finish. It opens with Rincewind and dragons and sapient pear wood luggage and the symbolism in the number 8 as the color of magic, basically octarine as numerology, symbolizing magic as that which is out beyond our normal mundane world, what can be imagined rather than what can be scientifically verified. And then by the third book, Equal Rites, we are into the witches material with Granny's borrowing and here interchanges taking Eskarina to Unseen University in Ankh Morpork.

In a way, something small like the two leaders of these two strands, Ridcully and Granny, having been in love a little as young people before they both went their illustrious ways (revealed in his visit after her death in Shepherd's Crown) symbolizes the whole series. The series starts with Rincewind and Magic (and, nicely, it also starts with the really deep parody of society, not mocking but mystified and exploring, in an early version of the Patrician, the ultimate version of which will be Vetinari ... the man for whom there really was only ever one woman, one lover: the city itself, the polis ... he can rule Vimes because he is the purest "police man," man of the city [and you know that is on Prathcett's mind because he has Carrot specifically mention that etymology]).

With Raising Steam and Shepherd's Crown, the series ends with male and female, like Ridcully and Granny.

The mystical thing about it is that it does it with a real world bent. In the first of the two books, the male version, it closes with a magic that is actually identical to something in our own real world technology, BUT thought of in a magical way: Steam. But then, in the second of the two books, the female, it also ends with the radically and dangerously magical, with Tiffany as the new hag o' hags protecting the human world from invasion by the world of fairy (fairy being the radically dangerous magic for humans ... not Tiffany ... Tiffany protects the regular world from malicious invasion by the fairy world).

(ASIDE: And lest it be thought that my saying "second" necessarily means the feminine is secondary to the male here, it should be remembered that there is another way to think of things, and this gets really deep: it is scientism's radical chronism that places the meaning solely in material priority; in literary story telling, the penultimate always serves the ultimate, the next-to-last is in the service of the last, leading up to it, not the other way around, because the "last" is what is sought, the goal, in ancient and medieval terms, the telos ... and I can attest to the fact that scientismists dislike teleological thought by my own experience not long ago of hearing one go on a bit about how the Greeks had to "make up" a word for Plato's new made up category of teleology [the scientismist had a very disapproving tone in his voice concerning it ... interesting factoid: check the Wikipage on Discworld under the heading of "narrative causality," the first sentence of which reads "the Disc's nature is fundamentally teleological; its basic composition is determined by what it is ultimately meant to be"]. Teleology is basically the consideration of intention in the form of a goal, and "end" in the "end justifies the means"  sense rather than simply the strictly materially descriptive sense of "last." The word telos always meant "end" as "last," and it was indeed a new interpretive move to tie it to intentionality, just as fifth-century preSocratic philosophy was a new thing completely different from the mythology that preceded it, but it was a consciously interpretive move and not a fantastic inventive one. In the philosophical sense, teleological means the fact that the last in execution is the first in the order of intention, meaning it is what whatever the whole shebang in question was all about in the first place, and scientism really doesn't like that because desire and intent are subjective categories, and the scientismist believes that completely objective scientific description is not only possible (which I don't think that it is, not complete objectivity), but is in fact the base mode of all human understanding ... of course, the Plato aspect was in a language this particular scientismist doesn't know how to read, but that never stops a good scientismist .... I'm not saying that I think Pratchett had a conscious teleological plan to lead up to Shepherd's Crown; in fact, I don't think that the deep things for him always played out on the field of consciousness in the way we like to think of it, as I have said before in comments on the fact that he never mentioned trying to write structure but he did come out so structured, like 5 Death books in which two openings build to a trilogy, and 8 Vimes books with a structure of 4 ramp-up books leading to a trilogy and then an 8th (yes, octarine) book out beyond (the opening to the new generation, as young Sam develops his own personality) simply because Pratchett was hardwired for that structure; he didn't have to "think" it for it to happen ... and in the same vein, I think that, if we could look inside his head when he began Shepherd's Crown, we might see that it is no coincidence that, when parts of him could tell that his own end was near, he decided to write the book that put the fully fitting ending on the series, the book that could be a culmination of the whole. If you want evidence that I think the female is at the very least as strong as the male: I'm the one who will point out to you that Rincewind and the Wizards, and even Moist von Lipwig, have to have an ensemble cast (Vetinari, Vimes, Harry King, etc) and a new protagonist added to do the male half of the ending, whereas Tiffany and her witches rock their half all on their own ... well, with the help of a backhouse boy and his goat :) END ASIDE]

(Now I have to cover my ass by making sure I explain what seems like a real leap out of nowhere, saying that Raising Steam is masculine). Dick Simnel and Moist von Lipwig are, in Raising Steam, the men of our real world but coming at it from a magically informed perspective, one a physical tinkerer thinking about how steam harnesses the four elements and the other a societal tinkerer behind the scenes of the methods of communication (the post office fighting the juggernaut of the clacks) and economy (making money), but alongside figuring out how to wrangle golems (and how does he get the golems to wrangle? he's too clueless to get them on his own ... he's needs somebody really wise, like Adora Belle Dearhart ... and that line in Going Postal is possibly one of the greatest romantic lines ever penned: "and so he told her all of it ... she particularly liked the part where he was hanged, and made him tell it twice. And between them the ash tray filled up with ash and around them the post office happened" [paraphrasing/condensing]).

Tiffany is the female half of the ending ... the actually wise one, the one who can find the meaning of the railroad for the deeper things like invasion by the too-mystical AND effectively communicate it as an argument to the king of fairies so he puts his foot down on any from his realm who try this kind of stunt again (the argument that the world is now becoming ever-more girded in iron, to use Simnel's name for his first steam engine; and there is a sort of connection between this magic IN discworld and the magic OF discworld: Tiffany can keep the magic OF discworld, which symbolizes the mystical, from taking over the mundane too much, from getting the human lost in the mystical, the way Eskarina (I think? not Tiffany?) got lost borrowing the hawk and it took a while for her to come back to a human way of thinking or the way Wentworth and others get lost in the fairy world in The Wee Free Men, the way we can get lost in a story or a construct. It is fitting that her story is the one that tells us: "and here we must have an ending to the discworld, we must stay grounded in the real world ... use the discworld as a focusing lens and a source of models for imaginative approaches to the real world that find more joy and humor and love, but the real world is the place you actually live ... let the fantasy world help it, not conquer it."

