Far Green Country

So why is the movie Spring a romance on par with Casablanca for me? First, a disclaimer about criticism. A work of art has more dimensions than any criticism of it. I mean this figuratively, but it’s a tight analogy: a review stands in relation to a book or movie as a photo, or at best a set of photos, does in relation to a sculpture. I published nearly a hundred reviews by Lucius Shepard, and he was consistently right about films from the viewpoint he chose to take, but I thought he often dismissed what was good about a movie to concentrate on what didn’t work. He would stare hard into the butt-crack of Michelangelo’s David, so to speak, before grudgingly admitting it was better than most statues, taking the butt-crack view. Our mutual teacher Kate Wilhelm told both of us independently and years apart that she didn’t think The Lord of the Rings worked, and she was right, I think — according to the same principle. It’s still the best fantasy series ever.

I wouldn’t open with such a blow-hardy disclaimer if I didn’t care about the film enough to validate the experience and look out for the time of those who wouldn’t like it. It’s not going to be on par with Casablanca for most people. If you are wondering whether to watch Spring but don’t want me to give anything away, then maybe this will help: it’s a romance, not a horror movie. Its foil would be Let the Right One In, at least the Swedish original, which I consider the best vampire movie ever, and for me the most disturbing, decidedly a horror movie, staring into the bleak dark hole at the bottom of existence. Physical and spiritual mutilation has damned the young victim of Let the Right One In, who must tragically thirst after a kind of eternal spring while gripped by winter, disdaining the other seasons, clinging to decadent immortality; Spring, on the other hand, is about the final breaking of a true spring after a long, wearying dalliance with unending life.

Now for the spoilers….

Spring is Beauty and the Beast with Beauty as the beast. Louise is a chimera, both genetic and mythic, who has always lost herself in her loveless loves. But the difference between tragedy and poignancy is that tragedy reveals the now-hopeless death of potential or the irresolvable bleak paradox, and that’s not Spring: the horror is backgrounded, not foregrounded. Ultimately, she and the grieving Evan find a little eddy of peace and eternity adjacent to the indifferent forces of nature that claimed her family and toys with her in a parody of reproduction.

In connection with the instincts, I often think of the passage from Kings where Elijah is on the Mount to encounter God: “Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake.” For many religious people, Darwin’s theory is a challenge because they must imagine transcendent God to be in the wind or the earthquake, or following the symbols in Spring, the volcanic eruption or the implacable genes, and because God must necessarily be good and omnipotent, there aren’t any impersonal forces, and everything you do has a simple moral meaning that can be codified.

Well, they’re entitled to their religious view but not to facts, and they are wrong that the facts of evolution are not the facts. An atheist sees their error at the level of facts and dismisses both their literalist conception of God, just as I do, and the whole God project, which I do not. I’ve got a weirder take on God: not in the wind or the earthquake, but next to it, like Louise and Evan. Suffering and loss await them as surely as they do for the old man who has made a deity of his late wife, but he lives in bliss just as much as in grief for what she means to him (in a way that starkly contrasts the elderly and similarly obsessed but used-up minions of the creature in Let the Right One In). Ancient pagan and Christian iconography abound in Spring for good reason: the movie reaches for a statement on love and fertility at the highest level, and so is hugely ambitious for a quiet, low-budget “horror” feature.

At the end of Spring, the past two thousand years and the coming fifty or so converge in a fleeting expression of transcendence. Louise has found a love that she will neither dominate nor be lost in. Poignantly, I’d say, rather than tragically, they will grow old and die.

But there will be a baby.

—

*Tolkien, of course. I was thinking specifically of Arwen’s sacrifice to wed Aragorn and have children.

My friend Dr. Greg Scorzo interviewed me a couple weeks ago for his Culture on the Offensive podcast series, and he used my essay Liberalism Needs a Housecleaning as a discussion springboard. I greatly enjoy talking with Greg, and I hate to let him down, which I feel I might have done right off the bat. Why did I open my essay with, in particular, a comment about Adam Smith and Marx? If I remember correctly, I replied that I valued their observations, Smith’s in particular, over any prescriptions they made or might be derived from them, but I didn’t go into detail. I didn’t think even to emphasize that while I’m more of a philosophical conservative, my point wasn’t to discount Marx but merely to confess my bias.

With the benefit of time to ponder, here’s what I wish I’d said. Continue reading →

You probably have noticed that I say the same things over and over again. I’m well aware, but I try to say them in different ways. I’ve written many times about how discourse at any given time follows a mode that is either objective, religio-aesthetic, or political. A mode is form of conduct consistent with a given mindset, but that does not mean that the people engaged in the mode actually have the mindset, and to suppose they do is not logically rigorous. For example, a scientist may be passionately arguing the evidence because his reputation is on the line (that is, he’s politically motivated), but as long as he argues according to the strictures of scientific debate, he’s not in a political mode. A given conversation might range back and forth or vacillate quickly between modes, but those trained in a certain mode can hold to it. Politics easily dominates a conversation because everything we do has some motivation behind it. Again, though, that does not vitiate the idea — or the potential of observing — the mode itself.

