In the end, we are all chimeras
Monday, December 12, 2016
Saturday, December 10, 2016
Daenerys Targaryen: the Return of the Goddess
Daenerys Targaryen is, no doubt, one of the most interesting characters of the TV series "the Game of Thrones." An assertive, dominating queen portraited in a positive light; a character that would have been inconceivable in the fiction of just some decades ago. Something seems to be changing in the human mindscape.
The article by Gunnar Bjornson reproduced below (from "Katehon") reflects this mindscape change. It is dedicated to exploring the idea that some of the themes of "The Game of Thrones" are influenced by a return of the Goddess in the mindsphere; a creature that he identifies as "Cybele", the Graeco-Roman version.
This article is highly questionable in several respects; not the least one that of dividing the human views of the world into three well-defined categories, inspired to Apollo, Dyonisius, and Cybele. It is a much more complex story than that and this kind of forcing the narrative into categories often has quite some problems in maintaining even a minimum contact with reality: See, for instance, this sentence:
The Logos of Cybele thus concerns materialism, the dominance of the female over male, progressivism (development from highest to lowest), linear time, and the possession of wealth as the sole purpose of life.
Hmmm.... did I say "questionable?" Yes, I did. VERY questionable with its negative view of women in power. You can say a lot of bad things about some women who have been in power in the past, but it will always be difficult for women to beat the records of cruelty, madness, and wanton violence of most male rulers in history.
Yet, I thought that it was worth reproducing this piece in the "Chimera Myth" blog, where I have often discussed the theme of the Goddess.
Yet, I thought that it was worth reproducing this piece in the "Chimera Myth" blog, where I have often discussed the theme of the Goddess.
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GAME OF THRONES: THE TRIUMPH OF CYBELE
30.06.2016
Gunnar Bjornson
The sixth season of the popular fantasy saga "Game of Thrones" has concluded. True fans are worrying about the events of the last 10 episodes. The series has turned out to be surprisingly successful, with a both sudden and drastic development of story lines and in terms of the actors' performances and music and special effects. But most importantly, the last season demonstrates the triumph of well-defined archetypes underlying modern Western civilization. Perhaps not a single piece of recent popular culture has revealed this so vividly as “Game of Thrones.” Thus, it is necessary to turn once again to the mythology and philosophy of this popular show.
The victory of women
One of the most important results of the storyline at the end of the sixth season is the triumph of the female characters in the saga. Cersei Lannister takes the Iron Throne of Westeros and kills all of her opponents. In the kingdom of Dorn as well, all power goes to women. Having killed ruler Prince Doran Martell and his cousin, Ellara Sand declares that the government no longer "belongs to weak men." In the North, Sansa Stark makes a decisive contribution to the victory over Ramsey Bolton. Arya Stark begins to implement her plan of revenge and stabs Walder Frey. On the Iron Islands, the lesbian Yara Greyjoy aims to become the first woman on the throne, and then joins Deyneris Targaryen, another strong woman who seeks to conquer the whole of Westeros. Both Dorn and the House of Tyrell, which is also headed by a woman, Olenna Tyrell, are ready to join Deyneris. And even Northern lords are humiliated by young Lady Mormont.
The unconditional domination of the feminine is thus the main feature of the sixth season. Male characters go by the wayside in a context of female domination. In medieval surroundings, an entirely strange picture is recreated. Of course, the European Middle Ages knew the reign of Queens. But not on this scale. The Middle Ages were foremost the era of the dominance of patriarchal relations and the male heroic type.
The rise of power-hungry women in the series is clearly consistent with the trends of real politics. Hillary Clinton, in the country where the series is produced, enjoys the sympathy of its creators. However, it is not only in this way that the series’ authors are trying to promote Clinton. Rather, there is another reason tied to the working of myths.
European society ceased to be the Christian one of the Middle Ages when it became “modern.” The modern world triumphed because it killed, crucified, and subjected directly to genocide (as in Ireland and the Vendee) the “old order,” the spirit of the old patriarchal-aristocratic and traditional Europe. Because of this, any clash between modernity in the Middle Ages is always hysterical. In this feminine hysteria, modernity reveals its true nature.