A Further thought on Discworld

An earlier version of some of the basics of this part is here. There, in considering the possibility of Raising Steam as the final book of the series, I went through the various protagonist subseries to look at how they wound up with a structure to them. The new further thought about discworld for here and in connection with the closing of the series in Raising Steam and Shepherd's Crown is that I see the two protagonist series with the least structure, the Wizards and the Witches, as being the ones who provide the most structure to the overall series. Even though the Wizards appear only slightly in Raising Steam (if at all?), their thread did carry up through 2009's Unseen Academicals, one of the last five books of a forty-one-book series, and their specific number of books puts them as tied with Vimes as far as number of books for a subseries, Eight, which is the highest number except when you take Granny across the span of the witches and the Tiffany books together (Tiffany/Feagle have five, Death has five, Moist has three). More importantly, the theme of Rincewind and the wizards is the magic in discworld, and the driving thematic of Raising Steam is the magical/technological parody, the magic IN discworld getting as close to real world technology as is possible (beyond that you have to start delving into electrical manipulation of current to make strong and weak pulses that get interpreted as 0s and 1s to make digital computing [if I understand it rightly, which is a big if ... editing an interesting book right now on internet "daemons," small programs that control traffic flow and other things on the internet] ... and it's a long-standing trope used in both Harry Potter and Harry Dresden that magic and electrically based technology don't mix).

As I have said, the other half of this bringing the discworld magic as close to our own technology as possible is keeping magic from invading, and that it the job of Tiffany and her "hedge witches" and her book, Shepherd's Crown. The nice tie-together Pratchett does is to have the element that she uses to clinch her argument in getting the fairy king to put his foot down (he wasn't the one who made the invasion, but he was too busy partying with his vegenitals to be bothered, and Tiffany makes clear that he needs to be bothered to keep his people in check) is the very thing that happens in Raising Steam, the railroad is girding the world with tracks made of the very thing that is poison to fairies, iron.

In these two books, you have the two character/theme arcs that spanned the whole series, Wizards/Magic and Witches (if Rincewind and the Wizards tied with Vimes for number of books, as I said, Granny beat them by having the six witches books plus her role in the first four Tiffany books, and really the witches win over all when Tiff's final identity is as the hag o' hags, the true heiress of Granny, giving the witches eleven books total ... but neither the witches nor the wizards completely opens and closes the series: the wizards open and the witches close).

I'll move on in a second here to a secondary point with the Wizard stream that I think I'm writing for the first time, but first I want to note that I think that an important role of personal disposition for Pratchett is played by the thing of the two protagonists who provide the arc of the whole series not having as much distinct structure in their own actual series of books. The way that Pratchett wrote the series was rambling: one year a witches book, the next a Vimes/Watch, the next maybe a stand-alone YA like The Amazing Maurice, the next maybe a Death book or a more postmodern theoretical stand alone like Monstrous Regiment (the whole thing of gender, which he also has going with the "low king" of the dwarves). And I think it was important to him to have that rambling and meandering feel, in part because life simply is that way. When I come in and find these structures of trilogies and such even though he probably didn't consciously intend at first to do them, it is probably less eisogesis and more chaos theory. I don't think he would have minded being shown the structure as long as he was not expected to play a part and say "yeah, yeah, I'm really excited about it being structured, and I actually intended it that way." The point of chaos theory is that the order is discovered after, and in the actual writing, Pratchett is able to meander and ramble in that way that is so productive for him in coming up with this wonderful material. But it is still chaos theory, not radical reader response: the order is found, not inserted.

It's funny that the most meandering series ever written should be described as being teleological in its magic (on the Wikipedia page indicated above in the aside), but I think that that fact is more paradox, in a positive, Chestertonian way, than irony. So it is fitting that the two most meandering subseries are also the ones to provide structure, at least the structure of having a theme-based arc, to the whole. It is very Terry.

I would say that the person writing that on Wikipedia is speaking of the magic IN the discworld, and that most people think that the magic OF discworld, meaning his creativity in writing and constructing and connecting, basically his plotting, is not teleological, but rather very random and meandering. But I would argue that the magic OF discworld is also teleological; it's just that it is completely chaos theory discovering it (I have always thought we emphasize conscious intent in literature too much), or at least that part of it that is the structures of which I am speaking.

Raising Steam
So, since I admitted that the Wizards aren't in Raising Steam, I have to do some heavier work here to demonstrate that their particular theme, which is the version of magic particular to their strain (versus the hedge magic or human-sympathy magic of the witches, like Tiffany taking the Baron's pain away or what Granny calls "headology"), is indeed central to the book. But I also hope that this will enable me to pick up another new point, or at least one I don't think I have written on in here yet, which is the origin of magic as "occult property."

Magic started the discworld series with Rincewind and the imagined/believed dragons, but Raising Steam ends it with magic by going back to the real world roots of magical thinking, just as it brings magic as close as it is possible to bring it to our real world technology (without going into electricity ... or that wonderful scene in Colour of Magic, I think, where Rincewind crosses from Discworld to real world as a Norwegian psychologist on a commercial flight, but then the luggage crosses over too and chases him down the plane and they both pop back into the Discworld). It is noted several times in Raising Steam that steam is the combination of the four elements: earth, air, water, fire all work together to make it. This was ancient Greek "natural philosophy," basically their thinking on "science." So Raising Steam takes it back to core magic thinking not in the manner of having the same wizards who started the series, but by going back beyond them into the real world history of thought on "magic.'

