Big things exploding, forever

I was reading about the militarization of space, and ended up pondering the militarization of science fiction TV. Take the Star Trek franchise, for example – a set of shows whose heroes are almost without exception members of the military, working compliantly within military structures to achieve the goals it sets for them.

Building on that, I went through the other military based / related SF shows I’ve seen. Immediate ones that sprung to mind were Babylon 5, Stargate SG-1, Andromeda, Battlestar Galactica, Quantum Leap, Timecop, The X-Files and Space: Above and Beyond.

These are some of the key US SF shows, and all of them support a view of society in which the military – or related civil institutions – represent the finest exemplars of that society, and are battling to preserve its coherence from one kind of threat or another.

There’s an implied worldview there that’s both fascinating and rather worrying. These are very popular shows. Their viewers (myself included) are clearly happy to buy uncritically into the concept of military or militarised action as the final solution to any problems in dealing with any external, ‘other’ threat.

That’s worrying, for obvious reasons – and it’s also one more symptom of our more general obsession with violence as entertainment. If TV has its way, we’ll all come to see the future as big things blowing each other up, out of a deep rooted and unchallengeable sense of personal righteousness; or, at a more intimate scale, agents of governance stepping in to solve problems before which civilians can only ever be passive.

Martians kill Humanism

I finished off a collection of Leigh Brackett’s Martian romances over the weekend – ‘The Coming of the Terrans’. Some great stories in there, but there’s more going on than just pulp mayhem.

Brackett’s Martian stories are set on an exotic, faded Mars. In her world, humans arrived there to find an aeon-shadowed (thanks, HPL) civilisation in the final stages of decline. The dessicated, decadent atmosphere of that fading culture is key to the stories’ success.

The stories in ‘The Coming of the Terrans’ show what happens when humans encounter that culture. In each case, the human engages with the Martian, and as a result the limits of his humanity are (more or less) brutally exposed.

One protagonist hunts down a disappeared girlfriend, and in doing so is forcibly de-evolved and bluntly reminded of man’s fundamentally bestial nature. Another encounters an ancient Martian god-thing, but represses all knowledge of lest it destroy his academic career, and is destroyed by that repression. A third discovers just how futile – not to say absurd – human efforts to re-vivify the Martian deserts by tapping into hidden water supplies are.

In each case, human rationality is broken against far more enduring and deeply rooted alien structures. Initially, I read this in quite a Jungian way, understanding the human to represent the conscious mind and the Martian cultures and landscape to image the archetype haunted depths of the subconscious.

That points to the fundamental misunderstanding-of-self that Jung exposed in his writings. We commonly believe that the superficial structures of the conscious self are the core, enduring definers of what it is to be human. We choose what we are on a daily basis; our humanity lies in those choices.

In fact – Jung pointed out – that’s a profoundly deluded viewpoint. The common self of humanity lies in the deep subconscious. We inherit archetypal patterns, modes of behaviour, from those shadowy regions – and they are our shared human heritage.

Next to them, the conscious self is a useful but ultimately entirely transient structure that gives a useful purchase on daily life, but not much more. Archetypal structures endure through millennia; the self gets three score years and ten, or thereabouts.

There are clear parallels with the basic structures underlying Brackett’s Martian stories. But I think there’s something else going on there as well, something deeper and in some ways far more interesting.

It’s part of a broader trend in 20^th century literature. Brackett wrote about the failure of a humane, rational, human centred worldview. She wasn’t the only person to do so. From pulp visionaries like H.P. Lovecraft to broken epic poets like Ezra Pound, the failure of that kind of narrative of the self was a common, obsessive theme.

What I think Leigh Brackett was really charting was the final failure of the Humanist project. Born in the Renaissance, it posited a universe that demanded liberal, humane, rational behaviours as the most productive mode of being possible.