Gynecocracy
The series, like any other product of mass culture that works with images of the past, projects such on current trends. Romantic and unnatural surroundings are made more brighter and more visible than they are in real life. Gynecocracy, or women's dominance, is a feature unnatural to patriarchal Indo-European civilization, and especially for the type of thinking that dominated the historical era of the Middle Ages. This thinking was based on the celestial Apollonian philosophy of Platonism, which was adopted by Christianity. In its origins, it was based on the domination of celestial male deities over the chthonic creatures of Mother Earth (Titanomachy and Gigantomachy of ancient mythology) and the paternal principle over the mother’s one, heaven over earth and the chthonic, a priority that in religious and philosophical systems was given to the idea of the world. This was characteristic of the Indo-European worldview before the adoption of Christianity. The dominance of spirit over body, hierarchy, discipline, duty, sacrifice, honor, order, tradition, faith, and patriarchal family were the principles inherent to this particular civilization of true Europe.
On the contrary, matriarchal traits, such as the dominance of earthly sensuality and material wealth, were always associated with women in Indo-European families and cults. This, together with the legalization of every form of perversion and degeneracy, a distinctive feature of modern times in Europe, broke with traditional institutions. The famous traditionalist philosopher Julius Evola noted that the modern civilization of the West is based on the ideas which the ancient Indo-Europeans attributed to the feminine principle:
With the advent of democracy, the proclamation of 'immortal principles’, the 'rights of man and citizen’, and the subsequent development of these 'conquests' in Europe into Marxism and Communism, it is exactly the 'natural right', the leveling and anti-aristocratic law of the Mother, that the West has dug up, renouncing any ‘solar', virile Aryan value and confirming, with the omnipotence so often granted to the collectivist element, the ancient irrelevance of the individual to the 'telluric' conception.
Three Logoi
The contemporary Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin, in his complex project “Noomahy", (“war of minds” in Greek) offers an interesting interpretive model in which he reviews the structure of the three fundamental paradigms of thought corresponding to the three types of philosophy, religion, mythology, ritual, symbolism, epistemology and anthropology, which correspond to three mythological figures from Greek mythology: Apollo, Dionysus and Cybele.
The Apollonian Logos is related to Platonism and the traditional Indo-European solar theme. It emphasizes eternity, heaven, the paternal, and the spiritual, as opposed to the earthly, temporal, maternal, and material. This paradigm of thought states that only the divine and celestial, for example Platonic ideas, really exist. The world, as the organized cosmos, has a hierarchical structure which is aimed at the apophatic horizon of the inaccessible One. In politics, such a logos preaches monarchy, the reign of the philosophers, the idea of an eternal empire, hierarchy and caste society.
The Dionysian Logos is that of mysteries, battle and marriage, death and resurrection, the interpenetration of earth and heaven, earth’s subordination to the heavens, and the soul reigning over body, as form over matter. This is the philosophy of Aristotle, the metaphysics of the Son in Christianity, and Catholic Thomism. In politics, this is the idea of the imperial, eschatological savior king. It entails a distinctly messianic eschatology.
The Logos of Cybele, named after the Goddess of Asia Minor, is a matriarchal cult of the Great Mother, the Earth, believed to generate all. This is the idea of the material origin of things and the solely material nature of the world. This is the philosophy of Epicurus and Democritus, the ancient materialists, and the ideas of the Roman Titus Lucretius Carus of the evolution of species and the spontaneous generation of life from Mother Earth.
In fact, this logos is an extrapolation of the ancient feminine chthonic myths that have since become the axioms of modern science. These were chtonic cults where the dogmas of modern science first originated. The is the dominant Logos in modern times which manifests itself in the form of scientific thinking. At the same time, however, it is still an archaic mythology inherent to pre-Indo-European ethnic groups in Europe. The Logos of Cybele thus concerns materialism, the dominance of the female over male, progressivism (development from highest to lowest), linear time, and the possession of wealth as the sole purpose of life.
The religious centers of the matriarchal goddesses, such as the temple of Artemis in Ephesus, served as the first banking centers. The Greek philosopher and atomist Democritus was one of the first to put into practice the method of speculation and considered democracy to be the ideal political system (Plato and Aristotle considered it to be the worst). The same Democritus blinded himself in order to refrain from looking at women, a fact which resembles the ritual self-castration of the priests of Cybele in Asia Minor.
