Still Passionate and Confused

So, um, hi. If you follow this journal you'll know I have a Patreon page now, which I've started in a desperate attempt to put my abilities to some use in plugging our leaking domestic economy. I have thirteen lovely patrons right now, which is a wonderful start, but I am really hoping for more.

I've made it a monthly-pledge Patreon rather than per-thing, because I have no idea how to price my things even when I manage to finish them. So for as little as one dollar per month (it's a US site and they show everything in dollars, but they'll take whatever) you get access to everything new I put up there, and I'm aiming to put up at least one piece a day.

Looking at other people's Patreon pages, that looks like a heck of a deal.

And the more you pledge, the more I can do. I intend to start putting music and art up there in due course.

There are now more reward tiers, if you feel able to pledge a bit more. You can comment on my posts and tell me what you like or don't like, what you'd like to see from me. I really hope you will.

Because this isn't just about the money, though that is important too. This is about you and me having a conversation, getting to know each other better. It's about me getting better at making art for you. As long as it's something I can do, I promise to try.

If you know someone who might enjoy my stuff, tell them. If you enjoy my stuff, pledge a little (or a lot if you like, but a little will do if you spread the word).

Let's see if we can make this work.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/conversation-8571542

A short-short story this time, stand-alone. Patron-only. I hope you will look at it and like it.

Okay. If I have done this right, the following link should take you to what is probably the beginning of a new Gestalt story:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/possibly-new-8553397

But, if I have done this right, it will only do so if you have signed up as a patron, for as little as one dollar per month. I don't know if this will work, and I'm not sure if I like it, but this is the path I've started down and I have to give it a fair whack. We really do need the eggs.

If you aren't a patron and you can see it anyway, please let me know.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/well-its-start-8542539?utm_campaign=postshare&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook

More and hopefully better will follow.

Here's the link: https://www.patreon.com/zandamyrande

I hope to earn some financial support this way, instead of just panhandling. Wish me luck.

watervole responded quite impassionedly to my suggestion for some dialogue that I would quite like to see in a movie, in response to a certain rather tired cliché that I have encountered rather too often in various forms of fiction, and most recently in Doctor Strange, which we otherwise enjoyed quite a lot. She seemed to think I had missed the point of the statement. Since the point she thought I had missed was stated in the immediately following line, I rather think I did get it. I just didn't agree with it.

Quick show of hands. How many of you here reading this (not many any more, I know) actually treat every single moment of your lives as precious? How many fill each and every unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run? How many live every day as if it might be your last? Every moment? Every minute? Every day? Honestly?

Can't see your hands, of course, but I'm open to the idea that I'm the only one here who ever gets bored, ever feels dull and uninspired, ever gets tired and just wants to stop. I've always known I was deficient in many ways, and if I was alone in that terrible vulnerability that wouldn't surprise me. But if by some chance I'm not, if there are others of you out there who have black moments and terrible quarter-hours and days when you just want it all to be over, tell me this: how does it make you feel when someone tells you that you should really regard every moment of your life as precious because it might end at any minute?

Exactly. It's rubbish. As a reason for valuing your life, it's among the least rational of all. When (not, thank gods, if) I have times when my life seems precious to me, it's because I have friends and family, chosen and unchosen, whom I love, and because I have things to say that I think need saying and music to make that I think will make the world just a tiny fraction richer and people whom I believe I could make laugh if I could just get the words in the right order, and because there is more to see and more to do and more to experience, and the notion that all that could be chopped off at any moment by a random stroke of fate...just makes the whole thing seem even more pointless. Half the time when I want to die it's because I know that I'm going to, at some point, and when it happens I probably won't be ready anyway, so it might as well be now when I'm as ready as I'm going to be. What can I say, depression isn't logical.

Life isn't gold. It isn't some useless metal that only has value because it's scarce. Life has value for a whole host of reasons, and the fact that it will end is not one of them. So no. Death does not even give life meaning in that way. It just takes it away. And if you are so far down that the only reason you could possibly have for valuing your life is its temporariness...then that's not going to do it for you either. Trust me on this.

And I wouldn't have gone any further into this, except that a piece of speculative movie dialogue got mistaken for a serious philosophical essay. Which is probably my fault, for not making it clearer what I was doing. I'm sorry. But I stand by what I've said in both posts.

