tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-77715890695452791752024-02-07T08:55:32.401+00:00Remember It's the FutureSufficiently advanced philosophy is indistinguishable from trolling...Beckyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16677076598470332030noreply@blogger.comBlogger257125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7771589069545279175.post-88760440661472397212015-07-20T17:45:00.000+01:002015-07-20T17:45:15.293+01:00Virtual TravelI went to a family gathering this weekend, about two hundred miles from the places I call 'home'. This is actually the first time this decade I've been that far from home (I don't get about much). The journeys there and back were seven and five hours respectively in a car, and were the longest car journeys I've been on in the same period.<br />
<br />
Travel is starting to become a theme of my writing about <a href="http://startswithafish.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/to-walk-turning-world.html">video</a> <a href="http://startswithafish.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/abstraction-simulation-and-narrative.html">games</a>. Many of my favourite in-game moments have to do with travelling through virtual worlds. A big part of my excitement for upcoming games like <i>Tales of Zestiria</i>, <i>Xenoblade Chronicles X</i> and <i>Final Fantasy XV</i> is that they offer vast new worlds to explore.<br />
<br />
By contrast, I really don't like to do anything in the real world that's vaguely analogous to my virtual explorations. I don't like hiking, I don't like driving (or being a passenger, since I can't legally drive myself anywhere), and I generally don't like to travel. There are a variety of reasons, but the biggest is quite simply that real travel is a lot of effort.<br />
<br />
I want to see mountains like the ones my dad likes to climb without getting sore feet. I want to experience the vast sweeps of landscapes like the ones we drove through this weekend (some of which were very pretty) without the steadily-hardening crick in the base of my spine. I want to float through the world as effortlessly and intangibly as a videogame camera.<br />
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And I thought until this weekend that there was no harm in this, provided I kept to my lane and didn't get too whiny when I actually <i>do</i> have to travel. But Actually Travelling, and looking at the landscapes I travelled through with the same critical eye I've been training to look at videogames with, put me ill at ease.<br />
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Games, by the limits of their technology and the demands of their audience, compress distance. Sure, you can walk for some hours in a straight line without touching the sides of some recent games. But you could walk the real world for the same length of time and in many places not even leave the valley you start in. I found myself wondering, as we drove over the crest of a hill and the horizon retreated on Friday afternoon, how dishonest it is to indulge in this, and how harmful.<br />
<br />
It would be a pretty shallow critique to say that the shortening of distance in games is straightforwardly misrepresentative and creates harmful expectations of travel - no better than tired old arguments that the mere presentation of violence is sufficient to induce people to be more violent. It's more complex than that.<br />
<br />
But games are so often about the mastery of space, the individual eventually rising to an effortless, unchallenged mobility. There's no better example of this than the 'airship moment' in JRPGs, the point at which you've explored most of the world on foot and, to avoid forcing you to retread old ground, you get a tool that allows you to hop or float to wherever you want, bypassing even the abstractions that are supposed to add labour and time back into the earlier compressed journeys.<br />
<br />
This is all a bit unfocussed and musing-y (which is why it's here and not on my actual games blog). The problem probably has more to do with the way games construct mastery than the way they handle travel and distance. But this weekend, looking out at the same sweeping vista for twenty miles and realising it would take ten times as long to walk it on foot as in-game, I had a moment of very sharp discomfort. I hope I'll be able to hold that in mind as I develop my critical ideas on this theme.Beckyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16677076598470332030noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7771589069545279175.post-15729143397402686452015-07-01T22:30:00.002+01:002015-07-01T22:30:32.147+01:00Feels and Reals<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<![endif]-->'Reals over feels!' and variants thereof have become a slogan for the internet right in the ongoing shitstorm over whether 'objective' journalism is a thing. Simplistic as it is, it's an expression of an ideology with roots in the work of some much-celebrated twentieth-century philosophers (at least, those in the English or anglocentric tradition), and indicative of a subtle shift they engineered in how we use language about truth and reality. <br /><br />The general meaning of 'Reals over feels!' is that one kind of proposition, understood as impersonal and objective, should be considered more true, or more worthy of consideration, than another, understood as personal and subjective. Statements about objects independently of some personal perspective are considered accurate; statements about how something seems to some perspective are inaccurate or invalid. <br /><br />In the journalistic field, the problem with this is that all journalism, no matter how diligent, is perspectival. This issue generalises, though; there are, quite simply, no non-perspectival facts. This is <i>not</i> the same as saying that there are no facts. How we arrive the idea that there are objective facts despite the truth of this claim is a topic to which I'll return later. <br /><br />Let's start with the basics. We have known since Descartes that the only sure foundation for knowledge is conscious experience – that the only thing that absolutely cannot be doubted is the current content of our conscious fields. I may be only hallucinating that I sit in front of a computer right now, or the image of the computer that I see may be the product of a Matrix-like simulation (or, in Descartes' scenario, a trick played by an evil demon), but I cannot be mistaken that I <i>seem to see </i>the computer; I cannot be mistaken that a computer appears before me. <br /><br />Absolutely every other thing we take ourselves to know is known by inference, and every means of inference we have, we know to be periodically fallible[<a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.com/2015/07/feels-and-reals.html#one" name="noteone">1</a>]. So however reliable a claim of knowledge beyond immediate awareness may be, we know there must still be some small chance that it is wrong. <br /><br />Why emphasise this? Well, as the physical sciences developed in the wake of Descartes, the gulf between direct awareness and the theories of the sciences widened dramatically. The seventeenth century gave us cells, the nineteenth atoms and the twentieth quanta, so tiny that any conventional notion of being directly conscious of them goes out the window. <br /><br />My point is not to dismiss the theories of science, not at all; just to remind where they come from. What I want to repudiate is the relatively recent philosophical contention that because direct awareness is of appearances that often do not correspond closely to the equivalent deliveries of scientific theory, it is inherently misleading. <br /><br />The difference is subtle. No-one denies that appearances <i>can</i> be deceiving. The question is whether appearances are <i>inherently</i> deceiving. The shift from the former claim to the latter was accomplished in philosophy largely during the rise of Bertrand Russell, and the fall or at least pushing-aside of the British Idealists and Continental Phenomenologists his dominance replaced. <br /><br />Idealism (in this, rather than the political, context) is the metaphysical and/or epistemological theory that the world, or at least our knowledge of it, is fundamentally based on experiential/conscious facts. Phenomenology is a philosophical method that requires one to start from what is observed most directly, explain that, and then build on the explanations. Both these positions have clear roots in the idea that conscious awareness comes first. <br /><br />Russell, along with friends like G.E. Moore and disciples like the young A.J. Ayer, held that these approaches had given rise to obscure and absurd metaphysical systems, convoluted theories that were of little use in actually explaining things. It's true that the phenomenologies and idealisms of the 19th century were complex, but then so is the world[<a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.com/2015/07/feels-and-reals.html#two" name="notetwo">2</a>]. Russell in particular held logical clarity to be the most important virtue of philosophical systems, and was willing to ignore or bury a great many issues that would not submit to logic-based treatments[<a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.com/2015/07/feels-and-reals.html#three" name="notethree">3</a>]. <br /><br />What all the theories discussed so far, including those of Russell and Moore, have in common is that they are attempts to explain the relationships between the experiences of different people. We take my experience, now, of sitting in front of a computer, to be accurate precisely because if you came and took my seat, you would have a similar experience, and because if I come back to this room later today and sit in this same seat, I will have another, similar, experience. <br /><br />The standard early modern philosophical explanation of this consistency would be that there is an object, the computer, in this room that produces computer-like experiences for any who sit in front of it. With modern science, however, we know that the object in this room can't be simply described as 'a computer'; it's an immensely complex structure of polymers and electronics, each themselves complex structures of molecules, which are made up of atoms, which are in turn complex structures of subatomic particles and fields that can be described mathematically and logically but not terribly intelligibly. <br /><br />This sets up a huge discrepancy between the experience of sitting at the computer and the scientific description of what's going on (it gets even worse if you try to factor in a scientific description of me, and/or the process of perception). The tendency of the (anglocentric) philosophers of the 20th century was to argue that this meant the experience was deceptive and false, while the scientific description was accurate and true. <br /><br />But as I argued <a href="http://startswithafish.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/experiential-worlds.html">here</a>, the scientific description is actually much less useful than the experiential one in most cases. Our knowledge, the everyday stuff that enables us to find our way to the shops and so on, is overwhelmingly experiential in character. <br /><br />And this hints at another reason for preferring the experiential to the scientific; where scientific knowledge is useful, it is only because of some effect on experience that it enables us to generate. The microscopic precision that allows Intel to inscribe GHz CPUs on a postage stamp is only worth achieving because computers enable wondrous new experiences, whether that means exploring the Mushroom Kingdom or establishing personal relationships that stretch around the globe or even just being able to do your own accounting without needing pages and pages of maths paper. <br /><br />In truth, all values – not just the emotional or aesthetic, but every kind of utility as well – are values only from some human[<a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.com/2015/07/feels-and-reals.html#four" name="notefour">4</a>] perspective. Feels <i>are</i> reals, both in the general sense that perspectival facts are real (because they are the only kind of fact), and in the specific sense that emotional perspectives are important, because it is those emotional perspectives from which the values that make <i>anything at all that we do worthwhile</i> spring. <br /><br />The only question that remains is why, if all this is correct, some people are so convinced that there is an 'objective' perspective, one that is right above all others. I said above that the issue is about the relationship between experiences; Russell and his colleagues came to see the explanation for the relationship as more fundamental than the experiences it relates, but there is another process at work here too. <br /><br />To examine the relationship among experiences generally, you must have a set of experiences to generalise from. Ideally, as indeed the theory behind the scientific method suggests, this sample will be representative; if it is not, there is a much bigger chance of missing something important. In practice, you cannot include experiences of which you know nothing. <br /><br />And the philosophers I've discussed here had relatively narrow ranges of experience to draw on. Descartes (and other influential early modern philosophers like Locke, Hume and Kant) lived most of his life in and around the courts of Enlightenment Europe. Russell and his cronies were ensconced in the ivory towers of British academia (and I can tell you from personal experience just how narrow the windows there are). <br /><br />Not only did these men have a limited range of experiences to draw on, they either had or have subsequently gained a great deal of influence to pronounce with. Their positions, social class, shared ethnicity and so on have made them Great Men with Important Views; people who have differing opinions seem unimportant by contrast. This actually applies to their historical opponents every bit as much as to marginalised people today; one hardly hears the names of Bradley and Meinong in philosophy classrooms anymore. <br /><br />The tendency of self-proclaimed logical thinkers to exclude dissenting opinions from both history and contemporary debate should by this point be sadly familiar. It's a self-reinforcing process; when dissent has already been shut out once, it is much easier to dismiss a second time. People clinging to Russell's model now, a hundred years down the line, may not even realise how trapped they are in it[<a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.com/2015/07/feels-and-reals.html#five" name="notefive">5</a>]. Open-minded reflection on the views of people from different backgrounds and demographics is the only antidote. <br /><br />In summary, the idea of an 'objective fact' is a mirage. The only indubitable propositions are subjective in character. The philosophical models that allow us to link them together into a coherent world are at best intersubjective, a negotiation shaped by social pressures much more than 'purely intellectual' considerations (if there are any such things). <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /><br />[<a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.com/2015/07/feels-and-reals.html#noteone" name="one">1</a>] It's worth stressing at this point that awareness is not purely sensory – memory is a kind of awareness, so your memory of an event (though not the event itself, if it is in the past) may serve as the foundation for some knowledge, or at least reasoning). <br /><br />[<a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.com/2015/07/feels-and-reals.html#notetwo" name="two">2</a>] There's an interesting comparison here with the current state of quantum physics. Its more phenomenological elements – the mechanics that describe and predict actual measurements – are the most accurate science yet developed by man, but the interpretations that seek to explain why those relationships exist... well, here's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_mechanics">the Wikipedia page</a> on interpretations of quantum mechanics. Just count how many different interpretations there are, don't try to wrap your head around them all. <br /><br />[<a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.com/2015/07/feels-and-reals.html#notethree" name="three">3</a>] This Spockish attitude persists today in the myriad ways our culture insists on quantifiability and computability. Things (like emotions) which are messy to compute tend to be regarded with suspicion. <br /><br />[<a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.com/2015/07/feels-and-reals.html#notefour" name="four">4</a>] In the interests of inclusion, this should be 'appropriately human-like perspective', really. We want to be able to extend values and valuation to sentient aliens, sophisticated animals and so on. <br /><br />[<a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.com/2015/07/feels-and-reals.html#notefive" name="five">5</a>] Which doesn't excuse their lack of awareness, since they're also likely to have more spare time and money to support self-reflection with than other social groups.Beckyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16677076598470332030noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7771589069545279175.post-15281910653078956722015-05-06T13:43:00.000+01:002015-05-06T13:43:42.336+01:00On VotingI will be voting in the general election. I will probably vote in every general election in my adult lifetime (this will actually only be my second - I missed out by a month in 2005). I vote in every local election, too. I was going to write a post this week with a thorough and general defence of democratic participation, appealing to cynics and anarchists alike.<br />
<br />
But I'm not sure that's helpful, particularly given how miserable the system's current offerings are. I don't have quite the same conviction regarding the importance of voting that I used to; the reasons for my remaining conviction (which is still, obviously, fairly strong) are weaker, narrower, more personal.<br />
<br />
I used to argue, when challenged to defend centralised government, that the global scale of contemporary problems like overpopulation and climate change would require a global coordination only possible through centralisation, and that a purely bureaucratic centralisation was at least as dangerous as one with some element of democracy.<br />
<br />
But, quite without realising it, I betrayed this argument completely when writing The Second Realm. It's not really emphasised or investigated in the story, but governance in The Second Realm (actually in the First Realm) is localised, with only the very lightest central coordination. Society functions as a network of small communities each communicating with and mutually supporting its neighbours.<br />
<br />
Granted, it's a much smaller society with very different problems to ours and a surplus of natural resources, but apparently I don't (universally) believe central, hierarchical governance is necessary. I can at least imagine us surviving without it.<br />
<br />
Maybe, then, voting won't always be necessary. I'm still voting this time round, though, for a whole bunch of well-trodden reasons; because the parties aren't all the same, and with a population of 60million to work with even small differences may improve lives for lots of people; because my abstinence would be read by the mass media as apathy, which makes my skin crawl; because over longer terms than the parliamentary, there's at least some reason to think that many small voices add up.<br />
<br />
It would be disingenuous to overlook the privilege of my upbringing in this, of course; part of the reason I'm voting, and that I don't feel completely hopeless about it, is that I've grown up with the idea that my voice will be heard and will make a difference. At quite a deep level I'm not inclined to see voting as futile.<br />
<br />
But that's also a form of optimism, and it's possible - even important - to be optimistic without being naive.Beckyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16677076598470332030noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7771589069545279175.post-74550643376438920102015-03-31T17:31:00.000+01:002015-03-31T17:31:13.361+01:00Boiled Potatoes and the Analytic Method, part 7<i>I found myself in need of counselling last year. The counselling I
received was extremely helpful, but it's only as, in the intervening
time, I've started to study critical perspectives from gender and race
discourse in depth that I've been able to understand the wider context
of my difficulties. These approaches emphasise connectedness; the
marketing of children's toys, for example, contributes to a
domestication of women that in turn commodifies their sexuality and
devalues their consent, leading to rape culture.</i><br />
<br />
<i>By contrast, the idiom of 'analytic philosophy', the tallest and
remotest of the academic ivory towers, to which I've given a decade of
my life and all my adulthood, puts detachment and abstraction foremost.