The Face of Cybele
Democracy, progressivism, evolutionism, feminism, egalitarianism and the destruction of traditional hierarchies, the revolt against the gods, gender ideology, atomism, materialism, capitalism - all of these ideas are very archaic phenomena that have become modern only because Europe chose them in the early modern period and abandoned its former identity. These are in fact integral elements of the cult of the Great Mother. And the further we are from the historical Middle Ages, the more the ancient goddess veils her face under the guise of modernity.
And in Game of Thrones, the Gestalt of Cybele is extremely open. One of the key characters of the series, Princess Daeyneris Targaryen, embodies this archetype more than any other character. Let us recall that the Great Mother (Cybele, Rhea, Ishtar) in Greek, Asia Minor’s and Semitic mythologies is surrounded by chthonic monsters. Her priests practiced ritual castration and, in addition to the court of monsters and eunuchs, there were also dwarfs. Throughout the whole story, Deyneris is accompanied by chthonic monsters, dragons, to which she refers as to her children, and she is worshipped by an army of castrated slaves. Other male characters finally come to Cybele-Deyneris having experienced the act of castration, such as the eunuch Varys and Tyrion Greyjoy, whose sister Yara is also an embodiment of the archetype of the insurgent Cybele.
Naturally, the only dwarf in the series, Tyrion Lannister, is also in the end included in the court of Daeyneris. She destroys social hierarchy in the conquered cities, eradicates slavery and introduces election management insisting on equality and multicultural democracy. The egalitarian masses proclaim her to be “Mother" (Misa). As the Mother of Dragons and mother of rebellious slaves, it is is symbolic that the Phrygian cap, the headdress of Cybele’s lover Attis, became a symbol of the rebel slaves in Rome, and then the symbol of the French Revolution.
The main centers of Cybele’s cult were located in Asia Minor. Coincidentally, in these cults was the culture and geographical design of the continent of Essos, where Daeyneris begins the invasion of Westeros, which resembles ancient Asia Minor. Thus, her war is a war of Cybele’s Logos destined to conquer Europe and suppress all the remains of old traditional order.
Of course, she is not the only embodiment of this principle. Other facets of the archetype of Cybele are revealed in the character of Cersei Lannister who creates children from sexual relations with her own twin brother, the person most biologically identical to herself. In this can be seen the myth of parthenogenesis, the birth of Mother Earth’s children by and out of herself. They are destined to fail and be killed as are many of the creatures of the earth like the numerous offspring of the goddess Gaia in the Greek myths of the Olympic gods. Everything that she likes is associated with death since her love is insatiable and proprietary and killing is the love of Cybele. It is this archetype which leads those she loves (like her lover Attis) to their death.
In modern mass culture, we see the resurgence of ancient myths earlier veiled by the hypnosis of scientific thought, rationality or “common sense.” But, as the prominent German conservative and specialist in Greek mythology, Friedrich Georg Junger, said, when the gods are gone, the titans occupy their place.
Rejecting the celestial spirituality of Christianity, the West was doomed to chthonic matriarchal cults and to the resurgence of ancient mythical figures in its imagination. Cybele’s trend in Game of the Thrones is just one example of the changing gender mythology of the West which is renouncing its masculinity in psychological self-castration. From imagination, this will turn into real politics to the point that we will soon see the deadly incarnation of the bloody goddess enthroned.
Catastrophe
Catastrophe is the fate of the titans, the sons of Gaia, just as it is her own. The catastrophic absence of a “happy ending” is a distinct feature of Game of Thrones. The series’ credibility and success is largely due to the fact that the authors allow the myth to work. The myth of female domination and titanic power, as the above-mentioned Friedrich Georg Jünger noted, is inevitably linked with the prospects of disaster and catastrophe. The Greek word for catastrophe literally means to turn to the bottom, to matter and the Great Mother. The disaster awaits those who stand on the side of chthonic power, who follow their passions, and stand in the ranks of the army of titans. Their lack of the harmony given by God to the world will be punished. The disaster is always present where there is an immoderate desire for power. Another leitmotif of Game of Thrones. In the world of Game of Thrones, the Middle Ages without Christ, there is no other possible outcome than one of total destruction. The imaginary world of the West shares the fate of and projects the future of the real world.