Actually this goes back "beyond" magic, not in a temporal, historical way, but rather in a "grounds on which a thing is built" way. The way all magical thinking starts that is properly magical, rather than religious (appealing to a god or demon), is in the consideration of "occult properties," consideration of them within the "scientific" material universe. For the Greeks, that material universe was the four elements cosmology (built on the four contraries) and the four humors anthropology (also built on the four contraries). But the belief was that we could in some way or another observe all of this natural cause and effect going on ... except in the case of occult properties. The word itself means "hidden," so they would be unobservable by definition. If you look up "occult" in Merriam Webster, you get "supernatural," which sort of misses the point in the original meaning, or maybe jumps over it to get to a modern meaning of supernatural by way of supernatural being invisible to natural, only they don't explain that jump. You can see more of the real meaning if you look up "occlude." There you get closer with something that fits something like "occulemency" in Harry Potter better, which, since "mens" is the Latin for "mind," could be described as "blocking off" the mind. But really what the word means, and what would be a better way to describe occlumency, is "hiding," because originally, magic is about manipulating the "hidden" properties. The key example they always used to talk about occult properties was the lode stone, a magnet, which has the ability to move iron in unobservable ways (fitting ... the whole iron thing). All other stuff we can see: my hand moves a nail by picking it up and you can see that. But a magnet moves a nail and you can't see how, so it must be a hidden property. And magic begins with the attempt to find the way to manipulate those hidden properties.

[NOTE: Occult properties were tied also to astrology in that being born under certain stars made those stars exert certain pressures or forces, occult modes of causality, on a person and make them to be a specific type of person. Even somebody as orthodox as Thomas Aquinas bought this much ... but he emphatically did not buy what they call the "semiological" side of things, which here does not have to do with words as language signs pointing to things (linguistics and language studies are the most common place one hears of "semiotics"). The Greek semeia means "signs," and in the ancient world it would be astrological signs or miraculous workings (Christ did "signs" and wonders). So here, the "semiological" side that Thomas distinctly did NOT buy was that, based in the fact that astrological bodies exerted particular occult pressures at the time of conception or birth yielding particular personal dispositions, the movements of the stars could be used as "signs" of what was going to happen in a person's life ... the practice we commonly call "astrology." END NOTE]

So, at the same time as Raising Steam brings Pratchett's magical world as close to our own as you can without crossing (bring computers other than Hex into the discworld, and Hex is powered by the animism of an ant colony, not the manipulation of electricity), the book also includes elements that pair that with an opening that is not only back before the discworld's magic in Colour of Magic, but back beyond magical thought in the real world, back beyond the attempt to manipulate the "occult" properties, back to the desire to understand and work with the "natural philosophy" of the four elements cosmology, what was conceived of as the "natural" world: Dick Simnel working with earth, air, fire, and water by Raising Steam.


Shepherd's Crown
I have sort of stated at least most of what I have to state about this one at various points already, so for here I will just collect the basics in one place to make sure the connections aren't missed. Where Raising Steam brings our world and the discworld as close together as they can be brought, Shepherd's Crown presents a protection against an incursion of the magical/mythical world into our own on some sort of literal level by giving us the image of Tiffany protecting discworld against the fairies. And the thing that connects the two books is the railroad: developed by Simnel and Moist in  Raising Steam and deployed by Tiffany in Shepherd's Crown as an argument to persuade the fairy king to keep his people in check (if your people try, we witches will be here to fight you off, but you should tell them that they might as well not even try because it's going to be a serious pain in the ass because of how the world is now so girded in iron, which is poisonous to you all).

I'll just end by saying that I think that Tiffany's job is extra hard in our day and age because she not only has to keep fairy from over-running the real world; she has to keep the science of the real world from destroying the world of the imagination when used as weapons by the scientismists who have hijacked more legitimate science. The book itself is mainly about the one half, protecting the mundane from the magical, but there is an equal need to protect the magical from the mundane, to protect literature from the conquests of so-called "scientists" who think that the way to find the meaning of literature is for their "science" to force literature into that science's own categories of understanding.

(At some point I should get around to reading the "science of discworld" books, which seem like an incredibly imaginative thought experiment: the wizards at Unseen University make a model of an alternate universe that just happens to be our own real universe, and they send Rincewind in to poke around and try to understand how our "science," our nature, works so as to compare it to the magic in discworld.)

[ASIDE, BUT REALLY GOOD ONE: I have always loved that title of the fourth Tiffany book and the line it comes from: "When I am older, I shall wear midnight." Aside from the just awesome characterization (especially when she finally dons midnight and where the specific dress came from at the end of that book ... and the competitor for the best romantic line ever is in that ending too [again, paraphrasing]: "Miss Tiffany the witch, what does love sound like?" asked Preston, and the world grew still and the bees stopped buzzing and all noise died ... And Tiffany said "listen."), the line about "wearing midnight," for me, connects to an old complaint I had in learning Latin: when it says "attacked with fire and iron" they tell you to translate "attacked with torches and swords." No. There is more than just the material "thing" referent. There is the fact that in doing so, they wielded the elements. And here, "wear midnight" is more than wearing a black dress ... it is wearing midnight itself, wearing an emblem of the fact that the witch stands on the edge between light and dark, protecting light from dark, and so she knows that darkness better than most; she is the one who could realize the violence of human psychology on its way in the "rough music" and not only save Mr Petty from being murdered but also save the good townspeople from becoming murderers, but who also had to use the very pain he caused his daughter, use that darkness to fight off his besotted attempts to stop her from helping him. And out of that darkness, the daughter and her beau, comes the gift of the dress that symbolizes being the one who can handle the darkness, the one who can wear midnight. END ASIDE].

City Watch
At the time of the writing of this piece, Pratchett's Facebook page began a thing of "reading the most popular book together," and the unanimous choice for the first one of these, according to actual reader votes, was Guards Guards. And this was actually the first one that I read myself. And I also think it provides a unique in on the magic of discworld, that thing that I was describing as the mystical connection between magic as power of thought or imagination (like those dragons in the inverted structure in Colour of Magic, which get thinner and thinner the further away they get from the construct that relies on imagination) and the parody and characterization.

In a way, the City Watch series represents a tension in that the Vimes books are all about the character, with very little magic involved anywhere (there is, but it usually quickly connects into much more human modes, like the golems and goblins as outsiders/pariahs but ones who are needed by the same society that marginalizes and abuses them), and the same is true of the Moist von Lipwig books (Going Postal is a close second for favorite for me, but Night Watch still holds number 1). But with the City Watch series, Guards Guards is an important opening because it grounds the character-driven subseries in the magical-themed whole series by having it be about a magical, alternate-world creature like a dragon (although neither the swamp dragon nor the big dragon of Guards Guards are the imagination-mountain controlled dragons of Colour of Magic). And the actual anchoring is the fact that the two dragons pretty much represent the human couple of Sam and Sybil, the same characterization but in a magical mode. Sam is wiry and a common functionary, and a low-level one at that (a drunk leader of the squad viewed as a joke, the night watch), whereas Sybil is full-figured and from a much larger and more powerful strata of society. And so, even the most character-driven and social-criticism-driven subseries of the whole discworld series begins with a grounding in a magic element of the alternate universe.