It was detachment and abstraction - an overdose of both - that led me to
counselling. What follows is a reflection on that journey.</i><br />
<br />
<i>In <a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/boiled-potatoes-and-analytic-method.html">part 1</a>, I discussed the specific experience that led me to seek counselling.</i><br />
<br />
<i>In <a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/boiled-potatoes-and-analytic-method.html">part 2</a>, I talked about a lack of emotional sensation that I discovered during my counselling sessions.</i><br />
<br />
<i>In <a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/boiled-potatoes-and-analytic-method_19.html">part 3</a>, I blamed everything on boiled potatoes (and allowing my everyday life to become too bland).</i><br />
<br />
<i>In <a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/boiled-potatoes-and-analytic-method_25.html">part 4</a>, I surveyed the rise of analytic philosophy and attempted to show how it rejects the spiritual and the emotional.</i><br />
<br />
<i>In <a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/boiled-potatoes-and-analytic-method.html">part 5</a>, I evaluated analytic philosophy and the limits of its conception of meaning.</i><br />
<br />
<i>In <a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/boiled-potatoes-and-analytic-method_23.html">part 6</a>, I identified the limit that the analytic method places on discourses of morality and responsibility. </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<u>Part 7: What Pieces Are You So Scared Of?</u><br />
<br />
I wasn't expecting to write this part in quite the mode I'm in at the moment. I've been feeling generally pretty positive and upbeat so far this spring, and was looking forward to rounding this series out with a similarly cheerful summation on the theme of healing and embracing a life that values emotional sensation.<br />
<br />
But I had a bad weekend in a handful of little ways that left me feeling a bit on the low side. As ever when I get on a downer, I started to pull back from things, and especially from people. Anxiety sets in, loading every potential encounter with a hundred disaster scenarios.<br />
<br />
There's a numbing process that's part of this, too. It's a defensive reflex, I think, shutting down the mechanisms of self-regard and self-care that identify the problem to avoid having to think about it. We're supposed to solve problems by disinvesting, stepping outside ourselves to look at them 'objectively'. This is supposed to make solutions clearer and less clouded by emotion. But sometimes the problem <i>is</i> the emotion, more than anything else.<br />
<br />
In my head, at least, this sits side-by-side with the analytic method. They present themselves to me as the same process. For years I have embraced them as one, and identified all sorts of objective solutions to my problems - limited budget, for example, or shared living environments that aren't well cared for, or (when I was still living at home) the fact that my parents insist on listening to the radio news four times a day, making it completely inescapable.<br />
<br />
The real problem, though, is and has always been the denial of inner sensation, the failure to attend to so many important dimensions of well-being, the determination to rise above 'meat'. I am starting to learn, though. Slowly, I'm thawing out.<br />
<br />
It starts, perhaps predictably in my case, with music. Music has always offered the most purely emotional experiences of my life - I don't have the theoretical knowledge to analyse it the way I can tackle novels, films and now to a certain extent also <a href="http://startswithafish.blogspot.com/">video games</a>. It's in music that I'm normally closest to engaging bodily - while I'm a terrible dancer, I'm also basically incapable of standing still when there's music playing.<br />
<br />
And I have some <a href="https://atlasfactory.bandcamp.com/">incredibly</a> <a href="http://pocketapocalypse.bandcamp.com/">talented</a> <a href="http://samjonesmusic.bandcamp.com/">musician friends</a>. Look, I know no-one ever takes my music recommendations, but click that last link and listen to Sam's most recent album. Seriously, it's not long, and the last track is the first piece of music in a decade to bring tears to my eyes. It's five minutes that I can get completely lost in. Sometimes it's good to be lost.<br />
<br />
Sometimes getting lost is exactly what I need. Some problems don't need the analytic distance of the cartographer - the map is clear, the map is the problem, the map shows you all too clearly what stands between you and the shining horizon. The map tells you what the walk is like, but sometimes you need to stop thinking about that and walk anyway. That's the point at which the map can't tell you anything useful. Beckyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16677076598470332030noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7771589069545279175.post-90659640368068088692015-03-23T17:04:00.002+00:002015-03-31T17:35:08.541+01:00Boiled Potatoes and the Analytic Method, part 6<i>I found myself in need of counselling last year. The counselling I
received was extremely helpful, but it's only as, in the intervening
time, I've started to study critical perspectives from gender and race
discourse in depth that I've been able to understand the wider context
of my difficulties. These approaches emphasise connectedness; the
marketing of children's toys, for example, contributes to a
domestication of women that in turn commodifies their sexuality and
devalues their consent, leading to rape culture.</i><br />
<br />
<i>By contrast, the idiom of 'analytic philosophy', the tallest and
remotest of the academic ivory towers, to which I've given a decade of
my life and all my adulthood, puts detachment and abstraction foremost.
It was detachment and abstraction - an overdose of both - that led me to
counselling. What follows is a reflection on that journey.</i><br />
<br />
<i>In <a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/boiled-potatoes-and-analytic-method.html">part 1</a>, I discussed the specific experience that led me to seek counselling.</i><br />
<br />
<i>In <a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/boiled-potatoes-and-analytic-method.html">part 2</a>, I talked about a lack of emotional sensation that I discovered during my counselling sessions.</i><br />
<br />
<i>In <a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/boiled-potatoes-and-analytic-method_19.html">part 3</a>, I blamed everything on boiled potatoes (and allowing my everyday life to become too bland).</i><br />
<br />
<i>In <a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/boiled-potatoes-and-analytic-method_25.html">part 4</a>, I surveyed the rise of analytic philosophy and attempted to show how it rejects the spiritual and the emotional.</i><br />
<br />
<i>In <a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/boiled-potatoes-and-analytic-method.html">part 5</a>, I evaluated analytic philosophy and the limits of its conception of meaning.</i><br />
<br />
<u>Part 6: On Taking Responsibility</u><br />
<br />
The concept of moral responsibility has been at the heart of my journey through analytic philosophy. The first philosophical system I encountered which inspired and moved me was existentialism, a position that has moral responsibility as its foundation and centrepiece. This stands in direct opposition to the determinism which characterised much of 20th-century analysis.<br />
<br />
Science has long been thought to promise a perfect system for predicting human behaviour (I choose my words carefully here, since few practicing scientists have embraced this belief - it belongs more to the realm of 'popular' or at least establishment commentary). It's a classic modernist tenet, and for a while scientific discoveries did seem to be progressing in that direction. Neuroscience and psychology made great strides through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.<br />
<br />
Still, as early as 1942, Isaac Asimov could acknowledge, with his invention of 'psychohistory' in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series#Publication_history"><i>Foundation</i></a> short stories, that a truly determinist understanding of human behaviour was out of reach, prohibited by the fundamentally probabilistic character of quantum physics. This is not to claim that prediction of human behaviour is impossible, only that it can never be done with complete certainty.<br />
<br />
Philosophers, who have been arguing with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplace%27s_demon">Laplace's demon</a> for two centuries now, were slower to catch on. Even ten years ago, when I was in my first year at university, hard determinism was still discussed as a plausible theory, rather than merely a far-fetched possibility. So great was my determination (hah) to hold onto moral responsibility that I once refused to read an assigned article because of its determinist slant, which is about as defiant as I've ever been towards a teacher ever.<br />
<br />
Determinism and scientism suit the analytic approach. They are theories of absolute knowledge and certainty, of everything in its place, clear and predictable. In denying the possibility of free will, they deny the meaningfulness of the aesthetic, reducing emotions, beliefs and principles to the purely causal.<br />
<br />
This outlook has persisted despite the eventual demise of hard determinism. The philosophers who would have been determinists in a previous generation now begrudgingly begin their papers with 'we know that hard determinism is false, <i>but</i>...' and go on to argue that quantum randomness leaves the defender of free will no better off.<br />
<br />
The point is not entirely without merit. Fundamental randomness does not guarantee a meaningful freedom of will. Free will theorists have long held that free will is a necessary condition of moral responsibility. The best they can claim from quantum theory is the existence of a narrow sliver of space in which freedom of the will might hide.<br />
<br />
More insidiously, the post-determinists have targeted moral responsibility itself, even as free will theorists began to abandon the connection between will and responsibility (the resulting positions are myriad, and better covered in detail elsewhere). The essence of the new determinist argument concerns motivation, understood as whatever mental state in an agent results in their action.<br />
<br />
An agent is morally responsible for an action, the argument goes, if their action is a product of a motivation in an appropriate way (that is, not subject to hypnosis or other control). Motivations, though, are products of the agent's character, and said character is a product of the agent's birth and upbringing. If we are to hold agents responsible for their actions, then, it seems that we must hold them responsible for their upbringing and their ancestry. This, the post-determinists argue, is absurd.<br />
<br />
And, on the face of it, it <i>does</i> sound absurd. A person cannot literally be responsible for their own birth - this would distort time itself. This argument, the causal argument, seems to present a profound challenge to the existence of moral responsibility.<br />
<br />
And yet... Let us come at this from another angle. Critical theories, such as Marxism, feminism and queer theory, recognise differences among birth circumstances as important social phenomena. The concept of privilege is vital to understanding these models, and their well-grounded demands for social justice.<br />
<br />
These days, it is common to hear reactionaries crying that it is not their fault they were born male, or white, or middle class, or straight, or cisgendered, or able-bodied, or neurotypical. Strictly, they are not wrong - but then, you will find no serious feminist arguing that they are. What the reactionaries <i>are</i> doing, though, is relying on the same simplistic, causal understanding of moral responsibility as the post-determinist analysts.<br />
<br />
Responsibility for the circumstances of our birth, for the privileges and attitudes therefrom, is something we <i>take</i>. It is not something we are born to, nor something we are morally entitled to ignore. The essence of maturity, of adulthood, is making this transition; this is the sense in which children are innocent.<br />
<br />
Practically speaking, the act of taking responsibility consists in critical self-reflection, the willingness to examine our own behaviour and the attitudes which condition it, and the seeking of ways to change them where appropriate. It is the act of taking seriously our relations, both structural and specific, to others, rather than viewing ourselves as isolated particles predestined to bang into one another with whatever arbitrary results a crude social physics dictates.<br />
<br />
Theoretically, taking responsibility requires detaching responsibility from the purely causal, embracing the messy illogicality of a putatively free choice to escape the fist of determinism. The result is not a neat theory; it has little of the clarity that analysis craves. But it is honest and liberating, and above all else it allows a hope for general, meaningful change that the determinist mindset can never offer.<br />
<br />
(<a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/boiled-potatoes-and-analytic-method_31.html">part 7</a>) Beckyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16677076598470332030noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7771589069545279175.post-1926793730241968012015-03-16T12:34:00.000+00:002015-03-30T16:41:37.482+01:00Boiled Potatoes and the Analytic Method, part 5<i>I found myself in need of counselling last year. The counselling I
received was extremely helpful, but it's only as, in the intervening
time, I've started to study critical perspectives from gender and race
discourse in depth that I've been able to understand the wider context
of my difficulties. These approaches emphasise connectedness; the
marketing of children's toys, for example, contributes to a
domestication of women that in turn commodifies their sexuality and
devalues their consent, leading to rape culture.</i><br />
<br />
<i>By contrast, the idiom of 'analytic philosophy', the tallest and
remotest of the academic ivory towers, to which I've given a decade of
my life and all my adulthood, puts detachment and abstraction foremost.
It was detachment and abstraction - an overdose of both - that led me to
counselling. What follows is a reflection on that journey.</i><br />
<br />
<i>In <a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/boiled-potatoes-and-analytic-method.html">part 1</a>, I discussed the specific experience that led me to seek counselling.</i><br />
<br />
<i>In <a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/boiled-potatoes-and-analytic-method.html">part 2</a>, I talked about a lack of emotional sensation that I discovered during my counselling sessions.</i><br />
<br />
<i>In <a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/boiled-potatoes-and-analytic-method_19.html">part 3</a>, I blamed everything on boiled potatoes (and allowing my everyday life to become too bland).</i><br />
<br />
<i>In <a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/boiled-potatoes-and-analytic-method_25.html">part 4</a>, I surveyed the rise of analytic philosophy and attempted to show how it rejects the spiritual and the emotional.</i><br />
<br />
<u>Part 5: Aesthetics and Anaesthetics</u><br />
<br />
I only recently made the etymological connection between 'aesthetics' and 'anaesthetics', but it's hardly an earthshaking revelation. Aesthetics is (roughly) the study of art, a fundamentally sensory thing; anaesthetics make us numb, insensate. The common Greek root originally means perception.<br />
<br />
It would not be too far wide of the mark to describe analytic philosophy as anaesthetic. Above all else, what analytic philosophy denies is the subjective. It is the search for objective answers to the grand philosophical questions. The whole analytic construction of 'rationality' opposes the value of personal perspectives, appealing to a transcendent reason which may or may not bear any real connection to the divine intellect of the early modern or classical rationalists.<br />
<br />
But analytic philosophy undoubtedly has its advantages. The detachment it advocates can be absolutely crucial for some debates. It's particularly important when responding to criticism; one cannot, after all, take up the point of view of another while clinging to one's own. There are other ways to develop the ability to detach, but practice in the analytic method is a particularly effective and pure one.<br />
<br />
(Note: it's far from perfect, as anyone who's ever pricked the ego or threatened the funding of an academic can attest).<br />
<br />
And the analytic tradition in philosophy has real triumphs to its name, too; the systems of formal logic developed in the first half of the twentieth century are not just a huge step forward over their arcane predecessors. They are legitimately powerful tools of reasoning, at least within the limit of Gödel's theorem, and underpin much of modern computing.<br />
<br />
Another important product of the analytic tradition, one that is rather more complicated to endorse, is its discourse on meaning. This is usually what definitions of analytic philosophy centre on, but the analytic discourse on meaning is almost exclusively linguistic - it concerns words and sentences, spoken and written. In <i>aesthetics</i>, on the other hand, languages are only a small subset of things that mean (the first part of <a href="https://youtu.be/WYCXy4c0Pw4">this video</a> has a pretty robust introduction to some of these ideas, referencing the omega of analytic philosophy, Wittgenstein).<br />
<br />
And in aesthetics, meaning is a very different beast to the meaning of the analysts. It is lived, experienced, bodily, not a clinical study of how words point to things in the world. Analysts have devoted a great deal of work to establishing what it means to say something exists; in aesthetics, the question is simply 'is it felt?'<br />
<br />
The modern technophile's - my - obsession with transcending 'meat' (as William Gibson perfectly put it in <i>Neuromancer</i>) is born of this analytic understanding of meaning, thought and reason. We disdain bodily hedonism for the 'higher pleasures' of the mind, and in doing so fail to realise that our 'higher pleasures' are really just contempt for other ways of seeing the world, other tools that are in their own way as valuable and in many ways richer than those we have learned.<br />
<br />
Aesthetic comprehension, in a way, is a much more basic part of the human condition than analytic. This, perhaps, explains some of our disdain; a baby can feel, but only a sophisticated adult can 'really think'. That we can believe this while yearning for our lost, or innocent, or joyful childhoods is a testament to the spectacular power of the (archetypally white, male etc.) privileged ego.<br />
<br />
(<a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/boiled-potatoes-and-analytic-method_23.html">part 6</a>) Beckyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16677076598470332030noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7771589069545279175.post-5223666215677716692015-03-09T14:41:00.001+00:002015-03-09T14:41:49.290+00:00Words Matter(content warning: discussion of ableist terms, reference to other slurs)<br />
<br />
I changed the URL and title of this blog yesterday, to remove the ableist slur 'stupid'. I apologise wholeheartedly for not doing this sooner and for failing to treat this issue with the gravitas it deserves until now.<br />
<br />
The rest of this post is addressed to anyone who thinks this is making mountains out of molehills, or that I needn't have bothered making the change.<br />
<br />
Let me start with the obvious: words matter. They have power. I'd be a pretty poor writer if I didn't believe that. And power is <i>always</i> dangerous - not necessarily always harmful, but always accompanied by the danger of causing harm.<br />
<br />
Words can become harmful in lots of ways, but one of the most serious is when used to justify (or in the justification of) harmful policies. We rightly regard racial slurs like the n-words as harmful because of their association with governmental policies and societal patterns of slavery and segregation - policies and patterns with costs both measurable (in death and injury figures) and immeasurable (in lost human potential and complex, oppressive legacies).<br />
<br />
Why, then, is 'stupid' harmful? It is, after all, a very common word, and one not normally connected to any great opprobrium.<br />
<br />
The simplest answer to this is a direct comparison with racist language. Constructions of intelligence have sometimes been used as viciously as constructs of race to justify policies every bit as horrible. The eugenics movements of the early 20th century are the best examples of this - in the 20s and 30s, many 'developed' nations including Britain and America forcibly sterilised people who failed to meet certain standards of 'intelligence' (usually measured with IQ tests - the exact purpose and value of which remains controversial to this day). More famously, Nazi Germany sent people to concentration camps and even gas chambers on 'intelligence' grounds as well as racial.<br />
<br />
It's generally good policy to not throw around as insults words that the Nazis used to justify genocide.<br />
<br />
One final thing; I want to point out how easy it is to overlook this issue. When I started this blog, I was twenty-three, already in possession of a master's degree and well on my way to a doctorate - hardly able to claim general ignorance, and yet I had no idea that my choice of phrase (a reference to Bill Clinton's famous campaign policy from 1992) could be harmful. Worse, I was literally working in disability support for students at the time - none of my (actually quite limited) training had addressed this issue.<br />
<br />
And it gets even worse than that, because a year or two later I was working with a student whose course included modules of disability studies and special educational needs. There were several lectures about ableist language, including specific problems with the language of intelligence, and I still didn't see a problem with my own blog title. It's very easy to dismiss issues when they require you to change.<br />
<br />
Learning to rid my everyday vocabulary of words like 'stupid' - to put them in the procribed category where they belong - is not easy. But there are plenty of better words, both as insults and to refer to things that are strange/absurd. We can - and should - live without words that are imbued with such harm.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://isthisableism.tumblr.com/">Here</a>'s a great resource for examining ableism generally, and here's their <a href="http://isthisableism.tumblr.com/sluralternatives">excellent collection</a> of articles addressing specific ableist terms.Beckyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16677076598470332030noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7771589069545279175.post-75902235706678966752015-03-05T13:45:00.001+00:002015-03-10T15:53:02.968+00:0041.62MB'IT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE', thundered a friend of mine on Twitter when I said something about finally getting a smartphone. I took the plunge in January, at last feeling I have enough spare cash - over a long enough time-frame - to make being able to keep up with a 24-month contract a safe bet. I looked forward to joining the truly modern part of the modern age, the edge where we're beginning to bleed into cyberpunk, the networked species.<br />
<br />
And yet, here at the end of my first monthly billing cycle, I've used barely 2% of my 2GB data limit - 41.62MB, to be precise. Obviously, part of that is that I'm new to this device and don't really know what it can do, so I'm not yet using it for many of the things it could be.<br />
<br />
That's comforting, but it's the minor part of this issue. The perspicuous truth is sadder; I'm simply not mobile enough, in my day-to-day life, to get much out of mobile computing. I spend the majority of my time within ten feet of a high-powered PC with a cabled connection to a fibre broadband router that gives me download speeds in the region of 9MB/s. When I'm out of the house, I'm walking to places, most of which are workplaces of one or other kind.<br />
<br />
A mobile phone cannot change a stationary life. And while the extent to which I don't get out much is perhaps a bit disheartening, it's equally true that I get most of the things that other people do on their smartphones on my PC. Crucially, it's when I'm on my PC that I'm most connected to the rest of the world.<br />
<br />
That's what really matters with mobile communications technology, after all - how much more communication it enables. Being romantic and optimistic, we could say it's how much closer together it brings us, the potential to blur the edges not just of communities but ultimately of individuals as well. Talking about <a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/boiled-potatoes-and-analytic-method_25.html">the rise of analytic philosophy</a> last week, I mentioned Leibniz; his philosophical system, the 'monadology', posits human minds/spirits as the building blocks of the universe, with space, time and everything that fills them emerging out of the phenomenal (sensory/felt) tensions between us. I've always liked that image as a way of thinking about humans in networks.<br />
<br />
I feel that way even when I feel disconnected from those networks. And maybe that's where the greater sadness resides in my current situation (I realise, writing that, that this is all terribly self-pitying, so sorry, I guess). If I already have all the benefits of mobile technology - something I can't anymore deny - then I can't blame any disconnect on technological barriers anymore.<br />
<br />
And indeed, I am trying to reach out more, to engage more, to communicate whether from my desk or my pocket. So while the smartphone itself isn't going to change my life, it might yet prompt <i>me</i> to make some changes.<br />
<br />
If nothing else, I've been able to spend hours laughing at this game about an <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id915222954">enormous, hilariously fragile fish</a>.Beckyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16677076598470332030noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7771589069545279175.post-14332046506780499342015-02-25T14:17:00.000+00:002015-03-22T15:18:04.704+00:00Boiled Potatoes and the Analytic Method, part 4<i>I found myself in need of counselling last year. The counselling I
received was extremely helpful, but it's only as, in the intervening
time, I've started to study critical perspectives from gender and race
discourse in depth that I've been able to understand the wider context
of my difficulties. These approaches emphasise connectedness; the
marketing of children's toys, for example, contributes to a
domestication of women that in turn commodifies their sexuality and
devalues their consent, leading to rape culture.</i><br />
<br />
<i>By contrast, the idiom of 'analytic philosophy', the tallest and
remotest of the academic ivory towers, to which I've given a decade of
my life and all my adulthood, puts detachment and abstraction foremost.