GUNNAR BJORNSON
Wednesday, December 7, 2016
Walking around Fiesole
Walking About Fiesole: From the Etruscan Civilization to the Middle Ages
by Tatiana Yugay (from the blog "Medieval Walks")
I fell in love with Fiesole even before visiting it. I first knew about this charming town from Ugo Bardi's photo blog. Ugo published there his photos with brief or sometimes long comments. I liked very much his pictures of nature and its creatures, sunrises and sunsets, historic sights, old postcards and local folks. He also wrote about historic and modern political, scientific and cultural events in Fiesole. I write in the past time because, unfortunately, Ugo didn't update his blog since December 2015. Though he wrote in Italian, I highly recommend you to visit the blog because his photos speak by themselves. It was a kind of chronicle of Fiesole's everyday life which was made with such a love and mild humor that I became dreaming to see Fiesole with my own eyes.
As the matter of facts, the Fiesolans have two strong reasons to consider themselves superior than the Florentines. Firstly, Fiesole is much more ancient than Florence and, secondly, the town literally overlooks the Arno valley where Florence is situated.
As the matter of facts, the Fiesolans have two strong reasons to consider themselves superior than the Florentines. Firstly, Fiesole is much more ancient than Florence and, secondly, the town literally overlooks the Arno valley where Florence is situated.
Fiesole is a hilltown located on a scenic height of 8 kilometres right above Florence. It spreads over two hills, San Francesco and Sant’ Apollinare, and the modern town is situated in the saddle between them. Fiesole (Etruscan - Viesul, Viśl, Vipsul) was a flourishing Etruscan city which was probably founded in the 9th century BC. It was surrounded by an imposing ring of city walls stretching for over two and a half kilometres which were erected to defend Fiesole from the Gauls' invasion. Even three millennia later, we can observe impressive Etruscan remnants in the town.
The Romans conquered Faesulae, as Fiesole was then known, in 283 BC. Under Roman rule, it became the seat of a famous school of augurs, and every year twelve young men were sent here from Rome to study the art of divination.
Fiesole had seen the great victory of Roman general Stilicho over Germanic hordes of the Vandals and Suebi under Radagaisus in 406. Ugo Bardi wrote in his blog “Cassandra legacy” that he had visited the battle place in order to commemorate a anniversary of this victory. During the Gothic War (536-53), Fiesole was besieged several times and in 539 Justinus, the Byzantine general, captured it and razed its fortifications.
In the early Middle Ages, Fiesole was more powerful than Florence in the valley below, and many wars arose between them. In 1010 and 1025 Fiesole was sacked by the Florentines, and was finally conquered in 1125.
Nowadays, Fiesole is a charming and tranquil city and only landmarks of various epochs remind us about its glorious and turbulent history.
My first meeting with Fiesole took place last August when I visited the Bardi in their beautiful house near Fiesole. It was great to walk around the city with such a connoisseur of the place as Ugo. When driving to Fiesole, Ugo asked me, what would I like to see most of all. Of course, I wished to see the memorial place of Stilicho's victory at the King's Mountain. It took us some minutes to get there. I'd better cite Ugo's post about this place.
“Of those remote times, little more than a few lines in history books remain. But, in the Mugnone Valley, you can still find a hill that takes the name of Montereggi, from the Latin "Mons Regis", the King's Mountain. It is the place where, it is said, King Radagaisus was beheaded. We can still walk there and find a small Christian church surrounded by cypress trees. There is also a pile of stones with a sign that says "Ave crux, spes nostra" (Hail, cross, our hope). We have no reason to believe that it was the exact point where the king was beheaded, but surely it is a suggestive place”.
After a short walk along the Etruscan walls, we found ourselves in the mediaeval Convent of San Francesco. It seemed to me that during few minutes we were brought by the time machine from the Etruscan civilization to Ancient Rome and then to the Middle Ages.
The square in front of the church was very unusual. When we entered a lateral gate, we found ourselves in front of a sober little church and on our left there was a small loggia. The pavement was overgrown with grass and that gave the whole scene a bucolic country look. A pathway paved with big irregular stones was beginning right near the steps of the main entrance and led to the left. When we came nearer, I looked to the left and saw that there was a smooth descent to the belvedere with a breathtaking panorama. Of course, I rushed there to make photos. Florence was in full view, veiled in a haze of late afternoon light. Right below I saw the Brunelleschi cupola of the Duomo and all the city. The blue Apennine mountains could be hardly seen in the background.