For Humanists, the cosmos existed to reflect back human enlightenment and benevolence on us. Archetypal Renaissance mage Giordano Bruno described an ideal mind state; full of classical learning, the enlightened man should step out of his house and, looking around, see benevolent connections uniting everything around him.

Of course, Giordano was burnt at the stake. Even back then, Humanist optimism faced very substantial real world obstacles. But it’s taken the 20^th century’s combination of deep science and deep brutality to really finish it off. The universe isn’t necessarily ordered around anything; it certainly doesn’t run like a benevolent ticking clock.

It’s that death of Humanism that’s exposed in Leigh Brackett’s planetary romances. Against the impassive, often bizarre, and always unshakably experienced ancients of Mars, Humanist thinking is exposed as being at best naïve, at worst downright damaging.

And that exposure is echoed in the 20^th century itself, the moment that broke Humanism against events ranging from the discovery of the fundamental oddness of matter itself to industrial genocide on an unprecedented scale.

Sono ergo sum

sono sonare sonui sonitum [to sound , resound, make a noise; to sing of, to celebrate]; of words, [to mean].

‘it means what it is’

Avant garde internet radio

Just a quick reminder that Jean Herve Peron’s Avantgarde Festival 2007 begins today. If you’re near Hamburg, head on over - and if you’re not, you can listen to it live over the next couple of days by following this link (once you’re there, click the little play button at top right of the page - seems to be running 7-12pm, Friday / Saturday / Sunday).

As Tim Stella once said, ‘nothing beats making strange noises with your friends’.

STRONG TRUTH!!!

<EDIT - Quite a few people have been coming here having searched for ‘Avant garde internet radio’ or similar. Jean Herve’s no longer broadcasting from Shiphorst, so I’d recommend checking out the ever-intriguing Resonance FM - Enjoy! Al>

The butcher’s apprentice

I’m at home, watching trailers for upcoming movies on Five. Guns, fisticuffs – combat as a fundamental dramatic component. It’s so all-pervasive, you don’t notice it any more.

And I’m sick of it. Sick of the reduction of the subtle emotional conflicts inherent in drama to meatheaded literal battles; sick of the constant presentation of violence as a positive response to problematic situations; sick of the idiot miscalled-morality that can only respond to opposition with absolute destruction.

Encoded in violence-as-entertainment is a whole broken world view, over-brought in to a narrative structure that demands a frangible antagonist for every protagonist, and makes every hero an innocent victim of evil, a by-definition justified responder to a situation that’s been forced onto him or her, thus absolving them of any real moral responsibility for their actions.

This sickened externalisation of such a limited view of evil, this self-indulgent definition of the other as both dispensable and perpetually unjustified, is at the root of so much of the damage we do in the world, complaining about our own hurt while butchering by the thousand to re-confirm our brutally narrow, boneheaded definitions of what heroism is.

You want to hold up a mirror to up to the worst parts of what we are? Turn on the television, and watch endless butchery presented as narrative positivity, casual massacres as a constant solution to opposition. We are our obsessions – and, in the modern world, our obsessions are so brutally, perpetually present and exposed.

A pirate’s life for me, Pt 2

Well, more on pirate narrative structures. Today, it’s Key Equipment and Supporting Characters, below.

What interests me about this exercise is not so much the usefulness of better understanding pirate stories, but rather the way it reflects onto the construction of fiction in general.

A story of any kind is an end product of a series of questions - who’s my protagonist? What’s their situation? What do they want to change about it? What happens as a result of that desire? etc. The answers to those questions are on one level limitless; the content of fiction can be equally wide ranging.

However, answering those questions - ‘Who’s my protagonist? A pirate’ - and fulfilling the expectations associated with those answers (’this is how pirates behave’) can lead to a surprisingly restricted set of moral arguments. Fiction is infinite; our moralities aren’t, something it’s very useful to be aware of.