It was detachment and abstraction - an overdose of both - that led me to
counselling. What follows is a reflection on that journey.</i><br />
<br />
<i>In <a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/boiled-potatoes-and-analytic-method.html">part 1</a>, I discussed the specific experience that led me to seek counselling.</i><br />
<br />
<i>In <a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/boiled-potatoes-and-analytic-method.html">part 2</a>, I talked about a lack of emotional sensation that I discovered during my counselling sessions.</i><br />
<br />
<i>In <a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/boiled-potatoes-and-analytic-method_19.html">part 3</a>, I blamed everything on boiled potatoes (and allowing my everyday life to become too bland).</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<u>Part 4: A History of Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy</u><br />
<br />
Bertrand Russell's <i>A History of Western Philosophy</i> is a landmark text. Russell's position as its author - author of one of the most influential histories of philosophy - is a testament to his stature and import in the first half of the twentieth century. If anyone is the father of 'analytic' philosophy, it is Russell; at very least, he was the first patriarch of its fractious family.<br />
<br />
History is written by the victors.<br />
<br />
Russell's career was built, founded, on the strength (or at least the success) of his attacks on the philosophies that preceded him; the British idealism of his teachers, and the late phenomenology of Brentano and Meinong that paralleled it. By the end of the 1920s, analytic philosophy was well-established, with Russell at its head.<br />
<br />
His opponents were not just defeated, they were dead; Meinong died in 1920, at 67. Bradley, greatest of the British idealists, hung on until 1924. Analytic philosophy delivered triumph after triumph in logic and language, most notably in modernising formal systems for logic which had languished in an Aristotelian mode long into the Enlightenment. Since those formal systems underpin the computation sustaining this blog post, we can hardly reject the analytic approach outright.<br />
<br />
But it bears asking what was lost to its triumph. Analytic philosophy is a cold, clinical thing, characterised by abstraction, a devotion to clarity pursued by stripping an object of any context that might introduce ambiguity. This is the mindset that numbed my body to serve my mind. This is the approach that relegates emotion to a backwater, nothing more than a hazard to reason.<br />
<br />
The archetypal rationalists of the early modern period - Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz - would have had no truck with this division. For them, there was no great conflict between mind and spirit (mind and <i>body</i> might be a different matter, but body-as-pertaining-to-felt-emotion would have been spiritual to them, not 'merely animal' if there was such a thing). Their tradition, and the work of those who inherited it, from Kant all the way down to Bradley and Meinong, is one of unified, harmonious worlds in which things can <i>only</i> be understood as they are in relation to one another.<br />
<br />
It is very hard, when tackling the metaphysics of the post-Leibnizians, not to chuckle, not to view their spirituality as naive, archaic, a product of a 'less enlightened era' in which people still believed in wooly notions and lacked clarity of thought. It is easy to see these men as clinging to religion in the face of marching progress. To do so is, at the very least, to overlook how many of them flirted with outright heresy in challenging the established religions of their times; Spinoza was outright excluded from the Jewish community of Amsterdam, and their sanction against him stands to this day.<br />
<br />
While it would be presumptuous of me to present this as an account of the origins of modern critical thought, there are definite links; Marx and Freud, for example, both draw on ideas from Hegel which are fundamentally legacies of Leibniz - ideas that are political, economic and psychological cognates of the metaphysics of Bradley and Meinong. Marx in particular went on to influence a broad range of modern critiques not just in matters of economic class but also the discourse around race, gender, sexuality and disability.<br />
<br />
Even the fact that, in anglocentric culture, we view 'philosophy' as something esoteric and removed from daily life can be attributed to analytic philosophy, a product of a simplistic and privileging attitude to the academy and 'academics'. What I hope I have shown, or at least plausibly suggested, is that philosophy is <i>lived</i>, is at the foundation of how we live, is stitched through life and culture in a way that is shaped by but also helps shape everyone who participates in it. The shape it has fitted me into has not been kind, and I am in so many ways one of the fortunate ones.<br />
<br />
(<a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/boiled-potatoes-and-analytic-method.html">part 5</a>) Beckyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16677076598470332030noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7771589069545279175.post-68522373323217161142015-02-19T13:54:00.001+00:002015-03-10T16:04:11.035+00:00Boiled Potatoes and the Analytic Method, part 3<i>I found myself in need of counselling last year. The counselling I
received was extremely helpful, but it's only as, in the intervening
time, I've started to study critical perspectives from gender and race
discourse in depth that I've been able to understand the wider context
of my difficulties. These approaches emphasise connectedness; the
marketing of children's toys, for example, contributes to a
domestication of women that in turn commodifies their sexuality and
devalues their consent, leading to rape culture.</i><br />
<br />
<i>By contrast, the idiom of 'analytic philosophy', the tallest and
remotest of the academic ivory towers, to which I've given a decade of
my life and all my adulthood, puts detachment and abstraction foremost.
It was detachment and abstraction - an overdose of both - that led me to
counselling. What follows is a reflection on that journey.</i><br />
<br />
<i>In <a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/boiled-potatoes-and-analytic-method.html">part 1</a>, I discussed the specific experience that led me to seek counselling.</i><br />
<br />
<i>In <a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/boiled-potatoes-and-analytic-method.html">part 2</a>, I talked about a lack of emotional sensation that I discovered during my counselling sessions.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<u>Part 3: The Problem with British Food</u><br />
<br />
Boiled potatoes are non-food. Without either flavour or texture, they are sustenance without experience, matter without properties, as close to the Lockean idea of the bare particular (no, that's not a euphemism, though I've just realised I missed out on a hell of a joke lecturing about them last week) as occurs in real life.<br />
<br />
At least, they are when I cook them. I'm aware that various interesting things can be done with boiled potatoes, but I've never had much success when trying. It all seemed more effort than the marginally-improved results were worth.<br />
<br />
I ate a <i>lot</i> of boiled potatoes during my PhD years. Money was tight, and I am a coward in the kitchen. Boiled potatoes are a very safe option for student cooking - it's not like they can get any blander from being overcooked, right? Yes, I could have mixed things up sometimes with rice or noodles, but that would have meant keeping rice and/or noodles in stock - more diversity of food means more money spent.<br />
<br />
And I didn't really care that they were bland. I viewed eating - everything related to sustenance, basically - as a chore, something to be minimised. That doesn't just mean the simplest cooking possible, it also means the least attention-demanding food. The blandness itself became a kind of virtue, a way of reacting against my limited means; 'I can't afford good food? Well I DON'T CARE, SO THERE!'.<br />
<br />
(Sidebar: I wasn't poor - in all sorts of structural ways, from parental support to a fees grant without which I wouldn't even have been able to start the PhD, I was well-off. But I was strapped for cash on a day-to-day basis for most of the four-and-a-half years).<br />
<br />
Lots of other elements of my daily routine were similarly, deliberately anemic. I didn't care about them. I cared about the things that I thought 'enriched' my life - my work, my studies, my writing, music and gaming. All those things did, of course, greatly enrich my life. They all mattered to me, and still do.<br />
<br />
But the quotidian stuff isn't meaningless, and one of the things I learned in counselling was how much I couldn't 'rise above it'. Quite the opposite, in fact - it dragged me down. Initially, I clung to rigid domestic routines to keep my budget under control, a strategy that worked but at a cost. The routine itself began to the object of my clinging, though, and therein became a problem.<br />
<br />
When the disruption of decorating began to stress me out last summer, I initially identified my shattered routine as the cause of my mounting anxiety. I felt that if I could just get things back in order, I would stabilise. Only after the discomfort had almost boiled over into meltdown did I start to think that perhaps the routine itself - a rigid sequence of bland, boiled-potato nonexperiences whose only value to me was their place in the order - might be the problem.<br />
<br />
I'm not actually eating much more healthily these days (and indeed, I'm still eating some of the same stuff - no more boiled potatoes, though). But I do try to think about what I'd <i>like</i> to eat before making decisions about buying meals. It wasn't hard to start developing actual preferences again.<br />
<br />
(<a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/boiled-potatoes-and-analytic-method_25.html">part 4</a>) Beckyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16677076598470332030noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7771589069545279175.post-59251254739346100892015-02-09T13:03:00.000+00:002015-02-09T13:03:38.713+00:00PianoSometime in the next month or so, it will be twenty years since I had my first piano lesson. That's the point I think it's reasonable to call the point at which I first <i>played</i> the instrument (or indeed any instrument), rather than just sitting at it and poking keys to extract sounds.<br />
<br />
There was a piano at home before I was born, so I grew up with it there as a piece of furniture. I don't remember ever <i>not</i> being allowed to play it, though obviously my efforts at a very young age were at best unsophisticated. The family collection of 'embarassing/endearing stories about Rik's childhood' includes several of my 'compositions'. Whatever my ambitions, I was no Mozart.<br />
<br />
I asked for piano lessons from pretty young; my parents didn't cave until I was seven. Probably wise, since I was a pretty faddy, impetuous child, and it was to be at least a decade before I stopped resenting having to practice daily.<br />
<br />
Thinking about it, I really don't have many memories that I can clearly point to as coming from <i>before</i> I started learning piano. That's not claiming any miraculous memory-enhancing powers for music, just that my recollection is pretty scattered from being younger than 7.<br />
<br />
What I'm getting at is that I've been a pianist for a long time - that part of my self-image is very deeply ingrained. It might have petered out for me when I left home and my parents' piano, but I asked for a portable, digital piano for my 18th birthday to take to university with me. The entire family clubbed together, to the tune of £800, to make sure I had a decent model.<br />
<br />
Even that piano will have been mine for a decade this summer. She's sat behind me right now, and I still play pretty much every day (I'm - very slowly - working my way through learning Mussorgsky's 'Pictures at an Exhibition', and after over a decade I've got about a third of it down). And playing has shaped my life in a lot of ways that might not be obvious.<br />
<br />
It's not just that I love music, understand some part of how music is constructed and produced, enjoy creating music and find solace in the sounds. It's not just that some of my most important social relationships are and have been musical (pretty much the only way in which I 'get out of the house' these days is going to gigs).<br />
<br />
It's also that the way I learn is shaped by a musical paradigm - regular, consistent practice, stepping up one cautious level at a time. I do not thrive when thrown in the deep end. I approach almost all tasks like performances, with meticulous preparation, often to a fault. It can drain my confidence and feed my anxieties, sometimes, since life often doesn't offer much preparation time, but it has its upsides too, when it works.<br />
<br />
There's also the fact that twenty years of training my fingers to be clever and independent has real benefits (yeah, make your jokes - honestly, they give my sex life far more credit than it deserves). I never had to learn to touch-type; I just kinda picked it up as I went along. I never need to look at the keyboard anymore. Seven of the letter keys on this keyboard have had their markings rubbed completely off by time and I only struggle when I have to stop and think about where I'm putting my hands.<br />
<br />
Manual dexterity shapes a lot of my attachment to video games as well. I get a real kick out of the way my hands climb around a controller in the flow of play. My favourite games tend to be those where the interface is slick enough that I feel like my fingers are extending into the game world, the game character's contortions a manifestation of my own prestidigitation.<br />
<br />
I don't really have a message or an argument today. Just 'yay piano', I guess. That'll do.Beckyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16677076598470332030noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7771589069545279175.post-28884807700580441282015-02-03T11:39:00.001+00:002015-03-10T15:59:48.495+00:00Boiled Potatoes and the Analytic Method, part 2<i>I found myself in need of counselling last year. The counselling I
received was extremely helpful, but it's only as, in the intervening
time, I've started to study critical perspectives from gender and race
discourse in depth that I've been able to understand the wider context
of my difficulties. These approaches emphasise connectedness; the
marketing of children's toys, for example, contributes to a
domestication of women that in turn commodifies their sexuality and
devalues their consent, leading to rape culture.</i><br />
<br />
<i>By contrast, the idiom of 'analytic philosophy', the tallest and
remotest of the academic ivory towers, to which I've given a decade of
my life and all my adulthood, puts detachment and abstraction foremost.