"Everyone's entitled to their own opinions. Nobody is entitled to their own facts." (Internet truism)

I've said before that essentially, nearly all "facts" as we understand them are in fact opinions, based on or supported by what we believe to be evidence, as filtered through our sensoria and interpreted by our brains. In practice, for the most part, this is a difference that makes no difference, and anyone who makes anything serious of that argument is being studenty and pretentious. There is one reality, and for the most part, in most cases and most of the time, we can agree on what it is. What it *means*...well, that's another kettle of fish entirely.

The abovementioned truism has been getting quite a lot of use in the last couple of years, and with Tronald, the current President of the USA, and his team busily coming out with "alternative facts," that seems likely to go on. What interests me about it, though, is the large hole it blows in the idea that non-religious people (who, I believe, comprise the majority of users of said truism) are actually capable of religious tolerance in any real sense.

When you call them on this, they stoutly maintain that they think everyone should be entitled to believe whatever they wish, as long as they don't try and force it on anyone else. Which is as good as saying that everyone is entitled to "their own facts," since it must surely be obvious to anyone who thinks about it that, to a religious person, a religious belief must of absolute necessity have the status of a fact, or what exactly does the word "belief" mean? Christians are not "of the opinion" that God sent His son to redeem mankind. Buddhists do not "incline to the view" that the material world is an illusion that must be transcended if the soul is to attain Nirvana. Jews are not "prepared to entertain the notion" that Passover night is different from all other nights. If any of them say they are, then in my estimation (and I admit I'm an outsider, see below) they're just being nice and trying to avoid causing conflict or offence, which is laudable but not conducive to greater understanding. An atheist friend, not so circumspect, told me quite flatly the other day, "it's a fact. There are no gods." It may be her fact, but it's not everyone's.

How all these contradictory beliefs may be reconciled is not an insoluble problem--I can think of half a dozen reasons why a deity might have communicated, or been understood as communicating, different truths about itself to different peoples, without using the words "sadistic," "psychopath" or "deceiver" once--but happily, it's not my problem. I have no facts in that area. None. Nor any opinions. I have nothing to defend except truth and logic.

But when you say "nobody is entitled to their own facts," and then claim to be okay with different people believing that different deities created the world, you are contradicting yourself. Because a belief is not the same as an opinion.

I love Stranger In A Strange Land. It's about the only thing of Heinlein's I do actually love. There is much wrong with it besides what I'm going to talk about, but much right as well. He did, however, fall victim to the very common fault of idiot plotting.

This is where, in order to make the story work, some or all of the characters have to be too stupid to do what to the reader is the obvious thing. To be fair, this may be because it wasn't obvious to Heinlein either, but since he conceived the characters, the situation, and the plot, one has to ask why not.

The omniscient narrator states as a fact that the driving force behind all humanity's strivings is the bipolar nature of human sexuality. If there's evidence to support this contention, I missed it. The driving force behind humanity's strivings is far more obvious to me, and if it had been explained to Mike early on in the book, a lot of heartache might have been avoided.

Jubal, or Jill, or Ben, or someone, could so easily have sat Mike down and said something like this. "Look, kid. Where you come from, when Martians get old they leave their bodies and hang around as Old Ones giving advice, right? They transform into some sort of incorporeal form of life. We don't. When we get old, we die, and we either stop existing altogether or we go somewhere else, we don't know where. Opinion is divided on this because we don't know.

"We just don't know. We don't know anything. We don't know what's going to happen next. We don't know what the universe is really like. We don't know, but we want to, real bad. And since we don't know and we don't have any way of finding out...we guess. We imagine. We make up stories. We guess what happens after we die and we call it heaven, or hell, or reincarnation. We guess where the universe came from and we call it god. We guess what's going to happen tomorrow, and if the guess is good we call it hope, if it's bad we call it fear. And when we guess right, we figure there must be a reason and we make a guess about that and call it intuition, or clairvoyance, or reasoned deduction, but all it is is a guess, because we don't know."

And that is the real driving force behind all our strivings. We strive to take care of our future needs because we don't know if we'll be able to do it tomorrow. We desperately strive to understand the universe because we don't know what it's going to do next. And we defend our guesses, whatever they may be, because if we lose them we're back where we started, in the void of unknowing, and we don't trust other people's guesses because we don't know what's going on in their heads. But all the while we know, deep down, that everything we like to think we know is just a more or less informed guess, and the only thing that makes that uncertainty bearable...is faith. Faith in our guesses, whatever they may be. Faith in the reliability of science, faith in the validity of the evidence we think we have, faith in the veracity of our own perceptions, faith in other people, faith in the rightness of law, faith in the future, or faith in gods. It's all faith. Because we don't know.