3) Key equipment

The pirate is outside a given society. His equipment should represent that outsider status:

a) Living space

An entirely personalised space, springing from the pirate’s obsessions and representing his history. It should be both an accurate representation of his / her character and personality, and easily abandoned.

b) Transport

The pirate should have access to modes of transport (whether virtual or real) that allow him / her to circumvent any restrictions created by the oppositional culture. The OC’s attempts to prevent the pirate from achieving free movement in pursuit of his goals will form key plot points.

c) Armaments

As previously noted, the pirate takes sustenance from the oppositional culture on his / her own terms. He will make use of whatever armaments necessary to achieve this. Again, the type and level of damage that these armaments do to the OC / its representatives are a key plank in the moral judgements that the story expects the reader to reach.

4) Supporting characters

Other characters will either be for, against or neutral towards the pirate. Moral ambiguity is difficult to sustain in such a morally charged narrative.

a) Other characters

Explicitly or implicitly they will share the pirates estrangement from the oppositional culture. Level, type and significance of support will be dependent on their depth of estrangement. Contrasts between the supporting characters’ and opposition culture’s morality cast light on each.

b) Neutral characters

Under certain circumstances, non-judgemental characters could be used to cast an ironic light on the absurdities of both pirate and opposition culture positions, implying a set of moral absolutes that exist above and beyond the set of dualistic oppositions that protagonist and antagonist embody.

Hmm, thought I’d written something about opposing characters - obviously not. Tho’ having looked over all the rest of this, I don’t think I need to. Their narrative function should by now be pretty clear!

And finally…

Aaaarrrrrrrrrr….

*stumps off one-leggedly to look for treasure*

Smashing the piano

Well, it’s quite the weekend of music coming up.

On Saturday night, Stoke Newington’s legendary Drones Club hosts the awesome testosterone rush that is synth duo Raagnagrok, plus mash up Arabist mayhem from Djinn. More details here, it’s going to be a blast.

On Sunday, as part of Resonance FM’s Month of Sundays sessions, Raagnagrok offshoot Grok is playing with the even-more-legendary M. John Harrison, plus techgnostic Erik Davis, at the Corsice Studios down in Elephant and Castle. Details here, again it’ll be truly mind expanding.

Oh, and there’s also going to be comedy from Simon Munnery, science chat from Little Atoms, Dexter Bentley, Marvin Suicide and more.

I’ll be at both - see you there!

Breaking out of heaven

Non-realist writing is about the creation of transparently fictional, secondary worlds for the mind, imagination and emotions to play in. One of the joys of such worlds comes from the suspension of disbelief needed to enter them. Put simply, you can pretend that they’re real – a complex joy, but a joy nonetheless.

It’s easy to forget that we create fictions of the world around us in day to day life, as well. We build narratives around work, around play, and enter into them wholeheartedly. Here, too, there’s suspension of disbelief; we forget the wider possibilities of the self as we settle ourselves into the restrictive, consensual limits that daily life creates.

It’s when we forget that these limits are defined by a fiction we’ve created that problems happen. We come to believe that the story IS the reality, that we have no choices in a given situation; but that’s rarely, if ever, true. There is no story that cannot be reframed, no narrative that cannot be stepped out of.

There’s an interesting mythical take on this, as well. In the Christian narrative, we fell from heaven so we could have choice. Such a shattering birth has ensured that free will is a core component of our lives. We can never lose as much as we’ve already lost through exercising it; and so, we are absolutely free.

A pirate’s life for me, Pt 1

Well, not much time to write today, so digging through the files I found my ‘how to build a pirate story’ document from a while back. Which set me thinking about how much narrative structure is pre-formed by subject matter in general…

So, in honour of general piracy, here’s Part One, dealing with Subtext and Key Narrative Strategies. Part two tomorrow, about Pirate Equipment and Characters…

1) Subtext

Two basic ways of presenting the story. In both, the pirate represents a critique of a given set of social or moral values. Both are reliant on the pirate’s position as an outsider, an individual who has rejected conventional norms for better or for worse. Any pirate story must embody and explore this tension.

a) Pirate as liberator
An ironic inversion of moral values. The pirate becomes an exemplar of honesty and truth, breaking away from the pretensions / hypocrisies of a corrupted social setting. The important thing is the moral relationship between the pirate / society – character and setting could be widely varied, such as historical, fantasised or deep space.

b) Pirate as dark other
A distillation of fear. The pirate upsets the moral order of a given individual / group of individuals / society, and is used to explore the strengths of that order as the protagonist fights to restore it.