I was very glad that church's interior was also designed in my favorite Gothic style. In fact, you can very seldom find a church in Italy designed in the unique style. This happened because Italians were always fond of modernizing their churches and that sometimes resulted in a rather eclectic appearances of churches. I think that the San Francesco church has been a happy exception because it belonged from the very beginning till now to the Franciscan order.
We passed the cloisters which were so peaceful and serene. I'd like to stay there much longer but Ugo wanted to show me other remarkable things. One of them was the Franciscan Missionary Museum, which contains Egyptian and Chinese collections gathered by numerous missionary fathers to those lands. It was rather unusual to meet all these oriental artefacts in a mediaeval Tuscan monastery.
After the Convent, we made a short walk about the historic center of Fiesole. Unfortunately, there was a mass in the Duomo, so we couldn't enter it. I'm going to write about the Duomo and the historic center in my following posts.
Related posts
The King's Mountain
The National Etruscan Museum in the Medieaval Stronghold
Dont Miss This Small but Very Rich Museum in Viterbo!
Useful links
Foto di Fiesole
http://www.fratifiesole.it/
Опубликовано 4 minutes ago пользователем Tatiana Yugay
Saturday, December 3, 2016
In the end, we are all chimeras
Image from early 18th century, by Anonymous. Source.
As I say in the title of this blog, "we are all chimeras." This phylosophical piece, written by "Reason," from the blog "fight aging," is in perfect agreement with the concept.
The Slow Death of the Self that is Produced by the Normal Operation of Human Memory
People are terrified of dementia, by the loss of the self that results from the final stages of the accumulation of age-related damage in the brain. Whether this is loss of data or merely loss of access to data, that data being encoded in the structures of neurons and their connecting synapses, depends upon the details along the way. Either option amounts to the same thing for someone in the midst of the condition when there is only faint prospect of therapies arriving soon enough to matter. But if dementia is an asymptotic approach to 100% loss of data, what to make of the fact that we are, on a day to day basis, largely accepting of our normal relationship with the data of the mind, in which we lose 98% of everything that we experience within a few weeks of the event? A week from now you will not remember reading this, nor will there be any trace of what took place in the surrounding minutes before and after. You will have to guess at how you spent your time, what you were thinking, who you were at that moment. We are, every one of us, thin and translucent ghosts of our own history, mere summaries of a rich set of data that is now gone.
Yet we get by. Normal is normal, but that doesn't mean it is good, or that it should go unexamined. To put this another way, there was a person who lived a few decades ago in the UK, and got by. Later, there was another person who came to the US and spent time here, as people do. I know about as much about those individuals as I do about friends of long standing, perhaps just a little more. Yet both of them were me. All of that remains of them, of their richness of data, are the echoes I carry with me now. I have the memories burned in by adrenaline or, to a lesser extent, by sheer boring repetition, but those are just signposts in the mist by this point. Ask me who I was back then, and the answer will be largely extrapolation. Are those individuals dead? Am I so different that such a question makes sense to ask? To what extent is the self burning away and vanishing because we have a poor capacity for remembrance? To what extent is change death, in other words? Here of course I do little more than wave my hands at questions that have been debated at great length in the philosophy community.
Those of us who are generally opposed to the idea of being scanned, uploaded, and copied have the view that a copy of the self is not the self. It is its own separate individual. Individuality stems from the combination of pattern of information and the matter that the pattern is bound to. It isn't clear that, for example, an emulation running in an abstraction layer over computing hardware can be considered a continuous entity, rather than a unending series of nanosecond individuals assembled and then destroyed. In the continuity view of identity, a Ship of Theseus sort of a viewpoint, you are still you even if all your component parts are slowly replaced over time. There is a sizable grey area at the border between small parts and slow replacement, which is fine, and large parts and rapid replacement, which is the same as death. If someone removes half of your brain in one go and replaces it with a hypothetical machine that accepts exactly the same inputs and produces exactly the same outputs where it connects to the remaining brain tissue, I would say that this means that you just died, even though an entity that thinks in the same way as you did continues onward. Conversely, replacing neurons one by one with machines that perform the same functions, and allowing time for each neuron to reach equilibrium with its neighbors, seems acceptable.