Faith is what drives human beings. It's all we have.

Heinlein's Martians don't have any of that. They know everything about their universe, because Heinlein decreed that it should be so. And nobody in the book twigs that that's the difference, that's what tears Mike apart, because he feels he should share that certainty, he tells himself he does, but he doesn't have the equipment to perceive it. Of course Heinlein also decreed that there was an afterlife for humans in his universe as well, but the humans didn't know that and neither did Mike, till after he was dead. Up to that moment, just like everyone else, he was relying on faith.

Maybe Heinlein did know all this, and his apparent nescience was a sophisticated bluff...but it certainly leaves what looks like an idiot plot right at the heart of Stranger, because nobody ever explains to Mike the central fact about human beings that sets them apart from Martians, and it's certainly right out there with a big neon sign pointing to it.

Or maybe I'm wrong. I don't know.

A LOADSCREEN MADE ME DO IT

TTTO: "Abdul the Bulbul Amir"

Oh, the horses of Skyrim are hardy and strong
And built for endurance, not speed,
But the stoutest of all, as you'll hear in this song,
Was Dudley, the Dovahkiin's steed.

When the dragons returned, as the Scrolls did foretell,
They ravaged the land near and far,
But the worst was a beast with a heart straight from hell,
The dragon they called Sisboombah.

To the snow-covered slopes of the Throat of the World
To the steps that approach High Hrothgar
Flew a menacing form as the snow flurries whirled--
The dragon they called Sisboombah.

And a figure forlorn and foreshortened she spied
And her jaw clenched in hunger and greed.
Standing there till his master was ready to ride--
'T was Dudley, the Dovahkiin's steed.

All unknowing, the Dragonborn loitered within
While the Greybeards were teaching him DAH.
There was no-one but Dudley to save his own skin
From the dragon they called Sisboombah.

Down she swooped from the clouds like a wolf on the fold
And prepared on roast horseflesh to feed,
For he made her mouth water, more even than gold,
Did Dudley, the Dovahkiin's steed.

But it watered so much that it put out her flame
Which caused her a terrible jar;
When her Shout petered out she was wracked with the shame,
The dragon they called Sisboombah.

So she veered off in haste and then circled around,
On her quarry she got a clear bead--
When the heavens above were convulsed with a sound
From Dudley, the Dovahkiin's steed.

It was only one word, but his Thu'um was true,
And his talent was well over par;
It was “NEH,” which means “never,” a concept quite new
To the dragon they called Sisboombah.

She lost all control and she fell from the sky,
On the landscape she left quite a scar,
And the folk round about came to kiss her goodbye--
The dragon they called Sisboombah.

But the Greybeards had heard, and came out of their doors
To find this new student in need,
But to their amazement, saw only a horse--
'T was Dudley, the Dovahkiin's steed.

Now the Dragonborn works up at Mixwater Mill
And damns the entire equine breed,
But the Greybeards are teaching a Dovahkiin still—
'T is Dudley, the Dovahkiin Steed!

Minimal explanation: Skyrim has loading screens which carry snippets of information about the game world, and one of them begins "The horses of Skyrim are hardy and strong..." Well, I mean. Asking for it or what? "Dovahkiin" means "Dragonborn," an epithet applied to the protagonist, who learns from the mysterious Greybeards in High Hrothgar how to Shout Words of Power in the language of dragons, who all have names composed, like Shouts, of three such Words. I'm not sure what "Sisboombah" would mean in Draconic, but "Bah" means "wrath," so we're in the right sort of territory.

greygirlbeast likes the new Star Wars film, Rogue One, because it's "raw and gritty and dirty and very dark."

I'm glad she likes it...but really, does *EVERYTHING* have to be "raw and gritty and dirty and very dark"? Does one even go to Star Wars for "raw and gritty and dirty and very dark"? Are there not hundreds, thousands of other story 'verses out there that are "raw and gritty and dirty and very dark"? Are people still making good, well-told films for grown-ups that are not trying to be "raw and gritty and dirty and very dark," that are trying to be positive and bright and hopeful and visible to the partially sighted?

There is a place for all kinds of stories, beyond the promptings of passing fashion. In these coming days I predict that we are going to rather go off "raw and gritty and dirty and very dark." There'll be too much of that all around us. We'll be looking for a Frank Capra de nos jours, to tell us that in spite of everything there is goodness and light in the worlds.

In the meantime, I don't think I'll be making a point of seeing Rogue One. I go to Star Wars for a very specific kind of experience, and that...if Aunt Beast is right...is not it.