So one thing that confuses people when I talk about the religio-aesthetic mode is my summing it up as the mode of irrational human truth, of art broadly defined and of religious feeling. It doesn’t sit well with people generally to think of art as either irrational or nonpolitical. Well, the mode of defining things is the objective mode, and it’s difficult to interpret one mode in terms of another. But here’s what might help. We have evolved emotional, intuitive thought-heuristics for survival. We can use logic to guide these intuitions but the intuitions themselves follow a different process than abstract logic does. They were, after all, evolved to line up emotions with the goals of survival, and the “right” answer there is survival, which just happened to be rational enough times that the very concept of rationality could carve out a space for itself. But what’s an example of this problem of evolved intuition not actually being rational? Well, a friend of mine brought this up in the context of applying Bayes’ Theorem to intuition, and sent me a link to a video similar to the following, which I think is a tad more accessible than the one he actually sent:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrK7X_XlGB8

The religio-aesthetic mode is about exploring the direct experience of evolved heuristics, and the truth it puts you in touch with is a _human_ truth that cannot be fully appreciated from the logical mode; it’s an answer to logically unanswerable questions, at the level of feeling: What’s the meaning of life? Why is love better than hate? Does a song move me? What is the value of a scary movie? We can attempt to answer these questions logically from premises we come up with, but that’s objective-mode stuff. Religio-aesthetic mode stuff is about feeling the answer. And since we are emotional creatures, it’s really impossible for us to participate in the logical mode without feeling the correctness of a logical proposition. But while emotion is essential to the process of logic at the level of motivation and a feeling of understanding (you know that little dopamine hit when the lights go on and you finally really get something you’ve been taught?), logic itself works whether you’re doing it or a computer is doing it, and so far, our computers feel neither smugness for the correct calculations nor chagrin at their errors… as far as we know. [I’ll follow up with another post with another link my friend gave me on the issue of motivation and Bayes’ Theorem.]

My teen romance about roleplaying gamers in 1980s Portland, Oregon, is live at Amazon.

If you are not interested in Dungeons & Dragons, Portland, teen romance, or vampires, werewolves, giants, or cannibal hags — both terrestrial and aquatic — this will probably not be for you. But if it might be, then I recommend it. Despite all the frustration it’s caused me, it still inspires me. Thanks to Richard Garfield, Pete Adkison, Jesper Myrfors, Jonathan Tweet, Loren Rosson III, Skaff Elias, and Bryan Costanich for the generous blurbs, Catska for the beautiful cover, and everyone else who helped my effort to revise it and pushed me to get it done!

I promised my best friend a couple weeks ago that I’d stop posting on Facebook and get back to writing fiction. And then something happened, and I felt I had to write about it, but I just couldn’t, and instead I did the last two posts to approach what I had to write about.

And it didn’t help.

Two weeks ago, we had a tragedy in town that has upset me like few others that haven’t affected me personally, though it’s a near miss, given that my sister has been close to the people involved. To get some relief from contemplating it, I watched the documentary My Octopus Teacher, and I saw some things clearly that had been only on the periphery of my thought and understanding for most of my life.

The octopus is a very strange product of evolution, an exception that proves general rules. Most creatures with a wide-dispersal strategy for reproduction have a small energy budget for intelligence: fish, mosquitoes, snails. Intelligence is so costly that it’s generally associated with modest broods and parental care of offspring. But nature loaded the octopus with intelligence and amazing dexterity and camouflage ability, along with a short life and no parental support after birth. The male dies after mating. The female dies a short time after hatching her eggs, which can number in the hundreds of thousands.

While most predators teach their young to hunt, among other survival skills, the world itself teaches the octopus, and it’s an instruction marked by huge attrition. Those that survive to maturity are intelligent, playful innocents. And even for them, life is a game that’s soon over, with no transmission of knowledge, and little companionship. You might say, they’re just animals, and oblivious, and the idea of their intelligence and innocence is a silly projection.

Right?

I can’t answer with confidence. It’s clear for the filmmaker who spent every day of a year with an octopus, the creature was sentient. His tears at the end of the movie are disturbing. We can scarcely enter his experience, even though he’s done a good job of sharing it, and he has far more authority than anyone else over it. If he is right to cry over his octopus, which he is according to my reckoning, then he’s revealed a larger and stranger world than the one that most of us inhabit. Can you really empathize with an octopus and meet it where it lives? That’s not really the point, is it? He encountered more of himself in the octopus than he had anticipated. He unlocked more of his own potential, and shared some of it. (“Humans are the only animals that matter,” a conservative friend said to me, and this is true, and that which _matters to us_, matters, especially if it challenges us to grow. So conservation is our duty. We are impoverished if we shirk it.)