2) Key narrative strategies

An implicitly moral, oppositional story demands certain types of narrative strategy to achieve its effects.

a) Appropriate point of view
Point of view should be such to allow for effortless contrasting of pirate and accepted ethics / behaviours. At no point should the reader’s experience of such contrasts feel forced or difficult.

b) Clearly defined protagonist / antagonist
A dualistic relationship, where conflict allows for examination of the moral / ethical structures that drive each of the characters. This conflict is made explicit, not implicit.

c) Crime in motion
The narrative should be centred on a crime. The reader is expected to reach a moral position regarding that crime. The moral position they reach (approving / disapproving) defines the pirate either as a liberator or a dark other.

d) Crime and punishment
The pirate will either be punished or not punished for their crime. The nature and intensity of the punishment that he / she undergoes will further support moral judgements reached by the reader.

e) Battle of the sexes
Sex of the pirate is relatively unimportant. Sexual contact achieves plot significance in so far as it supports the subversive / conservative nature of the protagonist / antagonist / supporting characters.

f) Self support
The pirate should support him / herself by utilising the resources of the oppositional culture on terms defined by him / her rather than by the culture. The level of hazard / damage to the culture and its representatives, and any moral judgements resulting from these activities, are a key support for the moral judgements that the reader is expected to reach.

Flesh eggs, scarlet tracings

Bringing Iain Sinclair’s book of poems, ‘Buried at Sea’, into work this morning made me think about the impact his selected poems ‘Flesh Eggs and Scalp Metal’, and his novel ‘White Chappell Scarlet Tracings’, made on me when I first read them.

I was at a very conservative boarding school in Dorset; every so often Ted Hughes’ ‘The Thought Fox’ would get dusted off by some corduroy jacketed English teacher as an example of the finest, most dangerous poetry that modern Britain had to offer; appreciation of the contemporary novel stopped at Ford Madox Ford.

After Hughes’ tepid, self regarding, bankrupt Romanticism – a poetry that had and still has all the allure of a fly-blown egg salad sandwich rotting in an over warm chiller unit in a barely used Little Chef just off the A303 – and FMF’s (admittedly excellent, but simultaneously) seventy years gone Modernist novelising, Iain Sinclair was a revelation.

I’ve come to read his work as a driven Cockney response to writers like Ezra Pound and Charles Olson; people obsessed with the way history and geography combine to create an environment that the self cannot but rely on for definition.

He built on their methodologies, marrying berserk pulp mythologies with the seedier scrag ends of the Matter of London to look at how popular culture and mythology shape us.

London becomes a dense palimpsest of experience, a place where figures as diverse as Jack the Ripper, Stephen Hawking, Mithras and Nicholas Hawksmoor create intertwining narratives that echo in an absolutely contemporary way through the lives of all Londoners.

Within it we are are perpetual slaves to our environment, unknowing flaneurs being perpetually remoulded by the city that we are always strolling through, always observing, always being observed by.

There’s an obvious political edge to this, as well; those with the power to shape the environment have the power to shape us. Picking up where the Situationalists left off, riffing off the pulp innocence of H. P. Lovecraft and Victorian Penny Dreadfuls, Sinclair forces us to beware of such designs.

Iain Sinclair was using fictions I was deeply engaged with to build an argument about the nature of place, memory (both personal and cultural) that I found very exciting and relevant. Set against Ted Hughes and his dustily savage nature poetry – what took him a career to achieve was done better by Tennyson in four lines in 1849 – there was no real competition.