It was detachment and abstraction - an overdose of both - that led me to
counselling. What follows is a reflection on that journey.</i><br />
<br />
<i>As for what boiled potatoes have to do with anything? Wait and see... </i><br />
<br />
<i>In <a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/boiled-potatoes-and-analytic-method.html">part 1</a>, I discussed the specific experience that led me to seek counselling.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<u>Part 2: A Body with No Answers</u><br />
<br />
I'm not going to go through everything I discussed in counselling. Not all of it is relevant, a great deal of it is probably extremely tedious, and the conclusions are likely obvious to all except the protagonist. My counsellor, Jules, was brilliant at drawing me out, getting me to reflect on myself without too much criticality. She didn't try to diagnose or explain, but let me draw my own conclusions and thus internalise each successive realisation.<br />
<br />
I learned - perhaps it would be better to say 'reinterpreted' - a lot about myself in those five hours of discussions, but the standout experience is one that happened several times. When I was struggling, either for words or in discomfort, Jules would ask 'How are you feeling right now?' I never had an immediate answer.<br />
<br />
In fact, I didn't really have an answer at all. Feelings are embodied things - they happen in the 'gut', the 'heart', sometimes the spine or the back of the neck. Jules would ask me, and (the first few times) specifically direct my attention to bodily sensation. I would frown, expecting an immediate answer (who doesn't know how they're feeling at a given moment?). When that didn't happen, I would interrogate my body, a technique I've learned for fiction writing.<br />
<br />
And there would be nothing there. There were physical sensations - the chair, sometimes a headache or a dry throat, ordinary itches or aches - but no emotional ones. What I could identify of my emotions - usually a sense of dread about where a question might lead, how I might be pressured to change my behaviour - were 'head' things, and not sensory. It was the racing-thought, future-chasing anxiety seeded by stereotypes of therapeutic exercises ('Feeling lonely, you say? Okay, GO INTO TOWN AND START ASKING RANDOM STRANGERS FOR A HUG'), something that for all its unpleasantness is almost entirely mind, not body<i></i>.<br />
<br />
Trying to describe the silence in place of expected sensation is difficult at the best of times. I managed to be intellectually disturbed by the solid flatness of my chest - not cold or hard, like stone, just... there, like a well-plastered, plain-painted wall - but couldn't even <i>feel</i> afraid of it.<br />
<br />
Occasionally, on the cusp of some realisation, there would be a vertiginous moment, a yawning, teetering on the edge of a bigger, more daunting perspective. That, at least, was a sensation, though mainly around the crown of my skull, sometimes spilling into my eyes as a headrush. It was all I ever managed to report to Jules.<br />
<br />
I was self-reflecting the way I'd learned to reflect on everything else - Analysis, with a capital, historical A, a clinical process of standing outside an idea, surgically peeling away its context, tracing each vein and neuron one at a time. There's a time and place for that, perhaps, even when the idea is your own self, but it cannot, must not, be your only paradigm for thinking.<br />
<br />
(<a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/boiled-potatoes-and-analytic-method_19.html">part 3</a>) Beckyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16677076598470332030noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7771589069545279175.post-17714788297270045792015-01-27T12:40:00.000+00:002015-03-10T16:05:16.743+00:00Boiled Potatoes and the Analytic Method, part 1<i>I found myself in need of counselling last year. The counselling I received was extremely helpful, but it's only as, in the intervening time, I've started to study critical perspectives from gender and race discourse in depth that I've been able to understand the wider context of my difficulties. These approaches emphasise connectedness; the marketing of children's toys, for example, contributes to a domestication of women that in turn commodifies their sexuality and devalues their consent, leading to rape culture.</i><br />
<br />
<i>By contrast, the idiom of 'analytic philosophy', the tallest and remotest of the academic ivory towers, to which I've given a decade of my life and all my adulthood, puts detachment and abstraction foremost. It was detachment and abstraction - an overdose of both - that led me to counselling. What follows is a reflection on that journey.</i><br />
<br />
<i>As for what boiled potatoes have to do with anything? Wait and see... </i><br />
<br />
<u>Part 1: To Paint a Comfort Zone, First You Must Destroy It</u><br />
<br />
First, the journey itself, or at least the closing chapter of it. This, by the way, is not a dramatic or melodramatic story. Probably it's quite underwhelming. It has no histrionics, no blubbering collapses, and the longest redemptive journey involved walking round the corner from my department building to the university's counselling service.<br />
<br />
Proportionately to that, it starts with decorating. Having made <a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/home-is-where-you-arent-decorating.html">this rather optimistic post</a> about how my bout of decorating last summer might go, things actually went pretty well for most of the process. The schedule was met, and by the Sunday of the week after that posting, I'd finished all the decorating work. All that remained was the carpet, which was to be delivered and fitted, along with a carpet for the adjacent bedroom, on the Monday.<br />
<br />
And then, about lunchtime on Sunday, we spotted that the boiler, which is in the other bedroom, had leaked a few spots of water from what looked like a badly-corroded valve.<br />
<br />
Obviously, there was no way we were going to put a new carpet into a room where a boiler might need a valve replacing (where, indeed, the whole boiler might turn out to need replacing - it's a pretty old one, though - *touch wood* - still reliable). And it was a Sunday, so reaching the carpet fitter to discuss arrangements with him was going to take a while.<br />
<br />
I can't quite put into words how I felt about this (more on this point in a later part). But to resort to tired metaphors, a stone sank into my gut. My chest felt tight, and I found my jaw clenching a lot. Even thinking about the emotional state I was in then is making me feel a bit hollow now. In retrospect, it should have been a warning, but I was a little too self-absorbed to notice (if that even makes sense - too self-absorbed to notice my own emotional state?)<br />
<br />
But it gets worse, because I wasn't the person dealing directly with any of the people who needed to be contacted about the carpet and the boiler. All that was handled by one of my housemates, the one whose bedroom had the boiler in it. I tried not to pester her, I promise I tried, but it still got to the point that I almost drove her to tears by passing my stress onto her.<br />
<br />
Perhaps oddly, it was the break in tension that brought matters to a head. When she finally managed to get confirmation from the carpet fitters that they would be happy to come and fit just my carpet on the Monday, and do the other one at a later date, it was my expression of relief that finally pushed her to tell me to back off.<br />
<br />
I spent the next fifteen minutes shivering in my temporary bedroom, fighting off a panic attack. A mild one, by the standards of some I've had. It was half an hour or more before I even managed to apologise.<br />
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AND EVEN THEN, I was only thinking about <i>maybe</i> seeking counselling, not really sure what I should be seeking counselling <i>for</i>. Being a rationalist is no guarantee of always being rational; being a lover of wisdom is no guarantee of always being wise. These revelations have a significant role to play in what's to come, but for now suffice it to say that I was eventually convinced to make good on the counselling idea.<br />
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(<a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/boiled-potatoes-and-analytic-method.html">part 2</a>) Beckyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16677076598470332030noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7771589069545279175.post-23642321548972289812015-01-06T11:37:00.000+00:002015-03-10T16:09:24.773+00:00Everyday sexism (that I am guilty of) part 2Actually, this time it's not just sexism - it's every other dimension of privilege as well.<br />
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I'm working on a lengthy and complicated thing about white male identity and 'gamers' - my identity, basically. What I'm trying to do with it is address self-identified gamers defensive of our identity on the grounds that it's the only thing we have. I examine why it's possible to feel this, and how to think more broadly about our identity.<br />
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But it's really hard to do that without feeling embattled. 'Gamer' is an identity with a lot of really toxic associations. 'White' and 'male' are even worse, both having a long history of oppression and brutality. The urge is always there to get defensive, to rationalise or try to explain away my association with those identities. It's the urge to mansplain, whitesplain etc. (I'm not sure that 'gamesplain' is a thing yet, or just regarded as a combination of 'all the above') - call it xsplaing in general.<br />
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The problem with xsplaining is difficult to state succinctly. It's <i>most</i> problematic when a privileged person butts into a conversation about a problematic pattern of privileged behaviour to explain why - even if not done in an explicitly abusive way, this reinforces existing power dynamics by demanding that every conversation be limited by our comfort. It also equates our discomfort with the actual harm suffered by other groups, which is dismissive of their experience as well as flat-out inaccurate.<br />
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Another problem is in demanding 'they' solve 'our' problems - the attitude of 'if you don't like it, <i>you</i> tell us what to do'. We're adults. If someone criticises us, we've got to be able to take responsibility for that. Before demanding specific attention from someone - adding to the burden you've already imposed on them - do some googling, or at least some self-reflection, to try to understand the problem.<br />
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This goes doubly for issues of identity. The piece I'm writing is an attempt to collect some criticism of 'gamer' and develop from that a better model of the identity. I don't agree 100% with everything I'm quoting, so there is some editorialising, but my primary purpose is <i>not</i> to refute or dispute those criticisms; it's to identify what we can learn from them.<br />
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So I have to be very careful of where I'm pointing my arguments. How often do I have to check for xsplaining? Every. Damn. Sentence. That's really what I want to get at here (as with <a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/everyday-sexism-that-i-am-guilty-of.html">last time out</a>); this isn't something to only worry about occasionally. It's not even limited to times when you're actively engaging with someone from a different background (though that's when it's at its absolute most important).<br />
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It's <i>so</i> hard to resist the urge to make excuses, to haggle, to move from addressing the problem to denying it. And this is in an article specifically addressed to <i>our</i> concerns - I'm not trying to join an existing debate (though I am responding to one). It's even harder when engaging with people 'live'. But you can't learn or grow while rationalising; xsplaining serves your ego at the expense of your mind - not to mention at the expense of other people's peace of mind.Beckyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16677076598470332030noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7771589069545279175.post-33748805847022387632014-12-30T14:51:00.000+00:002014-12-30T14:51:24.282+00:00Cultural VertigoA few weeks back, someone challenged me on Twitter to come up with a New Year's Resolution and I came back with 'Open some of the doors I've got my toe in at the moment'. That's a worthy, if slightly trite, answer, but since then I've come up with a better one.<br />
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I'll get back to that at the end of this post, by which time I think it will be obvious what I've chosen. I've had a year, particularly this final third of it, of learning a <i>lot</i>. There are personal and professional elements to that, but where I've learnt most, where I've been most challenged, has been from the Twitter timelines of people I've followed because gamergate targeted them.<br />
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Gamergate has been and remains terrible, but in listening to those fighting it, I've received a whirlwind tour of critical gender and race theories on a par with the experience I had a couple of years ago as an amanuensis on a university-level Special Educational Needs/Disability Studies course. It's forced me to reexamine a lot of my preconceptions about games, about feminism and civil rights, about myself as a progressive and a liberal, and about my species as a whole.<br />
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And I'm starting to realise that there's a characteristic emotional state that accompanies the best of this learning. It's not a pleasant one. It often hits when least expected - this <a href="http://sufficientlyhuman.com/archives/599">piece challenging the player-centrism of established gaming</a>, for example, challenged me much more than any number of pieces about how reprehensible gamergaters are (because its critique applies to games <i>I</i> love just as much as, say, <i>Hatred</i>). It involves a slight feeling of nausea, and a stronger feeling of panic, of being overwhelmed by how much change might be needed to accept the argument.<br />
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I think of it as cultural vertigo. It's one thing to say 'I support diverse perspectives in art!', and another entirely to actually look down from the cultural pedestal (or out from the cultural bubble) of being straight, white and male and catch sight of those perspectives for the first time. It has nothing, of course, on the terror and hurt that straight white men inflict on others worldwide, but those are terrors that I am unlikely ever to experience the like of.<br />
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Cultural vertigo isn't comfortable, but it can be inspiring, and it has been a pretty consistent sign of opportunities to make myself a better person. Since there's a lot of work to do on that front, my New Year's Resolution for 2015 is to seek out cultural vertigo as much as I can stand to.Beckyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16677076598470332030noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7771589069545279175.post-66069051504458625882014-12-24T11:44:00.000+00:002014-12-24T11:44:18.984+00:00Idiot OverloadIt's been a truism of human society for centuries that it's easier to sound convincing than to be right - 'a lie has run around the world before the truth has got its boots on' and so on. I want to pick out one particularly egregious manifestation of this, something I've only taken conscious note of recently, though it's probably not new. There may be a 'proper' name for it, but for now I'm just going to call it idiot overload.<br />
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Idiot overload happens when there are so many errors, inaccuracies and other logical problems with a statement that it's impossible to refute succinctly. 'Succinctly' here means 'coherently and within the attention span of the relevant platform' - to use a pretty blunt example, most tweets are very difficult to refute in the space of a single reply. (Another example would be how hard it is to write a comprehensive reply to something in a blog comment before other commenters get in and move the debate along).<br />
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The sole intelligible claim to emerge from gamergate, 'Gamergate is about ethics in game journalism!' makes a pretty good example. As far as I can see there are at least five major objections to this statement:<br />
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1: gamergate more or less ignores actual serious breaches of journalistic ethics, like the review embargo on Assaassin's Creed: Unity that meant no reviews were published until 12 hours after release. Sure, maybe some gamergaters shouted about it briefly, but there's been nothing like the sustained campaign of anger directed at gamergate's preferred targets.<br />
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2: gamergate has yet to articulate a clear system of ethics of any kind. Ethics are <i>systematic</i> - not just a collection of arbitrary laws, but a coherent framework that allows the extension of those laws into situations unforeseen by their authors (again, unsophisticated example, but the provision of the U.S. constitution for later amendments is a version of this).<br />
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3: unethical behaviour in the promotion of an ethical system is hypocrisy, and self-invalidating. If your behaviour is unethical, you <i>are not</i> supporting ethics of any kind, no matter how you shout about it. The ethics of what is and isn't OK in acts of protest are complex, but without thoroughly engaging in a discourse on that topic you have to err on the side of caution - one thing gamergate certainly hasn't done.<br />
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4: game journalism is, by and large, critical journalism rather than reporting. It's not purely descriptive. In the early days of gamergate, there were attempts by various gamergaters to codify the journalism they wanted from the games press - focus on facts that could be presented honestly without or in resistance to financial/privileged incentives from the development side of the industry, the removal of opinion. The problem with this is that that's not what game journalism is or was ever for. Yes, factual journalism has always been a part of it, in reports and previews of what's coming up in the near future, and in discussions of hardware, but the majority of game journalism is reviews, and reviews are always going to be a matter of opinion. Want a broader perspective than any one person's opinion? Read a bunch of different reviews.<br />
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5: the feminism that gamergate actually spends most of its time fighting <i>is itself ethics</i>. What Anita Sarkeesian, Brianna Wu, Leigh Alexander et al have been campaigning for is more ethical weight in gaming. I suppose in that sense one could argue that gamergate is about ethics in gaming in that it's about keeping ethics out of gaming, but I don't think that's the claim gamergaters are making.<br />
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(sidebar: no, feminism is not 'an ideology', at least not in any sense that implies it isn't ethics. People describing feminism as an ideology are generally trying to paint it as a matter of opinion, when many of the most important concerns of feminism - rape statistics, wage gaps and so on - are matters of clear, repeatedly-proven facts. Just as human rights are an ethical system, not an ideology, so it is with feminism)<br />
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So there you go. It took me 473 words to give a (very brief) sketch of the objections to a 7-word statement. I may be missing some objections outright, I'm certainly missing key details from all of those points (to say nothing of evidence and examples, but this is one blog post and I am only human). It's just not possible to give an organised, ordered summary of the objection to 'it's about ethics in game journalism' (at least, that provides any more detail than 'NO') in a short space of time - human beings don't read fast enough.<br />