So, for now, be it blessing or curse: May we live in interesting times.

Insidious: The Last Key (Horror, 2018)

So, this is a short interlude to do a review of another horror film, since I am continuously interested in how my attraction to at least certain horror films and franchises (particularly 1408, As Above So Below, The Ring 1 and 2, The Counjuring 1 and 2, Insidious 1 through [now] 4, Paranormal Activity 1 and 2 [3 was all right, and interesting for flipping to to the male character being the one who took the situation seriously, but it also set up the trajectory that, for me,completely derailed 4 and 5], the Babadook, and to a lesser degree but still interesting, Lights Out ... and The Others with Nicole Kidman was good ... but I have no use for Blair Witch or The Purge franchises) fits with my other interests.This one, however is actually a real "review" in the sense that, at the time I am writing this, the film is still in theaters, which is not unheard of for me, but definitely rarer. The film is Insidious: The Last Key (or Insidious 4).

I liked the first three Insidious movies a lot. I liked Patrick Wilson's and Rose Byrne's down to earth couple thing (as I like Wilson's couple thing with Vera Farmega in Conjuring 1 and 2 ... and Farmega's sister is, interestingly, set to play in the The Nun prequel), and I liked the whole family-centered thing. I liked #3 in general because of the Elise character's endearing persona and because, with a deciding factor being the return of the mother to pull with the living in the final battle, the devotion to family was again strong, but beyond that, I also thought it made a development in meaningful chills, meaning horror as critique, in the sickening "affection" posturing of the man who can't breathe in that final battle when he is coddling the girl, almost consolingly, but that is the sickness of it, that he is trying to get her to stay enslaved to him now by choice, to get her to give herself to him rather than simply being taken, because the final choice is up to her: the family encourages and the mother's presence is a big boon, but ultimately the girl has to fight the battle to return to her body ... they framed that false "affection" quality chillingly well.

When I saw 4 (the Last Key), my first impression was that it was not terrible but not great. Not much in the way of jump-out-of-your-skin moments, and I am sure that there are things that could be rightly criticized on pacing. But my reaction now is a bit like when I was a kid and a friend and I went into the huge locker room in the gym building at the college where my dad taught and one of us would hide in one of the full length lockers and the other would start looking to find him, and one time he hid in the last locker at one end of the maze-like run, and I just happened to start at the other end, and by the time I got to that last locker he was in, I had gotten in the habit of opening and closing the doors quickly, and so I opened his and shut it again without noticing he was in there until a few steps away, when it gave me serious chill tingles. And that is what has happened with Insidious: the Last Key: at first I thought "meh ... I still like the character, but the film leaves me unexcited," but then I realized something that sent chills down my spine. Which I think is interesting, because it is very similar to what I now think is the thing itself I have noticed and that I think is a major advance the film makes in doing horror that has social critique potential.

The thing that is an advance in social criticism method is the flipping of the assumption that the oogie boogie is in fact an oogie boogie ... a ghost or a demon or something other than a living and breathing person. And that facilitates the horror that is ongoing in the present in the sense of the horror of what one human being can do to another. Getting used to the tropes as tropes (she no longer got shocked by the ghosts) made her assume that this is just another ghost whose time was past when anything could be done for them ... but it wasn't; she was seeing a real live person, and in the last moment of life, in the midst of desperate hope of escape. And that is the spine chill ... and the stomach turn ... it was a time when something still conceivably could have been done.

It's also a critique of psychological manipulation: the point of my critique here is not that Elise has been complicit in the horror of abuse; it's that the demon and the father used the tropes [the father backhandedly by denying them], BUT they also committed further injustice in the fact that Elise would now internalize the horrific realization as her own guilt, when it wasn't.(This is also foreshadowed in the scene of her thinking her "giving" the key as a child actually opened the door, that she was the one who let the demon in.)

The main "development" quality is criticizing the way a manipulative person can flip even "horror" (meaning real world horror such as perception of abuse) around to being a tool used in perpetuating the horror in spite of some others being able to see that something horrific is there.

There are a couple other interesting things. The way Elise enters into the demon's trap is insightful psychologically: getting trapped in the emotion, the obsessed anger, of doling out the retribution on the father. And I thought the whole key-finger thing was chilling as far as it's potential for using a creepy image (particularly the jerky movements of the demon) and a relatively original image, as far as I know (the key fingers), to portray the silencing of abused/assaulted women as horror. The key in the chest causing coma is not as dramatic and just sort of more mechanically explains the comatose state, and you don't really get an emotional reaction shown because now they are comatose, but the key in the throat is followed by a well-executed performance of the terror of the realization that nobody is going to hear one's screams ... nobody is likely to listen.

I also thought the setting of being in the shadow of the prison where death reigns (through the electric chair always dimming the lights) was a good critique point.

The mother at the end may be a bit deus ex machina. And I would take that as a valid criticism, but I also think that the gain in methodology of social critique as meaning offsets that considerably. There are different kind of horror. There is the kind that makes you jump out of your seat or sends chills down your spine in a single scary image, but then there is the kind of more slowly dawning realization of exactly how insidious a situation is, exactly how horrific are the things that one human being is doing to another on a more subtle but just as damaging level.