I promised in an earlier post to explain how the theory of evolution underlies my own sense of meaning, where for many people it threatens to smash their faith. On one level, I really don’t have a choice. There’s no doubting the model. It’s ironclad. There are people who reject it, and there are people who understand it. That may seem dogmatic if you’ve been taught there’s any real controversy, but no, if you have, you’ve been misled, and when I make this binary pronouncement, it’s just the same thing one might observe about physics, or math, or chemistry.

Evolution is a fact, and a challenge for anyone looking to nature for the intervention of God. Christians hold that God gave us freewill, and beyond that we have nature through which we glimpse the lineaments of supernature and by which God directs us toward meaning. He dishes out his miracles sparingly, but he does intercede… or so goes the teaching.

I don’t know. I suspect all texts regarding miracles are figurative. A world that has such wondrous and tragic creatures as the octopus must be one where nature is free to probe out any possibility, any beautiful or horrible thing that might offer a chance at survival or express the shaping force of pain and death. Evolution is biology groping into any conceivable niche, creating new niches, parasitizing, seducing, dominating, cooperating. What is human love and pain and search for meaning to this blind, amoral process?

Well, meaning is central to our survival, physically and emotionally. How can a meaningless process give rise to a human creature — and maybe other creatures — with needs like that? Because it can, that’s why. It was possible, and it happened, and it is preeminent. And its manifest possibility is the thin wedge between a vast, uncaring universe, and one that’s filled with terrible purpose.

So this is lesson one: nature is free to realize its possibilities. Don’t look there for God’s mercy or lack thereof, unless you are really prepared for a challenge that will take you into your own depths, outside any help from other people, and from which you may not return with anything like your old faith. My once-Catholic fishing buddy — my father’s childhood friend — who was a medic in Vietnam was basically done with churchgoing after the war: “There was no God in charge of what was happening there,” he said.

My own father expressed regret a couple of times that he had not undergone the rite of passage that our mutual friend had. Shortly after Dad died, I said to our friend, “I told him he was crazy to regret not going to war. What do you think?”

“Well, Robert, your old man said the same thing to me when I got back.”

“And?”

He laughed. “I told him he was crazy.”

Which brings me to lesson two, that puzzling line from The Lord’s Prayer “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” How strange. God does not lead us into temptation, according to any teaching of the Church I know of, but these are supposed to be the words of Christ Himself.

I now read it thusly: “Do not saddle me with such challenges that I cannot keep my faith. In humility I accept that some things may be beyond me. (My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?)” Three young ladies died suddenly in a car crash the week before last, and one of them I had seen often, though I didn’t really know her. I’d met her at my sister’s probably at least once, certainly at the lunch table at the high school where I play games and discuss computer programming with students, probably walking with one of the young ladies in town I knew to be her friend, my niece maybe, or my neighbor’s daughter. I recognized her picture in the paper, but could not exactly place her. Rather than making her death impersonal, though, the uncertainty of how I recognize her has made her loss ubiquitous: she had been part of this town’s welcoming environment and, like all the most important things, easy to take for granted. I don’t know why contemplating her is so poignant for me. I only have guesses: my heart goes out to her mother, who, like me, raised a one-and-only and invests all her love in her, and so I easily inhabit the idea of her loss. Or maybe it’s the young woman herself, who, it turns out, valued writing as I do, and was a very talented essayist. Or maybe it’s sympathy for my sister, who must feel this even more keenly.

Before leading Kaddish for the dead, the rabbi at the young lady’s outdoor memorial observed, “God has a lot to answer for.” And this is wise and appropriate. Her mother implored us not to forget her daughter, and I won’t. At some level, my fixation on her is my own choice; to let go of it too soon would be to abdicate the responsibility — the dreadful honor — of acknowledging a world that’s bigger than me, where I simply do not have control.

Evolution is a fact. Immortal young people, the children of too many of my friends and acquaintances, die suddenly. A tough free-diver is moved to tears by a dead octopus. And no trite sayings or memes will address this terrible burden we each have, to make sense of it without pretending it’s something it’s not. No amount of philosophical or political argument will let us escape our reckoning. I’ve distracted myself too much with Facebook, to avoid confrontation with meaning. Don’t be like me. Don’t tempt meaning to pursue you while you waste your time in senseless logical argument. A meaningful life is not comfortable for long. A grownup holds not just to faith but to honest doubt.

Okay, Rob, I’m done.