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I don't have a solution to this one, I'm afraid. Other examples include 'if global warming is real why is winter still cold?' and 'evolution must be wrong, my grandparents weren't monkeys'. When there's just too much to argue against, you have to rely on the general audience understanding enough to enumerate the problems themselves, which has never yet been a safe bet (though of course we can work towards that in the long term).Beckyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16677076598470332030noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7771589069545279175.post-2003338588475689392014-12-18T11:34:00.001+00:002014-12-18T11:34:48.789+00:00LecturerNo-one who knew me during my first year at university, or to be completely honest at any point in the five-to-eight years before that, would be surprised to hear that I enjoy lecturing. During that time, I lectured indiscriminately and at length to anyone who paused to listen or gave me a reason to open my mouth.<br />
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The years (yes, all eight of them) have humbled me somewhat. When my head of department asked me back in August if I'd be willing to do some lecturing this term to fill a gap left by a departing staff member, I was paralysed with something quite a lot like fear. On the one hand, I knew it would mean more money, money I do still need to be quite careful about. On the other, it meant standing up in front of dozens of undergrads - any one of them potentially as uppity as I was at their age - and desperately pretending to be an expert.<br />
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I did not feel qualified to be an expert.<br />
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I also didn't feel that public speaking could be a strong point of mine. Historically, I've done a much better job expressing myself in writing than verbally (which, long-time followers of this blog will realise, implies some truly horrific moments of verbal misexpression). I'm not good at improvising and I know from long, painful experience that an over-planned lecture, particularly one with a tight, complete script, is a miserable waste of student time.<br />
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But in the end I took the job. I arranged my share of the lecturing so I wouldn't have to be the first member of the team to go in front of the students, did my best to prepare, and fretted until it was my turn. I felt certain that I'd panic, or stumble over my tongue and say something completely false, or that I'd do that thing nervous speakers do where they steadily speed up and up and up and turn everything into horrible run-on sentences that go on and on and on forever until you're really desperate for the end of this paragraph right now aren't you?<br />
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Suffice it to say, none of that actually happened. My lectures weren't perfect - I flubbed jokes, ran too long in some sessions and too short in others - but I've not seen a catastrophic drop-off in attendance and no-one's made a formal complaint against me, so at the very least there have been no disasters. And it's actually been quite fun. Well, not preparing Powerpoint presentations for each session, that sucks, but the rest of it.<br />
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Probably some of this is unhealthy - the gratification from playing the expert for an hour or two a week (sidebar: turns out that compared to people with a decade's less experience of philosophy, I <i>am</i> an expert and don't need to do much pretending) - but unless and until someone complains I'm not going to overanalyse. For the most part, I'm just pleased that I've now been asked to do more lecturing next term - though this does mean I'm going to be just as busy and thus have just as little time for blogging, which is why new content here has been a bit sluggish in recent weeks.Beckyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16677076598470332030noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7771589069545279175.post-38632767800225589992014-12-04T12:20:00.000+00:002014-12-04T12:20:00.814+00:00Everyday sexism (that I am guilty of)I was walking across campus on Monday and it so happened that the person in front of me on the path was female and attractive. I made a conscious effort not to ogle, and yet, when she was greeted by a group of her classmates waiting outside a lecture hall, I still had this weird moment of cognitive dissonance. Suddenly, she was a human being interacting with human beings, rather than a shape taking up a central chunk of my visual field.<br />
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Was this entirely a sexist response? I don't know - it was, after all, Monday morning and I'd just been giving a lecture on semantics for quantificational logic, so I was a bit spaced out, and maybe there's an argument that I was just startled by the intrusion of voices in what had been a quiet environment - but I think I can tell the difference between sensory and cognitive startlement. My point is this: it's <i>that</i> easy (for me as a man) to dehumanise a woman, even despite a conscious effort not to. That's how insidious sexism can be.<br />
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Another example, this one perhaps a little less everyday, but more stark. Over the last couple of days, Crash, the dog belonging to game developer and favourite gamergate target Brianna Wu, took severely ill and died. Wu mentioned this on Twitter and was barraged with abuse in the form of mockery of Crash, photos of mutilated dog corpses, and at least one fake account for Crash proclaiming 'lol I'm going to die soon'.<br />
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All of which is horrible and reprehensible, but that shouldn't need saying. What does need saying is this: I felt a new level of shock and outrage at this kind of abuse, compared to the 'usual' abuse Wu has been receiving (threats of rape and murder against her, her family and friends, and her business, which among other things drove her from her home).<br />
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To put it bluntly: abuse aimed at the dog had more emotional impact with me than abuse aimed at the woman.<br />
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Perhaps it's tempting to say something along the lines of 'well, yes, but the dog's innocent, gamergate shouldn't be dragging a pet into this'. That's stupid, though, because it implies that Wu is in some way <i>not</i> innocent. That she deserves some part of what's happened to her, which is bullshit.<br />
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My point, guys (and I do mean guys) is this: these subconscious psychological mechanisms don't go away when we decide to try to care about other people. I don't know whether these two responses are things I've learned or are innate in some way, but they're habits of thought so deep that even when trying to be conscious of them I miss them working.<br />
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And they are responses I am responsible for. Even if I was born with the tendency to think about women this way, as long as it has the power to affect my behaviour, I am responsible for making sure that it doesn't. I am responsible for making sure that my poisonous habits of thought don't spill out into the real world.<br />
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That requires an effort of constant vigilance, regardless of whether it's Monday morning and I've just come from lecturing on difficult logic. And it really matters, because (for example) a huge part of the problem of stopping gamergate, and of taking it seriously as something that <i>must</i> be stopped, is a lack of empathetic understanding of what life is like for gamergate targets - of how damaging harrassment can be.<br />
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It's exactly the kind of empathy that I've failed at (at least) twice in the last week which we (men) most need in order to recognise, understand and tackle this problem.Beckyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16677076598470332030noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7771589069545279175.post-26475619104461973792014-11-19T12:31:00.001+00:002015-03-10T16:16:08.038+00:00Getting what you wish forBack in early July I wrote <a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/video-games.html">this post</a>, basically bemoaning the fact that video games aren't 'taken seriously' by our culture. Since then some very serious things have happened in gaming (i.e. gamergate), and so one negative element of gaming has come to be taken a little more seriously, but that's not what I'm going to talk about today. I refrain from talking about gamergate primarily because I've yet to think of anything I have to add to the discussion that hasn't already been said - I do, of course, wholeheartedly condemn gamergate itself.<br />
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Today, I have something rather more optimistic to offer. I'm now part of the planning process for a university-level 'gaming and interactive media' course (title not final) within the <a href="http://www.liv.ac.uk/">University of Liverpool</a>'s <a href="http://www.liv.ac.uk/arts/">School of the Arts</a> (backstory: UoL is my alma mater and now my primary employer; I lecture and teach in the <a href="http://www.liv.ac.uk/philosophy/">Department of Philosophy</a>, part of the SotA). We had our first departmental discussion of possible modules/topics this morning, and I got clearance to engage in some informal public consultation.<br />
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This is exactly the kind of thing I was yearning for when I wrote that post back in July. It's not a technical course - we're not expecting to cover programming, hardware design etc. though we may build links to courses that will - but a cultural/humanities one. The process will put gaming closer to film, television, theatre, literature and so on in terms of serious cultural consideration.<br />
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But this is a very new field, and if we're clear about one thing so far it's that we're not clear about much. I'm looking for suggestions of issues that a course like this - a humanities course, one approaching games as cultural artefacts - could or should address. If you're a gamer (either in the sense of 'someone who plays games' or of 'someone who identifies primarily as a gamer') what would you like to see discussed?<br />
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Some issues are obvious; for example, there's no clear definition of 'a game' or 'a video game', and phenomena such as augmented reality gaming and the gamification of education make the definitional question profoundly interesting. There are complex issues relating to authorship within videogames, too; who is the author of a narrative which is directed as much by the player (the audience) of a game as its developers? And, given everything that has come to the surface over the last three months, it would be negligent not to discuss feminist critiques of games (along with other dimensions of privilege - race, sexuality, ability etc.).<br />
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Not everything need come under the banner of philosophy. Our School of the Arts includes Music, English, Architecture and Communications/Media Studies, and there's a joint meeting in three weeks' time where we'll all be putting things forward. Any suggestions you can offer for what we should cover will be most welcome.Beckyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16677076598470332030noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7771589069545279175.post-77298417872933018042014-11-12T14:24:00.000+00:002014-11-12T14:24:06.694+00:00Fully Automated Luxury CommunismGo watch <a href="http://youtu.be/dmQ-BZ3eWxM">this</a>. It's not necessarily a perfect sociopolitical model (after all, it's only an 8-minute video), but it's an interesting idea. The claim is basically that automation means that very soon - in the next 20 years or so - no-one will need to work longer than 12-15 hours in a week (note: we're talking about a quite complex notion of 'need' and a conservative estimate of the effects of automation in that sentence - but there's nothing in that to render the claim implausible).<br />
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And once you've watched the video - probably well before the end, in fact - you'll immediately be able to hear in the back of your mind the voice of your current political leadership (at least in Britain and America) raising the following complaint:<br />
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'Without the incentive to work more and work harder, everyone will just sit around all day doing nothing!'<br />
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Now, anecdotes are not data, but I believe I can provide at least one counterexample to that objection. For the last two-and-a-half years (longer, depending on how you account it), I have been in the fortunate position of working an average of less than 15 hours a week, and having living costs small enough and a wage rate good enough to make ends meet.<br />
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In that time, I've completed a PhD (including all the thesis-writing and most of the specific research), written well over 300,000 words of original fiction (seasons 2 and 3 of The Second Realm, two NaNoWriMo projects and a handful of short stories/novellas), written and recorded an EP of original music (which you shouldn't listen to because it's terrible but no-one can say I didn't put effort into it), decorated half a house, and studied a huge amount of stuff about the world, from feminist discourse to critical history to the publishing industry.<br />
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Perhaps none of that sounds very worthwhile (because it didn't make me any money, perhaps? But then what did I need the money for, if my living expenses were met?), but even the most cynical person could not accuse me of inactivity. And, since all these activities are things <i>I</i> value, no-one could accuse me of not trying to better myself (whether or not you think I'm barking up the wrong tree in terms of what I value).<br />
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The other objection to my example would be to suggest that I'm in some way exceptional - that most people in my (again, extremely fortunate) position would not behave the same way. There are two possible responses to that. The first is to take the objection as claiming that I possess some rare intrinsic virtue of productivity - and anyone who's seen me on an off day can tell you immediately that this is a particularly stupid idea. I am possessed of no exceptional will or drive at all, only a rare freedom to express a very ordinary human will.<br />
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The second response is to take the objection as making a purely statistical claim, that there is a body of data from which I am the exception. The problem with this is that no such body of data exists - my circumstances are simply too rare. There are <i>very few</i> jobs on which you can make even as much as I do from as few hours as I work, and I have exceptionally low costs of living.<br />
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In fact, the only people who work less than I do for more money are the very heirs and old-money institutions most likely to be found making this argument in the first place. So if I <i>am</i> the exception, it suggests that they are, in fact, a bunch of lazy tossers. News to no-one, perhaps, but nice to have it confirmed in their own arguments... Beckyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16677076598470332030noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7771589069545279175.post-37526659776107423252014-11-06T16:23:00.000+00:002015-03-10T16:19:32.334+00:00NaNoWriMo 2014(Disclaimer: contains shameless self-congratulation and bragging. You are under no obligation to read any further).<br />
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When I finished <a href="http://nanowrimo.org/">NaNoWriMo</a> 2010 in a little under 8 days, I knew I could do better. I proved that in 2011, by bringing my personal best down to under 7 days. At that point, I foolishly opined that I could complete the 50k in five days, if I had them completely free. That would require me to be able to take time off work, though, which has not really been possible for financial reasons in the intervening time.<br />
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I improved my personal best again in 2012, to six days and fourteen hours, despite still having various professional commitments. Last year I was on track to better even that, but my chosen project ran into a thick tangle of character and theme issues which weren't fixable within a NaNoWriMo mindset (it would be fair to say, too, that I neither prepared well nor was quite as committed to it as my ambition required). Having thought at one point that I would break 6 days, I ended up finishing the 50k on the last day of the month, and then only by switching to another project altogether for the last 10-15k.<br />
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That actually gave my writing confidence quite a hit, and this year I've been going back and forth over whether to do NaNo. The biggest question was what project I was going to write; with the Second Realm over, I was having all kinds of trouble deciding what to work on next anyway, and choosing a project suited to the intensive, relatively research-and-planning-light NaNo process just made that question more difficult.<br />
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I settled on a plan whereby I'd only do NaNo if I could finish last year's project before November, so that I could get on with its sequel this year (that series remains almost uniquely suited to NaNo, as far as my ideas go). I failed utterly to get last year's project finished on time, though I did at least make some progress.<br />
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So I thought I wouldn't write something new for NaNo. I figured I could get on with one of the many bits of editing I need to do. Then I discovered that reading week for the courses I teach on falls this year on this week, the first week of NaNo. Since this entails not having to do anything this week for what this year is the much more significant of my jobs, I was gutted that I didn't have a proper NaNo project. I started to think about some way to make the 'edit things' plan more concrete.<br />
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Then life dropped another heavy hint. My current client for my other job turned out to be on a field trip from last Friday through this Wednesday (i.e. yesterday). Since that meant not seeing him until Friday of this week, the first week of November was now completely free. I gritted my teeth and tried to pretend I'd never bragged to myself that I could do it in five days if I had them completely free. I told myself I'd get through an entire editing pass on the season 1 collection of The Second Realm instead (no mean feat given that's currently around 125,000 words). I prepared accordingly.<br />
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And then the powers that be got sick of dropping hints altogether. I woke up on Thursday morning from a dream about the tail end of a horror movie scenario, the heroine finally escaping and burning down the haunted house, to realise that I had been given the seed of a new idea, well-tuned to address a theme I've been keen to address for some time.<br />
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Even then, I prevaricated somewhat, hemming and hawing over whether I had a setting I could write in, an ending I could write towards, a selection of characters which befitted <a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/diversity.html">this commitment</a>. The muse, or whatever other vengeful god it is that sees to it we are required to make good on our outrageous boasting, obligingly answered my every question.<br />
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I wouldn't speak in such mystic terms, but seriously, it is sometimes pretty hard not to be superstitious. An entire novel plan fell into my lap in the space of about thirty hours right on the cusp of the best writing opportunity I've had in about three years.<br />
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So I wrote the damn thing. Well, in honesty, I wrote about half of it, padding frantically and egregiously. It's NaNo, there isn't time to stop and think about whether what you're writing really serves your final goals. The last day's progress included some pretty big I'm-definitely-editing-this-out-later moments; the main character's mother turned into an appauling comedic stereotype in the midst of an otherwise serious narrative about haunting and harassment, and I took a couple of thousand words to just tell a random unrelated ghost story mid-scene, for example.<br />