Patema Inverted

I really enjoyed this 2013 animated film from Japan, Patema Inverted, when watching it last evening with some friends and their kids. My point in writing about it here is not, however necessarily to discuss content, and I haven't really done enough thinking on it yet to really do that, but I suspect that it would probably be a productive enterprise to do so (Editorial NOTE: After finishing this, I realize that I do wind up doing a bit of it, but in the context of discussing the more core questions for this post ... and not necessarily in the most ordered way). BUT, just going into the matter, I want to point out a couple aspects that I thought were really well done or I really like. The first is the vertigo feeling that I thought they pulled off for Patema in Age's world, but also at the end for Age and the good guys from his world once finally on the true surface. Somehow they managed, at least I think they did, to pull off a vertigo of falling into the sky. I think they actually borrowed the feel a little, or at least it has to be admitted that there is an earlier instance of a feeling of "falling into the sky" dizzying vertigo, which is when Harry walks through the golden mist in the maze in the third task of Goblet of Fire. If the maker of Patema did borrow from Harry Potter for the basic idea: they still pulled it off visually well; and most artwork borrows in some way (as I have said before in other posts, there were only ever three original ideas in the whole history of the world: creation, fall, and redemption; and the only one of those humans can claim full originality on is the middle, negative one). And the second is that the vertigo feeling supports the same thing it supports in Harry Potter, which is the employment of trope that goes back quite a long way of seeing the heavens and the deep sea as analogous to each other. James Cameron instantiates it in Abyss when he has the aliens coming from the deep ocean ... indeed, deep ocean and deep heaven are united in theme of danger to humanity: the danger in space is lack of pressure and the problem in the deep sea is too much pressure. The direction in which PI takes it is inner earth (or at least that is my theory of the topography as detailed below) versus sky/heavens, but the dynamic is the same. C. S. Lewis also gets at the relationship by calling space "deep heaven" in the space trilogy, and "deep" is most recognizable, particularly in the realm of Lewis's work in classics and medieval and his studies in the Bible, as the "deeps" in Genesis 1, which comes from the turbulence and chaos of the primal/mythical deep sea in the ancient imagination. Anyway, PI really did, I think, pull off this vertigo of falling into deep heaven. It's all the more accented by the fact that it happens only for the one whose perspective is shown. When Patema is being guided along by Age and she is upside down, the feeling is more of a helium balloon being tugged along (some might complain that this seems materially inconsistent because if it is actual gravity we're talking about, it should be a full body's weight, the kind of pull that would have teeth gritted and hands sweaty holding on in real life upside down holding somebody, but I think there is leeway [and also that the "real life" version is skewed because one is actually contending with one's own weight in that situation] and that it is possibly intentional as a surrealist way to put an emphasis on how the vertigo feeling can be isolated to the one person in a relationship), but when she is right side up is when we get the vertigo feeling.

[SIDENOTE: Oh, and one thing that I think I was the only one in the room to get was the visual reminiscences of the first Halflife game in Patema's tunnels world, especially the broken foot bridge and the ladder up the wall ... I spent so many hours locked in to the visual world of that game at once point]

My main purpose in writing is to use two responses to the film, two theories about it's topography, as an example of what Owen Barfield takes about as pre-modern making of theories to "save the appearances" and modern issues surrounding a radical myopic quality in modern "scientific" thinking (what I call, below and in many other posts, actually "scientism"), particularly the inability to grasp that actual type of conversation taking place in what I, and I think Barfield, would say is really going on in literature (like the "outside" or "topside" people of Age's world in PI, not having the conceptual rubrics to grasp the reality)

So, one has to watch the film and, unless one is much better than me at analyzing things like this in the moment (which is not hard to do, meaning being better than me at it), read the plot description on the wikipedia page. The basic difference in interpretation is the topography. In the ones the kids I was watching with were describing (provided I am understanding what they were saying correctly), which originated from their older brother who is in college, Age's world is the real surface and the place to which Age and Petema go to briefly in the sky of that world is a chunk that broke off of the earth in the original accident with gravity and is sort of hanging up there. I'm not sure if that means in orbit just over Age's immediate city and its surrounding countryside or what, which is one of the reasons it's harder for me to buy this reading, that is has to keep coming up with new things. It might have the advantage of  accounting for the big pit in Age's world if that is the chunk that went into the sky, but there are still many more questions than answers that can be based in the actual data in the film (especially if you go with militant demands of scientific accuracy to real earth, which begs the questions of (1) how does is stay in orbit in exactly the right place to be the sky for his world and (2) at the height they are when they get to that place, the air has to be pretty thin, if not non existent because all the way outside earth's atmosphere).

Before I go any further, I have to admit two possibilities: (1). The kids misunderstood their older brother's explanation (entirely possible, as the two who were most avidly explaining, one of them trying to do so even before the movie was over, are 12 and 9), or (2). I totally misunderstood the kids (which is also entirely possible: I had a really good and big Mexican dinner with two 20 ounce beers, so food coma could have been wrecking havoc on my mental landscape ... stranger things have been known to happen).

Now, my topogrpahy, supported (and in no small part clarified for me) by the wikipedia author, is that the final surface found is the original and true surface of the planet, with the now-corrected/fixed proper gravitational orientation of earth=down. Age's world is a construction down under the earth made for those who got trapped in the inverted gravitational state and Patema's people [NOTE: this is corrected from the original of this post, which had "Age's peopl" here] are the descendants of the scientists who messed things up but then righted most things but couldn't save everybody, so they made this place for those who couldn't be righted to exist, and they themselves (the scientists) accept the penance of living in the tunnels "under" (really above) that manufactured world. Then the place in the sky of Age's world that the two reach for a little bit is a sort of roof (from Age's perspective) or floor (from Patema's) of the cave that has mechanisms to make the the "sky" appear to have stars.

[SIDENOTE: There may be a third possibility, but I think the perspective problems are of such magnitude as to preclude even the most robust suspension of disbelief, or at least that is my opinion: both Age's world and the final found surface are the surface of the planet, and Patema's zone is a tunnel all the way through the planet. For one thing, if everything else works the same with the circular planet etc, Age's gravity should work the right way when they get to the final surface, the same way it would if he walked around the globe to that opposite point, and a bit like the reorientation at the zero-G point of the pass through tube in the 2012 remake of Total Recall, and that would ruin the whole "opposites need to attract rather than fight" theme.]

I call these two explanations two "topographies." In each there are three planes and one intermediary place: there is the final surface found, which I am calling the true surface, then there is the surface of Age's world, and finally there is the plane of the place in the sky of Age's world that he and Patema visit briefly. The intermediary place is the place of tunnels inhabited by Patema's people, which shares gravitational orientation with both the final surface found and the sky plane in Age's world. That is the basic datum from which one must start in constructing ... not from the finished picture that one wants to see of a diagram of the situation looking this way or that.