Continuity comes attached at the hip to change of the self over time. Life is change, and we celebrate it. But we lose so very much in the course of that change that it seems matters really could be better managed. The figure for 98% loss of memory over weeks arises from self-experiments carried out by a determined fellow in the late 1800s, and which have been repeated every so often by the research community ever since. A replication paper was published just last year, for example. This enormous loss is the way things work for normal humans, and coupled with the adrenaline mechanism for selective additional memory of events that matter, one can see how this sort of a system might have evolved. A prehistoric lifespan is the same few tasks with very minor variations repeated over and again until death or disability, interspersed with a much smaller number of painful and terrifying learning experiences, with each new generation running the same rat wheel as the previous.
There are claims of people with extraordinary memory, or even eidetic or photographic memory, but the scientific community is far from settled on the question of the degree to which these claims result from (a) misinterpreting the top end of the curve for normal variation in memory capacity, versus (b) narrowly specialized memory training, versus (c) some form of genuinely unusual and exceptional ability based on neurobiological differences yet to be described. The mechanisms of memory are being deciphered in the laboratory, however, and there are various demonstrations of a modest degree of enhanced memory in animal studies. The question of whether greatly enhanced memory can be induced through near future medicine remains open: it will certainly happen eventually, but when will it start in earnest, and when will it go beyond adding only few more percentage points to the fraction of events we recall from our lives? It seems to me that this is a goal that should be given a far greater priority than is the case today. Consider that if we had perfect memory, what would we think of someone who forget near everything he or she did? We would call it a medical condition and offer support, in the same way that the medical community seeks to treat and aid people suffering age-related cognitive decline or amnesia today. If there were a great many of those people, there would be an enormous investment in the search for a cure, just as we do today for Alzheimer's disease. But because our disability is normal and shared, there is no such effort.
Friday, November 25, 2016
Something out there: if we don't have a narrative of the future, we will have no future
Do you remember the great season of science fiction, mid 20th century? It was not just entertainment, it was a narrative about science, about the marvels of the future: spaceships, robots, flying cars, and all the rest. It was not just about technological marvels, it could be harsh, dystopic, difficult, and it didn't shy away from describing nuclear wars, political oppression, planetary catastrophes, and more. But it was the soul of an age: without that season of science fiction, nobody would have imagined of sending men to the moon.
Science fiction withered as a literary genre with the late 20th century, together with its twin: science. Today, science fiction themes in movies are reduced to little more than a tired repetition of the idea of exploring space ("The Martian") while scientists, then, have reduced themselves to the role of ridiculous priests of a dead deity called "technological progress." They are still engaged in their kludgy incantations that should save the world and that never do. They seem unable to realize that if so many people say that the exploration of the Moon was a hoax, there is a reason. And it is not that it was a hoax.
So, what are we left with that tells us of our future? Not much. During the 20th century, there was another great literature season that had to do with social justice and change. In the US, think of John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" (1939) and, in the Soviet Union, think of Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago". (1973). But all that is gone, as remote to us as the Sumerian hymns to the Goddess Inanna of three thousand years ago. What has survived of the 20th-century literature is, mostly, the genre we call "Epic Fantasy", with endless filmic versions of the Trilogy of the Ring by Tolkien. On the screen, we keep seeing hordes of orcs, goblins, trolls, and assorted monsters battling shiny heroes; all full of sound and fury and signifying only that we are terribly afraid of what we don't understand.
Yet, the future is there; looming upon us, and we cannot ignore it. And we have an instrument to understand it: it is narrative. Only by means of a story our brains can come to terms with our future. Think of Dante's "Comedy", not a novel in the modern sense of the term, but a story that encapsulates a whole vision of the universe. The "Comedy" was not entertainment, it was a roadmap for the future; a story that starts with despair, goes through redemption, and ends with enlightenment. The Comedy is literature at its best, in a nearly pure form. A vision of the universe and a vision of hope.
So, in this difficult moment, we are seeing something moving, out there. A new form of literature that embodies our future, makes it real, tells us about it. And it is not a good future. It is a terrible future. It is a future that most of us refuse to contemplate, even though we know that it is there, even though we refuse to admit it. This new literary genre takes sometimes the name of "climate fiction" or "Cli-Fi", in reference to science fiction, of which it is in some ways the continuation.