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But as of about 11:30 last night, I'd written my 50,000 words, in five days flat. Strangely, it's been physiologically the <i>least</i> debilitating NaNoWriMo I've ever done. I planned better, was careful to always get enough sleep, to take regular breaks, to make sure at least <i>some </i>of my snacks were healthy (cherry tomatoes are god's gift to the compulsive snacker). Today, apart from a slightly sore wrist, I feel great.<br />
<br />
Whether that feeling will persist once I go back and look at what I've written remains to be seen. I do intend to finish a first draft this month, though I'm taking a couple of days off first. If you want to see me actually writing in real time, you can follow me on <a href="http://www.twitch.tv/rjdavnall">Twitch.tv</a>, where I've been live-streaming most of my writing for the past few days (disclaimer: at the moment, it's just my Word doc, no webcam or anything, and I've no idea whether it's interesting to watch).<br />
<br />
In the meantime, I'm off to look up the definition of 'month'.Beckyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16677076598470332030noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7771589069545279175.post-76500746475936825792014-10-29T14:56:00.000+00:002014-10-29T14:56:30.598+00:00DiversityMy books are not very diverse. In all my published work and in my trunk novels, I have never written a black character. I've never written an openly gay character, or one who is not cisgendered. I briefly approached disability as a topic with Dora in the first season of The Second Realm, but fell into at least one common failing of mainstream disability narratives - the disability-that-is-also-a-superpower (think <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daredevil_%28Marvel_Comics%29">Daredevil</a>).<br />
<br />
I could give narrative reasons for at least some of this, but that would be to paper over a genuine personal and creative blind spot. It's a problem I've been growing aware of for some time, but I think it's finally reaching the point of jumping from 'aware of' to 'actually not giving myself a free pass anymore'. (Even the fact that I could be aware of my problem without feeling motivated to deal with it is a symptom of the problem).<br />
<br />
#<a href="http://weneeddiversebooks.org/">Weneeddiversebooks</a> has appeared prominently on my Twitter feed recently, with the launch of a new <a href="https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/we-need-diverse-books">Indiegogo campaign</a>, raising money to fund grants for authors, classroom campaigns and other activism in support of diverse authors and books. I've just donated, because part of the problem is that I very seldom encountered diversity in the books I read growing up.<br />
<br />
But throwing money at other people won't fix my books or my writing. That would be Medici thinking - buying my way out of past sins. I need to learn how to write outside my own demographic.<br />
<br />
For that, <i>I</i> need diverse books. There are no black characters in my books because I have carelessly, lazily imitated patterns established by the books I have read, which in my genre are overwhelmingly about white people, with other races either sensationalised or rendered as primitive savages (sometimes both at the same time). The same goes for disabled and LGBTQIA people.<br />
<br />
<br />
It's not enough for me to contribute to the funding of diverse literature. I need to seek out whatever diverse literature exists and read it. I have (ballpark) twenty million words of epic fantasy on my bookcase, in which I can think, off the top of my head, of perhaps two well-written, non-stereotyped, non-sensationalised characters outside the straight, white, able, privileged norm. That's a big imbalance to redress.<br />
<br />
And, of course, I need to fix the imbalance in my own work. That doesn't necessarily mean meeting some arbitrary quota of 'diverse characters', nor does it mean centering my storytelling on people whose lives I do not know from the inside - it's not my place to tell other people's stories, and doing so runs the risks of appropriation and misrepresentation. But I've got to stop writing worlds where the only race is white, the only sexuality is straight, and no character is disabled.<br />
<br />
Fantasy novels present a reality that is not necessarily our own, but they are inescapably <i>part</i> of our reality - not necessarily presentations of it, but always <i>representations</i> of it. Diversity exists in our reality, so it must be represented in fantasy (the question of how is complex, interesting and difficult, but a topic for another time).<br />
<br />
I don't know if I can fix The Second Realm, which I'm in the process of re-editing for a collected edition at the moment, and I'm not willing to abandon it outright (either by unpublishing it or leaving it in its current state), but I'll be choosing my next project very carefully. And, of course, following #weneeddiversebooks intently for everything I can learn.Beckyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16677076598470332030noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7771589069545279175.post-60731248525644448902014-10-22T12:37:00.001+01:002014-10-22T12:37:45.933+01:00New Realms and OldSo, <a href="http://itsthefuturestupid.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/the-second-realm-84-rain-that-doesnt.html">it's done then</a>. <a href="http://itsthefuturestupid.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/second-realm-hub.html">The Second Realm</a> is complete.<br />
<br />
What the hell do I do now?<br />
<br />
Actually, before I get to the future (...he said as if he wasn't entering it right now), I'd like to take a moment to look back over the series and what it's done for me.<br />
<br />
I never actually wrote a blog post at the start of the project laying out my aims for it (though somewhere in the past three years I've convinced myself I did). In October of 2011, I'd just published <i>Heaven Can Wait</i> (which I might finally get around to republishing soon, but I'm not sure), and was two years into my PhD, with the hard part very much still ahead of me.<br />
<br />
I wasn't sure how much attention I'd be able to give to my writing and platform-building over the coming couple of years, a concern that proved well-justified. I'd made what felt like a good start, joining a warm, passionate and very active community of authors spread out across social networking and the blogosphere, but it was very early days - this blog, for example, enjoyed less than a thousand pageviews in the month that The Second Realm launched (this month is on course to be the first to break 50k).<br />
<br />
I felt a bit like I was trying to kindle (see what I did there?) a fire in a high wind. Constant attention would be needed to maintain progress, during a period in which I would have little attention to spare. A serial looked like a good option - a way to write, publish and promote in small chunks scattered through my otherwise busy life.<br />
<br />
This wasn't just about promotion and platform-building, by the way. It was also about practicing and developing my craft. In the thirteen months November 2010-November 2011, I wrote five whole novels, and I knew I wasn't going to be able to do that again any time soon. My technique had improved markedly over the time and I didn't want to start back-sliding.<br />
<br />
So The Second Realm had two purposes, really; to keep me writing and to keep me publishing. It wasn't, initially at least, intended to make any money. Episodes went out completely free (except for the few that I pushed onto Amazon, where I couldn't set 'free' as a price), and I'm not convinced that my introduction of pay-what-you-like mechanisms from season 2 onwards was a well-thought-out strategy.<br />
<br />
Given those goals, I think I have to consider The Second Realm a success. I finished the thing, so I must have kept writing. Indeed, my writing has definitely benefitted, not just from repeated practice, but also from <a href="http://itsthefuturestupid.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/acknowledgement.html">regular, robust feedback</a>. As a writer, I've not degenerated, I've advanced.<br />
<br />
As a platform-building exercise, the analysis has to be a bit more complex. On Smashwords, episodes and samples have been downloaded a total of over 9000 times, but while the persistent growth of that number over time entails continuing (and even growing) interest, it's not clear how much of that represents people actually reading my words. The same goes for the traffic on this blog, which has shot up over the last year - there's a lot of page-viewing happening, but not much visible sign of engagement (I get over a hundred spam comments a day, but that hardly counts).<br />
<br />
Still, my storefront on Smashwords has 32 book covers on it, and the number 9000 is a pretty good calling-card. Money has trickled in, though not yet enough to justify the expense of getting a passport so I can apply to the US IRS for tax treaty status and actually collect my earnings.<br />
<br />
The test will be whether there's significant carry-over into whatever I publish next, and that requires me to publish something. Which brings us up to date. I have several options, and would love nothing more than to go for all of them (I can't, after all, out-compete myself), but the demands of earning a living make that infeasible right now. When I make up my mind, you'll all be the first to know.<br />
<br />
One thing that can't be underestimated is the value to my self-esteem and self-perception of having finished this thing. I don't feel like I have to cringe anymore when someone asks me 'yeah, but are you <i>really</i> an author, or are you just saying that?'. I can give them a link. Hopefully soon, I'll be able to hand them a physical copy of (at least part of) The Second Realm, or maybe hit them with it if they get really uppity about it.<br />
<br />
Thanks for taking this journey with me. Here's to the next leg!Beckyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16677076598470332030noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7771589069545279175.post-67833733272717744752014-10-18T12:25:00.003+01:002015-03-12T22:53:34.604+00:00The Second Realm 8.4: Rain That Doesn't Fall<a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/second-realm-11-i-can-see-clearly-now.html">First Episode</a> - <a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/the-second-realm-83-ash.html">Previous Episode</a> - <a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/second-realm-hub.html">Season 1 Hub</a> - <a href="http://itsthefuturestupid.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/the-second-realm-season-2-children-of.html">Season 2 Hub</a> - <a href="http://itsthefuturestupid.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/the-second-realm-season-3-lost-realm.html">Season 3 Hub</a> - <a href="https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/485772">Smashwords</a> (all major ebook formats, pay what you like)<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/485772" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCqAsSfm7HopvpPjGn1CzEcfUuUd-8XRw0YrM7fquV_mI-kXSJv7SjHymLWl-63ynIijQmH28ghI3NBLNeHQVHYr_GaOK6xCkBHW65cO3gh_VRQ_uRkVFIrSntj2hDvCjAHX_nC7d9l_o/s1600/8-4+mixdown+resize.jpg" height="400" width="250" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
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<div style="text-align: center;">
Logic and Reasons</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
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<div style="text-align: center;">
4. Rain That Doesn't Fall </div>
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Late in the morning, Soan's trail ran into rocky ground that had been rinsed by dew and baked dry by the sun, and vanished. Rather than waste time scouring the stone with Clearsight, Rel tried the future. Where he'd expected Soan's Gift to resist him, there was nothing. <br />
<br />
With the lurching sensation of a footstep slipping on unseen ice, Rel's Sight fell through to a tree-lined vale, resplendent in summer greens and dappled shade. Soan sat on the grass between the knuckles of two roots, his back against their parent tree. His face was slack, with none of the fixed attentiveness of Clearsight. <br />
<br />
Why had he stopped running? With Taslin's help, and Chag and Keshnu following as Pevan's observers, Rel had been chasing the old man since first light. Soan had headed purposefully northwest, towards his home at Ilbertin, diverting only to avoid the scattered towns on the way. Why give up now? <br />
<br />
Perhaps fleeing through the night, after the battle, had exhausted him. In the Viewing, his craggy face did seem pale, worn. He lifted his head, and turned to look directly at Rel's vantage. Across time and space, their eyes met, and slowly, Soan nodded. <br />
<br />
Blinking, Rel pulled back from his Gift. Taslin reappeared as his eyelids opened; she was watching him, resplendent in a violet dress chased everywhere with silver embroidery. She'd promised to eschew her protection from his Gift, but hadn't had time yet to make the complex adjustment. He took a moment to catch his breath. Sunburn was starting to dig in to the tips of his ears, the back of his neck. <br />
<br />
"He's waiting for us." Rel let the words hang in the heavy air, worry stalling further thought. <br />
<br />
"Where?" Taslin folded her arms. "Have you recovered the trail?" <br />
<br />
"No. I got a good look at where he's waiting, but not how to get there from here. I didn't want to get trapped like last time I Saw him." Internally, Rel probed his Gift, measuring his logic fatigue. It was under control, more or less, but lingering time-lag made his head feel bloated. "I can go back in in a minute and try another approach." <br />
<br />
"You're sure we won't lose ground?" As if sensing his discomfort, Taslin pressed a cool hand to his cheek. Rel glanced automatically at the observers, surprised to see them both impassive. Keshnu probably approved, but he had no idea what Chag would be thinking. Taslin physically pulled his attention back onto her. "It could be a trap." <br />
<br />
"There'll be a trap of some sort, sure," he said, grimly. "But I think he wants to confront us." He caught her hand, kissed her fingers, and a thought occurred to him. "Could you take an image from my mind and use it as a Gateway target?" <br />
<br />
Her eyes blurred for a moment, as if he'd said something difficult for her, as a Wilder, to understand. Then she blinked, back to herself. "I could learn to, but not quickly." She smiled. "Your emotions, your character, I can see quite naturally. That's why Keshnu makes a good observer on your sister's behalf. But to pick a whole, coherent thought from your mind, I would have to spend far longer in deep communion with you than I have, learning the structure of your mind." <br />
<br />
"We should start learning as soon as we can, then." <br />
<br />
"It's not something to rush into, Rel." A hint of a frown crossed her brow. "And it's... intimate. I don't want to do it just for this kind of work. It has to be <i>for us</i>." <br />
<br />
"Well, okay." He took a deep breath, preparing to let go of the moment. "But when it's time..." <br />
<br />
Taslin rose up on tiptoe, bringing her face to his. He kissed her, then remembered the two watchers again. Her eyes shone as she pulled back. "When it's time." <br />
<br />
Rel returned to Clearsight, looking for the route that connected Soan's glade to this outcropping. He couldn't track his own movements, and Taslin and Keshnu were both shielded enough to be difficult targets. Chag was another matter. Strangely, Rel found he wanted the little man there, wanted Pevan to have her Witness. <br />
<br />
The scene he sought was almost too easy to find; Chag, pensive, standing in the shade of a tree that matched Soan's valley. Keshnu was a ripple-edged hole in the air beside him. Rel pulled back before his Sighted awareness could expand to include the confrontation itself. The trees matched closely enough; he didn't need to check any closer, particularly if Soan was indeed lying in wait. <br />
<br />
Holding the image of Chag against the back of his mind, Rel worked down towards the present like a rope spooling out down a cliff-face. The little man bounced backwards across the landscape, appearing for one moment at a time between Keshnu's Gates. Hidden though the Gift-Giver was, his Gateways weren't, and each betrayed a hint of where it came from, a subtle twisting of Rel's mental image to represent the distortion in the Realm. <br />
<br />
Soan wasn't far away, only a mile or two. Keeping his Clearsight active as much for the cold it spread through his brain as for vision, he gave Taslin the heading and followed her through the resulting Gate. After the first, he checked back to see if Keshnu's Gate matched the one he'd Seen, but he took that as confirmation enough for the rest. <br />
<br />
Ten minutes saw them to the ridge overlooking Soan's woodland hideaway, while the sun went from high and hot to truly blazing. Beyond the mouth of the valley, haze smeared out the horizon thickly enough to confuse even Clearsight. Rel held at the top of the slope, wary of traps. <br />
<br />
For a moment, he thought about trying to pick a spot for Taslin to Gate to, closer to Soan, but decided against it. Clearsight could only do so much; ferreting out another Clearseer's traps was best done at short range, where it could be done most thoroughly. Rel led into the wood, one cautious step at a time. <br />
<br />
The ground crawled with life, ants and caterpillars and greenfly in their hundreds exploring the grass and the bluebells. Birds flittered around the branches, giving the invading humans and Wildren a wide berth. Rel kept his attention sharp, focussed on one small patch of ground at a time. Any sign that Soan had stood near here, and he'd choose a different route. <br />
<br />
There were none, and Soan's voice caught Rel by surprise. "That was impressively careful." <br />
<br />
Rel looked up, found himself almost on top of the other man; the walk hadn't felt long enough, but there he was, still sat under the same tree. A quick survey with Clearsight gave no hint of any danger around Soan. Picking his words slowly, Rel said, "I was expecting traps. Are you giving yourself up?" <br />
<br />
"Everywhere I could think to try running, I Saw you getting there first." Soan pushed himself to his feet, his movement ponderous and steady. "It was fight or surrender." <br />
<br />
Rel found himself looking just slightly up at the man's face. "I'm not here to fight." How would that look to Wolpan? Either coming back beaten and empty-handed, or dragging Soan in physically broken. Gifts or no, a fight would be brutal, and the Four Knot would take any excuse to argue Rel had provoked it. Or, worse, that he'd decided to take matters into his own hands again. <br />
<br />
"It's my choice, not yours." Heat rose in Soan's tone. He blinked a couple of times, and his Gift locked, vice-like, around Rel's. <br />
<br />
In spite of himself, Rel felt his body tense. He shifted his weight to the balls of his feet, hunched forward. Unless Delaventrin had taught Soan some trick previously unknown to human Clearseers, this was stalemate. At the trailing edge of the future, right where it met the present, Soan's outline appeared to vibrate. <br />
<br />
It was the tension between their Gifts, the deep training that gave them the reflexes to use Clearsight in combat. Any twitch Soan made would provoke a counter-twitch in Rel, and vice versa. Never enough to bring them to blows, since the first to move would cede all the advantage to the one who waited. Between them the future trembled like a harp-string. <br />
<br />
Stuck like this, the duel could last until one of them hit logic burnout. Rel fancied his chances if it came to that – Soan had been fleeing all night, after all – but he had enough of a headache from his time-lag that he couldn't be sure. Either way, it gave him time to try to talk Soan round. <br />
<br />
The old Clearseer's face was a blur. His eyes, though pinned wide with his own Gift, flickered so rapidly around the clearing that his irises were just dark smudges. In endless combinations of speaking and not speaking, his mouth looked smeared with grey-brown paint, the ghosts of his thin lips. <br />
<br />
Speaking was about the only safe option to speed things up. Here in the First Realm, miles from the nearest Sherim, their words could hardly be weapons. Facial movements couldn't provoke the same violence as bodily gesture. If he couldn't read Soan's mood too clearly, well, Taslin had taught him to look deeper than appearances. <br />
<br />
Voice held level by the tension running through him, Rel said, "Do you still believe you're honouring your oath?" <br />