And that is, finally, what I am talking about with drawing this all in as Barfield's "saving the appearances." The appearances in this case are those basic data of three planes and the intermediary place and one gravitional direction being shared by two of the planes and the opposite gravitational orientation being what operates in the third plane, Age's surface. Beyond this, things are constructions to explain those appearances. Barfield talks about the ancient astronomer's coming up with their theories to "save" or explain the appearances of the movements of the heavens. The key thing that he relates is that none of them were that bothered when they differed. They knew the theories were just attempts at models that would explain things, but they never assumed that any one of them would save all the appearances. In a sense, they were built to be adjusted.

I'll throw in something else here from a very famous writer who himself stated Barfield as a huge influence on his own writing ... C. S. Lewis. In The Discarded Image (one of Lewis's last books, and by his own statement, probably the summing up statement of his vision of what he studied as an academic), Lewis talks about maps and how maps done in medieval times were laughable from the perspective of operating at sea by them. But nobody ever laughed at them because no mariner ever consulted them to navigate. They knew that the purpose of the map was never for practicality of navigation. For that, they relied on other sources, descriptions provided by others before them, sort of like our appearances of the three planes for PI: you simply know that, to go in this direction, you detach this weight from connection to the flying ship etc. The point of a map in those old times was to tie those appearances into something other than pragmatic utility, to bring them together in a model in the realm of cosmology. They are two different projects, the practical and the cosmological, and they relate to two very different models or things, actual maritime tradition and medieval maps (Actually, I myself notice this difference in trying to actually navigate using google maps or i-maps). The map we make out of the appearances of the planes in PI will likewise be oriented to a purpose, and one that must be larger than the map, beyond the map, giving the map itself purpose ... a what to save the appearances for.

Basically, at least from what I could tell of what the kids were saying, and very interestingly given the name of the film ... our proposed theories or models (mine and the college-aged son) might be the inverse of each other (my "real" down is his "up," but more importantly, my "inner" is his "outer"). The real thing, though, as I was noting above that Barfield said of the ancient astronomers, isn't who is "right" or "wrong" on the material level. The real point begins with the fact that we are both simply coming up with models to "save the appearances," to explain the phenomena in the film. Like the various ancient astronomer's Barfield speaks of, we come up with differing theories ... but we also shouldn't take any one theory as possibly THE right one at the outset because at the outset we shouldn't be myopically focused on "accuracy" or even necessarily "consistency." Both models can be considered as equally valid at first, and maybe in the end both valid, like those pictures that if you look at it one side up, you get a young woman's face, and if you look at it the other way up, you get an old man's face ... both are true of the picture. It doesn't have to be advocating relativism across the board to say that one particular situation lends itself to two distinctly different interpretations with both being right in themselves in relation to the appearances (in the case of those pictures, the two would only ever be definitively mutually exclusive, and thus require radical relativism to coexist, in a world in which the existence of old men completely precluded the existence of young women, or vice versa). Both can be considered equally valid at first statement, although it is entirely possible to establish invalidity or unsoundness as well (somebody saying "and if you turn it this way, it looks like elephants going at it" and you can legitimately say "no, that is not there ... the old man and the young woman can be demonstrated, the elephants can't"). But in all of this, we are talking about approximation and differing levels of internal coherence and explanatory power ... never about one definitive "scientific" (in the modern scientistic, materialist sense of the word), completely "accurate," explanation (Barfield hits heavily on this radical shift in thinking about "theories" in which the idea of "one right theory" was a radically new way of thinking that entered with the scientific revolution).

And here is where I get into some of the contention and, for somebody from my direction, occasional frustration. Accuracy for accuracy's sake, to me, is pretty much not of much use or interest. For one, I don't think it is possible for any author of any literature that will wind up being interesting as literature about human questions. As I have written in my post on "story time," I think theme always breaks consistency of material details at some point if the theme is at all interesting. I don't think even completely non-literary scientific report accuracy is as possible as scientismists wish to believe it is.

But even aside form the question of whether complete accuracy or internal material consistency is possible, there is the larger question of whether it is desirable for its own sake. As I have said in other posts, I do think that striving for as much of it as you can get is in important part of literature being incarnational and not gnostic. But therein lies the point: it has to be in the service of larger things that can be discussed in such terms as incarnational or gnostic ... it doesn't qualify on its own. When radicalized in isolation and being able to be on its own for its own sake, it is neither incarnational nor gnostic ... it's materialist.

Talking about incarnational and gnostic and materialist is talking about qualities of literature in general. The elements I would pin out in PI are not at that level yet; they are the things in the movie that would be eligible for consideration in determining whether or not a film's/story's message and/or method makes it more or less conducive as support. But before we get to that point (which I'm not going to do in this post), we have to theorize about what concrete symbolic etc elements there are beyond the material set up that might be symbolized in the material set up, the topography. As I said, the topography has to be in service of something larger than itself. If my position on the topography is correct and the final plane is the actual now rightly oriented surface and Age's plane is inside the earth, then there is (I would guess intentional) Plato's cave going on a bit, which would then bring in some of the themes of Plato's cave, such as reluctance to accept understandings that challenge our original understandings. Even without Plato's cave, there is a lot of theme going on in those who are actually the inverts according to the original planetary gravitational organization . There is also possible symbolism in the fact that the "inverts," Patema's people, have no plane to call their own, no "ground." "Ground" is not only a heavy theme in contemporary theory, such as in Judith Butler's challenging of the language of "ground" in discussing gender, but also a trope in science fiction that has significance for evolution of society/race/etc. beyond older understandings: I always found it to be a very interesting aspect of Asimov's first Foundation novel that, on the planet on which the story starts, so much has been built both above and below the original "ground" that that point is at best an arbitrarily determined one now).

If my topography is right, there is also possibility of "scientific explanation" (at least in the radically thorough way that scientism winds up trying to practice it) being, like the number in Arnofsky's Pi, some depth at which the human mind cannot long dwell without being overwhelmed and torn apart (Pi) or burned up (PI ... get it? nice little spin on the names of the two films). Age and Patema spend only long enough there to realize the singular scientific datum that the "sky" of Age's world is a constructed mechanism to create an illusion, and even that "knowledge" oppresses the mind, represented by the heat from the "stars" that smites upon them, to borrow biblical language for fun.