It is still an embryonic genre that reminds in many cases the early, naive, science fiction of the 1930s. And yet, it is growing and turning into literature. Bruno Arpaia has written a harsh and unforgiving cli-fi book titled "Something out There", the story of a group of dispossessed migrants who try to reach Northern Europe, leaving an Italy devastated by climate change. Only a few will make it. Surely not an optimistic book, although it has elements of hope. But it is a book that does the work that a literary piece must do: showing to you the change ahead.
It is not by chance that I cited Dante; a book like Arpaia's one is comparable to the comedy's first cantica, the one about Hell. It sounds like the very first lines of the Comedy, where Dante tells of having been lost in a "dark wood," which is a typical cli-fi theme: people desperately looking to escape from the climate disaster. And it is our situation: we are completely lost; unable to find our way out. Someone still has to write the cli-fi equivalents of the other two canticas of the Comedy, the one about Purgatory and the one about Paradise, and that will make it possible for us to understand what is in store for us. Can narrative take us out of Hell? Hard to say, but it is certain that without a narrative of the future, we can have no future.
"Qualcosa là fuori" is written by a professional novelist who creates a fast moving story with well-designed characters and impressive mastery of the scenery. Although he is not a scientists, Arpaia understands the science of climate and he describes a scenario that may be somewhat extreme, but well within what the current models indicate as possible. Personally, I found that the many flashbacks that interrupt the main story are distracting and sometimes overlong and over-dramatized. But flashbacks add a scientific background to the main story and contain a number of fascinating remarks about how the human minds work. In these sections, we follow the work of the protagonist, an active neuroscientist in the early novel-time, who studies how the mind continuously creates narratives in order to understand reality.
It is not by chance that I cited Dante; a book like Arpaia's one is comparable to the comedy's first cantica, the one about Hell. It sounds like the very first lines of the Comedy, where Dante tells of having been lost in a "dark wood," which is a typical cli-fi theme: people desperately looking to escape from the climate disaster. And it is our situation: we are completely lost; unable to find our way out. Someone still has to write the cli-fi equivalents of the other two canticas of the Comedy, the one about Purgatory and the one about Paradise, and that will make it possible for us to understand what is in store for us. Can narrative take us out of Hell? Hard to say, but it is certain that without a narrative of the future, we can have no future.
"Qualcosa là fuori" is written by a professional novelist who creates a fast moving story with well-designed characters and impressive mastery of the scenery. Although he is not a scientists, Arpaia understands the science of climate and he describes a scenario that may be somewhat extreme, but well within what the current models indicate as possible. Personally, I found that the many flashbacks that interrupt the main story are distracting and sometimes overlong and over-dramatized. But flashbacks add a scientific background to the main story and contain a number of fascinating remarks about how the human minds work. In these sections, we follow the work of the protagonist, an active neuroscientist in the early novel-time, who studies how the mind continuously creates narratives in order to understand reality.
Thursday, November 24, 2016
My paper on Cellini's Medusa
So, the book on "Cnidaria", better known as "jellyfish" is out, published by Springer. It is a massive book of more than 800 pages, mostly about biology and contains a good number of very technical papers. Some are rather general and interesting also for the non-specialist in Cnidaria. And it also contains four contributions about the ancient myth of Medusa, supposed to be a member of the Cnidarian family. One of these contributions is my piece on Cellini's Medusa, the statuary piece that you can admire today in Florence. You can find an early version of this paper in this blog.
Here is how Cellini interpreted the figure of the mythological Medusa. Not exactly a jellyfish, but artists have a lot of leeway in their work
Friday, November 18, 2016
God Bless America!
God bless America!
- For having given me a job, a career, and a new language
- For my first home, where I lived with the woman who is still my wife after 40 years
- For being the land where my son was born
- For the fog of San Francisco's bay, for the great trees of the Sequoia National Park, for the Japanese gardens on the hill
- For the raccoons cavorting in the garden, for the blue jays landing on the window sill, for the lone coyote trotting along the street.
- For the bottomless cup of coffee, for the champagne brunch, for the maple syrup and the pancakes
- For Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Leonard Cohen
- For John Muir, Rachel Carson, and Donella Meadows
- For Ursula Le Guin, Robert Anson Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov
- For all that and so much more
God bless America. She needs that. Badly.
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