<br />
"Do you?" The words came drenched in contempt. <br />
<br />
"Did Ashtenzim ever admit to you what Separation would do to the First Realm?" <br />
<br />
"Is this any better?" Soan ground out through a jaw that barely moved. "Our whole lives ruled over by <i>them</i>, even while they kill us?" <br />
<br />
Would Taslin answer that? Rel didn't dare wait too long. Fumbling for words, he managed, "They don't... Not all Gift-Givers... it's not the Gift-Givers who kill humans. When we die... those are feral Wildren. It's no different than being attacked by wolves, or whatever." <br />
<br />
"Wolves don't kill. Only if you're foolish and go looking for them." <br />
<br />
"Wolves kill plenty of Wildren. They stray into the Second Realm and kill there. Just like Ragehounds do here." The shimmering edges of the future cleared, as Soan's emotions coalesced in hurt and hatred for a second, and Rel kicked himself. Of course Ragehounds would be a touchy subject with this man. He'd lost his entire squad to one less than two years before. Awkward again, he managed, "I'm sorry, but the point stands." <br />
<br />
"I don't give a damn about your point!" Soan snarled. "The Second Realm <i>kills people</i>. People we swore to protect." <br />
<br />
"Like the Gifted you killed yesterday?" <br />
<br />
"I was trying to protect those you can't." Hard lines smudged across the old man's forehead as his emotions tangled up again. His voice came lower, hotter. "For as long as Wildren can come to our Realm at will, no human will ever be safe. No Gifted will ever be enough to save them all. Not even you, with all your arrogance. If you'd seen what they can do like I have-" <br />
<br />
"Do you think I haven't?" Rel found inspiration in anger. "Which of us has been to more funerals, Soan? And do you not think Wildren mourn, either?" <br />
<br />
"How would I know how they think? Do you? Your training really was incomplete if you believe that." <br />
<br />
Refusing to rise to the barb, Rel said, "You could ask them." <br />
<br />
"And trust what they say?" <br />
<br />
"I've seen what happens to Wildren who lie." Was he getting through at all? Without the benefits of Clearsight, Soan's bitterness was hard to read. Rel pressed on, "Ask a direct question, you'll get a straight answer. This whole mess could have been avoided if I'd asked a few more direct questions." <br />
<br />
Soan spat back, "Could you have saved Natyl and Trellie? Shendo? Ivis?" Rel recognised the names. He might not have been able to call them up from memory without prompting, but now that Soan had, he could place their Gifts. Four Knot, Warder, Gatemaker and Guide respectively; the old Ilbertin squad. <br />
<br />
Putting aside the argument for a moment, Rel bowed his head in respect. He couldn't risk taking his eyes off the other man, but some memorials were sacred. "No, not them." He'd been back in Federas by that point, under the full, dark cloud of his unfinished training. Waiting on a message to reach Soan, to request his arbitration between Dieni and Ciarive in respect of Rel's status; a message that had been lost in the chaos following the Ragehound's attack. <br />
<br />
"And what about your own?" Soan pitched his voice to sting. "Could you have saved Dieni and Temmer?" <br />
<br />
"Okay, you've made your point." It was getting harder to hold his nerve. "I meant what happened with the Separatists." <br />
<br />
"That doesn't matter. People are <i>dying</i>, Rel." A tremor went through the old man, some savage gesture ruthlessly repressed. Even so, reflexive reaction almost smashed Rel's balance and poise. "Separation would put a stop to that." <br />
<br />
"Yeah, if there are any people-" <br />
<br />
"Let me finish! I want to know what you offer instead. Things are never going to get better your way." Seniority and scorn made Soan haughty; he spoke as if to a snivelling underling. <br />
<br />
Rel forced some of the heat out of his chest with a long breath. "My old way, yes." Confession made him awkward. "Fearing the Second Realm, fearing the Gift-Givers. I was ruled by fear. I thought it kept me sharp, to always remember not to trust them." <br />
<br />
"Ciarive trained you well." <br />
<br />
"You didn't see Vessit after the Realmquakes." The old city had still been shaking a month later. Fighting his voice steady, Rel said, "That's Ciarive's training for you. The one thing I ever agreed with him on turned out to be the one thing he was truly wrong about." <br />
<br />
Soan's anger cooled sharply, to a deathly chill. "You still think you can pass judgement on him?" <br />
<br />
Skin prickling, Rel scrabbled to take back his rhetoric. "His father's eldest brother was a signatory of the Treaty of Peace. Ciarive told me what it was like when he was young." Then he rallied. "His attitude suited that time just fine, but times have changed, and they'll change again. <i>That's</i> my way." <br />
<br />
"So we should just trust <i>them</i>?" The old Clearseer didn't need to indicate Taslin. He wouldn't have forgotten she was there, even if she was still shielded from his Gift. "Why? You can't trust her just because she kissed you." <br />
<br />
Fire rushed through Rel, a wave of clenched muscles that he managed to hold short of violence only by driving his fingernails into his palms so hard his fists cramped. Even in the shade, it was too hot a day to handle this kind of provocation. The wind was dying, or perhaps just shying away from the tense air between the Gifted. <br />
<br />
Every motion a conscious effort, Rel opened one hand. Slowly, slowly enough not to provoke Soan, he reached to take Taslin's. "I trust Taslin because I've seen her throw everything she is against threats to <i>our</i> Realm, time and again, even when I was the threat in question. I trust her because she's done a better job of my job than I have. I trust her because she's not afraid to stop me when I need stopping." He couldn't look at her as he spoke, but she laced her fingers through his, and he took that as a good sign. <br />
<br />
Trying to relax, to let just a little of the desperate tension go, he lowered his voice. "Come back with us. What other good option do you have?" <br />
<br />
"That's a good option?" Soan snorted. "What are you even going to do with me if I do? It's not like any squad would accept me after yesterday." <br />
<br />
"You could, uh... You could still train people." Would Pevan approve that? Federas taught its Gifted to spare no advantage, and Soan had more experience training Clearseers than anyone else living. "I mean, no-one denies you know Clearsight. That shouldn't go to waste." <br />
<br />
"Train kids? From inside a prison? Could Ciarive have trained you in a prison cell?" <br />
<br />
In fact, Ciarive had insisted on doing everything outside, to get Rel used to holding his eyelids open in all weathers. An uncomfortable prickling told him the heat was beginning to dry his eyes out. Soan would have the same problem, but it was going to make every extra minute of this painful. Rel said, "No, I mean they'll have to let you out for some things anyway. Why not training as well?" <br />
<br />
"Don't be an idiot. They'll never go for that." And Soan's tone turned... almost proud, as if being smarter and more cynical than Rel was all he needed. "It's a fool's argument. You're no peacemaker, Rel." <br />
<br />
"Well, I'm new at this." The heat under Rel's collar had nothing to do with the sun. <br />
<br />
The old man leaned forward fractionally. "It'll come to blows in the end. We're not good for anything else, you know that." <br />
<br />
Feeling as if he'd suddenly been handed a very fine, very delicate glass vase, too big to hold comfortably, Rel lowered his voice again. "What will you do if you win? Go to Ilbertin?" <br />
<br />
"They haven't forgotten the War there." <br />
<br />
<i>Nobody</i> <i>living</i> remembers<i> the war</i>, Rel almost snapped. Fighting his instinct to fight, he slid out words like daggers. "Did you forget recruiting a Separatist to defend the town against us four months ago? And do you really think Pevan won't come for you there? Do you think you can stop her?" <br />
<br />
Soan's face probably held his silent answer, but Clearsight blurred it beyond Rel's grasp. <br />
<br />
He pressed on. "Or will you go back to Delaventrin? Cower in whatever's left of the white cave until the Gift-Givers come for you?" <br />
<br />
"Why not just kill me, then?!" The old man's cry seemed to rattle through the woods, a last spasm of the dying breeze. "You don't want to face them any more than I do. Fight me, and let fate decide!" <br />
<br />
"You know nothing of Fate." Rel reined in his bitterness. "I'm just here to bring you in. It's not up to me <i>or</i> Fate what happens to you. And for what it's worth, I <i>do</i> want to face <i>our comrades</i>. How else could we ever make amends?" <br />
<br />
Soan's face cleared as the old man fell still, thoughts of fighting fading from the front of his mind. Below his jaw, though, not a single muscle relaxed. Not fooled, Rel kept himself on edge. When the moment finally broke, his legs were going to turn to jelly. <br />
<br />
Assuming it didn't come to violence, anyway. Sun-warmed, Rel's calves seemed to float atop his ankles, effortless with adrenalin. Invisible at the periphery of his vision, Taslin squeezed his hand. Soan <i>had</i> to stand down, but if he didn't, the Gift-Giver would be there. <br />
<br />
The pained lines of the other Clearseer's face fuzzed again for a moment, a sudden thrill of desperation as he contemplated lashing out. Rel rode down his own instinctive response, tingling fingers racing across his back and shoulders. He flinched less the second time Soan's tension pulsed. <br />
<br />
If the visible clues were gone, he could still feel where his Gift locked with Soan's. It wasn't just the faint sense of additional pressure at his brow, or the deeper-than-normal chill of his eyes. He felt as if his heart was teetering on the edge of a cliff, with logic burnout pushing from behind and the gut-clenching seizure of trying to See his own future below. <br />
<br />
And still Soan vacillated. His face scattered and resettled like sand on a drum. Rel could almost see the ghosts of the old Ilbertin squad standing behind the old man's shoulder. Perhaps, too, the faces of the Gifted he'd murdered on the battlefield. Small wonder he'd asked Rel to kill him. <br />
<br />
Just as Rel was thinking it, Soan made up his mind. There was almost no warning. He hissed, "Stop acting so high and mighty." <br />
<br />
Rel squeezed Taslin's hand. <br />
<br />
Soan lunged; Clearsight flooded with recursive chaos. It was all Rel could do to navigate a sidestep. <br />
<br />
His hand emptied except for the lingering sense of Taslin's touch. <br />
<br />
Mid-leap in the dragging moment, a million Clearseers piled in. Fire exploded down the middle of Rel's skull as his logic overloaded. <br />
<br />
He blinked, seeing Soan do the same. Amethyst stars flashed in a midnight-purple cloud. The world whirled as gravity caught up. Grass too dry and reedy to be much comfort hit him, and for a moment his head swam. <br />
<br />
Getting back to his feet was a long and complex process that started with working out which one was which and ended, incomplete, in the crouch that allowed him a first check of Soan. The old man's face poked out of the top of a cocoon of seamless purple silk, lying on the ground a few feet away. <br />
<br />
If, in that frantic instant, he'd thought of, or known of, the trick Thia had developed to counteract Taslin's attack, he hadn't used it. Voice thready, chest tight, Rel gasped, "How long can you hold him like that?" <br />
<br />
The cocoon rose into the air and hovered, upright. Taslin's voice came from somewhere near its head. "Long enough to get him back to Vessit. The Warding may present some difficulty." <br />
<br />
"If need be, I can assist." Keshnu spoke from behind Rel. "You've done well, both of you." <br />
<br />
Standing up, Rel nodded acknowledgement, his attention still on Soan. The old man glared back, silence his only weapon against the indignity. Was he struggling within the cocoon? If so, Taslin held him so tightly that it didn't show. Wildren were capable of exerting that much physical force, but Rel hoped it wasn't needed now. <br />
<br />
Satisfied that Soan was held, Rel turned to Keshnu. "You know, I still don't understand why you didn't do that to me at the Abyss." <br />
<br />
The Gift-Giver raised one eyebrow, gently. "I wanted to give you every chance to back down." <br />
<br />
"Even to the point that I almost killed you?" Some of the relief from the confrontation's end bled through into Rel's voice, made him sound more incredulous than he intended. "That was more chance than I deserved." <br />
<br />
"I think you just proved otherwise." With the stately slowness of a flower unfurling, Keshnu smiled. "Shall we be getting back?" <br />
<br />
Rel glanced at Chag. "Got everything?" <br />
<br />
"Yeah. If... if that's all?" He frowned. "I don't know... I'm not sure what Pevan wanted, sending me here." <br />
<br />
"Let's let her worry about that, for now. Our job is done." Rel finished with a gesture for Keshnu to lead on. <br />
<br />
The return journey passed much faster than the morning had. As they neared the sea again, the breeze returned and took some of the heat out of the air. Rel's muscles stiffened up, and by the time they sighted Vessit he was ready to lie down and wait for tomorrow. <br />
<br />
Taslin did request help moving Soan through Vessit's Warding. Keshnu stretched out into a long silver ribbon and wound himself around the cocoon, and it seemed to do the trick. For a moment, realising the arrangement meant the two Gift-Givers could discuss him without his knowledge, Rel felt a pang of discomfort. He rode it down, though. He'd endured Pevan and Dora trading whispers about him before; this was really no different. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Pevan ordered Soan confined in the cell under Vessit's Warding Hall, with the maximum justifiable number of Gifted on hand to keep a constant watch. Thinking of the possibility that he'd soon be sharing the cell, Rel didn't protest. <br />
<br />
For his own trial, they convened in front of the Warding Hall rather than inside it; a courtesy to the Gift-Givers that left Rel feeling profoundly exposed. Gifted and civilians alike accumulated, but Pevan at least managed to keep the front row of the crowd at a few feet of respectful distance. Rel stood between her and Wolpan in front of the Hall door; Chag, Keshnu, Taslin and Vessit's squad, less Thia, faced him within the circle. <br />
<br />
Thia's absence gnawed at him, set a leaden lump in his gut. There was only one possible explanation; even severely wounded, she'd have been here, leaning on Bersh or Atla. Perhaps it was for the best that he didn't have to try to explain about Taslin to her, but the gap between Bersh and Keshnu, where she would have stood, was hard to ignore. <br />
<br />
The only other Gifted missing was Rissad, who had gone with the Threekin down to the Abyss to free Dora. He'd sworn to emerge only for sustenance until she was released. Rel didn't know if anyone had invited him to the trial, though his absence would probably simplify things with Wolpan. <br />
<br />
Chag replayed his Witnessing of the confrontation with Soan, while Keshnu summarised what had been said. Watching silently, Rel was struck by how dull the scene looked. Two men, one old and one young, arguing in a wood. The elder angry; the younger frustrated, tired. Seen from a distance, both looked quite afraid. How had he not seen that in Soan at the time? <br />
<br />
The Witnessing finished, and with it Keshnu's dispassionate narration. Everyone waited, expecting more even as Chag let the bubble of his Gift pop and dissipate. Glancing from one side to the other, Rel tried to measure Pevan's and Wolpan's reactions. He wished he'd faced them instead of the crowd, but it was too late for that now. <br />
<br />
Wolpan clearly wasn't happy with the positioning either. She took a couple of steps forward, into the centre of attention, and turned to face him. "Can we really trust that you've changed so much?" <br />
<br />
"That wasn't an act." Rel waved a hand, vaguely, to indicate the Witnessing. Did Wolpan think he'd ever actually <i>meant</i> to be a traitor? Chag had tried to recruit him for the Separatists, but he hadn't gone with them. "I've been rash, but I always believed I was defending our kind. Or the Treaty. Both, I suppose." <br />
<br />
"Can we trust that you are wiser now?" The Four Knot's tone made every word pointed. <br />
<br />
Rel shrugged, conscious that the gesture would satisfy no-one. "What do you want from me? I'd take back everything I've done if I could. I'm trying to learn... how to not make those mistakes again. I mean, if that's not enough, then..." What more was there? <br />
<br />
The same thought seemed to stall Wolpan, and most of the crowd. The civilians among them had plenty of reason to hate Rel, but looking around, he realised many of them wouldn't even recognise him. Had never seen him before. To the assembled Gifted, he was probably most infamous for fleeing his training. <br />
<br />
Keshnu said, "Studying the mistakes of the past can only take us so far. The decision you face concerns Rel's future, not his past." <br />
<br />
While Rel scrutinised the Gift-Giver, Pevan spoke up. "You don't think the two issues are connected?" <br />
<br />
"Of course I do." A hint of a smile crossed Keshnu's face. "But what are the options? You can imprison him, if you so decide. At the other extreme, Rel goes back to his regular duties as Federas' Clearseer unhindered. A duty, it must be said, at which his record was impeccable until the beginning of this year." <br />
<br />
Rel felt his frown deepen. Of all possible advocates, Keshnu was almost the least expected. It wasn't that he thought the Wilder would bear a grudge, but he wasn't ready for outright support. <br />
<br />
Perhaps for a similar reason, neither Wolpan nor Pevan broke Keshnu's pause. He went on, "Twenty-three Gifted are dead. Soan, it appears, will not change his position, and thus cannot continue his service. A number of other Gifted at Ilbertin and Yunec must face questions about their loyalties and intentions. In the final accounting, the Separatists may have cost the First Realm two score of its defenders." <br />
<br />
"Relvin has had quite enough stays in the name of expedience." Wolpan scowled at Keshnu, then turned the force of her glare on Rel. "You have admitted your guilt, and I will admit that you seem sincere. Should that factor into your censure? You cannot evade justice entirely." <br />
<br />
Holding his peace, Rel braced for more. When angry, Wolpan was seldom short-winded. He clenched his jaw. What would she ask for? And was she waiting for him to agree? The thought of living in a cell while other people fought to defend the Realm was repulsive, but there had to be <i>some</i> kind of punishment. <br />
<br />
"What purpose would censure serve?" Keshnu spoke up again, this time with a little more animation. He sounded... confused? But a Wilder who was truly confused just acted less human, the confusion interfering with their ability to project the illusion of humanity. He had to be making an act of it, but why? <br />
<br />
The Gift-Giver continued, "This is a subject of some consternation among my kind. For us, the kind of social contentions you call matters of justice are handled through our system of Talerssi, and that is not a system whose rules we choose. It is a part of the nature of the Second Realm, much as the physics of light, or gravity, are of the nature of the First. <br />
<br />
"Retribution, vengeance, these we understand after a fashion. They are emotional responses, and if they are not responses we experience, we do at least know what it is to have an emotional response when confronted with harm to others. Retaliation is a manifestation of those emotions. But as it has been explained to us, your concept of <i>justice</i> relates to the best interests of the community. How is it that censure against Rel serves this end?" <br />
<br />
Rel searched the inside of his suddenly-empty skull while the question rustled around the crowd. Parts of Keshnu's speech were familiar – Taslin had explained Talerssi to Rel, as much as it could be explained – but the answer to his question lay in unexplored territory. <br />
<br />
"Wrongdoing must have consequences, mustn't it?" Wolpan voiced the thought Rel was approaching, but she sounded no more certain than he was. <br />
<br />
"Haven't Rel's wrongs had consequence enough?" Again, the faint ghost of humour flitted across Keshnu's face. Was the Gift-Giver manipulating the trial? Rel started to dismiss that thought as his old paranoia, but realised he'd have felt the same about a human being acting like this. Sober again, Keshnu said, "You cannot claim that Rel needs any further reminder of the harm he has done." <br />