Beyond that, and I'm not sure whether this film lends itself or not, I simply haven't thought about it enough and don't have time at present to do so, being as the core mechanism of the film has to do with gravity manipulation, there may be some themes possible in common with what I wrote about in Christopher Nolan's Interstellar.

It is definitely true that one of the emphases of the film is beyond the topography and on a personalist level, that Age and Patema have a connection together that enables them to function together (her weight offsetting his gravity in his world and making him able to fly-jump). One of the interesting things is that the gravity thing makes them naturally repel from each other, which makes the choice/intentionality aspect of them being together much more accented.


My final point: 
I must be clear that I think that beginning to do a topography in the first place is insightful on the college-aged son's part. It shows initiative in looking for relationality in the same way as I have talked about going from mere quantification to looking at juxtaposition and other placement relations in talking about interpreting the magically appearing 14 feet in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in my post on method and other places. And that is one of the things a map is about versus mere verbal description (e.g., Maritime tradition): being able to better understand the relationships by visualizing them. But I also think it has to then connect with more to be a meaningful endeavor. It has to connect up in a way that is more than latent or potential or subconscious. Once one has started down the path of the conscious endeavor of interpretation, one needs to go it to the right place (which isn't necessarily my topographical interpretation; it's connecting topography with literary matters like characterization and theme). Even though the beginning is good, stopping partway merely then provides fodder for other, mistaken types of interpretation, like scientism's conquest of literature.

I'm not saying the inverted version or the "all the way through the earth" models might not be able to have legitimate interpretive possibilities along the lines as mine, and maybe even some that both make mine not feasible AND beat mine as far as being demonstrable. I'm saying that it makes me a little sad that I don't think that the attempt will ever be made by those who side with that model (if it it were to be done, it would probably have to be done by myself playing devil's advocate) because, from what I can tell, analyzing symbolic and emblematic connections beyond the most simplistic versions of allegory is not on the radar enough even to be interested or disinterested in. That's not something intrinsic to that model, it's something coincidentally in the particular group of people whom I know who would get into that theory. But I also think there is a certain regrettable difficulty for people coming from a certain background, what I am about to call "Christian scientism" (NOTE: PLEASE KEEP THIS TERM DISTINCT FROM THE SPECIFIC CAMP KNOWN AS "CHRISTIAN SCIENCE"; my use here simply means the attempted assimilation of Christian thought to the philosophical [often unconscious] position that I and others call "scientism," the belief that historical material fact is the base mode of truth and that scientific discourse is the base mode of all discourse) when they try to grasp questions beyond scientific realism and strict moral exemplarism (this is the hero of the film and thus he is good univocally and therefore this thing that he does is good and therefore this is a way you should act ... basically a very didactic focus ... one that can't be avoided in the way that humans process stories, especially when young, but also one that takes into consideration only individual actions and only on one plane, basically, it does for the meaning of a story what allegory does to the plot, which is to borrow it from another work, which can be useful, but is always pretty limited in how far its value goes). It seems regrettable to me that I might be the only one who would even have it on radar to look at the possibilities of symbolic application of the topography as a possibly pertinent factor when asking the question of the respective validity of these two topographies in the film.

In a sense, this could be put again in terms of the language of "appearances." In the scientistic perspective, even the best case scenario of the attempted melding with Christian thought beyond scientism, at best, if there are "appearnces" to be saved beyond mere material accuracy/consistency, they are not interlaced with the material appearances. Radical scientism will not even admit of any symbolic or emblematic or  metahphorical meanings at all (the whole best role of literature is always to present stories in which science always leads to something better ... propaganda rather than literature .. .actually, to be honest, quite often it is mixed, but all the larger elements often have a fairly contrived feel of things only really understood in quote marks, as in "I'm not doing simply propaganda for science, see, I have some 'psychological characterization' in there, where he yells 'fuck' at her twenty-five times and then they have sex" ... that is a statement by such an author, a statement by such an interpreter would be "see, I do know about and look for more than propaganda, because I know that the gratuitous cussing and sex is really characterization").

But even in the attempts of Christian scientism, which admits of metaphors and symbols, the link between those and the literal meaning is never organic, that I can tell. There is always a sharp divide between the metaphorical and the literal, a strictly defined dualism. Something in conceived of as "happening" between them, but its a bit like how something "happens" between mind and body in Descartes's ghost in the machine. The thing that I advocate that I think neither radical scientism nor Christian scientism has is a connection between the literal and metaphorical/symbolist that is an appearance that also needs to be saved. Radical scientism can't have that because it doesn't even have any idea of the metaphorical/symbolic as an appearance needing to be saved/accounted for. And even though Christian scientism does allow the existence, they really only sort of halfway have it because they don't often define it as something that mush have organic connection to the literal, a methexis, a participation in it to even be what it actually is (for more on Reale's work on methexis in Plato in his project of "Plato's second journey," see the last chapter of Enrico Mazza's Mystagogy).  And so, while Christian scientism does in word save more appearances because it saves "metaphorical/symbolic" appearances, it doesn't (I don't think) understand those fully or accurately, and so they don't really save those appearances as much as they at first seem too, and possibly because you can't save them well without saving the participation, and the participation is the one thing they least save.

I'm not claiming I can do the job adequately ... I'm just saying that I think it is a step closer to the truth to realize that the project of analyzing literature means saving those three kinds of appearances, the literal, the metaphorical, and the participation between them (very much like soul as the relation between body and spirit), rather than simply the literal/material, as does seeking simply a model that explains the physical landscape or topography consistently. I think that mine/wiki's does even just that project at least as well, if not better, but it goes beyond (or, in the case of Wiki, has the potential to go beyond) that to explaining the metaphorical topography and its organic connection (personally I think the aspect with which I started this whole thing, the vertigo, which is a fear, is a psychological landscape that can be maybe the participation between the physical topography of the gravitationally inverted planes and the moral topography of the metaphorical possibilities [those arrogantly thinking that their up is the definitive up, when in fact they are the deprived ones, etc. might = assuming prematurely that one has the "right" take on things]).

I think that the older brother of the kids with whom I was watching it has the ability and the interest in such things, and even for those in that circle about whom I wonder if or doubt whether that could ever be the case, it's not a "fault" thing or a "virtue versus vice" thing on the subjective level necessarily. Such things do have the potential, as do all things of this type, to be that (virtue or vice or fault) in a given situation, but they don't HAVE to be that in any given situation and the assumption should not be made without solid evidence that there is a question even of intellectual honesty. I do think there is an objective "better"ness to being able to get not only the symbolic analysis itself but also the broader issue of the relations between elements such as topography and the thematic messages of a film, and the even broader yet question of Barfield's position that the idea of "accurate theory" underwent a radical shift in meaning in the scientific revolution when it became "THE right theory."

And it does sadden me some to see others laboring under the effects and fallout of scientism when coming to literature because it seems like a lot of mental and emotional is spent in trying to get the "right" answers that satisfy both aspects, "science" and "faith," when the whole problem may be the fact that both words are in quote marks that the person had foisted on them and then felt like they had to satisfy. It's a bit like the tortured labors some have put themselves through trying to beat "science" (meaning the scientism of the scientific revolution) on its own grounds without realizing that it will never work because its grounds are too shaky to support even scientism's internal coherence as a stated system, let alone coherence with the observed outer world ... but so much mental and emotional energy is spent in the endeavor. I mean, I spend a lot of mental energy in things like this blog, but then again, I'm bipolar II and hypomanic general thought patterns are an ongoing issue in life and always will be, so, like the hyper-active kid, I have a bit extra of that energy to blow off anyway. But some of these people have more than enough on their plate and to be getting on with without having to bear the burden of continually rolling the stone up the hill of trying to prove the (I would claim non-existent, and thus the Sisyphus allusion) supposed compatibility of scientism, which they probably got from people who imbibed it themselves unconsciously from trying to beat "science" on its "own grounds," with Christian thought. Maybe I'm wrong and they actually can get it but are aware of even further difficulties and, like Age's world, I am the one assuming I know the real broader "truth" when in reality I am the one living in ignorance underground (or maybe I'm just crazy about it all in the first place ... which is always a possibility). All I can do here is lay out what seems to me to be the case as best as I can.


[END NOTE: I should probably note here that I think that one of the reasons I am drawn to write on this movie on this blog, in addition to finding the movie very engaging in its imagery, is  the fact that I am lazy and a nice small-scale topography like this gives me the opportunity to talk about topography as symbolic without having to get into more serious big-ass ones like 1 Enoch's tour inside the earth (topography also gets used in one of the other two main second-Temple apocalypses, 2 Baruch, when Hebron becomes the new place with messianic significance because of its Davidic history, as the capital of his reign before he moved it to Jerusalem, now in 2 Baruch opposite corrupt Jerusalem, with Hebron symbolizing the marginal and [once populated but now] deserted place opposite Jerusalem's populated corruption). I mentioned C. S. Lewis's The Discarded Image above, and that book has heavy discussion of seriously enormous cosmological topography in the classics world as well as in Dante's Divine Comedy and other medieval works like Pseudo Dionysius's Celestial Hierarchies. PI is a much nicer smaller-scope instance on which to sort through some ideas ... and as I say, I like it alot ... and as I also say, I'm lazy.]

Addendum January 22, 2018

This is the same evening of the day I actually wrote this post, but at night after I rewatched (while on my elliptical machine) the found footage horror film As Above So Below, on which I have already done a post (but if you happen on the present post and follow that link, read the rest of this addendum before you do, as it has some adjustments). The thing I picked up in this watching of that film that I want to note here  us that it has a scene relating to visual maps versus statements of experience in dealing with actually navigating topography. The main character Scarlett is arguing with their French guide Pappilon about which way they should try and she is showing him the map and using it to argue for going the one direction, and he asks her something to the effect of "What does that map show you? Can it tell you which ones are caved in, or which ones are full of water? I am the one who has been down here!" So, that's another nice little example of differences of sources for knowing a topography for different purposes, as I was discussing above concerning Lewis's' comments on maps versus maritime tradition handed down and the making of a topography map for PI.

Now, if you want to check out that post on As Above So Below. You should read these adjustments first. (1) I was off on some of the sequence: she hugs her father's hanging corpse before she sees realizes that she is the stone. This doesn't bother me as much though because it simply means that she has made the realization of the confessional path early, maybe on a subconscious level, and maybe this is even the thing that makes her able to realize what it all means when she puts the fake stone back and sees herself in the mirror. I think maybe too that the way she sees herself in the mirror is important: her face is covered in blood from when she got pulled into the blood canal; you might even say "baptized in it," but so as not to get too over Christianizing things, what the blood symbolizes is the brutal experience of actually confessing/confronting; the her in the mirror, the one who is the true philosopher's stone, is the one covered in blood who has been through this hell (literally, in the Dante sense, having gone through the door that says "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here"). There is actually a lead up to the realization of the confession model in that, after Papi bites the dust (literally) but before all the shit starts really hitting the fan, when they first see the robed watcher go by and run down a side tunnel to hide, George tells her, "Whatever happens down here, the week in Turkey was the best week of my life" ... he "rectifies" things by forgiving her for leaving him in a Turkish jail while she pursued the lead. And that is the other lead up and tie out, that that language of rectifying is prevalent: it's what signals to her that she has to return the stone, and then when she comes back, while it is her kiss that heals the neck wound, in order to make the jump she repeats the line to them, telling them they have to rectify their horror by speaking it. I do think that there is something in her materially becoming a magician but I think that the message is that that can't be all there is: material control is not the highest good ... reconciliation and personal healing is. And notice that, while she is the magician, because she can heal George's neck and make the grabby hands disappear from the blood trench and all, she is not the ultimate magician, because she cannot herself simply make them survive the leap into the hole: they have to speak their horrors themselves, their traumas or sins, for that ultimate magic to happen.

(2) The other thing I noticed is a stronger Dante reference. Dante's Inferno begins "Midway through this course of life ..." In this film, in the materials they find on the tombstone in the museum (I think, or it could be on the bull in the Iran tunnel, not sure, but I think it is in the material on the back of Flamel's tombstone in Paris), there is a line about "midway between" that is a key in figuring out where they think the depths lie mechanically and all that, but what I think it really is as far as the film as a piece of literature is a clue to Dante being the interpretive model. I may have mentioned it in that other post, but if I didn't, Le Taupe's key line "the only way out is down" is pretty much straight up (or rather down) the Inferno and St John of the Cross's "The way down is the way up."