<br />
"So we should just let him go?" It wasn't quite a shout, but Wolpan's voice had definitely risen a tone or two. <br />
<br />
"It's not exactly a life of idle luxury, in case you'd forgotten." Pevan put herself squarely opposite the Four Knot. Her eyes flashed. "We're going back to the most dangerous posting in the Realm. And we <i>are</i> going back. Keshnu's right. I don't know about the Realm at large, but Federas can't spare Rel any longer. If you want to punish him, it's got to fit around that need." <br />
<br />
Rel fought down the sudden, desperate urge to ask for news of his hometown. Pevan was here, so it couldn't be that bad. Could it? Now he thought about it, they'd been without Pevan and Dora, too, for half a year now. <br />
<br />
"That's ridiculous. What could fit around that and still be meaningful?" <br />
<br />
Pevan snorted. "You should have seen what Dora could do to him with a frown." Somehow, her lighter tone did what all Wolpan's stiffness couldn't and silenced the crowd. "Look, he's a good man when he's not being an idiot. It used to be that only Dora could keep him in line, but I've been learning." Out of the corner of one narrowed eye, she shot him a lopsided glare, then glanced quickly at Taslin. "And I think I'm not the only one." <br />
<br />
Had anyone else spotted the gesture? A few of those around the circle looked to be enjoying Rel's discomfort. Well, a humbling was the least he deserved, and Pevan <i>probably</i> wouldn't let the cat out of the bag about him and Taslin. Not here and now, at least. <br />
<br />
"We'll go back to Federas, and Rel will do what he's good at, which is protecting people. I'll keep an eye on him, Jashi will keep an eye on him. Heaven knows, Notia will keep an eye on him. And if he gets big ideas again, we'll tell him he's being stupid." Pevan turned to look at him, openly sardonic. "And perhaps this time you'll listen? <i>Before </i>doing anything dramatic?" <br />
<br />
This time, the stir that ran around the crowd had a definite undercurrent of scattered chuckling. Rel's jaw felt like it was about to burst, he was clenching it so hard. Voice creaking, he managed, "Is that really enough?" <br />
<br />
"What, you <i>want</i> us to lock you up?" The way Pevan rolled her eyes came straight from Dora. "We'll all get our share of your blood, sweat and tears if we just let you do your job. I know that's what you actually want to be getting on with right now." <br />
<br />
"But... really?" He swallowed, looked around the circle, then back to his sister. Quietly, not caring whether his voice carried, he admitted, "I don't trust my own judgement anymore. How can you?" <br />
<br />
"You got some bad ideas in your head. I'm hardly innocent of that. Which of us is?" Pevan turned to take in Chag, the crowd, Wolpan and finally Rel again. "You used to trust yourself above all the rest of us. Well, except maybe Dora. There's nothing wrong with doubting yourself, if you're willing to trust others occasionally." <br />
<br />
"That's it?" It was a stupid thing to ask, but he couldn't think of anything else to say. Wolpan's silence was a good sign – the Four Knot was studying the backs of her hands as if they were mirrors – but... <br />
<br />
"Your problem was overconfidence." Smiling with a sweetness that only Rel could hear the teeth in, Pevan finished, "A little self-doubt will do you good." <br />
<br />
While Rel was scrabbling for a barb to throw back, something about how she was enjoying this more than she should, Keshnu stepped forward. "There is still the matter of choosing someone to serve as the First Realm's senior Clearseer." <br />
<br />
"Oh, no." Rel held up a finger, not quite pointing it at the Gift-Giver. "No. No way." <br />
<br />
"Officially, the post has been empty since the death of Ciarive Dekanis. Though he took on the duties of the role for the interim, Soan Ialvas clearly cannot continue in that capacity." Deliberately, disingenuously bland, Keshnu's eyes bored into Rel. "If you will not take the position, you are at least best-placed to nominate an alternative. Who would you suggest?" <br />
<br />
Who <i>could</i> he suggest? With Soan off the table, the strongest Clearseers Rel knew were all fresh. Soan's trainee, Horvin, was the most promising, but he'd sided with the Separatists at Ilbertin, and hadn't even finished his training. Few of the older generation – those who'd trained alongside Dieni or Ciarive – were still alive. Out loud, but mumbling, Rel found himself saying, "But I can't take it. I'm not ready." <br />
<br />
"Your predecessor said something similar to Quilo when she insisted the post pass to Ciarive." Keshnu folded his arms, smiling benevolently. "At the time, it was almost unthinkable that the senior Clearseer <i>not</i> come from Federas. But Dieni Tofarn was still technically a trainee when Storand Coberin died." <br />
<br />
Dora's grandfather, and technically some sort of distant cousin of Rel's. He remembered the old man, vaguely, and the funeral more clearly. Of the procession of Gifted funerals that had punctuated his childhood, it stood out; Dieni had taken him aside afterwards and asked him how he felt about being a Clearseer one day. She'd told him Storand had picked him out years earlier as a potential candidate for the Gift. <br />
<br />
Keshnu was still speaking. "Quilo witnessed her oath, but she would not be persuaded to take office. She insisted that the position go to someone more experienced. Perhaps she was right, but perhaps not." <br />
<br />
When the power of Rel's Gift first became apparent, there had been no question – he had to train under the serving senior Clearseer. Ciarive, hardened by a quarter-century on the border of the Northern Wilds, and before that a childhood that went back almost to the Realmwar, had taught Rel to be a soldier. <br />
<br />
And Rel couldn't claim that was why he'd left the man's strict regime. He'd left because Ciarive hadn't been willing to promote him early. He'd carried the poison of all that hatred and fear back with him to Federas. Dieni and Dora had tried to tame it, but it had still led him to Vessit. <br />
<br />
"None of which excuses your lapsed training." In Keshnu's narrowed eyes, blade-silver irises gleamed. "But it is certainly time to consider it at an end, and more. Perhaps the added responsibility of seniority will cool your temper a little." <br />
<br />
Never mind cool, Rel's blood ran outright cold. Taslin caught his eye, gave him a slow nod that did little to reassure. She'd keep him straight about the big picture, but he'd never even trained another Clearseer. How was he going to decide on training assignments for others? Or who should be posted where? <br />
<br />
"It bears saying," Keshnu continued, turning to the crowd, "that the way Gifted are organised could use some rethinking. My kind as well as yours have much to learn from what you all achieved yesterday. But we must have appropriate senior Gifted to tackle the question, and to administer any changes that are decided upon. Do any of you present object to Relvin Atcar as senior Clearseer?" <br />
<br />
The assembled Gifted and civilians rustled an indistinct negative, the sound rolling around the circle and drawing all attention toward the silence of Vessit's Four Knot. It was Pevan who said, "Wolpan?" <br />
<br />
Wearing a frown that still seemed more conflicted than angry, Wolpan looked up. Speaking past Rel, to Pevan, she answered, "You're the commander." There was no bitterness in her voice. Rel almost thought he could hear relief in it instead. Some sort of self-directed surprise, perhaps. <br />
<br />
Pevan nodded solemnly. Then she raised her head and her voice. "Keshnu's right. There are things we can do to prevent any of this happening again. Our communication has been too scattered, our pride too territorial. We've been miserly with our trust, except when we've been careless with it. <br />
<br />
"There will always be carelessness, and bad luck, and danger. We've all seen what those can cost us. We've all sworn to pay that price when it comes due. <br />
<br />
"The price of distrust, though – the twenty-three who died yesterday, the squads at Ilbertin and Yunec in whom Separatism took root, and too many other disasters to count – that is a price we need not pay again. If true understanding between the two Realms is not possible, we will understand what we can and trust our counterparts for the rest." <br />
<br />
A breeze whispered through the listening crowd while Pevan gestured to the crumbling towers of old Vessit. "Both Realms have shaken from the power of our fear. It's time for a better way. If we can find peace here, now, in spite of old wounds and grudges, we can build a true peace that will keep our descendants safe and unafraid for generations to come." <br />
<br />
Pevan finished. For a moment, Rel thought of Dora's description of the civvies in the Vessit of the future, but it was a challenge from another time, <i>for</i> another time. Into the waiting silence, he brought his hands together in the loudest clap he could muster. <br />
<br />
The crowd didn't need much encouraging. Bersh and Taslin were the first to join in, then Chag, Atla with his ever-present mask of confusion, Keshnu. Applause spread out in a wave. Someone shouted Pevan's name, and cheers answered. <br />
<br />
Bersh and another big Gifted who Rel didn't know snuck up on Pevan and hoisted her onto their shoulders. Laughter mingled with the cheering at her embarrassed attempt to free herself; her demand to be let down disappeared under the racket. Rel threw her a wave and a wink, and she stuck her tongue out at him. <br />
<br />
He turned away to find Taslin at his elbow. She wore a smile much broader than it was wry, the light in her eyes brighter than ever. Leaning close to keep her words to his ears only, she said, "Not feeling overshadowed?" <br />
<br />
Rel let out a single chuckle, a mix of chagrin and relief. "It's for the best and you know it." <br />
<br />
Something like a dance, or maybe a procession, was emerging within the chaotic swarm of people. Pevan bobbed along on top of it like a branch in a stream, already drawn away from them. Taslin leaned closer and kissed Rel's cheek. "I don't intend to let you forget that." <br />
<br />
"Then we might just be alright." He slid his arm around her back, and thought again of the future he'd visited. The future he was helping to build. There was something incongruous about this mingling of Gifted and civilians. He said, "Come on, I bet we can get a few minutes to ourselves while they're having fun." <br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
Epilogue: Another Day</div>
</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br />
The Abyss was still dark and cold, but someone had at least installed a few more torches on the ledge. Probably Keshnu; the Gift-Giver was waiting in the gloom when Rel stepped through Rissad's Gateway. Pevan and Chag followed, then Rissad himself. Taslin, constrained by Gift-Giver protections, stepped out of her own Gate alongside Rissad's, a moment behind. <br />
<br />
Rissad had interrupted the tail end of a much-needed lunch; Chag still held the last couple of mouthfuls'-worth of a sandwich. The elder Van Raighan hadn't needed to say what brought him; hadn't said anything, in fact. A week had passed since the trial, and the waiting had grown like toothache. They'd moved as one, without hesitating. <br />
<br />
Up in the darkness, over the vast drop, a patch of summer-field green – clearly visible – rippled and shimmered. Squinting, Rel made out the glint of metal on what would soon return to being Dora's stylised Four Knot belt buckle. He stayed well clear of his Gift, a courtesy to Sevitz-Anwar and Mag-Ridon which still took more force of will than it should. <br />
<br />
They drifted over to join Keshnu. Rel took Taslin's hand, enjoying the privacy of trusted company. Chag and Pevan, who'd maintained a conspicuous distance in any public place for the last week, seemed to have the same idea. He had an arm around her shoulders, and hers was at his waist. <br />
<br />
Chag said, "How long..?" <br />
<br />
"She's... talking, for want of a better word, to the others." Rissad shrugged. "Mostly business, I think. Something of a tradition, but she's free to come down whenever she's ready." <br />
<br />
Rel looked up again at the coalescing shape of Dora. To the left of her, there was no sign of Sevitz-Anwar; whatever sight lingered of his black hair and clothing was swallowed by the darkness. To the right, though, a faint streak of red was the afterimage of Mag-Ridon's sash belt. He resisted the urge to wave in thanks. <br />
<br />
For a minute, they watched, and listened to the low sounds of the chasm. When Dora moved, she drew every eye. She didn't descend, so much as surfacing. Her fluid outlines straightened and grew still, until she stepped through the curtain of her Gifts and onto the ledge. <br />
<br />
Rissad went to her first, his step hesitant. He moved as if he thought Dora might break if he looked straight at her, then jerked back as she threw herself at him. The result was an embrace that almost took him off his feet, and from the look of it made breathing rather difficult, too. <br />
<br />
He'd barely recovered enough to put his arms around her when she pulled back, just enough to give her room to put a hand to his face. She murmured something, lost to Rel's ears beneath the whispering of distant waterfalls that was the voice of the Abyss. Her face flickered with amusement while Rissad's mouth opened and closed soundlessly. <br />
<br />
Dora extricated herself and approached the waiting group. Nothing in her gait was out of place. She walked like that, had always walked like that in Federas, when she had somewhere to be, even if it was only the other side of the room. It was almost a march, except that it was impossible to be in front of Dora when she <i>really</i> marched and not cringe slightly. <br />
<br />
She went to Keshnu, looked up into his face. "Our child?" <br />
<br />
Rel glanced in surprise at Taslin, whose brief, dark look told him to leave the question for later. Keshnu answered, "Safe and well. I'm afraid your visit to the crèche may have to wait for a few months yet, though. The Court is still healing." <br />
<br />
She took his hands, and if her smile fell away it was only because she didn't need it to communicate with a Gift-Giver. "I can wait. There's a lot of time to play with, after all." <br />
<br />
"As for you two..." Dora's tone shifted as she turned her attention to Rel and Pevan. Rel's spine straightened out of reflex. That tone of voice only ever picked out errant Gifted of the Atcar family. Dora didn't relent as she went on, "I don't know that I can swear that your parents will be proud of you, or your mentors for that matter. But I am." <br />
<br />
She moved away from Keshnu, to brief them just like in the good old days. "I sort of know the stories you're going to tell me, the things you've done, but I'm looking forward to hearing all about it. You'll tell it well, I promise." <br />
<br />
Then her attention shifted again, and the clearest sign of where it landed was in Chag's involuntary half-step back. Rel watched Pevan's arm tense as she held him in place. To the air somewhere around the little man's head, Dora said, "Why do I suspect that you're going to be a bad influence on my Gatemaker?" <br />
<br />
"I'll... I'll try not to be?" The squeaks in Chag's voice cut the distant water's roar enough to echo. <br />
<br />
"You'll watch her back and be a good Gifted." This time, when Dora smiled, it was the deliberate expression she used to put strangers at ease. As much as she ever could, at least. Chag didn't seem to be able to tell the difference. <br />
<br />
"Taslin..." Lifting a hand to her stiff, tangled hair, Dora turned finally to the Gift-Giver. "Thank you." <br />
<br />
"It has been my pleasure." <br />
<br />
"Then I hope it continues to be so." The hard-edged mien of ordinary life as Federas' Four Knot settled on Dora's face. She spread her arms to herd them all in, towards the wall where Keshnu was already opening a Gate. "Come on, you lot. We need to figure out how this family is going to work." <br />
<br />
"Family?" Rel spluttered over the word. <br />
<br />
"You hadn't thought about it yet, Rel?" Any other time, he'd have chafed under her disapproving tone. "We'll all be in-laws." <br />
<br />
Keshnu with Dora with Rissad, brother to Chag, with Pevan, his sister, and he with Taslin. Rel looked around the group. "Frightening thought." Dora laughed. That was new, a hint of the future Dora. When she spoke, though, she was new and old as one. "Get moving, or I'll show you frightening."<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
* * *</div>
<br />
<a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/acknowledgement.html">Acknowledgement</a>. And thank you for reading! </div>
Beckyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16677076598470332030noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7771589069545279175.post-18896604055169214082014-10-17T12:34:00.003+01:002015-03-12T22:53:58.426+00:00AcknowledgementLynne Hunt has been my beta reader/crit buddy for The Second Realm since <a href="http://rememberitsthefuture.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/second-realm-13-hole-in-her-mind.html">episode 3</a>, back in February of 2012. I'd initially planned to try to get a different test reader for every episode, which quickly proved both impractical and misguided (not only was The Second Realm not the instant, overnight literary revolution I'd hoped for, but as a serial it was quite useful for a reader to have read all the episodes, not just one random chunk from the middle of it). I got the vague idea Lynne might be the perfect person for the job when she instantly identified the episode title, <i>A Hole in Her Mind</i>, as a reference to Babylon 5.<br />
<br />
"Yes," I thought, "this is someone I can trust."<br />
<br />
And trust I could. Since episode 3, Lynne has fielded everything I've thrown at her. Some 280,000 words of the main series, various side projects, a number of other things I've written and wanted a second opinion on. When I've emailed her saying 'I really needed to ask you about this last week, can you get back to me yesterday?', which has happened far more times than it should have, she's done everything short of actually bending time to help me out.<br />
<br />
Sartre argued that we only ask people for advice when we know what they're going to say. I'm normally a fan of the man, but working with Lynne has proved him dead wrong on this point. She's been consistently as incisive as a surgeon in identifying the weaknesses of my first drafts - weaknessesd I'd never in a million years have spotted myself.<br />
<br />
The Second Realm is stronger for Lynne's attention, but I am also a stronger writer. There can be no better lesson than having someone follow you through your own work for a long period of time, pointing out - precisely but never harshly - its weaknesses. For a long time, for example, I had a pathological inability to start stories without a page or two of waffling. Lynne called me on it every time, until I finally started editing my own first pages before sending them to her.<br />
<br />
It hasn't all been criticism, either. People somewhere in the world are definitely reading The Second Realm (it passed 9000 total downloads on Smashwords last week), but Lynne is the only one I hear from regularly. Writing can be a lonely process; Lynne has made it less so. Intimidating as feedback can sometimes be, I always look forward to an email from her; her enthusiasm for and dedication to my little project has been heartening and profoundly moving.<br />
<br />
Of course, it's not all about me. Lynne is a fine writer in her own right; I've been lucky over the years to have a sneak peek here and there at her work. She has nothing for me to plug at the moment, but you can be damn sure you'll hear of it when she does.<br />
<br />
And as if that wasn't enough virtue, she's also a keen charity fund-raiser. Last time I met her in the real world, she was having her head shaved for charity whilst simultaneously hand-cooking a bajillion pizzas to feed the crowd assembled at her house for an annual charity party she hosts. As someone who can barely manage 'take pizza out of freezer, remove packaging, put in oven', I found this awesome just as a feat of domestic organisation, never mind the hundreds of pounds raised for a local hospice charity.<br />
<br />
Lynne, you're one of the finest examples of humanity I know, and I'm honoured to have had the benefit of your wit and wisdom these past three years.<br />
<br />
Thank you.Beckyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16677076598470332030noreply@blogger.com0